2019-04-01 Pirate boarding and raids, Cloaking shield, Digging, A drill tools

[Deantwo]

Pirate Boarding Parties
Pirates should attempt to capture your spacecraft rather than destroy it.

Pirates will now attempt to board and capture player ships.

• They will use transporters if they have them and can get enemy shields down.
  
• If they have no transporters they will attempt to EVA over and breech the hull doors with plastic explosives.
  
• Once on board they will fight their way to the helm to start the capture sequence.
  
• Only ships with valid pathing to the bridge from all rooms and hull doors will be valid boarding targets.
  

Pirate Raids
Pirates should raid poorly defended cities.

If a system has no defenses and there is a pirate base in the sector pirates will now raid the cities.

• If no avatar is on line in the system the raid will simply appear in the city's event log.
  
• If an avatar is on line in the system an encounter will spawn a pirate ship that will move to hover over the city.
  
• Pirate raid will steal commodities from the cities on the world. Primarily stealing money, upgrade modules, spare parts and food.
  
• If the pirate ship has a deployment bay and bombs in its hold it might drop a few bombs for dramatic effect.
  

Cloaking Shield
Cloaking shield is not implemented.

Cloaking shield is now implemented.

• Ships
  • The cloaking shield provide a very weak shield for the ship.
    
  • While active on a ship it will be hidden from sensors when outside of visual random.
    
  • The ship is further more obscured slightly while the shield is active.
    
  • Pirates use cloaking shields to great effect.
    
• Buildings
  • A military shield projector with a cloaking shield will hide all emissions generated by the world.
    

Digging
Digging trenches and mines by hand.

You can now use shovels and other digging tools to reshape the terrain.

• Use a shovel or drill on the terrain to dig.
  
• Every dig has a chance of spawning rock resource items.
  
• Reshaped terrain can be reverted by bulldozing it.
  
• Don't be surprised if you find bugs.
  

Drill Tool
Need bigger digging equipment.

Added an electronic drilling tool. All mining manufacturing processes gain time reduction from having it.

Mine Machinery
Mine machinery is not implemented.

Mine machinery is now implemented.

• Added a temporary mine machinery model.
  
• All mining manufacturing processes gain time reduction from having a mine machinery on a connected building's site.
  
• The mine machinery has a special weapon that will work like the shovel's digging ability.
  

Subterranean Animals
Subterranean animals should react to digging near them.

Subterranean animals that are burrowing underground will come to the surface and attack you if you dig near them.

Mega Beasts
Animals are too easy and provide no challenge. Bring back mega beasts.

If you dig too deep you might disturb dormant mega beasts hidden underneath the surface that will attack anything in sight. This include buildings and ships.

[Vectorus]

Some very fun stuff in this update!

Can you dig on enemy worlds? Can digging add terrain?
Should pirates attack defended cities if you're personally present, but only undefended if you're not? It would be fun to see your defences in action occasionally.
Does the cloaking shield care how much volume you give it? Does it obscure buildings from the sensor console when out of visual range?
Are animal attacks triggered by grading down or only hand-digging?

[Deantwo]

Happy April Fools day all! That is something people say, right?
Anyway, disregard this update thread, since it was just a joke.
:P

Yeah, I like the idea of all the things I wrote here.
Of course a lot of them are written in a way that would be catastrophic! Which was supposed to be the joke.

Examples:

• Pirate boarding parties would be useless if everyone makes ship blueprints that simply have invalid pathing.
  
• Pirate raids would maybe lead to city decay if pirates start stealing all the food and air from cities. Other wise seems like a nice feature if not over done.
  
• Having cloaking hide energy emissions of cities would be insanely overpowered. You would be able to hide your empire permanently anywhere. Even in the system next door, if your target has never visited it of course.
  
• The idea of pirate ships decloaking in front of your ship out of the blue sounds awesome. Akind to what happens in Star Trek. But again players using it in warfare would be more horrifying than the current warp-out-of-combat issues.
  
• I had a nice image in my head of a newbie using a shovel on the ground and suddenly a mega beast pops out of the ground and eats everything he has made.
  

Likely best to make idea threads for each of the items on the list if you guys want to discuss them further.

[pizzasgood]

I'm not very smart today.  I spent way too long staring at your post wondering why Haxus would change his name to Deantwo before I figured out what was happening.