Shima Tanaka
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Posted - 2005.05.18 05:01:00 -
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Why is mining boring?
Beyond the obvious, a few categories can be analyzed more precisely than as an observation of a more generalized feeling of malaise.
1)You only have to target the roid once.
2)You just have to sit back and wait for a pickup.
3)Security is labor intensive, extremely simple, and requires constant oversight.
Why is station or structure assault/management boring?
1)There is a cap on how well a station can be run.
2)Everything can be controlled from one point, instantaneously for many hours/days.
3)Only one person is required to manage them.
Solutions:
Allow subtargetting within models besides ships. Roids in belts can have hundreds of thousands of weakpoints. Instead of having the server handle all of them, allow only 5 or so of them to spawn at once. The points of interest behave like NPCs, only they are non mobile. The pilot can seek locks on these individuals points as an almost continuous activity. Some points can be explosive or dangerous. Some can be fleeting and yeild a windfall.
The same for stations. One should be able to operate a repair module or attack individual components on a stationary habitat. The HP on such a structure should be able to rise above normal but with diminishing returns. An enemy should be able to filter for just a specific type of subsystem even though they are randomly generated. There should be a randomly generated point for each aspect of the structure. Each point targetted could lower or add one point of powercore, cap regen rate, or CPU, or sig radius, a km of targetting range, a portion of tracking, or EW capacity and so on and so forth.
This sort of constant activity can even become a new sort of career. It also gives the green light for the creation of vastly volumetrically expanded structures and compounds.
The other mining fixes are for another thread. However, I favor the idea of using a sort of roid capture array instead of mining lasers. The capture field would take advantage of the subcomponents targetting of the asteroid. It can work very well for surface deposits using specialized rockets, or more deeply using more traditional weapons and exposives. The discovery of subcomponents is governed by skills and modules. Also, instead of 5 points within every asteroid around, they are only spawned by an asteroid that is "attacked," or they only occur in lone larger asteroids that appear in relative safespots on a scanner. Skills determine how 'deeply' the the subtargettable points appear and for how long they last. The ultimate goal is to make ore gathering rather rapid. Time sinks can be inserted elsewhere in compensation. Specialized ore holds that can only hold ore or ice can be used to make outings more sensible, even by groups rather than individuals.
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