Event Planets

These are planets found in a scan that are controlled by an alien race that isn't one of the playable races. Call it a hostile alien race, with advance technology. Call them Legion XIII or whatever, anyway these planets can't be taken over or controlled by a player, but rather only destroyed. If you find one of these planets, you can begin attacking it right away, but it will randomly attack back, disabling your ship. The more people attacking the lower your chances of getting attacked.

-Alerting your Legion: This will allow everyone in your Legion to attack, and they can alert their legions and they can attack.
-Getting the Rewards: These will be based on Legion strength and which legions did the most damage. Example: Lets say I find this planet, and alert my legion, and one of my Legion mates alerts his legion. Damage is added up per individual and then a person's over all total will be all the damage his legion did. So lets say I have 10 legion members that did 100k damage each, that would be 1 million damage my legion did. Lets say my mate has 25 people in his legion and they all did 100k, his legion's damage would be 2.5 mil making his legion the top damage. (In thinking on this further, an event should be capped by the size of the planet. So a very small planet would only allow 10 attackers. The planet attacks every 15 minutes, giving each ship a 10% chance of being the one attacked. You can see how the risk factor would help balance the events, possibly even removing disabled ships from the fight altogether. So the planet has to be killed fast before the legion gets wiped out. The chance factor adds a new element to the event.)
-Rewards: The epic/rare/uncommon rewards would be ship modules that take up less ship space. Example: EM Scanner is 20 scan, takes 20 ship spaces, the epic find would be an EM Scanner that is maybe 22 scan and takes up 17 spaces. Then the rewards filter down to stat rewards or artifacts etc. The items go into the cargo hold, if they don't have room for it, they have an hour to sell off some stuff to make room.
-When it's Over: After the planet has been destroyed, it drops off all lists, and then reemerges into the mix waiting be found again. Maybe throw 100 of these type of planets into the mix of the 23k that are out there, give them some unique names.


Population Centers:
I think you need to eliminate several planetary buildings, I'll get to that in a second.

I read that increasing population just basically makes the planet harder to take over, however I was thinking population should also provide bigger bonuses to attack, defense, research, mining, artifact finding. So its not all about stacking a planet of one building type, but rather finding a balance with population hubs and say research buildings. To get the maximum output, I don't want to put 10 research labs on a planet, but rather 4 pop hubs and 6 labs to get the most research out of it.

That said, I think there should be four building types total. Population Hubs, Military Laser Matrix, Research Satellites, and Defensive Bunkers (Names are a work in progress).
Military Laser Matrix: They utilize lasers to disable raiding ships or to effectively mine the rock the currently are on. Higher population returns a higher yield of mineral, and increases a planets offensive capabilities. Also provide bonuses to a Ship's over all attack.
Research Satellites: These babies have long ranger sensors, and utilize them to keep themselves cloaked and off long range sensors, making it hard to find them. The more heavily manned, the greater its scan / cloak bonus, but the weaker its research abilities become. A ship can utilize these structures to boost its own scan and cloak capabilities.
Defensive Bunkers: These are planets are littered with military outposts, trying to find rare artifacts from lost races. Depart of Defense is responsible for these planets as they could pose a threat to national security. They don't want any potential weapons to escape. The chance of finding an artifact greatly increases by the number of people present, with everyone stomping around, makes it harder to find rare artifacts. Since these bunkers are mostly underground, it makes it near impossible to kill off its population. These can not be place on gas planets, for obvious reasons.

Random Thought: Also a slider or % guides for what the population should be concentrating on, either the military aspect or the harvest (each building type you put on the planet needs at least 5% of the population, so if you put one of each building type, that is automatically 15% of the population that can't be shifted). So you get higher bonuses one way or the other. A good example of a use for something like this would be a planet that has little or no resources, it can still be colonized for military purposes and increasing a ship's capabilities. So I have this large planet with nothing on it, but I build a ton of research buildings, scale the population so its boosting scan/cloak only, giving my ship higher bonuses in this respect, and leaving little to no bonuses for research, as there really isn't any on the planet anyway, however with the boosts to scan and cloak, I could probably raid some one else's planet for research.

Why change it to this? It goes along with the raid event at the top, doing this allows for a more concise looting table, giving each epic building several ways to be boosted, and more desirable type of loot. Also, once epic buildings start being used, they can be easily lost to some one raiding planets. So lets say you got that Epic Research Satellite, that takes 15 building spaces, but had a 4% research modifier and provides +3 ship scan, and +1 cloaking or that Laser Matrix that uses 12 spaces and had 5% mining, and +7attack. Etc etc you see what I mean. You then put that building on one of your planets, hours later some one raids and steals the planet from you, and now they control that building. They can't take it off the planet, so the planet essentially becomes a hot spot for pvp fighting.

Now this kind of pvp may not be everyone's cup of tea, so you could introduce a way to flag a planet as your Home Planet, or your HQ or whatever, or using the guard this planet feature, and that would make that one planet unable to be stolen. So a person could place these epic buildings, and not worry about losing their hard work (however the planet could still be attacked and the population killed off, making it useless until the population built back up.)

