Star-map tiers are...lame

No, I mean like, explain how it makes more sense. Fighting your way outward into a harsher universe? I kind of prefer a mild universe while fighting into harsher bubbles. I guess both work just the same though.

I mean sure there's the small effort in finding one of the bubbles, but they are supposed to be relatively common to stumble across.

Start a game. The planet you land on is almost always ideal. And the solar system you start in? It tends to have +10 planets in it. You won't get stuck.

 

Random googled article tells us that:
"Closest potentially habbitable to Earth planet is approximately 6 light years away"
1 light year 9.4605284 × 10¹² kilometers = ~9460528400000 * 6 = ~56763170400000
S=4*3,14 ~56763170400000² = ~40 489 568 859 938 392 202 362 331 195,975 Km³
Forty octillion four hundred and eighty nine septillion five hundred and sixty eight sixtollion eight hundred and fifty nine pentillion nine hundred and thirty eight quadrillion two hundred and two trillion tree hundred and sixty two billion tree hundred and thirty one thousand one hundred and nintey five point nine hundred seventy five cubic kilometers of floating deadly rocks, most of which are hazardous to man in their own unique way.
Not a small number even on a cosmic scale.

Also this.

 

I think an alternative would be to have pockets of higher tier players in each sector that could be traveled to with gear made using whatever the boss drops. For example, in the beta sector, you could move on to the next, or you could use your new robotics table to make a air mask to explore the few planets in the sector that have gas based atmospheres. Just an example. I think the sector idea is fine, but I do think it would be nice to have option to stay in one sector a while longer instead of having to move on. Or, you could make the next tier planets accessable, just hard to work with. For example, you might encounter a moon in the alpha sector. At that point, it is really hard to mine because you don't have the cold resistance, so I think it would be fair to make, as a reward, access to higher tier material. Don't know what you could do for the higher tiers, but I'm sure the devs could think of something. And it would add more of a risk/reward feeling to worlds. A few other random ideas; a monster world with super tough hordes of aggressive monsters, a world with poisonous gas for an atmosphere, a world where the surface is completely owned by hostile aliens, etc. A few such things already exist, such as a lava and ocean world. If its harder to mine, it should give some kind of bonus, I feel. Risk/reward.

 

My starting system had 4 planets. The second time I started, I had six.

In the original starting system, pre-balance, I had a single L1 planet among the assortment.

 

This thread remembers me of ur-quean masters (or star control II). That was a game with a universe to explore in the way it should!. It has a main storyline, there are "tiers" in the sense that you unlock new technologies, and at the beginning you explore nearby planets and solar systems cause fuel is expensive and you need to improve your spaceship in order to travel to far solar systems. You can find any kind of planet, and you decide if you want to go down or not after an analysis of the planet data. If it was a lets say 10000 degree planet you could still go down and risk in order to get some materials!.

And of course the planets conditions would make sense: hotter planets the ones that are next to the start, with bigger gravity if they are bigger and so on.



Oh and it had a great ship upgrade system!:

 

More UPGRADES, less replacements should be the name of the game here. More content, less repetition. Toxic planets, planets too hot or cold for visitng without specialized gear, creature threats more dangerous and yet, more fairly handled than 'this monster has a sack of HP and ignores your knockback because your weapon isn't up to snuff so avoid it while you run across the surface of the planet to find a weapon of the appropriate tier".

Also, when it comes to getting better balance in your starting planet assortment: devs can control that somewhat, I mean, they made sure you always spawned on a l1 planet when it was 1-10.

 

Have to agree with OP on this one, right now all I do is find all my materials on one planet, make my armour and spawn boss and then travel to the next sector rinse and repeat. I barely ever leave the first planet I land on in a new sector. On top of all the ideas about making certain equipment to survive certain planet conditions, it would also be nice imo to have materials only spawn on certain planets to encourage exploration i.e one planet is rich in iron ore but lacks silver or copper otherwise like I said, I can find all my stuff on one planet in a sector and then be done with said sector.

 

I agree with both you & OP.
There are so many topics about this in the forums it's hard to know which one to post in to get your view seen, never mind the flame wars some have erupted into.

I think the idea was ambitious but it may have worked wonderfully if all players (maybe up to a certain size limit) shared the same universe although given how killing NPCs is profitable, I think that would just devolve into a bunch of barren worlds instead.

If we made a server right now for everyone on the forums, I doubt we would bump into each other on any given planet.

If we took everyone playing and had them all on 1 server, we would see a lot of each other but be fighting over resources.

