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Author Topic: New Ideas for SO?  (Read 18655 times)
jessiedog
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« Reply #45 on: March 23, 2008, 10:16:21 AM »

team bank is a great idea, but what about for wars server? u cant just have a segment bank, although that would help smaller players a lot.
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« Reply #46 on: March 23, 2008, 06:13:51 PM »

The bank idea would go a long way to help out smaller players and/or support more pvp actions and more excitement and bring life and war back to SO.

I have heard rumors of great wars that used to go on, but i havnt seen or participated in a good war since i have been here. And that is a year now.
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« Reply #47 on: March 23, 2008, 07:17:07 PM »

i havent seen a good war either. and i tried waging one... the oponents just dropped their power and hid. few attacks were made
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« Reply #48 on: March 23, 2008, 08:25:49 PM »

SO is text based that means people like me with dialup can actually play it, if you start putting up interactive graphics me and my ilk are screwed. its not like theres some shortage of graphic video games. SO stands out as the most original and challenging and different of text based games. if you make this game graphic you'll be playing eve online!

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« Reply #49 on: March 23, 2008, 10:31:24 PM »

Kudos to BadGuy he got everyone talking, i do hope a classic version is brought back i enjoyed that and as most people that got to know me found out that i cared more about alliance rank than personal rank but would love to see more inter alliance stuff going on that would rock and lets bring back alliance wars that was also fun cya
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« Reply #50 on: March 23, 2008, 10:32:59 PM »

lostedchylde has a point about graphics. i think the story line will have that problem tho

dz, if u want a war, start 1 !!!

or come to wars server, were at a bit of a standstill but it will start back after everyone's planet tech is higher
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« Reply #51 on: March 23, 2008, 11:03:00 PM »

Actually there really isnt anyone to have a real war with at the present time and i have never liked the war server but at the present time i'm not even playing except on my other game i just check in every couple of weeks to see if anything has changed
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« Reply #52 on: March 23, 2008, 11:18:50 PM »

I agree with all of Prophet's suggestions.

In order to correct some of the commented upon problems and implement some of the new ideas,
I would suggest the following.

Recombine the three servers. All styles of play will be accommodated in a single game.
(Multiple servers only further fractionalize an already too small user base and lessen interaction
between the current groups because most people now play in one of the other but not both.)

Expand the gal map to a 3 x 3 grid with the current map as the center.

Each of the nine maps would represent a galaxy and have a unique map. There would be a 1,000 turn cost to warping between galaxies.

It is an on-going saga and never ends (ala WARS) but monthly winners based on top ten alliances/
individual scores. No more D-Days (only the strong love them, which means 90% of players hate them)
and no tediously slow restarts. No more maxing of cash. When an individual player hits max cash,
he just gets +1 in another counter and resets to 50% of current cash on hand or in stash. If she runs
out and has a positive value in the max counter, decrement the counter and resupply with 50% of
max to the active. The only adjustment to ships is that defense can only be 10% of HP, so even maxed
ships (which continue to max at the other current values) can be killed by other maxed ships,
if there are enough attackers.

Put the central (current)  galaxy under council protection and only allow flying missions and encounters in it.
No building bases, system fleets, planets or PvP attacks in the central region. This would give
noobs or low involvement players a safe haven where they could learn the game, build their skills, power
and knowledge and give the grinders a place to grind, but with very little chance of finishing a round
ahead of the more daring and successful players/alliances who did their business in the uncontrolled gals.
(Maybe allow one base/system fleet per player in the protected galaxy, to experiment/ become familiar with.)

In the outer, unprotected regions, double mission/encounter rewards, base production/earnings
and allow all advanced features.  (Another way to look at this is gold bonuses would only become
available in the unprotected galaxies, even for gold players who chose to park in the neutral gal.)

Allow each alliance to claim one star system for the alliance and make it so all member's ships, system fleets
and bases at their system present a joint defense against attacks, so that every defender attacks in
turn until all attackers have been beaten or all have had a battle. If more than half defending
ships are eliminated, the attackers take control of the system and inherit any bases and planets there
and any remaining defending ships are scattered to the wind, each fleet warping to a random place.

