Suggestions post from the Suggestiosn forum

Lendorien · July 2004

I posted this in Suggestions, but I wanted to get input from other players here. I decided to report it over here to see what opinions and other ideas could be generated by other players.

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Hello!

First off, a strong congrats to the developers, who havce created a great game here. It's addictive and sure, I'm sure to be a hit.

I have a few suggestions, some parroting what others have written, some not.

1) Colonies - Colonies in Starport are underowered in terms of defense. The current weapons and such are simply too weak to hold off a power player. While I don't think it would be good to overpower defences, I think it should be possible for the average player, if he/she has enough money, to set up defences that are good enough to hold oll almost all singlke ship attacks. Since corporations are part of this game, I don't think it's a bad idea to make it hard enough that some colonies can only be taken by ships working together. As it is right now, you spend endless hours setting up a colony, only to have it trashed by a powergamer who is able to cut through the weak defenses like butter. It's discouraging and destroys some of the fun of the game, especially for noobs.

A few suggestions about possible ways to solve this.

Building Costs
It costs a fortune to build improvements for a colony, especially since it can be trashed so easily. It seems to me that things are WAY too expensive to build, forcing players to ferry endless supplies to the colony, only to risk it being wasted by a powergamer. Why bother if all your work is going to be wasted as soon as the UN protection drops off? Maybe lowering the cost of building improvements could help ease this problem a bit. Colonies are cool, but the frustration level is just too plain high to make them all that worth building.

Walls
This has been suggested elsewhere, but I think it's a great idea. Right now, the turret placement system allows gaps in a defensive position that a person skilled enough can clip through to get at the colony. Walls would go a long way in helping solve this. You could place them to block passage to your colony. They'd have to be blown up to break through. At the same time though, turrets placed behind them could NOT shoot through them.

Turret Types
The current turret type is weak and somewhat innefective. I have several solutions that I feel should work in tandem. The first is simply a more powerful turret type. Maybe a missile turret, or a laser turret. Weak on hits they can take, but packing a better punch than current turrets. They'd cost more, and maybe even be limited to use on planets. Second, allow the colony to build super weapons if they get to high enough a level of development. Likewise, mines might be ubgraded as well. Naturally, the better the weapon, the more expensive it is.

Colony Defensive Bonuses
I'm not sure what the ratio is at the moment, but perhaps colonies with high populations and a high percentage of people in military should get a higher bonus than currently.

2) More NPCS
I've heard it mentioned that it's sometimes near impossible to find NPCs anywhere. Since they occasionally move in convoys, and (in the last game i was in) there appear to be only around 250 of them, it seems that they're spread pretty thin. Perhaps the number of NPCs could be rased to 500? Likewise, their behavior could be modified as well so that they actually run trade routes.

3) More Payable Missions
I have a few suggestions for mission that could possibly be gotten at sace ports. Perhaps in addition to the taxi thing, you could carry goods to other space ports (with the possibility of just stealing them by selling or jetisoning them and thus hurt your rep.) You be told to collect goods from somewhere and deliver them, including perhaps, Turrets, and weapons and colonists from the Main Starbase (or elsewhere) to another base elsewhere. You could even have time limits, after which the player wouldn't get paid at all.

Making anything more long term would be dificult I'd imagine, but delivery missions, I hope wouldn't be too hard to code.

4) Longer games
14 days just isn't long enough for a good game. The game Space Merchant, an old web based game similair in concept to this one, has games that last 1 to 3 months, sometimes longer. Now, I'm not sure if the game world in Starport is big enough to successfully run a game for 3 months, but I do think it's big enough that month-long games would work fine. For longer games, you could have a cut off date after which no new players will be allowed onto that server. If it's a month long game, say 15 days in, new players can't join. This would allow players to play the game a bit more substantially, have real wars, and actually see their colonies and such come to fruition. 14 days, the longest current game just doesn't seem long enough.

Colonies are an issue in shorter games too, since the resource requirements for building improbements are so high. Building a colony is cost prohibative... maybe lower costs to build buildings a bit, so development can go faster in shorter games.

Well, those are my suggestions. Naturally, I'm not a game designer, so I can't say I have all the answers. Keeping gameplay balance in check is important too. I'd love feedback from other players on my suggestions... or from the designers themselves.

Thanks for a great game!

Lendorien

Xira · August 2004

1) Colonies - Colonies in Starport are underowered in terms of defense. The current weapons and such are simply too weak to hold off a power player. While I don't think it would be good to overpower defences, I think it should be possible for the average player, if he/she has enough money, to set up defences that are good enough to hold oll almost all singlke ship attacks. Since corporations are part of this game, I don't think it's a bad idea to make it hard enough that some colonies can only be taken by ships working together. As it is right now, you spend endless hours setting up a colony, only to have it trashed by a powergamer who is able to cut through the weak defenses like butter. It's discouraging and destroys some of the fun of the game, especially for noobs.

I think I have really identified the single point that makes colony defense so gimp.

Lack of RISK. You can't force the attacking player to take any risks. There are no risks involved in takeing a colony.

You can see all the bullets comeing toward you. You know how good your shields are. Nothing is so incrediably damageing that it can kill you in one hit - even if you are down to half shields- and nothing is so incrediably fast that it can't be dodged while running for that exit.

You just wear the defenses down little by little....No skill involved, no risks taken, and the rewards are so high. A decent player will literally never die takeing a defended colony.

Without even the remotest chance of a colony killing a decent player there's no reason for the decent player to not attack that colony. There is no thought process "Do I risk my 2,000,000 ship on the chance that I can take that juicy fully defended colony?", and there should be. Instead it becomes "Is it worth the time and money it will take to take that juicy fully defended colony?". The answer is all too often yes.

There are plenty of good ideas for how to improve defense, the devs must have seen dozens of them by now. The lack of implementation of any of those ideas goes to show that this is how they intended things to be. Things won't change.

Anything from cloaking defenses to True-laser based turrets to mines that you can't simply fly around. How about a turret type that pulls players towards it like a Sun? Ring one with mines, make mines something good players actually use.

Without RISK there should be no REWARD. This game has that ass backwards and it shows.

Dude® · August 2004

Why cross post, the reason there are separate forumns is for different topics.

Or do you think that more people will see it if you post it more places?

Dude®

screwballl · August 2004

part of the problems is that usually the first 5-10 veteran people to join the standard servers are the ones who run the game the entire time. i joined one when it was 6 days old and within 6-12 hours of me placing a colony anywheres, they're overtaken. ive tried remote areas and popular areas and inbetween, it is impossible to keep your colonies, defend them and still be able to keep them going and overtake others unless you start the game at the beginning and have 6 or 7 people in your corp to watch them at all times.

J.O. · August 2004

Originally posted by Xira

1) Colonies - Colonies in Starport are underowered in terms of defense. The current weapons and such are simply too weak to hold off a power player. While I don't think it would be good to overpower defences, I think it should be possible for the average player, if he/she has enough money, to set up defences that are good enough to hold oll almost all singlke ship attacks. Since corporations are part of this game, I don't think it's a bad idea to make it hard enough that some colonies can only be taken by ships working together. As it is right now, you spend endless hours setting up a colony, only to have it trashed by a powergamer who is able to cut through the weak defenses like butter. It's discouraging and destroys some of the fun of the game, especially for noobs.