Starborne - MMO4X

iMaple said:

Hey guys, I'm a dev working on Starborne and I thought I'd come say hi. We're quite overwhelmed with the amount of press coverage we got and we realized how little information about the game is actually out there. Our alpha test also coincided with the discussion around loot boxes which raised a lot of valid concerns about the pay to win aspect of the game, and we really haven't done a good job at explaining how we balance in game purchases to prevent paying players from running away with the game. If you have any questions about the loot boxes or the game in general, I'll be here to answer them. No PR filter, I promise.

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Man you're about to get e-stalked and slammed by Utnayan for a few months before he buys your game and then spends $280 on microtransactions anyway.

Not really my type of game I don't think, but good luck. Also, fuck loot crates.

If you feel like abandoning your game and working on a modernized version of the game Silent Death which used to be on Gamestorm back in the day let me know though.

iMaple - Thank you very much for the fast reply. A new question came up. What will carry over from "season to season"?

Palum said:

Man you're about to get e-stalked and slammed by Utnayan for a few months before he buys your game and then spends $280 on microtransactions anyway.

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So you're telling me there's a chance I'll get paid for facing the legion of pitchforks out there? Works for me!

Fyff said:

iMaple - Thank you very much for the fast reply. A new question came up. What will carry over from "season to season"?

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1. Badges, Trophies or whatever method we go with to display achievements in past games.

2. All owned cosmetics and other vanity items.

3. Contracts. These are temporary empire wide effects that you can only use once each in a game, and it's kind of like building a deck in a CCG as you can only use a limited amount out of a selection of 200+ in a 6 month game. You'll unlock most of the generic contracts very soon, but you'd have to work to get highly specialized ones geared towards niche roles and play styles. If you unlock them, they're yours forever and you can use them in other games.

Thanks for the welcome earlier by the way. I was feeling a bit jaded from some of the cynicism I've come across before entering this thread and that a pleasant surprise.

iMaple I wouldn't normally make this sort of massive game-changing suggestion, but you made it very clear the game is in early alpha, so here goes:

Take a page out of Grand Strategy/Stellaris in the option of vassalizing conquered players instead of outright removing them from the game. I have currently no idea as to how the game plays out just yet (I will give it a try later today) but you mentioned a lot of small-scale conflicts early on. Imagine if at the beginning of the game a player is ganged up on and quickly eliminated, especially one who spent money on the game (as much of a taboo as this may sound). They were just thrashed, so they don't get to play for the next several months and may just give up entirely on the game as a result.

If you offer player vassalization instead, after being conquered the player remains in the game, even if subordinate to someone else. Although slim, there is still a chance for them to grow and participate and possibly even overthrow the ones that conquered them. I think that is the big difference between a multiplayer game of Stellaris and Endless Space; it is not a deterrent in ES as the games are relatively short, but for something massive like Starborne where a campaign will last months and months it might be the deciding factor over whether a player may quit or remain.

Tallen said:

iMaple I wouldn't normally make this sort of massive game-changing suggestion, but you made it very clear the game is in early alpha, so here goes:

Take a page out of Grand Strategy/Stellaris in the option of vassalizing conquered players instead of outright removing them from the game. I have currently no idea as to how the game plays out just yet (I will give it a try later today) but you mentioned a lot of small-scale conflicts early on. Imagine if at the beginning of the game a player is ganged up on and quickly eliminated, especially one who spent money on the game (as much of a taboo as this may sound). They were just thrashed, so they don't get to play for the next several months and may just give up entirely on the game as a result.

If you offer player vassalization instead, after being conquered the player remains in the game, even if subordinate to someone else. Although slim, there is still a chance for them to grow and participate and possibly even overthrow the ones that conquered them. I think that is the big difference between a multiplayer game of Stellaris and Endless Space; it is not a deterrent in ES as the games are relatively short, but for something massive like Starborne where a campaign will last months and months it might be the deciding factor over whether a player may quit or remain.

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Thanks for the comment, you raise a very good point.

Vassalization happens somewhat naturally. Wars in Starborne are fought for three distinct reasons:

Forcing the other side to surrender some territory. (Common)
Forcing a complete surrender and absorbing the remaining players into your alliance. (Rare)
Exterminating an entire alliance. (Extremely rare)

The reason why elimination is not more widespread is that wars are not profitable, especially early on. Conflicts are costly and after a while you just don't have the ships and resources to continue fighting, resulting in some sort of treaty between the belligerents. To eliminate a single player, you have to destroy/conquer ALL of their stations, which becomes harder as the games goes on. Elimination happens early to factionless/inactive players, and poorly positioned frontline players in the mid and lategame. We're fine with both of these outcomes, as both are preventable and it takes a while to get there.

