(01-15-2022, 01:25 AM)Haxus Wrote: Avatars accumulate points based on online time.
Some large number of those points could be spent to establish a new empire.
The game could start up with two to five existing empires that always allow new players to join.
If you put it along with the "pay $10 to get your own empire right away", maybe?
The biggest issue I see with it right now is what happens when you transition from being part of the large starter empire to a self owned empire. At least assuming you do so with your existing character it would mean that you can't currently get any cities transferred over with you, and your starmap info is also completely reset when you create the new empire.
If the new empire is made with a newly created avatar I guess there is less issues, but we still have a lot of play te that is now basically over and nothing major can be transferred.
Forcing a player to do an activity they don't want to do before they can do what they actually want to do is normally a bad idea. Unless that work directly feeds into helping the future activity that they want to do.
Even if you spend all your time in that large starter empire just surveying for a location to settle your own empire, you will be in a situation where that large starter empire now knows your exact location because of the survey information. Well we can't see colonized solar systems on the starmap anymore unless we have a city near it, but it still becomes pretty obvious that someone settled in that area with all the surveyed Q255 resources.