Street's List of Probably Bad Ideas

[Deantwo]

I've got tons of half-baked ideas, and I'm gonna post them here so people can discuss how bad they are or something. If the thread doesn't get deleted, I'll probably post new ideas to this thread as well.

It is always recommended to make a thread for each topic. In its current form this thread is more about the fact that you have a ton of half-baked ideas than the ideas themselves. It is easier to discuss ideas when they have their own thread, and it leads to fewer misunderstandings and off-topic discussion like this.

- Slipspace travel, like in the Halo universe. Basically quicker FTL or something, I dunno how it would be balanced, but it's just an idea.

More FTL options were mentioned by Haxus a year ago or so, so he has something planned in this regard already.

- The ability to Warp through unexplored space, or at the very least be able to scan long-distance pathways between systems.

This is already possible while you are online on the ship. And given discussion we has on Discord and in-game I know you don't mean that. What you are asking for is for officered ships to fly through unexplored space without an avatar onboard.

As it was explained in-game by Haxus himself the other day. This won't happen, ever.
If officers/AI can travel through unexplored space without an online avatar onboard, all empires with make countless ships just exploring and generating countless systems for no reason.

Imagine an one-man empire building a thousand ships and send them all on automatic exploration missions throughout the whole universe. Now imagine a thousand one-man empires doing it. The servers would litterally catch fire.

As a reference, Haxus has said in the past that an officer cause the same amount of server load as a player.

- Some sort of planet/starkiller weapon (EXTERMINATUS). It should be super expensive to use, take hours/days to charge each use, and should give off a massive power signature while charging that can be detected across the galaxy.

Destroying worlds or even whole solar systems is a bad idea. I mean one thing is having to worry about being invaded at any time by a fleet of massive ships that you can do nothing but throw sticks and stones at, but having an enemy that can just blow you out of the game in one bit with no work on their part is just boring and stupid.

Also in a game with infinite resources, nothing is expensive. The only factor is time and amount of industry you have the will to build. The biggest ships can take around 30 days (or more?) to construct, if a planet/star-killer was to be expensive it would have to take several months of ACTIVE work to construct.

- The ability to properly access and modify the mission orders of ships in other systems/sectors

This isn't too bad of an idea, but low priority since we do have a method of doing it already.
We could have a mission creation editor that doesn't require you to be on a ship, but a lot of mission orders require that you are on board the ships, such as interacting with sensor contacts, specifying celestial bodies, interstellar travel destinations, and so on. So it wouldn't be as useful as being on the ship anyway.

- Basic and Advanced options for the Designer (Making ships is seriously hard, man)

Been suggested before many time. Haxus will be adding more easy to use options as the designer is expanded on.

- More superstructures, like Dyson spheres and man-made planets, and the ability to create superstructures.

I did suggest O'Neill Cylinders a while back, and others have suggested everything else many times over. Maybe some day.

But as Anr mentioned, there isn't much purpose to them, apart from the awe.

- The ability to increase the amount of Officers a planet can produce. Only by like, 2 or 3, but having only 1 officer from a planet with a population of over 10k is kinda silly

As already mentioned above, officers are expensive server resource-wise. Also limiting it to size of your empire is a fine way to do it. You have to maintain that empire in order to keep the officers, and enemies can do real damage to your fleet capability by capturing your worlds.

That said, Haxus was toying with the idea of changing the this a couple years back, but no good ideas have been made on how to limit it that is better than the current.

By the way, as far as I know you can get both a fleet and a company officer from the same habitable world.

- Automated construction of colonies/cities. Maybe you can save a layout, and have a big ol' ship carry materials and people, and tell an officer to build a colony.

Sounds like it would take away most of the current gameplay. Until there is something else to do in the game, I don't see the reason for this. You can always just ally yourself with a player that likes to build cities.

- Dean's idea for the Q of tools affecting the output Q of certain processes

I don't feel the need to say anything about this.
Link: Upgrading the Q of resources, #7

- The ability to have variations of one 'class' of ship that can be refitted into each other

I doubt this is worth the trouble. You can't turn one ship into another ship, simple as that. Doing so would require the two blueprints to be almost identical, or way too many checks would have to be made to check if they are identical enough.

It is much simpler for you to just make a new spacecraft and store the old one in a hangar.

Alliteratively you can design your spacecraft correctly the first time, included all the needed berths, consoles stations, rooms, and whatever else. Then you can use the existing refit features to change the volume allocation.