We'll continue to monitor the rate at which players drop out/get eliminated and adjust various factors to create a rewarding experience for both the attacker and defender. Ideally, we can get this result naturally from our framework instead of forcing it into the mechanics, but we need more data first.

iMaple said:

Thanks for the comment, you raise a very good point.

Vassalization happens somewhat naturally. Wars in Starborne are fought for three distinct reasons:

Forcing the other side to surrender some territory. (Common)
Forcing a complete surrender and absorbing the remaining players into your alliance. (Rare)
Exterminating an entire alliance. (Extremely rare)

The reason why elimination is not more widespread is that wars are not profitable, especially early on. Conflicts are costly and after a while you just don't have the ships and resources to continue fighting, resulting in some sort of treaty between the belligerents. To eliminate a single player, you have to destroy/conquer ALL of their stations, which becomes harder as the games goes on. Elimination happens early to factionless/inactive players, and poorly positioned frontline players in the mid and lategame. We're fine with both of these outcomes, as both are preventable and it takes a while to get there.

We'll continue to monitor the rate at which players drop out/get eliminated and adjust various factors to create a rewarding experience for both the attacker and defender. Ideally, we can get this result naturally from our framework instead of forcing it into the mechanics, but we need more data first.

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Very fair, and this sounds better than game mechanics as it is normal emergent gameplay. I still didn't get to play the game as when I attempted yesterday the server was full - with any luck I'll get to try again later today.

What's the status of the Alpha right now? I tried to DL the game and give it a go, but I can't get past the character creation screen. Is that intentional and I missed something or just overloaded?

Zyke said:

What's the status of the Alpha right now? I tried to DL the game and give it a go, but I can't get past the character creation screen. Is that intentional and I missed something or just overloaded?

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That's the server being full. We have an automatic culling system in place, but the few spots are usually filled up within minutes. We're going to manually delete some inactive players which should free up about 200 spots in the next few days.

Kiroy said:

I gotta ask, how'd you find this place? Just a lurker from a long time ago or...?

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I wanted to document press coverage about the alpha test, and this discussion popped up in the search results.

So far the game seems pretty cool and with a ton of potential for being a great game in the future, but is there a way to increase the size of the building queue? Only being able to queue up 2 is pretty painful with how fast everything builds.

Edit: Is there any guide or explanation on alliances? I found the one for most of the other mechanics and it's great, but didn't see it for this topic. IE how does war work with alliances? Can you send each other resources? How does basing ships at allied stations work and does it still cost tons of extra labor?

Zyke said:

So far the game seems pretty cool and with a ton of potential for being a great game in the future, but is there a way to increase the size of the building queue? Only being able to queue up 2 is pretty painful with how fast everything builds.

Edit: Is there any guide or explanation on alliances? I found the one for most of the other mechanics and it's great, but didn't see it for this topic. IE how does war work with alliances? Can you send each other resources? How does basing ships at allied stations work and does it still cost tons of extra labor?

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We're both going to increase the building times and introduce the mobile app, which should make the game less demanding. We're also thinking about additional Analemma slots, but we don't want players to require owning them in order to play at a moderate pace as they're a convenience feature.

Zyke said:

Edit: Is there any guide or explanation on alliances? I found the one for most of the other mechanics and it's great, but didn't see it for this topic. IE how does war work with alliances? Can you send each other resources? How does basing ships at allied stations work and does it still cost tons of extra labor?

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Good point, I don't think we have an alliance section in the guide yet. Soon™

Currently, you can declare a rivalry on another alliance which will paint them red on the map, but it won't change any game mechanics.

Stations have their docking permissions set to "Alliance members" by default, meaning you should be able to deploy your ships to allies. You currently cannot deploy from a non-owned station to another non-owned station, so coordinate your deployments carefully or build a support station near your allies to redeploy to/from. We'd like to make movements between allied stations easier in the future, but currently they abide by the same rules as neutral stations.

Fleets docked away from their home station have their labor cost increased by 1% for every hex they are away from their supplier. You can reduce this penalty by increasing the logistic efficiency of the supplier via the "Logistic Support" building and structure cards.

Another factor is the operating limit, which is the maximum amount of fleets a station can support. For every fleet exceeding that cap, all fleets docked at that station will cost 10% more labor. This limit can be raised as well via "Logistic Support" and structure cards.

Sending resources to allies is also feature that is still being worked on.

Is there an alliance? I'm going to take a stab at playing.