Button Requests

[Tenebrous Pirate]

I am starting a thread for requests on new buttons or the moving of buttons. Here is my first suggestion:

So last night I was playing my level 54 spy on crazy difficulty, cruising around with my 70 pilot, 68 stealth, and 40 in tactics, when I ran across a random encounter with a level 12 House Thulun smuggler.

Seeing as how I had something like a -3,500 faction with Thulun, I hit the battle stations button, and quickly hit the advance button twice so that I could close and take out his engines and begin a good old fashion plunder.

Sadly, this is not what happened. My beautiful, wonderful Droid X decided to lag, and instead of closing twice, I rammed him. My 200+ year career as one of the most hated enemies of the royal houses was brought to a swift end as all 40 of the engines on my fully upgraded Spear Class cruiser were destroyed in one inadvertent ram. The very lucky level 12 smuggler quickly had me captured, tried, and executed.

Ram is a VERY dangerous and often self-destructive, last ditch maneuver. Is there any chance that we could get a confirmation button before we use it? I literally felt sick to lose so many hours of game play on that character in such a crappy manner.

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[Tenebrous Pirate]

My second button request is for an Anchor button on the bridge. Sometimes you just want to be able to burn a weeks worth of time without flying anywhere.

Say, because you have a hold full of goods you want to sell to a certain faction, but right now they have this annoying trade embargo with your main faction, and you are dead broke and can't afford to cache it all and go do something else till it goes away.

It could have something of reduced water useage combined with a small boredom penalty to morale for each week you sit around doing nothing. And since your ship is mostly powered down doing nothing, you are less likely to have random encounters than flying around in circles on the map. Let me tell you, flying around in circles on the map to burn time gets tedious.

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[absimiliard]

I certainly wouldn't mind a button confirming intent to ram.

That said . . .. almost all of my characters die due to stupidity if they're lucky (and skilled) enough to survive past the "play catch up" stage of the game. It's "Ooops, didn't mean to ram", or "Frakkk, shoulda never taken THAT contract", "WTH, I didn't mean to hit Battle Stations, I was trying to just mash 'Surveillance'!". (We won't even get into the multitude of "Hrmm, guess I should have prioritized Stealth a little more" comments I make after getting my ship shot up to the point of "going to die soon due to lack of creds for fuel/repairs".)

That sense of incredible frustration with both myself and the cold/cruel world is actually what keeps me coming back.

(the rare exceptions are the "named" captains, like captain Quick Contracts, who get retired and deleted after they get the award I was going for. and yes, captain Dark Nemesis was absolutely a long familial line of people who died way too often . . . .)

ST: RPG. "No One Gets Out Alive!"

-abs

[oldalchemist]

Doesn't "Patrol" burn time?

You could always Blockade and independent world or take a break in a Spice Hall or seven.

[Tenebrous Pirate]

Patrol burns time but has you actively looking for encounters with other ships. Spice Halls are good for burning time, so long as more rumors and spice are available, which they aren't always.

[kremmen]

I'm happy for ramming to go altogether. I've had more good captains than I care to remember end because some pissy shuttle got through 16 hull and a dozen armour points in one bash.

It reduces all the skill and effort you put into the game into a single all-or-nothing gamble - which you don't get to choose.

[Tenebrous Pirate]

I finally remember my third button request! On the contract accept or reject screen, is there any chance we could get a status button? I have cursed myself so many times not remembering the coordinates of the last mission I accepted, and had to reject a perfectly good mission to the same area just to go and double check it.

It would be awesome to also be able to check your ship status before you accept a mission, to make sure you don't sign up for a long haul when you need to put your ship in for a lot of time consuming repairs.

[oldalchemist]

Once you're in the Contract Screen, you're in a closed room with the guy who's offering you the contract. Incommunicado. No information leaks.

[Tenebrous Pirate]

I do a lot of closed room negotiations for my job, and I always have my droid and planner with me, to let me know what else I have planned and any details I may need. ;-)

[slayernz]

Ramming is an important (albeit last ditch) tactic. I agree that having ramming confirmation screen would be very very useful given that no sane captain (except maybe Thulun dog) would do so as a first move.

Just being in space (anchored or not) will provide you with encounters. If, at least, you are blockading a place, you're getting money. However, if I were given the choice of chilling out for 52 weeks with a cargo of goodies, or dumping the goods in a wilderness cache and going exploring to find even more goodies, I would always pick the second option. That way, once the embargo is lifted, you have even more things to sell and make a bundle on. The only time I would think of wanting a passive way to kill time would be that Dark Nemesis award, but I hear that spending all your time wasted on spice is a sure way to attract the attention of bounty hunters, if you catch my droid.

For contracts, I think that Cory was looking into having a Status button in the contracts room, but in saying that, before you go into the contracts room, you should really just take a squiz at your status anyway. That way you know who likes/hates who, and remind yourself of who you are meant to be friends with at this point in time.

[oldalchemist]

Ramming to start would be awesome if you could get closer in pre-combat hailing.
"Hey, we'd like to trade some spice for water/fuel"
"That sounds great. We'll turn our airlocks to face you."
"Be there in a space-minute."
"Captain, does a Mars Class have an airlock on the battle prow?"
THUD

[oldalchemist]

Apr 26, 2011 11:12:04 GMT -5 Tenebrous Pirate said:

I do a lot of closed room negotiations for my job, and I always have my droid and planner with me, to let me know what else I have planned and any details I may need. ;-)

Yes, but how many of those negotiations fall under Shalun Contract Law?

[Cory Trese]

1. Status Button on Contracts Page
2. Confirm Ram Attack
3. Double Check Max Ram Damage = (Hull+Armor*0.86) of Attacker
4. Water Harvesting On Dead Planets will Burn Time, Low Risk ('Cept Aliens)


Any other ideas on time burn? I do not really like the Anchor button I think it will confuse people.

[Cory Trese]

PS: Thanks for the to-do items, will make the next release's notes easier to write =)

[Tenebrous Pirate]

I will have to try the harvesting on dead planets and see how it goes. I just have this horrid bad luck with harvesting/exploring. I can be an explorer with 35+ in exploration, and regularly lose 1/2 or more of my crew on my first attempt on a planet with a danger rating of 4. I probably just have bad luck, lol.

I can see how an anchor button could confuse people, maybe name it something else? I mean, it is pretty practical as something to do, to power down to minimum power and wait outside of a port for events to change. It happens in real life regularly. I grew up in a port town, and you would hear of large tankers or barges sitting off-shore waiting for price changes, warehouse space, or document authorization.

Remember that story a few years ago about the super barge from Australia loaded up with thousands of pigs that was held off-port somewhere near Africa because they didn't have the right paperwork? They got to their chosen destination market, and discovered that they couldn't sell their cargo (sound like a trade ban or loss of trade permit due to drastic faction loss anyone?) and sat offshore for months until they found another buyer in another port, and headed that way.

P.S. Oh! and you're welcome Cory! I'm glad to offer my input, and rather appreciate you always being so open to it!