I'm not 100% sure what you could populate it with.
Maybe some NPC firms, some general commodities, and (maybe) even some player dynasties. Get an option to go public listing with your dynasty, which opens you up to investments from interested NPCs that you generate interest by doing some batch of daily repeatable quests to make them happy/interested in you/your product, maybe even some RP plots?
They give your dynasty money, ultimately to continue doing what you do (whatever that is). Factions can also launch bidding wars on dynasties they wanna have control over. The price gets dictated by several factors like activity level, members, type of dynasty you are(?), and how many of that type of dynasty there are.
I forgot I was going to call myself Ike while in chargen, so now I'm Zarrach.
This would be amazing, I've been beating my head against the wall for ways to implement a good stock mark/shares system for our dynasty, and everything is super hard to do and very ah, arduous.
Character: Vega Faction: Song Dominion Class: Engineer
note: I am always up for RP, antagonistic or friendly. If she's being a bitch, it's because you're from Scatterhome or she's trying to meet a deadline and has nothing to do with whether I want to RP with you or not. Thanks in advance for the RP!
Starcoin, the cryptocurrency of the Starmourn Sector.
Bloody fiat marks.
We have Inka Imperials, a product of Inka Indomitable Industries, as an in-house currency based on proof of work depending on Ascendant Fleet performance. We assure everyone that behind every imperial there are lots of sweat, toil and destruction.
Maybe one day we should do an ICO* for the outside people!
*For those unitiated to mysteries of cryptocurrency: ICO - Initial Coin Offering is similar to a company selling shares to public except they sell their coins based on one concept, algorithm or something else entirely. Though since cryptocurrencies are the wild west of the investment world, these things are not properly regulated and it is advised to take extreme caution.
Why don't ship forge supplies draw directly from the market offerings? Seems like it should be a thing. Have it show the average market price and the max SF price.
Also, simple starter quests like fulfill one market order, complete one incursion, tether one asteroid, with maybe some bonus Captaincy XP or bound credits.
There's been a lot of talk about the economy in Discord. To summarize:
Distributors may have a potential niche in the economy; that is, people who do not gather nor produce goods, but rather take them from station to station to sell for a small profit. SF automatically pulling from market orders will kill this niche.
There are a couple of actual problems from which all other problems in the economy stem:
1. Scarcity in a particular resource (titanium) bottleneck the whole economy from functioning.
You need titanium for paristeel and transteel, and you need those two to produce repairkits, all the batteries, all the missiles, tethers, scoops, and mines. And because titanium is halting the production of these goods, then the other resources they use up stockpile: magnaril, duramine, helium11, vandium, tritium, and diamene to name a few. And this leads to the next problem:
2. Resources in stockpile halt the generation of more resources in space.
In essence, all these chokepoints in the supply completely gut the economy from the start, and so all the demand is pushed to the shipforge.
There are a handful of fixes that can tun this around:
1. Review the generation of resources, and base them on how much they're used to produce goods.
2. Remove the relation between stockpiled resources and resource generation. Don't worry too much about stockpiles: this is not Imperian nor Lusternia. Stockpiling here actually does cost something; you can't just put it in the commodity cache and call it a day.
3. Value the time of people, and either lessen production costs, or increase the SF supplies prices some more to allow for bigger profit margins. I think it's underestimated how time-consuming it is to go out into the vastness of space, find that single 'm' or puff of coloured cloud, and refine them into resources. Then comes refining, then actually producing them into usable goods, and then getting them to consumers.
Each step in production, ideally, will have a little bit of profit. Right now, you essentially need to have vertical integration because the profit margins are so small. And that limits how many players can actually participate in the economy. This is a shame, because the space economy is the unique draw of Starmourn in the IRE pack.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
SF should create its own market orders. SF has a minimum of 30 of Item A. If it dips below, a market order is automatically created. Player then fills the order by hauling it in to the SF station.
Has a drug tradeskill been suggested? I want to market some designer drugs.
I would like to see a drug market that actually has effects on things. Like a speed based drug that letsyou run 1 more room before you get the slow down message but, with a penalty to something else. Makes drugs more than just RP givve them a reason to exist.
I believe in Starmourn they could have similar varieties as well. Concentration enhancing drugs, stat enhancing drugs, combat stims etc. with a good withdrawal rate and side effects. And maybe the armada ships can shoot down ships carrying unsafe versions of them, could be a nice little excitement to smuggling.
Is there a reason that changing race is currently limited to a one-time thing and no more? Races are almost purely cosmetic.
From everything that the dev team has said, races have no mechanical benefit, but are purely for roleplay reasons, for the very reason that people won't feel as much need to switch. They want to avoid people changing for the sake of consistent roleplay reasons from what I understand. There is a discussion: here.