When an alliance has built bases at every star in a quadrant, they control the quad and their fleets
will automatically move to defend any planet in the quad. But system fleets and bases would, naturally,
be bound to the planet they were constructed at.  Bases/Mines can be built by any member of the team
at the planets/quad that is controlled by the team. Of course, this will mine them out more quickly, but
no one bothers with mining once they have high levels of replication skills anyway.)

If you randomly hop into an alliance's home system/quad and there are more than double your FP
in combined defenses, you bug out, back to the starting point of the hop, with a report that you
have evaded X Allaince's Home fleet. (The odds of this happening often are low because it's going
to be a big universe and the locations of allaince home ports will become public information before
long.)

This would encourage teamwork because it would take multiple, large, attacking fleets to take over
a claimed system. And would give people a place in the battle galaxies a semi safe place to park.
For instance, if ten attackers attack 20 defenders, they will each fight two defender's bases/fleets. If one attacks,
he would fight 20 times. If 20 attack ten, each defender would fight two. With the matchings being
strongest attacker vs strongest remaining defender. So in a ten attacks 20 situation, #1 attacker would
fight #1 and #11 defender.)  And would increase the intensity and complexity of battles to a level far
more interesting than single PvP's are.  And it would encourage all players to get into an alliance
because surviving very long in the eight non protected gals would not be very likely for solo players.

And add a new mission type, Scout System, that gives FP of combined system fleets, number of bases,
number and FP of defenders (but not their specific ships.) System probes can be performed remotely,
at the cost of ten turns per probe in gal and 100 turns out of gal.

At unclaimed systems, anyone can attack anyone they find there, but with the following
modifications to the battle rules.

1. Specific mission objective: marines, workers, credits, segments, minerals.

2. When players are of equal (within 10%) TP (not FP) the max booty is 10% of the goal resources.

3. When the players differ in size, the max booty is adjusted up or down by a scaling factor. Perhaps
something along the lines of +/- 1% for every 10% difference in TP, with a max of +100% (20% of total
available on target) and min of 1%.

4. No more remote attacks. You can only attack people in the current system.

5. Three levels of alliance relations, Allies, Neutral, War, with all defaulting to neutral until changed.

6. Can not attack ally fleets. Always automatically attack enemy fleets within a settable percentage of FP
or automatically warp away from any that exceed your FP by the set amount to a point somewhere in the
current region. Which could leave you far from your alliance system and unable to return immediately.)
Non allied players (those not in alliances) are always neutral. No auto attacks, but you can always attack
manually if desired or set up your to automatically attack neutrals. This works in both directions, no
matter if you were sitting at the planet when they arrived or are the one doing the moving.

7. All warps use the number of distance/turns you warp. Including warping away from retalliations.
Warps are never further than 50% of available turns. When you run out of turns or there is no system
within 50% of your turns left, you can't warp away. Meaning if someone with a retal has more turns than
you do and is willing to burn them until you run out, you get hit. And the attacker will be able to tell when
the defender is running low by seeing the hops to the new location getting shorter. Or, alternatively,
players with retals can also warp in pursuit and not burn turns. Just so both sides are the same price.
Or something in between, say like warping costs 10% of the distance moved.

8. Warp disruptors/stabilizers are capped at 50% (level 25) to prevent those who are willing to spend
all their turns on techs can not gain an overwhelming advantage and force everyone else into a
never ending arms race of using turns on techs. And the formula for stabilizer/disruptor effectiveness is

Warp Chance - (WC * (stabil - disrupt))

Which means, even at max disrupt against no stabil, the most you could increase your odds would be
50% of the initial odds. So, if you were 10x more powerful and had a 10% chance, the max you could
have is 15%. Since your reward for that attack would only be 1% anyway, there would be no big incentive
to attack much weaker players. You take a shot and if they warp, they're gone, but you did cost them
a bunch of turns. Which means weaker players could sustain dozens of attacks without losing significant
percentages of their resources, but could lose a lot of turns and wind up far from home or safe port.

