All around suggestions...

[Nariis]

I've been curious to know how people feel about the game, particularly some newer players who weren't completely familiar with the old game. This is one of the emails that I've received. I actually like the majority of his ideas, they do sound very interesting and well thought out.

All of the following comes from Oso:


My main criticism is that the "Merchant" part of SMR seems to take a back seat to the combat aspect of the game. I have only been here a short time, granted, but it does seem that the people who want to concentrate on the trading and planet building aspects of the games are simply cannon fodder for the hunters. Planet builders not so much but traders either have to trade at odd hours, get a couple of friends in Warbirds (an excellent solution in my opinion) or bite the bullet and accept the fact they will probably be podded every second, third or fourth trading day unless they get lucky and find a route no one has seen yet, or they content themselves with low experience/money routes.

This is actually not a problem if this is the type of game that most people want and will play. If the majority of the players (and you folks that made and maintain the game) want this type of game, there is absolutely no reason to change the focus at all. As much as I'd like to see some things change, even I can see the sense in not changing what works for the majority of the player base. No use making what I personally would call a "perfect" game if you lose half or three-quarters of your player base by doing that.

Some of the things I really like that you have done with the game:

1) SC. Refine it to your satisfaction, of course. But in my opinion, you guys nailed that one right out of the box.

2) GHP. Another great idea. Everyone has to take time away from their main focus in order to take advantage of this one. And everyone does. The ship increases and gadget acquisition this allows virtually guarantees that every player will devote considerable time and energy to it.

3) Ship Size. Again, a great idea. The ability to customize a ship beyond its base is great. Keeps player interest high and kind of gives them a sense of ownership above what was present in the earlier version. Even more so when it becomes possible to give it a name like in the last game. The only caveat I would have here is that a ship shouldn't be able to be customized too far outside its intended role. No ISTs that can wipe out an FU. No wasps that are supertraders.

4) Large Galaxies and Mini Galaxies. This was a great idea. Having MiniGals inside a much larger galaxy was genius. You still have the benefit of being able to wall yourself into someplace relatively safe, but you don't have the run of a whole galaxy. No alliance is able to wall themselves away from the rest of game and continue to be effective. There are good routes inside some of these MiniGals but not good or plentiful enough to support and entire Alliance. At least from what I can see, so they still have to come out and play.

Some suggestions I might make to add some balance and put the traders on a more even footing. Please note, I am not a programmer and have no idea how easy or difficult any of these suggestions might be.

Player classifications: A system where a player actually has a role based on their own choices and past behavior in the game. Actually, with alignment I think you might already have the groundwork in place for this. Their roles would give them limited protection/restrictions regarding some roles and greater vulnerability to other roles.

1) Trader. They are primarily concerned with exploring the trading/non-belligerent aspects of the game. Protected from actual warships (not raiders/hunters) unless the warship's race happens to be at war with the trader race.

2) Hunter(Pirate). Primarily concerned with getting money and experience through attacking traders. They can freely attack anyone without any restrictions save they must be in a hunter ship. The hunter ship would have no problem taking out a trader with 2-5 shots but would be severely outclassed by an actual warship.

3) Raider(Privateer): A hunter that works for their racial government during times of war may freely attack the ships of those they are at war with (with no alignment hit) but are restricted from attacking any ship of any race their government is at peace with. Protected from Warships and Hunter/Raiders of their own race and the races they have peace with for the duration of their being a privateer rather than a hunter. (2 and 3 would be my attempt to get each race active as a loose alliance of their own in addition to the player alliances. Sorry, but they don't seem to do a whole lot right now.)

4) Navy. As an added attempt to get the racial governments active, they would have a limited number of slots that they could fill with players. More during wartime, less during peacetime. These would be the only one of two classes of players allowed to own full blown warships. They would be restricted to their own racial (plus whatever ever neutral that had FED space i.e Skyscraper in this game) except during wartime. Their job would be to hunt hunters in their own racial (and neutral) galaxy and to conduct ops against enemy ships/ports during wars. As a bonus to being employed by the government they get 2x help points while employed. That bonus disappears of course if they ever leave the service.

