04-14-2020, 10:24 PM
I'd like to hear what the community thinks about this.
Now I remembered in vanilla Freelancer there were some dockable asteroid miners. You couldn't do anything on them though suggesting that whatever feature the official Freelancer devs had in mind was cut (or perhaps it was an oversight/simple copy paste error).
So what if we could make that original idea work and maybe expand on it a little. Recent suggestion about faction bonuses made me think... It would be crazy to give factions a direct advantage. But maybe we can make it an indirect advantage?
Basically the idea is the following:
- make new ore commodity types called something like "Unprocessed X ore / gas ". These ores would be "sold" on the asteroid miners of their respective factions for a symbolic price, but would only be buyable by Official Faction ID-ed ships. Their profit would be somewhat comparable to hauling "regular" ores when taking into account that the trade routes would be significantly shorter - in the same system or one jump away? (and therefore safer / faster)
- as a bonus the miners could be made destroyable with decent Hitpoint pools. That way the faction engineers also have something to do (if it's possible to repair non player objects with the repair ship ?). And of course the pirates and rival factions could mount organized raids to destroy the automated miners and hurt their rival's sources of "easy" income. Bam, now you need the factions to organize / hire patrols and people can actually do patrols for a meaningful purpose, not just "roleplay"
- if it's not possible to have both docking and destructibility then maybe it's possible to write a plugin that would periodically award money based on the amount of "alive" miners to characters with the correct IDs mounted? That way the idea about patrols still stays...
A similar idea is already proven to work in other games where exists a player driven "economy" of resources (see for example the game Foxhole - a persistent world World War alternate history logistics focused top down shooter). Although they have a limit on the gathering rate unlike in Freelancer where the only thing one can do is balance the price / hitpoints so it's not a money printing machine.
I believe this suggestion would encourage more official faction activity and more in-game interaction between factions. After all, asteroid miners are static (similar to mining zones) so you know where to find and rob the haulers.
As some of you might have already noticed I am (mostly) an ideas man, but might jump into coding a proof of concept for this as I believe it's something that wouldn't be too complicated to implement for someone who understands the basics of Freelancer ini files modding. Most of the work is in the balancing and, unfortunately, I have no experience with that.
Thoughts, criticisms welcome.
Now I remembered in vanilla Freelancer there were some dockable asteroid miners. You couldn't do anything on them though suggesting that whatever feature the official Freelancer devs had in mind was cut (or perhaps it was an oversight/simple copy paste error).
So what if we could make that original idea work and maybe expand on it a little. Recent suggestion about faction bonuses made me think... It would be crazy to give factions a direct advantage. But maybe we can make it an indirect advantage?
Basically the idea is the following:
- make new ore commodity types called something like "Unprocessed X ore / gas ". These ores would be "sold" on the asteroid miners of their respective factions for a symbolic price, but would only be buyable by Official Faction ID-ed ships. Their profit would be somewhat comparable to hauling "regular" ores when taking into account that the trade routes would be significantly shorter - in the same system or one jump away? (and therefore safer / faster)
- as a bonus the miners could be made destroyable with decent Hitpoint pools. That way the faction engineers also have something to do (if it's possible to repair non player objects with the repair ship ?). And of course the pirates and rival factions could mount organized raids to destroy the automated miners and hurt their rival's sources of "easy" income. Bam, now you need the factions to organize / hire patrols and people can actually do patrols for a meaningful purpose, not just "roleplay"
- if it's not possible to have both docking and destructibility then maybe it's possible to write a plugin that would periodically award money based on the amount of "alive" miners to characters with the correct IDs mounted? That way the idea about patrols still stays...
A similar idea is already proven to work in other games where exists a player driven "economy" of resources (see for example the game Foxhole - a persistent world World War alternate history logistics focused top down shooter). Although they have a limit on the gathering rate unlike in Freelancer where the only thing one can do is balance the price / hitpoints so it's not a money printing machine.
I believe this suggestion would encourage more official faction activity and more in-game interaction between factions. After all, asteroid miners are static (similar to mining zones) so you know where to find and rob the haulers.
As some of you might have already noticed I am (mostly) an ideas man, but might jump into coding a proof of concept for this as I believe it's something that wouldn't be too complicated to implement for someone who understands the basics of Freelancer ini files modding. Most of the work is in the balancing and, unfortunately, I have no experience with that.
Thoughts, criticisms welcome.