9. The winner of a battle gets scrap recovery from all ships, their own and enemy's, destroyed in battle.
50% of ships cost and 50% of marines. Surplus marines are held in reserve in a separate group on
the mothership, just like workers are on the secret base or mins are on the mothership. When you
add marines to new ships, they are first drawn from the available pool until exhausted and you have
to spend credits hiring more. You can hire reserves and resupplying marines after battle is only done
from your ready reserves. When you scrap a ship, 100% of its marines go into the reserves. (There
are naturally material recycling losses, but marines can just disembark and odds are not many of them
will not fall the gangplank. And, I would like to be able to control how much of my cash on hand
can be used up on marines before I am willing just to sacrifice my ships and percentage of targeted
item rather than continue to resupply marines.)

10. As long as a player, defender or attacker, has at least one surviving ship to report in,  they get
a full battle report. Otherwise, simply a statement their fleet was wiped out in a battle at x location.

11. Motherships always warp away if their fleet is entirely destroyed in a system battle, even if their
side prevails in the overall battle. In PvP battles, the Mship warps away after losing a battle and being
plundered.

12. No more nebs. If you need to be AFK for an extended period, you park in the neutral zone.

13. Auto resupply of fleets after losing battles, just like resupplying marines, if that option is turned on
by the player and up to the percentage of mothership cash selected.

As weaker, protected area players got stronger/bolder, they would begin making border raids into the
wild regions, meaning to retreat back into the safe zone after flying some high value missions. But, with
auto attacks, if they happened to run  into more powerful non allied fleets, they would get warped deeper
into the region. Perhaps running into more hostile fleets and burning more hours and risking running out of
turns deep into hostile territory. And the stronger players/alliances would most likely tend to congregate
near the borders of the protected zone, making cross border raids a risky venture for weaker players.

The whole crux of this is the auto battles in the unprotected regions. You're playing whether you
are logged in or not. You will get battle reports and may have gained or lost things while you were
not logged in, but the odds of being seriously damaged would be fairly small. There would be far more
battles, but the loses to individual player's wealth would not be greatly diminished, even if they had
lost several battles since last logging in. You gain stuff (creds, mins, marines, from successfully defending
against attacks) so you may just as well have improved your standings as lost stuff while you were AFK.

While the changes would be extensive, a lot of the current issues would be addressed and the game
would be more varied and active, without forcing anyone to adopt a certain style of play. And it would
add a lot more random events. Any time you hop to a new system (without scanning it first)
you risk running into a more powerful enemy fleet and getting warped far away. Perhaps making it
impossible to quickly return to your alliance system, leaving both yourself and your alliance less well
protected. Any time you do a coordinated team attack on an enemy alliance system/quad, you leave
your own team's system quad undefended (or less well defended) and may end up all scattered all
over the universe and a long time before you could regroup to defend. Which adds new considerations
for the players to make as to how many of their turns need be held in reserve to provide warping and
returning to base after forced warps capability.

Now, I know a lot of the present day killers are going to say that this will reduce their chances of
PvP battle and force them so spend more time playing. Which will most likely be true in the short run.
But the main objectives are to increase the retention of new players and to add more variety and
randomness to the game. If successful, over time, there really will be far more players and the
chances of finding targets in the unprotected gals will increase. And, frankly, people who spend a
lot of time playing, should do better than insiders who know all the tricks and can currently beat
the pants off everyone while only playing a very limited amount of actual time. Those players do
deserve to do well, but not to the point of dominating the game and driving away newcomers.
And it will introduce a whole new aspect of team battles that can be had for the taking at any time
once an allied system/quad was located. The only way to control multiple quads would be to take
other alliances systems. The losers would simply regroup and rebuild somehwhere else. But the winners
would be forced to split their player fleets between the controlled quads and holding many would
reduce the chances of defending all and the shoe would soon be on the other foot. Or they would
be forced into making major investments in system fleets/base tech to attempt to hold them without
a lot of player fleets being present.