As T'rath has pierced the veil, so will I, and so will my life become complete in a good death. Jin VOTE FOR STARMOURN
Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM
teehee b.u.t.t. pirates
GrootToday at 2:16 PM if there's no kittens in space I'm going on a rampage TectonToday at 2:17 PM They're called w'hoorn, Groot sets out a saucer of milk
This command lists the nearest dockable station and shows you the distance to it. I don't thing you should give this ability right off the bat, maybe at level two or three thereabouts. I enjoy fooling around with the ship system. It provides a sense of discovery and wonder.
One thing I don't love about flying a space ship, it the amount of time it takes to travel from point A to Point B. This would give new players a better sense of where they are in space.
Can the font color for https://www.starmourn.com/game-help/ be set to black? Having to highlight text to read it because it's white font on white background is a chore.
These are part QoL and part idea, so take them for whichever works for you.
1) Newbie faction: This thought goes beyond what I've seen in Starmourn and more to do with faction based games as a whole.
Getting dropped right into a faction out of chargen can be hit or miss if the write up for each faction isn't quite what you thought it was.
So give the newbies their own faction to start out in, without having to jump into any at all. This gives the new players the chance to get used to the game's mechanics if they're brand spanking new and also allows for some RP fact checking to see if what you read about Song, Celestine or Scatterhome actually plays out like what you think. This also lets players already in these factions have an opportunity to RP with interested players. Kind of like a hiring interview/first date, I guess.
2) Space is big. There's repeats of complaints about it feeling empty which get met with "Well, yeah it's space. It's supposed to be kinda empty looking." I figure one way to mitigate that is to make the planets appear larger on the space map thus taking up more space real estate and maybe give a secondary function to BEACON that you can also see who else is in your general area (like not specifically your subsector but maybe something larger such as who's with you in the Diamond Belt)? Not specifically names and coordinates or else that'd make bounty hunting stupid easy in space, but something like
"Your systems detect 4 other ships in the Grenshulian Sector with you."
Couple that with a kind of subspace communication method similar to shout/yell that only works in your specific area/sector and space might not feel so empty anymore.
I forgot I was going to call myself Ike while in chargen, so now I'm Zarrach.
I am just throwing space ideas out here, and I made these up while listening to the space discussion on Discord today and these are copied directly from my notepad file
Space pirate flagships: (board like stations but different "model" in space) Brings to the table: - group PVE/group "instance"?
possible ST one shot D&D style dungeon area to work with, doesn't need to have storyteller intervention/input to run normal bash parties. Just way more fun potentially to have one off plots somewhere off faction turf.
- Standard loot marks, junk plus whatever (if anything) the storytellers offer up as cool themed loot if there's a plot dungeon running. (level scaleable?)
Random space encounters Captaincy increases via this
- NPC spacers stranded to rescue -> marks, captaincy (requires rescue skill) - random wrecks to breakdown via gunfire, salvage for parts. Possible explanation for captaincy XP is that it takes some skill to blow up the ship without damaging anything useful. (both random ship related junk and actual ship parts - alternative way to build ships?) - stations to salvage parts from (random assortment of station repair parts) Captaincy XP gained from finding station, random parts gained from dismantling (similar to ship salvage, need some degree of captaincy to know what part is useful and what isn't) Self destructs after all parts are harvested, so gtfo. No space hoboing in derelict stations.
Pirate raids
-Faction territory gets raided by pirates periodically, im not sure what kind of damage that can cause. - Cosmipiercers when vulnerable have a chance to be assaulted by pirates and taken over. Get notified when this happens.
I forgot I was going to call myself Ike while in chargen, so now I'm Zarrach.
Several ideas about windup attacks, and hopefully a way to make them not be such a headache for players new and veteran alike. No idea how feasible any of these ideas are, but it would change things up significantly:
1) When a mob does a windup, whether it lands or is interrupted, it goes on cooldown for a brief time. This to me feels a bit more natural as it clearly takes a lot of of effort for the mob to do this attack, so it shouldn't be able to just chain them for eternity, this is a room-wide cooldown, so multiple copies of the same mob can't all decide to launch their player buster attacks all at once, cause there is no way you're escaping that fast enough.
2) It cannot instantly kill you, it just knocks you from whatever your current health is to a critical 2-5%. You're not dead, but you're damn close. Kind of like the black headcrabs from Half Life 2. Call it an emergency function of your wetwiring maybe?
3) Mobs can only launch a windup attack if they've suffered enough damage to "piss them off", and maybe gain brief invulnerability while charging their attack? (just so you can't focus fire them down when you see it) Any interrupt bypasses this still. I'm more interested in the enraged attack than the invulnerability as temp invulnerability has the potential to get stuck. Which would be bad.
4) If multiple mobs are stacked in the room, any mob's windup attack scatters the other mobs out of that room when the wind up happens.
