I know that the game has a PVP level inherent in the structure but has any thought been given to introducing an unplayed-alien race and including them in the list of ships available for combat. I'm interested in a little ship-to-ship combat but would prefer not to attack other players.

Speaking of aliens, it might be interesting to find occupied planets that didn't belong to other players either, possibly as an un-tapped resource or possibly as defenders where they can be attacked without retaliation.

Just some thoughts (or is this already implemented? or irrelevant?)

Sean

I like this, would give pvpers a PVE environment making the PVP one less cut throat, and make it a requirement to update your weaponry and other modules. Probably be a PITA to implement but im all for it.

ok... how about this idea!

there is a massive alien ship passing though the galaxy and is randomly attacking ships and destroying colonies (yes equal to scrap). it will take a combined effort to stop it before it does too much damage. usually when you attack you get immediate damage back. for this it may be a bit diff because the ship will score a kill in 1 hit. the ship will just continue to kill indiscriminately (every 5 or so minutes random attack on a ship or planet) until it takes enough damage to be defeated. players what contribute will get massive bonus to XP for their % of damage done, and possible chance for rare artifacts. also the ship will rank attackers higher % for attack chance than the others weighted on damage dealt. the ship should be visible in everyone battle tab.

I think this could go somewhere, but wed need to debate this. Thoroughly. For now I think we should stick to powell's idea.

to add to this... this could be a intergalactic garbage collector that cleans up unused (occupied but inactive) and crappy planets. in addition to players and their planets. dual use.

The way I envision it:

In the background Dan creates a number of empty players: Artificer* 20A, 20B, 20C,... 100Z. Each of these players is nothing more then a ship with gear and an algorithm to self heal/repair. No planet data or anything else important. Now when Capt Bob goes looking for a PVP kill he occasionally sees "Drifting Artificier transport, Lvl 20" or "Drifting Artificer armored dreadnaught, lvl 60" on his ship list. This means Capt Bob can engage in ship to ship combat without potentially sparking retaliation from another player. Since there is no risk of retaliation Dan might want to make the ships a little harder to kill (pack them full of android crew to up their stats). Not certain how difficult the coding would be but they are more difficult to kill you could theoretically get artifact points or research points from a win in addition to XP.

Without seeing the actual code I suspect most of the pieces are already implemented. The shield replenishment algorithm would have to be adapted for armor and Dan would have to create a subroutine that creates these dummy ship/players so they don't need to be created manually. Then the number of artificer dummy players would have to be regulated so that they are not common but also not impossible to find. That's a developer judgment call.

Sean

* You know, those ancient races that left the artifacts we keep finding.

P.S. notice how smoothly I assume a task is easy simply because I have no knowledge of how it is done? Yeah, I learned that technique from my boss who keeps assigning me work wothout knowing what and how I do it either.

I agree completely. My all-time favorite games are ones that have "boss" encounters, especially large scale team-oriented battles. I would love to see something like that here and have several ideas (big surprise, right?) but figured that would be a little ways off still. I figured things would move in that direction in time.

it would be cool to branch off on Sean's idea of having a few AI controlled ships. 3 of them visible in each battle window. one a mirror image of your own ship config, the rest a random config for lower and higher ranks. this would be a way to do some ship benchmarks without having to disable lots of real players. i disabled 1 or more ships every level in the beginning just for weapons testing. also would be good for building XP without going on a killing spree. of course there will still be those who will go on killing spreed to top the kills list.

Introduce a "testing arena" where you can outfit a ship and fight it while getting 'virtual' damage. Every time this feature is used, credits will be deducted.

/concur with everything above.

First, the introduction of NPC ships works very well with Sean Powell's idea of a NPC-only race called Artificers. It means that instead of beefing up the ship to balance the inability to attack back, the race itself can have bonuses. That leads to less programing than rewriting the combat system.

Second, there are already many other forum threads that talk about the introduction of 'boss' NPCs. It would be best to discuss the topic there.

Third, the introduction of a 'vertual training' ship combat is a good system to make sure your ship layout is good enough to defend itself.