And it provides for all styles of play, no PvP, wars and SO on one combined system, rebuilding
and maintaining contact and cohesion within the entire user community. And, to further encourage
that, add a newspaper where everyone can read reports about major events (large team battles.)
And allow an alliance an extra ten members for every quad they control.

And of course there are many possible variations within the multi galaxy framework.
Perhaps the entry point to a galaxy is a council controlled base where you  can
safely warp in and do system scans from, so that your 1,000 turns aren't wasted or result in
instant annihilation or losing many more turns warping deep into the gal and away from the ext, and
weaker players could get in some high value missions without too much risk, at the cost of
spending ten extra turns for every planet visited for system scouting, whereas stronger players
can just fly them without scouting and let the chips fall where they may.

Finally, I do not claim any of this is deeply or well thought out and it is only offered as a banquet
of ideas for purposes of discussion.
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« Reply #53 on: March 24, 2008, 01:09:22 AM »

Pirates touched on a number of my ideas that i did not post.  For the sake of discussion here is a list of those other ideas.

Keep the single galaxy but place 5-10 Coucil Planets where no attacks occur no missions spawn and players are completely safe when docked.  At these planets the Market would be accesible rather than from the main screen.  Each planet would only offer the basic resources and a different selection of the more expensive items.  You would have to buy from one and transport them to another planet where demand was high.  Put the asteroid resources into circulation as trade goods as well.  Then players don't HAVE to mine if they want to build and miners dont have to build if they just want creds.  Make mining a Gold Bonus.  Planets would also offer workers/slaves, bounty contracts, commander intel, Alliance advertisements, and Alliance missions.  These Game concepts could then be removed from the game console to streamline it and make it more user friendly.  Of course having a Gold membership would give you the option of doing some of these remotely.  The alien inursions could occur at these planets, providing a story/plot.  New content could be an arena to allow PvP battles using 0 turns and not actually destroying the players ships.  Each commander would pay an entry fee (say the FP of their ships in creds)  The winner gets the pot.  This would give players something to do when out of turns without providing a gigantic advantage.
Alliances could then build their own planets and research/buy their own structures, as the council planets.  The Alliance marketplace could generate royalties for the Alliance bank, A shipyard to allow non-alliance players Alliance specific ships, etc.

Create a character class system to allow players to differentiate themselves.  Something like Admirals can send more fleets into battle or provide bonuses to their ships.  Increasing hp, attack etc costs less cp for them.  Traders can mine asteroids better than others.  They get discounts on the turns + creds needed to mine, their warehouse hold more etc.  Bounty hunters are PvP specialists, They hold more marines, get a bonus when filling a contract hit, get more salavage, etc.  This provides a nearly endless opportunity to expand the game as more classes can be introduced and game play can be geared towards a players particular preference of game style.  Alliances could be based on these classes or carry a diverse team, thereby creating more PvP possibly.  2 Bounty hunter alliances could declare war on eachother.  Also, Alliance missions would require multiple players to complete and different specialists. ie, the group must go to a planet and clear the 5-20 fleets of reavers (or whatever), collect millions of units of carbon(or something) then deliver it to another planet but must defeat a Boss fleet.  There could also be class specific missions that have only experience rewards and require no turns to give players with more play time something to do when out of turns (like me right now, hence the essay)

Pirates had alot of good ideas and we need more players giving their opinions to make SO the best it can be.  The ideas here are mine and I think they are good but this might not be what the majority wants and that's who were looking to please so bring on the comments!
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« Reply #54 on: March 24, 2008, 01:54:57 PM »

heh, I know, I actually deal with people all day long now that there IP addresses change every 24 hours... even without them doing anything.  however there is other ways of doing it, that are effective.

anyway, on to suggestions:
-make an alliance able to support fully (within reason)
while some may think this will overpower lower people... your probably right.  until the game gets reset via DDay.  then it will actually give everyone a decent chance, including new people. 

