Simulated space micro-cosmos with trade and battle

[BONERMASTER]

This is the image that dorsidwarf posted in discord. I like it so much, that I want to see this in our game too. We could expand on ship navigation and have a simple map like this ready to plot courses and traverse the map. We could put space ruins like dots all over the map, some which are visible, some which you may only uncover by going close to em.
We could also expand on this by allowing the station to commandeer a set of battleships, that you can send where you want, and that can fight off syndicate ships that may start blasting your station if you can't keep them in check. All of this wouldn't even need models, this could all run over the console.
Furthermore, last idea, we can send in tradeships that will dock on the station. They could be requesting fuel supplies, plasma, whatever, and if you give it to them they could give you credits. Credits that you could use, to buy more battleships for example. And the syndicate may try to specifically target the trade routes these transporters take, so you would want to protect them to get your money.

[BeeSting12]

what game is that from?

[Iatots]

Aurora 4x c#?

[Qustinnus]

i considered this as it's basically what we did in SS13 but honestly i dont see it working out unless cargo is made to work with it nicely

[SpaceManiac]

All of this wouldn't even need models, this could all run over the console.

so it's stonks but more complicated

[EOBGames]

Alright what if we put crypto in the game? Think of it as being like the old stock market PR but with more pink wojaks

[BONERMASTER]

No listen, it's not stock market 2.0. Trading is a good way to integrate it into the station and to make the players see that something is actually happening. But I don't envision this as the sole purpose of that. There are tons of other things that you can build ontop of that system, possibilities like raiding syndicate ships with boarding shuttles, sending out rescue ships that can pick people up in space, having only NT be able to cure a sentient disease so you have to send a sample to them with a transporter and so on. And let's not forget, you'd have targets for the bluespace artillery, add some math shit ontop and you got a cool system thrown into the mix.

And I'm mostly talking syndies here, but what about ayyys? We got plenty of creativity for space-faring monsters like those hivebots, those could be on the map as well, also able to attack and infiltrate the station.

i considered this as it's basically what we did in SS13 but honestly i dont see it working out unless cargo is made to work with it nicely

A few things we sort of do, for example we got the cybersun ship that you can raid, and that's the sort of thing you would be doing a lot more often with that system. Though, it's pretty rigid and barebones. Right now, space exploration is when the curator grabs an EVA suit, one oxygen tank and flings himself out of the airlock. Ships only exist as static entities, and the few ones you can fly, only go to a handful of pre-determined locations. And still, we do have some interesting space ruins out there, but most people wouldn't actually get to see them because you have to blindly fumble through space.
With that system, hell, crewmembers could rent themselves a little ship, and go on to explore space on the map. I don't know how many Z-levels we can cram into our game, but we could make every space ruin a seperate Z level, we could have ships during travel exist in an extra Z level just like the shuttle.
And for cargo specifically, we can give them control over transport ships. They could send out their freighters to where-ever they want to, they could maybe send them on some scavenging missions to known space ruins, with possibility of something bad happening to it. They could also plot courses for other trade-ships to take, so if syndies keep camping a spot and shooting down ships, then you could change the path that the ships take to get to you. And that's just a few ideas. There is a lot more we can do with this.

[cacogen]

i can't read but yes space stations 13
the future of space station is an mmo

[Tlaltecuhtli]

there isnt much space content to justify having shuttles “scavenging” as whiteship is enough ( you can use megabeacons to enter other z levels and use the custom position cam to scan the sector

trades and battles could be a minigame: you can send a shuttle to another space port as trade convoy for new things, shuttle “moves” (not really ) while you are on station with rng encounters where you can tele on the ship ( or remote robots you can buy/upgrade)
to deal with em like syndi infiltrators, mimics, asteroid making holes and repairing hull you can tele back once done dealing with the encounter the convoy continues the route with whatever loss of freight you had

[SpaceManiac]

Your posts are large so I'm only quoting a representative segment, but this applies to everything:

And for cargo specifically, we can give them control over transport ships. They could send out their freighters to where-ever they want to, they could maybe send them on some scavenging missions to known space ruins, with possibility of something bad happening to it.

Are you imagining this like a text adventure or like a physical space which players actually occupy? If the latter, we don't have the server pop to support this kind of content without reducing the quality of on-station gameplay in the process. In fact we're explicitly discouraging off-station content for this reason.

/tg/ has very robust shuttle code so I could see this working as an offshoot server a la FTL13, but it's not for us.

[BONERMASTER]

It wouldn't be really a text adventure for you, but most of the ship stuff is not supposed to be manned by players either. Generally, nothing here should replace the station, every decision you make affects the station in some way, and that's what I would want for the game. To put it more precise, this is not going to kick the station out of focus, instead it gives players the opportunity to play on a more macro scale as they are being part of the station.

Don't get me wrong though, I would absolutely love if you could man a battleship with players, fly up to a random station, blow it the hell up and then enter the wreckage to take a good look at all the destruction you caused. But I would also hate to see this condensed down into a minigame, where all you get is an event message, then cappie puts the armory in his bag, a bunch of combat drugs and teleports in to clear a syndie attack ship in under two minutes. That wouldn't be cool macro-scale gameplay, that would be fuckin' tedious.

Suppose the word that would best fit this idea is emergent gameplay. Basically, things will happen based on what you are doing on that map screen. And when a cruiser starts throwing missiles at your station, you can track down why and how it came to this, not because RNG just rolled the event for it.

[Reece1995]

Add in pirates that steal the cargo shuttle, add pods to go get that cargo shuttle; create a new role where you're just deep space security that have to go and steal back the cargo.

[oranges]

NSV13 does this and better than we ever could.

[cacogen]

iamgoofball will shoehorn it into the code for us

[BONERMASTER]

Shit, I just took a look at it and I already got erect. But look, we're not going for a full-on space combat simulation here. Like the vast majority of combat would run purely on calculations, which will be based upon what kind of ships you're fielding, their equipment and what they are up against. On the player end, you'll mostly be busy with doing the preparations, maneuvering the ships on the mapscreen, and seeing the results. NSV13 will give you the opportunity to see what it's like being one of the ships yourself, the idea for us here is that we'll keep it to the macro-perspective and stick to managing and utilizing the whole fleet (that we have).