Final Note: I know what I'm proposing is a lot of work, and kind of changes a big aspect of the game, and that this was long and may be confusing at parts. However, I get these random thoughts stuck in my head and I find it helps me to write them out, or they drive me crazy. Some of this stuff is rough around the edges, but would gladly polish some of the ideas up, if you were curious where I was going with it.


Thanks for reading,
-Mox

Oh, just thought of something else.

Warehouse Buildings: Pretty self - explanatory. They store items for you on a planet, but if the planet get stolen, well everything in the warehouse gets stolen too. Was just thinking if we started doing raids, some of the gear we get, we may want to save for a later date. Also makes it so you don't have to constantly buy/sell ship modules to redo your ship for whatever kind of thing you were wanting to do.

Just for an example, I swap in energy modules when I am done for the night, so they refill completely and I have a lot of energy when I get back on the next day. I just keep these in my ships cargo, so I don't have to keep buying and selling. Having a planet to store some gear would be great.

I like the planet idea that sounds interesting. I think these "epic" items would be all right but I think his plan for fighting over planets is when people start terraforming the planets into mega rich for a certain thing or mega rich x4 for a certain thing. Its hard to terraform as it takes some time to actually get the amount of artifact shipment required and then its rare to get it by clicking accept shipment. So you have time it takes + actually getting it. I think endgame (months really) people will probably have mega rich planets that people will want to fight heavily over. I personally have an extremely rich research planet that I don't !!!!! want to lose as it gives me a ton of research and it hasn't even peaked yet. If I get another terraformer I would probably do the mega rich (If that is even doable). There are rare planets out there but I think its hard to find them let alone uncover other people's planets.

Love the idea of some sort of event or npc planets.

Did not know about the terraforming stuff. Still relatively a new, and finding out new things all the time. With my idea, terraforming would only add to a planet's overall value. I assume you are saying that it would change a planet's resource from like Very Abundant to Rich to Very Rich etc. This wouldn't overall interfere with my idea, it would add to the overall worth of that planet, making it a more desirable target. Unless I misunderstood the concept.

Good post!!

I wont be able to implement *all* of the ideas you mentioned, but I like each of them.

In the very near future though, I would like to change how population is used. Right now, a "damage soaker" just seems weak and pretty callous to your people living there if you think about it

One simpler idea is that population could add a passive bonus to the planet's defense and attack. Thus, by driving down the population, you are essentially "weakening the defenses" of the planet. This would not change the planet's base defense stats, it would only allow you to weaken the bonus it gets.

Although I thought about having population play a role in structures and resources, I thought another solution would be to have the planet receive a production penalty when it is under attack. You may have noticed your planet showing as "Calm", but there are other stats such as "Under Attack", "Recently Attacked", and so on. This would mimic a real-world situation where a planet bombarded by laser fire probably wont produce as much as one that has never been hit.

And yes, you would essentially *lose* your structure investment when someone invades - but if the planet is worth it, you could try to get it back. The structures are not destroyed after an invasion, but the person controlling them has to have the research necessary to use them. If not, they may be tempted to demolish them. There are also plenty of rarer planet artifacts that can ensure your planet stays safe and sound if you need peace of mind.

Some other tidbits about invasion:

* A planet cannot be invaded while it is guarded. The attacker would have to first disable all of the guards before they proceed.
* You can only attempt 1 invasion per day, win or lose
* an invasion costs twice as much as a standard colonization, so it is not a choice to be taken lightly
* invading has the same planet-limit requirements as colonizing new planets, so you cant invade if you are maxed out.

The major point is that as you spread your reach and expand to many planets, it will get harder and harder to protect them all perfectly. You will need to focus on your most valuable planets, bribe your legion to guard them if necessary, and have an arsenal of artifacts to use strategically when the time comes.

webguydan wrote:

Some other tidbits about invasion:

* A planet cannot be invaded while it is guarded. The attacker would have to first disable all of the guards before they proceed.
* You can only attempt 1 invasion per day, win or lose
* an invasion costs twice as much as a standard colonization, so it is not a choice to be taken lightly
* invading has the same planet-limit requirements as colonizing new planets, so you cant invade if you are maxed out.

The major point is that as you spread your reach and expand to many planets, it will get harder and harder to protect them all perfectly. You will need to focus on your most valuable planets, bribe your legion to guard them if necessary, and have an arsenal of artifacts to use strategically when the time comes.

Understood, so basically stealing a planet is hard work, and if a ship is guarding it, even more so.

Yea I figured a lot of the ideas wouldn't fit or would be more trouble then they are worth to add, but I find that some times a unworkable idea spawns one that does work. I've beta tested a lot of MMO's in the past, so I'm not expecting most of this stuff to make it to the final stages, but even if a fraction of it is used, I always like to contribute.

I had another planet idea, but it doesn't really fit in with this post. Expect another big post some time soon haha.