2022-01-13 FYI

[GaelicVigil]

I heartily agree with Celarious. The people who want to play a safe game of empire building can play HSS. Perhaps they will grow lonely there and decide to join the rest of us in the "real" universe.

HSS builds side-by-side with SoH. Only the top-most client app is different. They both share all changes. In fact, this caused me to revamp and improve a huge internal interface that had grown very ugly and prone to error. Now changes are reliably shared between the apps, with minimal uncomplicated programming effort.

I had just implemented that interface before taking a year off. Unfortunately, I only recently discovered that those changes broke the preview mode in the designer, for both HSS and SoH. I'm terribly sorry about that. It will be fixed in the next update, some time before the end of February.

Me and Celarious rather agree that the real universe should be small enough to encourage player interaction, while reducing the abrupt and brutal aspects of warfare. Any mechanical system where the entire population is within a dozen sectors of each other, but don't feel immediately threatened, results in much better gameplay. Any threat of war should be tense and creeping rather than an immediate "I conquered your empire in a day" situation.

Many people that originally intensely disliked the ultra compact game area have grown to remember it very fondly because of the social interaction and excitement.

My suggestion...
Make planets develop over the course of months (outpost, colony, core) so that developed planets have value. This could be increasing region population limits.
Make capturing planets difficult (you must have a certain tonnage of warships in a system for days to generate a "threat" level that is compared to the development level before you can actually invade). A system under "occupation" generates threat from the original owner twice as fast so they can respond to occupations faster, but not immediately.
Make the game area about 31x31x7 sectors so that there's PLENTY of room for all. That's hundreds of thousands of systems for hundreds of people.

The closer you can get people without them feeling hopelessly in danger, the better.

I'm not going to get into making any detailed suggestions or deep mechanics changes, but I do agree with the general sentiment that player empire interaction should be more accessible. That said, I would hate for players uninterested in it to feel forced into participating in it.

How you accomplish that balance is anyone's guess. I like the KISS rule though. Reducing initial player spawn distance may be the simplest solution.