More visible stats

[kindred192]

So reading around the guides and forums I see things like "planets with more metal provide tougher armor and hull points" and "you can hire hardier crews on frontier planets" and "holding records will improve your performance on wild planets."

That level of depth is really, really impressive. Problem is, I have no idea how much of an influence this has on my game. What quality is my armor plating? My crew? Are they abstracted or do the individual armor points/crew members have their own quality levels? I would love to see some stats somewhere, maybe on the status screen, that tells me just what I have in my ship and how it affects my performance as a captain.

Is this a possibility, or is the information involved too complex to be displayed in a clearly and concisely?

[Cory Trese]

#1. A few types of items directly add to your skill statistics.

- Weapons: +Warrior for Boarding / Blockade
- Electronics: +Tactics for Surveillance / [Tracking (coming soon)]
- Records: +Explorer for Exploration and Harvesting

Those are literal and 1:1. If you have 1 Weapon you get 1 more dice. If you have 75 you get almost +75 dice (there is a slight downscale based on the Crew -- don't try to give each Crew a weapon -- you need some ppl to fly the ship!)

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I am working to display more of the Engine in the UI.

There is an internal dice system and the Captain accumulates "nudges" which are stored into big arrays of shared preferences.

So lets say you buy 12 points of Armor Plating at the best starport in the galaxy. The game will put 12 points on your Armor and calculate a secret number of nudges.

Later, when the Armor is rolled and suffers a critical failure, a certain number of nudge values could be traded in to mitigate the critical (automatic re-roll of failures.)

Nudges and the float arrays in shared preferences. They are hidden for a number of reasons:
-- sometimes they might not make sense because of unknown rumors, conflicts, zero economic status
-- people might be angry because sometimes the phone / game has to throw them away because it got mad at ST / ran out of memory / you did something to my cache files
-- right now it is hard to explain that you can have between -3.00 and +4.00 nudges across something like 52 different tests. I really like how it works internally but I have no idea how to explain it on the screen

I am seriously concerned about keeping the game interesting to all players. I'm still trying to find a good way to keep it simple for new players but at the same time expose the details for advanced players.

[Zaereth]

Based on what I'm hearing, and trying to think of simple ways to display this info, we could look at the old d&d style of showing advanced items/npc's via plusses and levels.

In other words a verbal description in each spice hall mentions how many men are willing to serve. But perhaps an experienced captain (wisdom check?) Could even gauge how experienced the rough necks in the room are. Simply put, a statement like "based on the captain's experience with all sorts of crew, he can clearly tell the men in this room would be a fine crew of veteran (lvl 4) ((or whatever number to indicate the amount of nudges received by that particular crew)) explorers."

Secondly , back in the starports, using a system of levels or plusses, the same wisdom and/or tactics check (hurray for making this stat useful enough to actually *want* to level early on!) can be used to assess the value of the engine or armor/hull repairs. dialogue next to the info explaining the number of available repairs can also explain "based on the captain's experience around all kinds of hull alloys, he can tell that the metals used in this starport are of excellent (lvl 4) quality.

this format is already familiar to the traders who have seen exploring and harvesting difficulties explained in difficulty levels, and helps us simply get a rough idea of what we're buying. Additionally, since it would all be in a dialogue section, ppl who don't want such in depth info will likely not read any of that other dialogue anyway, so therefore won't find themselves caring its there!

Also, perhaps a "survey the ship" button/menu/doo hicky can give a quick dialogue in the bridge menus from the engineering room and head of security stating things Like "based on the latest reports, we currently have 15 rookies (lvl 1), 10 rough necks (lvl 2), 3 experienced (lvl 3) and 30 veteran (lvl 4) crewmen aboard, captain!" An equivalent dialogue can then be used for both hull plates and engine turbines or however you'd describe the engine units.

What so ya think? Also, why no advanced sails? Seems like changing "clothing" to "fabrics" and giving fabric rich planets better sails would be a nice addition!

Edit: phew! It takes forever to write these up on my phone! Lol!

[Cory Trese]

Solar Sails are manufactured out of Crystals. =)

Clothing has it's place in the economic system.

[Zaereth]

Ah, that'd explain it. I know the dialogue answer might not be perfect due to spacing issues on the respective menus when recruiting or buying, but when you have the time I'd love to get your opinion on the matter!