5) Alliances as well will have a limited number of warships slots based on their member count. These Warships are restricted from ever entering any Racial Galaxy unless the Alliance gets some sort of NAP with a government. Then they may be used freely using the same guidelines and restrictions governing Racial Warships with the exception that they may freely travel the non-racial galaxies.

These are broad outlines that could work in conjunction with ship type and alignment. Someone who trades in a hunter ship loses the trader protections, if a trader upgrades their trade ship with too many weapons then it get reclassified as a hunter at a certain point. A hunter can't upgrade their ship past a certain point unless they are willing (and able) to take government service and reclassify their ship as a warship, that sort of thing. I am not talking about stopping people from freely upgrading their ships, far from it. But rather if some of the upgrades get too high their ship must undergo a reclassification. Some examples:

1) A person in an IST upgrades weapons/drones past a certain point they lose their trader classification because the ship itself gets reclassified.

2) A person loses their trader classification by podding too many other players. Perhaps a method of trading in GHP (as in losing some and having to re-mine to regain it) or cash to remove a "kill" from their record. There's a switch, an SMR player paying to have a lower kill count.

3) A hunter may get reclassified either up or down by upgrading too many weapons (for a Warship classification) or too many cargo holds (for trader classification. If he wants the extra holds, he has to drop some weapons upgrades.)

4) Warships that start as warships can never change class.
All of this can work in conjunction with alignment, past actions and ship classifications. Traders are still just as vulnerable to hunters but (in most cases) can't be attacked by warships. Hunters are dead meat if they tangle with a warship. Warships are still the killer kings but they can shoot at hunters, not traders unless there is some sort of conflict going on. Plus, this might encourage players to work together even more than they do now. The racial warships don't have to be restricted to their own galaxy. They could be free to hunt pirates in neutral and other racial galaxies at will with few restrictions. In high risk areas, warships may be able to charge (and get experience for) escorting single, or groups, of traders.

As you can see this is just a broad outline of some of my thoughts and would probably take considerable work and refining to accomplish if it is possible at all. Like I said earlier, I have no clue what is and is not possible due to my lack of knowledge of servers and coding in general.

I did give some thought on what you said last night on planets in regards to jump drives and I think I may have hit on something that might work. Please keep in mind that I am perfectly happy with the solution you came up with last night.
But here may be an alternative: Planetary Jump Nullifiers. Basically, they prevent a non allied player from jumping directly to a planet. If they want to jump there, then they had best own the planet, be part of the alliance that does, or part of an alliance that has a treaty of some sort with the alliance that does own it. To cover the case of where there are planets that have locations in their sectors or nearby, extend the field to encompass the sectors 2 deep around the planet. If a location happens to be in that radius, then most folks will have to walk to that location instead of jumping there. This won't cancel a jump but will stop it short of the target. I'm guessing here that the jump drive uses the same algorithm as the manual plot so the game already knows what the sector would be to stop a player. The jump takes place as planned, but is stopped slightly short. Note, I extend this to non owned planets as well. If someone wants to claim an un-owned planet, they can't jump directly there either.

Whether theses nullifiers are inherent to planets themselves or have to be built like any other building would be a game play issue. Personally I'm in favor (if this method were used) of making it possible only when you have a minimum number of planets with a minimum level, then have it kick in. Until that happens an Alliance would have no protection from someone just jumping on their planets. And a person with a single planet and no alliance wouldn't have access to the feature at all.

I have other ideas as well on the jump drive that would make it somewhat less attractive without actually making it inaccurate.

One final thing that I remembered I wanted to say, was going to put this in the suggestions on the WebBoard but I'll go ahead here. This I got from another game I play. They took every one of their graphics (small and large) that were used on the site and put it in a *.zip for the players to download. In the profile there is a place to put the directory (easier or harder to get right depending on the browser) where you stored it locally. Don't know what this does on the server side but it did great things for my personal speed. All the graphics were loaded from my computer from then on and the server only sent the information that changed from my last click or refresh. Granted, it's not an auto update game like yours and the user my not see as much of a difference in speed but it sure helped for that game. Anytime there is a command to load an image, I assume it looks to see if it's in that directory before it goes to the server. Sort of like a permanent browser cache for that site.

[Holti]

Almost all of these involve 1.5 components that are no longer used.