I forgot I was going to call myself Ike while in chargen, so now I'm Zarrach.
I'll say that the only time I die while bashing nowadays is due to a windup I haven't encountered before and failed to manually interrupt, or to multiple mobs of the same type winding up on me at the same time. That said, I do have a soft spot in my heart for the thrill of "save or die" mechanics. Its one of the only skill checks, if you can call it that, that comes with bashing outside of level gating. I still don't think the should be as punishing as they are now. Having a completed windup hit and knock me down to 5% ish effectively turns it into a "save or fail", as I'm likely to retreat or finish the job in the next balance or two.
I like suggestions 1 and 2, and would like to see something close to this added. I think 4 is the wrong way to go. If nothing else, I (and my marks) would super appreciate some sort of protection for mobs of the same type that can windup, as it forces me to IH and find the right mob, switch to it, and interrupt it in the span of a single balance, or close enough. And that's only if they both aren't winding up at the same time.
Other options include
- you could keep the massive windup hits that kill the player, but have mobs deal less windup damage when sharing a room with another mob, or when sharing the room with a mob of the same type. Something akin to missing both leads to death, while missing only one is still a large chunk of health.
-mobs can only windup if the player is attacking them. Additional mobs can fight still, but not windup.
-up normal attacks a smidge to compensate
-more subsys damage
-non-subsys dependant afflictions.
-something that gives "big hit" protection like "any non-instakill hit that would take more than 50% of your total health is reduced to 50% of your total health". Give it a lengthy cooldown. Could be an artifact, but could also be a cool new avenue for unique armor mods. Could even make it effective against only certain damage types (which, btw, would be a good thing to be able to see), and could limit the uniqueness to 1 or 2 per player.
-have windups do less damage, but a lot more subsys damage. If a rock giant hits me like that, I should get some serious muscular or internal damage, maybe both. Something significant, like 10%. Could even add on some afflictions to the hit.
-less damage on a windup, but more durability loss. Might lose some gear though.
I think Deltrion touched on a workable and fair solution: mobs can only windup if the player is attacking them. I'd adjust it as follows:
Mobs can only windup if they are injured.
This has a few advantages over determining which mobs can wind-up based on whether a player is attacking:
Easy to track, game-side
Harder to cheese, potentially, by the player(s)
Encourages coordination and teamwork
Easiest to explain, both IC and OOC, and understand
Alternatively, it could be tied to number of players in the room. Numbers of players in room = number of mobs that can be channeling a windup at one time.
I'd like to see variation on the insta-kill windup, such as heavy subsystem damage and the many miseries that attend it.
Comments
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
Bloody fiat marks.
Maybe one day we should do an ICO* for the outside people!
*For those unitiated to mysteries of cryptocurrency: ICO - Initial Coin Offering is similar to a company selling shares to public except they sell their coins based on one concept, algorithm or something else entirely. Though since cryptocurrencies are the wild west of the investment world, these things are not properly regulated and it is advised to take extreme caution.
Distributors may have a potential niche in the economy; that is, people who do not gather nor produce goods, but rather take them from station to station to sell for a small profit. SF automatically pulling from market orders will kill this niche.
There are a couple of actual problems from which all other problems in the economy stem:
1. Scarcity in a particular resource (titanium) bottleneck the whole economy from functioning.
You need titanium for paristeel and transteel, and you need those two to produce repairkits, all the batteries, all the missiles, tethers, scoops, and mines. And because titanium is halting the production of these goods, then the other resources they use up stockpile: magnaril, duramine, helium11, vandium, tritium, and diamene to name a few. And this leads to the next problem:
2. Resources in stockpile halt the generation of more resources in space.
In essence, all these chokepoints in the supply completely gut the economy from the start, and so all the demand is pushed to the shipforge.
There are a handful of fixes that can tun this around:
1. Review the generation of resources, and base them on how much they're used to produce goods.
2. Remove the relation between stockpiled resources and resource generation. Don't worry too much about stockpiles: this is not Imperian nor Lusternia. Stockpiling here actually does cost something; you can't just put it in the commodity cache and call it a day.
3. Value the time of people, and either lessen production costs, or increase the SF supplies prices some more to allow for bigger profit margins. I think it's underestimated how time-consuming it is to go out into the vastness of space, find that single 'm' or puff of coloured cloud, and refine them into resources. Then comes refining, then actually producing them into usable goods, and then getting them to consumers.
Each step in production, ideally, will have a little bit of profit. Right now, you essentially need to have vertical integration because the profit margins are so small. And that limits how many players can actually participate in the economy. This is a shame, because the space economy is the unique draw of Starmourn in the IRE pack.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Example: https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Medical_boosters
I believe in Starmourn they could have similar varieties as well. Concentration enhancing drugs, stat enhancing drugs, combat stims etc. with a good withdrawal rate and side effects. And maybe the armada ships can shoot down ships carrying unsafe versions of them, could be a nice little excitement to smuggling.
