Suggestion:
Generate systems sooner; When potential jump points are generated in the system, or even generate everything all at once at game start. Or allow it as a game option.
Rationale;
Today, systems are generated when someone tries to jump through a jump point for the first time. While many players will try to explore as quickly as possible, this leaves open the option to game that system. If you only jump through jump points when you are good and ready to meet new foes, you can basically rate limit how fast you meet new enemies. This makes it beneficial to play extremely defensively and slowly.
The problem with that is that it’s unrealistic; The real world doesn’t work like that, and it makes sure you as a player empire will almost never be found by NPRs, instead of the other way around.
Of course, it’s entirely up to the player how to play the game; But it would be nice if there was an option to simply take away the temptation to turtle and have the game be a bit more proactive in generating systems.
There is a way to sort of fix the issue you are facing. At game start you make sure that there are a good amount of starting NPRs and that their distance in light years are not too far away. They will explore and find Sol if you just turtle there forever. You are as a result of this better of if you explore earlier to not have first contact be to close to home.
I’ll second having more starting NPRs. Many players try to have few or no starting NPRs because they are afraid of bad performance, but in practice I’ve rarely had serious problems (occasionally the combat interrupts can be annoying, but this is manageable). The benefits of a more exciting and alive galaxy is worth the potential performance hit.
How about changing the defaults a little to reflect that a bit more? Maybe not 8 of them, but if just one NPR is not how people are expected to play this, perhaps it can be changed.
SJW: The starting setting are really for new players. Once you get more used to the game, you can configure as you prefer.
Depending on settings, the NPR’s are advancing too though, and some are “preprogrammed” to always be X% ahead of the player.
A “simple” modification is to start the game with one’s normal settings and then after a predetermined amount of time, generate more NPR’s. In RP terms this “simulates” receival of transmissions from player’s home system. In my in-game lore, the discovery of Trans-Newtonian materials becomes either the boolean or the ticker if looking for a more spread out neighborhood.
With 3.0 perhaps Steve could offer the current “blank template” save as well as one that is “generated” with a “community standard” of settings and “best practices” components, ships, formations, etc. as a “tutorial guide save”. Or at the very worst, we, the community, work that out either here or on Discord, have the save file available here, Discord, and the Wiki, and then enterprising YouTubers and/or Bloggers can do tutorial let’s play series using that base file.
I for one really like that system are not pre-generated since this gives a player not concerned about balance the option to re-roll the system by saving directly before exploring a jump point and reloading and re-exploring.
@Pedroig On paper, sure, you could do something like that. But the question then becomes how much, and when? Not everyone will have the same answer to that, or even any answer. Unless you know the game extremely well, what the effect is of thes ettings or even the thought that you could do something like that takes a level of deliberation. When we bumped the odds in the earlier game we met a NPR immediately, but even after that the odds of finding anything were still fairly low.
So I think it’s better to have something you can set up at the start and then not think about for very much afterwards.
And the game I linked is very much in it’s infancy; 7 explored systems, including Sol. Now of course, not having spend any starting points on an actual navy also makes the turtling choice very logical and valid, but at the same time, it’s just a bit weird, waiting for decades to explore beyond just that one layer of explorations. A real world earth would have people chomping at the bit to find out what is out there.
Another option and one I was thinking about even before seeing this thread is to have a starting option to have an x jump radius from explored at game start. This could generate npcs for people who have them enabled but could also be useful for other play styles.
Another option too it is a pre-generated galactic map WITHOUT jump connections.
Exploration will reveal the links.
We could see some star systems in the map (we decide the number to show, from zero to all the DB), chosen randomly or those ones nearer in real space to Sol (i.e. to the starting system), but we don’t know which one is conneted to which other.
During exploration, hidden systems are revealed. And some of these could appear in between pre-revealed ones, needing to adjust the positions in the map sometimes.
In some cases, for very near systems, we could know some of their planets. But not their geo details.
I know all of this would need a complete rewriting of the systems and map generation.
But in real life, we know where the stars in the Galaxy are.
Known stars is this already, sure the map isn’t in game, but it can be looked up with complete fidelity on relative locations, though with jump connections, the absolute positions becomes less important than the relative positions.
3.0 allows for manually messing with jump points to their fullest extent, meaning you can “pre-generate” an entire galaxy to your liking if you so choose. You just have to do it manually.
It’s more of a gentle way to make this feel a little less artificial; Turtling remains possible, with or without this (or some other option), especially if you can turn it off.
I think the distinction is between turtling by building defenses before moving beyond them versus turtling by not exploring the map to avoid generating enemies. The former is a particular style of gameplay (arguably good), the latter is avoiding gameplay to exploit metagame mechanics (arguably bad).
It is a single player game. In my view it is not bad if someone decides to avoid one or more metagame mechanics. Some of us just turn off npc generation sometimes. If someone delays npcs by exploring slower or not at all that is a valid game play choice. I for on certainly do not want player choice to be limited or for choosing a particular choice of this type to be considered bad.
It is also possible to use space master to explore jump points and I do that sometimes also. Not opposed to more options being added.
Also forcing pregeneration could significantly expand storage requirements particularly if one backs up multiple copies of the game close to start for replay so one does not have to do the initial set up again.