The reason I bring this up is because I feel that each planet should have a reason for me to check it out (which is the same as what the OP is saying) whereas right now the reason is implied but the incentive isn't there. for example'Oooh a cool Lv4 gun, shame I am already in B sector so that gun is outclassed and worthless now'. Many of us agree that the reasons to explore planets would probably be gear. But gear doesn't scale very well (even when we had the AP system) so indirectly weapons & armor are like the bogus prize instead of the bonus prize. Who even buys weapons from merchants when the nearby guards can drop better for free?

But with everyone sharing planets, the incentive to branch out alone to get loot, or to work together to achieve great things (or troll) might be there.
Or it might not be.

 

I want to explore all the planets in the sector...but don't want to strip all the coal from the worlds just to be able to hop around, wish some of the planets had shuttles I could take to neighboring worlds or stars for a small fee.

 

I feel like this has to be posted in these threads:

 

I really dont want to see any artificial limits on progression. Only kind of limits I would like to see is attributes that you level up and pick which points go where.Like sword needs 25 strength to use.Or, this gun needs 30 agility to use.Want to build that robot?Need 40 intelligence.Attributes could also augment weapons and armor.The more strength points you have the more damage your broken sword does.That way everything doesnt become totally useless as you progress.This is the only limiting system I see that makes sense.Most everything else is artificial. I would like to see planets with hostile enviroments but not to block progress.

Keeping people from progressing to fast or difficult can rely on a few things.One is death penalty.Make them much more harsh.You lose items.There are a number of death penalties that can help guard the progression.Also loot should be guarded as well as ore.This will protect the progression system.

 

Here is my point:
1) No sectors. Its distracting and annoying.
2) No super ores. (Basically no super items made of that ores). Huge numbers killed every game in my experience. Just iron, steel and titanium.
3) Variety >> power. Its much more fun to choose between dozens of different working weapons with same damage, than just replacing old one with more damaging version.
4) Challenging exploration not based on brute force. Also, its easier to balance low range damage, than 10 tiers.
5) Non-combat activities like advanced farming or alchemy.
6) Interactive environment. More actions with furniture items ftw!

 

I'm relieved to see Tiy stating that the tier system won't be the long-term solution to progression. I hope this also means the team is thinking of condensing all the sectors into one region. I saw on his twitter that he's going to put in a "Home Planet" button when on the teleporter on your ship. Not sure of the exact details, but it's a promising sign.

 

Wherd he say that? Would like to know more!

 

Click the blue arrow. He posted it earlier today on another thread.

 

This is really all I want out of the starmap system.

Edit: It seems there are plans to improve the system. That's great news!

 

Its pretty crazy how many similar threads keep popping up. I think the more they unlock tiers, the more we are all simultaneously realizing how silly they are. Hopefully it will all work to get some dev love!

Yea, thats a really good thread, LOTS of great ideas. My goal with this thread is to be more community driven, my ideas are just sample solutions to problems that might arise from a single starmap, the only concrete thing being that we need one.

The technical term for what you are suggesting is a star map with planet levels determined by a form of perlin noise generation. This could def serve as an alternative (or addition) to gear style progress, if you like the concept of dangerous/safe sectors of space.

However, if you like having the all sorts of planets everywhere, and want to stick to different forms of progression (but are afraid of getting stuck in a shitty area), another option would be to start new games at the ships console. Allow people to look at the proposed system and give them unlimited use of "find random" until they decide to beam down. Maybe add some flashing red lights to make it feel like an escape scene =)

 

Basically this. As far as I can see, there are only two real outcomes with the current system. The first, the way it is now, we will all wait till the final tier to build, and ignore a long list of useless starmaps. The second, they add incentive to go back, and now we have to juggle a list of ten universes.

If we could get everything we need in one expansive universe, the new problems that would arise (imho) might be tough to tackle, would be less fundamentally obnoxious. Less detrimental to the foundations of this game.

 

Is there a practical difference between having sectors or making one big galaxy but stopping players from going to higher difficulty planets?

I understand there have to be restrictions in place to stop people from going to high difficulty planets otherwise people will exploit it and skip half the game.
So even if the sectors are gone, players would still not be able to visit higher difficulty planets.

I understand having sectors feels like it is a very linear and closed galaxy but practically speaking it makes no difference in having just one galaxy and restricting players to visit higher difficulty planets.
In fact, the sectors make it easy to find a next suitable planet. Instead of wading through the map trying to find a planet which is not to low difficulty or to high (to which you aren't allowed to go anywhere)

For me the discussion is not so much about the sector system (which is easily changed off course, we could have various sliders and buttons on the map to help us choose difficulty and terrain, etc. for example) but about the inability to visit high difficulty planets (aka higher sectors) and how to stop people exploiting it when those restrictions are lifted.

 

Been thinking similar thoughts. Idea supported!