-make a set (small) bonus to players that have been here longer.  for each DDay, they get 1, or 2% bonus to something.  non top ten get double (top ten get there own credit rewards... lucky  14 ).  gold get double once more.  so a gold person in top ten gets 1*2*2 or 4% bonus for being so awesome, non top ten get 8%, helping them catch up.  however, then you cap it at say, 10-25%.  this gives people an incentive for staying a long time, however not so much that people will never catch up. 

-and for the love of all that is good, keep the missions easy!  people want to have a challenge going against others, not the computer  4  except for PvE... I suppose I understand the concept there, but still, making missions hard to do mean once you get knocked down, it's that much harder to get back up.

-make minimum for encounters in galaxy 3-5 mil (just now noticing this) even between voting, and all this, I'm still not ready to do the all important encounters.  and if I'm having this much trouble in SO PVE, I hat eto see what new people go through.

-set the missions back to % of total fp... the E-missions and encounters are already awesome at what you have the mothership missions doing...  and personally I thought mothership missions based of your power was ingenous.
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« Reply #55 on: March 24, 2008, 05:15:06 PM »

here's an idea to scramble your strategy - make scouting enemy with little scoutship impossible.

xxxxxxx(#00000)'s fleet and mothership were huge.
Your fighters knew they would face certain death and turned back.

make it so you have to use fleet(s) with at least 25% of enemies power to be able to attack.

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« Reply #56 on: March 24, 2008, 09:28:24 PM »

Quote
-set the missions back to % of total fp... the E-missions and encounters are already awesome at what you have the mothership missions doing...  and personally I thought mothership missions based of your power was ingenous.

ars68, finally someone agrees with me that mothership missions in their current state suck and should be returned to the way they were..they were changed the round after bigbroni maxed out first....to try and stop people from maxing...which didnt work at all...changing them back would increase donations, we would have a way to grow without grinding and relying on luck in the galaxy....a big help to those of us who dont have hours to play. ive only been suggesting this since they were changed, i doubt E will listen now.
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« Reply #57 on: March 24, 2008, 09:52:38 PM »

well if they scaled back due to maxing then it wouldnt make a difference to bring them back to thier orginal power beings how there is so much other stuff to get people maxed now
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« Reply #58 on: March 25, 2008, 03:49:54 AM »

The Interactive Mission Creator is working now:

If you want to create some interactive missions you can use it here.
We need players with a lot of imagination to create different evolving scenarios.

A mission can have more battles in it to progress to a higher reward or upgrade the reward (from credits to items for example).
A mission can contain more reward types, but once a reward is given the mission ends.
You can have endless possibilities and steps in the mission.
Please try to link the steps to each other in a storyline to make the mission better and easy to understand.
Please try to keep it simple and interesting...

http://www.spaceo.net/mission/

P.S.: Please preview your missions and try to make them as easy to understand as possible. Only the best missions will make it into the game. Thank you.

Project Details if you don't know how to make it work:
http://forum.spaceo.net/index.php/topic,3794.0.html

P.P.S.: If your mission is included into the game, you will get a prize, depending on the length and greatness of the mission.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2008, 04:12:40 AM by SirEmi » Report to moderator   Logged

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« Reply #59 on: March 25, 2008, 04:43:59 AM »

SO is text based that means people like me with dialup can actually play it, if you start putting up interactive graphics me and my ilk are screwed. its not like theres some shortage of graphic video games. SO stands out as the most original and challenging and different of text based games. if you make this game graphic you'll be playing eve online!

                                                                     spider2
Why not have an option in the account room to turn on graphics?
I only changed last week from Dial-up to ADSL2+ Broadband, and on dial-up I still played many graphical games. It wouldn't have to be a full graphical game or anything, even just a small range of animated gifs or something in battle would liven it up a bit. A lot of people who join just say "CRAP game, can't even see the ships", Then they go and play all of those graphic video games you speak of, which you have to admit, have an easier time being more successful than text-based games. Again, It could just be turned on/off from the account room by those who don't like it. Just one of my two cents.  16
A ramped up (optional) menu skin couldn't go astray either..
« Last Edit: March 25, 2008, 04:53:32 AM by zephyrblade » Report to moderator   Logged

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