2022-01-13 FYI

[Celarious]

What if berth-a-porting and teleport invitations were nerfed?

To join a friend you just have to join their empire and recall. You should spawn at their capital or one of their cities.

This sounds good. Would make transportation a lot more meaningful if players can't just teleport around at will, which is always nice

[Yurk Embassy]

As far as I remember Wincil does have some social issues, so better to just not think badly of it. Yes the constant repeated messages that don't further any discussion is annoying, so just ignore it.

I mean, as I told him: I gave him a chance to fight my arguments. He didn't bother. So I was already intending to ignore him from this point on.

If Haxus wants to give it a try again, I am fine with it. The time of "The Box" was fun, but most of that is probably just fond nostalgia as it was right after the dark period. Interest did start dying out before the box was opened as people started to feel crammed and oppressed by Syndicate.

I would rather we work on making sudden attacks from large empires less devastating and fast. If eliminating another empire is more of a hassle than helping them relocate, we will see less reasons for newbiestomping and more diplomacy. For example attacks on a much smaller empire could be automatically broadcast to everyone within range, letting people know what is happening a decide to mount a united defence against the attacker.

But we also still need more reasons to actually interact with other empires. We can trade with each other now, but that is only gonna be useful early on where everyone is still surveying for better resources for themselves.

Indeed, the Syndicate supremacy thing kinda killed the fun at the end. I'm not arguing with the idea the box was too small; originally, I was one of the "huge map enthusiasts" myself and I still believe a reasonable distance between empires should be retained. I also agree about your point on war. I remember people on the Discord talking about some sort of building that would generate a planetary shield which would need to be bombed consistently for hours or days, before being destroyed and an actual invasion being possible. This would involve some sense of attrition to the attacking side, making planetary sieges more credible, and leave the defending side some time to react.

It could be balanced by being a building limited to one per Empire-claimed planet (maybe unavailable on Inferno and Frigid?), that would take quite a lot of resources and time to be operational, or even having a one-hour-or-so cooldown between completion of the building and its shield being operational, would stop it from being abused by building a replacement shield monolith in the middle of a battle.

What if berth-a-porting and teleport invitations were nerfed?

To join a friend you just have to join their empire and recall. You should spawn at their capital or one of their cities.

I feel like it would pretty much work like it used to. That sounds like a good idea. To be fair, I thought myself that teleportation kinda killed the need for space travel. You could visit other people without having to set up a journey to them, and if you needed to move around your Empire, you could just request TP to your mates and boom! To the other end of your Empire-owned space you were. I fear it might have made space travel less relevant in a way, so a return to classic Recall Home mechanics would be fine by me.

On another note, with regards to what has been debated over the course of the last few pages, and Martianant's post at the top of page 9, don't hesitate to let us know your take on the question of scale at the moment.

[martianant]

What if berth-a-porting and teleport invitations were nerfed?

I'm not sure how I feel about teleport, it certainly makes life easier but also does remove the need to travel places. I wouldn't mind too terribly if it were removed though, or severely limited? How were you thinking of nerfing it?

Berth-a-porting I have some stronger opinions on. I've found it's incredibly helpful for "debugging" why a ship has not done what you asked it to do. The AI is.. sometimes not the best, and a ship that should've arrived at City X two days ago still seems to be "stuck" or something. The only way to figure out what is up is often to go to to the ship and check it out. I've had to berth-a-port to ships a bunch to solve issues like this, only to find the ship got itself stuck somewhere or decided to spin in place forever. Often just changing the orders wasn't enough and it only got fixed if you visited it. No idea why. I know the AI won't enter unexplored systems without a player, but I've had issues even when the route was through 100% explored / owned space so it was never that. Sometimes it just.. stops working until a player visits it or something? Just my experience.

I think a decent compromise might be limited the acceptable of a berth to only ships belonging to your empire. That way you can't just accept a passenger berth on some friends ship on the other side of the galaxy and teleport there, but you can still find and fix when your empire's ships break.

Is that what you had in mind by nerfed? Would love to hear your thoughts on how you might nerf these options

[Wincil]

Scale doesn't bother me in a game even if it's realistic or not I don't think scale really matters in my opinion I think there's nothing wrong with having a sense of scale I think Most players probably felt the box was a bit too restrictive as it did not give much space to get away from other empires according to the SoH wiki https://www.hazeron.com/wiki/index.php/The_Box

[Haxus]

Martianant, that is what I was thinking. Perhaps you must be in the same system as a ship to take a berth aboard it, unless it’s an empire ship with an officer.

[Phoenix]

After more thought about the idea, I am not going to change anything about the way empires are created. I will not create a bunch of startup empires either. Let’s leave that stuff as it is now.

This is your choice of course. I feel as though we know the outcome if we change nothing. This is not terrible, but it could be improved.  I would implore you to consider creating at least one NPC empire, perhaps Imperium which could provide a safe zone within its solar system at least. 

If you do consider a pay to play model. Please consider a fee for creating empires and free to play to man a ship as a citizen. It would be a good way to show friends the game without them committing to a payment. 

Thanks for your time.

[Yurk Embassy]

Martianant, that is what I was thinking. Perhaps you must be in the same system as a ship to take a berth aboard it, unless it’s an empire ship with an officer.

That sounds like a good compromise. That way we would retain the ability to have cross-empire crews, and it would still limit the exploit potential of the Recall Home feature.

[Greydog]

I've always relied on Berth-a-port to collect the funds from my harvesters, but the option to place a mission order to deposit all but operating funds could replace that. After that I use it to retrieve stranded ships and visit my more distant planets. I do a lot of deep exploration so I do sometimes wind up with some very distant clusters of planets.

It does certainly allow players to more easily congregate as well.

Maybe some other options could be:
- Longer range transporters ( transport across a sector or more)
- Discover Hyper-space jump gates where building a gate at both ends could provide greatly increased to nearly instant travel from one to the other depending on distance.
- Increase warp and wormhole speeds.
- Wormholes that go a sector or more.
- Have stranded ships emit a beacon that rescuers can lock onto and follow even while drifting and powerless.

I'd really kind of hate to lose berth-a-porting but I can understand if you feel you must ;)

[Nitro2030ce]

I just have one request: Steam cloud support for Starship. If it runs on the new Steam Deck, it would be interesting to hop on, on-the-go and not have to worry about copying/moving save files around

[Neils Iyssada]

Martianant, that is what I was thinking. Perhaps you must be in the same system as a ship to take a berth aboard it, unless it’s an empire ship with an officer.

Yes this would make the game more interesting regarding empire interaction and even empire management.
It would make Ringworlds more useful, even if they are a bit unconvenient to use.

As for ships it would be perfectly usable to request a berth in the same system, if you make sure we can properly retrieve a "bugged" ship stopped in the void between 2 systems. Like a beacon produced by the ship, or exact coordinates to jump / deadhead to it (while avoiding collision).