Jin
VOTE FOR STARMOURN
if there's no kittens in space
I'm going on a rampage
TectonToday at 2:17 PM
They're called w'hoorn, Groot
sets out a saucer of milk
This command lists the nearest dockable station and shows you the distance to it. I don't thing you should give this ability right off the bat, maybe at level two or three thereabouts. I enjoy fooling around with the ship system. It provides a sense of discovery and wonder.
One thing I don't love about flying a space ship, it the amount of time it takes to travel from point A to Point B. This would give new players a better sense of where they are in space.
These are part QoL and part idea, so take them for whichever works for you.
1) Newbie faction: This thought goes beyond what I've seen in Starmourn and more to do with faction based games as a whole.
2) Space is big. There's repeats of complaints about it feeling empty which get met with "Well, yeah it's space. It's supposed to be kinda empty looking." I figure one way to mitigate that is to make the planets appear larger on the space map thus taking up more space real estate and maybe give a secondary function to BEACON that you can also see who else is in your general area (like not specifically your subsector but maybe something larger such as who's with you in the Diamond Belt)? Not specifically names and coordinates or else that'd make bounty hunting stupid easy in space, but something like
"Your systems detect 4 other ships in the Grenshulian Sector with you."
(board like stations but different "model" in space)
Brings to the table:
- group PVE/group "instance"?
marks, junk plus whatever (if anything) the storytellers offer up as cool themed loot if there's a plot dungeon running.
(level scaleable?)
Random space encounters
Captaincy increases via this
- NPC spacers stranded to rescue -> marks, captaincy (requires rescue skill)
- random wrecks to breakdown via gunfire, salvage for parts. Possible explanation for captaincy XP is that it takes some skill to blow up the ship without damaging anything useful.
(both random ship related junk and actual ship parts - alternative way to build ships?)
- stations to salvage parts from (random assortment of station repair parts)
Captaincy XP gained from finding station, random parts gained from dismantling (similar to ship salvage, need some degree of captaincy to know what part is useful and what isn't)
Self destructs after all parts are harvested, so gtfo. No space hoboing in derelict stations.
-Faction territory gets raided by pirates periodically, im not sure what kind of damage that can cause.
- Cosmipiercers when vulnerable have a chance to be assaulted by pirates and taken over. Get notified when this happens.
1) When a mob does a windup, whether it lands or is interrupted, it goes on cooldown for a brief time. This to me feels a bit more natural as it clearly takes a lot of of effort for the mob to do this attack, so it shouldn't be able to just chain them for eternity, this is a room-wide cooldown, so multiple copies of the same mob can't all decide to launch their player buster attacks all at once, cause there is no way you're escaping that fast enough.
2) It cannot instantly kill you, it just knocks you from whatever your current health is to a critical 2-5%. You're not dead, but you're damn close. Kind of like the black headcrabs from Half Life 2. Call it an emergency function of your wetwiring maybe?
3) Mobs can only launch a windup attack if they've suffered enough damage to "piss them off", and maybe gain brief invulnerability while charging their attack? (just so you can't focus fire them down when you see it) Any interrupt bypasses this still. I'm more interested in the enraged attack than the invulnerability as temp invulnerability has the potential to get stuck. Which would be bad.
4) If multiple mobs are stacked in the room, any mob's windup attack scatters the other mobs out of that room when the wind up happens.
I like suggestions 1 and 2, and would like to see something close to this added. I think 4 is the wrong way to go. If nothing else, I (and my marks) would super appreciate some sort of protection for mobs of the same type that can windup, as it forces me to IH and find the right mob, switch to it, and interrupt it in the span of a single balance, or close enough. And that's only if they both aren't winding up at the same time.
Other options include
- you could keep the massive windup hits that kill the player, but have mobs deal less windup damage when sharing a room with another mob, or when sharing the room with a mob of the same type. Something akin to missing both leads to death, while missing only one is still a large chunk of health.
-mobs can only windup if the player is attacking them. Additional mobs can fight still, but not windup.
-up normal attacks a smidge to compensate
-more subsys damage
-non-subsys dependant afflictions.
-something that gives "big hit" protection like "any non-instakill hit that would take more than 50% of your total health is reduced to 50% of your total health". Give it a lengthy cooldown. Could be an artifact, but could also be a cool new avenue for unique armor mods. Could even make it effective against only certain damage types (which, btw, would be a good thing to be able to see), and could limit the uniqueness to 1 or 2 per player.
-have windups do less damage, but a lot more subsys damage. If a rock giant hits me like that, I should get some serious muscular or internal damage, maybe both. Something significant, like 10%. Could even add on some afflictions to the hit.
-less damage on a windup, but more durability loss. Might lose some gear though.