Elite Dangerous: Frontiers

[Craic]

That you can create a faction and spread its influence from system to system is awesome, but the measurable impact on the game is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things. The bubble remains largely the same, and though its surely cool to see the name of your faction spread far and wide, little really changes. This seems like a missed opportunity in a game with such a huge and open galaxy. So, a food-for-thought proposal that could fit in with existing game systems for the most part:

Elite Dangerous: Frontiers

Frontiers, the latest expansion for Elite Dangerous, allows players to take the fate of humanity into their own hands, expanding beyond the boundaries of the bubble into uncharted space.

Two new massive transport vessels have been introduced; the Frontiersman and the Inquisitor. These vessels don't remain such, and are instead converted into orbital platforms above suitable planets.

If an Earth-like world is discovered in unclaimed space, the Frontiersman can haul an initial load of colonists, and in the conversion process detach a number of ground-facilities and small transports to house the burgeoning colony. The husk of the frontiersman remains in orbit, serving as a command center for the colony below and landing-pad for the construction of an orbital station. The station will take time and considerable investment of commodities and wealth to construct, but once it's complete the colony will begin producing goods and offering services, which will produce earnings and influence for the commander, facilitating the production of more colonies.

If a terraformable world is discovered, the Inquisitor can be purchased and once in orbit converted into the command-center for a terraforming operation. Terraforming a world will take a considerable time investment, but can be hastened and even improved with the donation of materials, certain commodities, and exploration data on other earth-like or terraformable worlds. Once the terraforming project is complete, the commander can either seek to colonize it with a Frontiersman, or sell the world to an existing power for a profit.

As commanders come to control more colonies, maintaining them will grow increasingly difficult. The more players doing missions for your colonies the easier maintaining them will be. Commanders can also pledge their colonies to an existing power, earning their support/protection but requiring a tax. Commanders can also chose to remain independent, and even form alliances of independant powers, but doing so leaves them vulnerable to invasion from other independent colonies or alliances. The larger an area a commander or alliance controls, the more vulnerable they become to invasion, though a commander can never lose all their colonies, and will always have a faction in an invaded colony that can be fought for to restore control.

The further from the bubble one builds their colonies the longer and more expensive the process, but also the safer you are from invasion, and the more influence you have over individual colonies. With enough time, effort, and coordination, commanders, squadrons, and alliances can start making their own bubbles, and perhaps in time become superpowers themselves.


Just an idea that I feel wouldn't be hard to pull off in the game as it exists, and would elevate Elite Dangerous from a really cool space sandbox to possibly the first and greatest 4X strategy MMO of all time.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Scale, I think, is the big problem with something like this - in a few respects.

Firstly is that the galaxy is huge. With millions of ELWs and billions of terraformables, there's not going to be enough competition for space to make conflicts happen much, except where people deliberately try to cause them. Between 250 and 1000 LY from Sol (so outside the bubble, but close enough to use its facilities) there are about 5,000 known ELWs, and well over 50,000 known terraforming candidates. (And for a new bubble, you're going to want economies other than Agricultural and Terraforming, which make up only about 6% of stations in the bubble, so other planets would probably also have to be usable)

Secondly is the exponential scale of player activity (the top 1% most active players account for 50% of total activity) and group sizes (almost all squadrons are 1-3 players, but there are a few really big ones with hundreds). I don't see a good way to price something like this.
- price it at 100 billion credits per system and only the biggest groups can use it at all, and even then it's a substantial investment for them, so it's making a feature for fewer people than play Powerplay now
- price it at 1 billion credits per system and it's still a substantial investment for most players, and the vast majority of players still won't use the feature, but the really big groups who could have afforded the 100 billion too can put down a Colonia-sized bubble pretty quickly, and anyone else either has to stand well out of the way or be steamrollered, so there's not much point in most of the people for whom 1 billion credits is an investment using it.

Thirdly is that in every respect except its use as a BGS battleground, the bubble is already far too big for the number of players in the game, with most inhabited systems getting single-figure daily traffic, so other than the 4X fans (and maybe occasional restocking explorers for the more distant ones) no-one would have much reason to visit any of these new systems. So their only supporters are likely to be the people who set them up - again, a few "we want our own bubble way over here" groups will do okay, but that's all.

possibly the first and greatest 4X strategy MMO of all time.

I think the problem with "4X strategy" and "MMO" is that the two things are conceptually working on very different layers

In a typical 4X, you're the Emperor or the President or someone similarly high up, who has uncountable minions doing most of the actual work who don't even get simulated except in huge aggregations.

In a MMO, you're a minion doing the actual work yourself, one cargo load at a time.

I think a 4X / City Builder / Transport Sim game set in the Elite Dangerous universe would be great, if Frontier want an idea for their next franchise. I'm not sure sticking it to the side of Elite Dangerous would work any better than Powerplay has, though. (Powerplay itself being a strategy game inside an MMO, of course, where the "leaders" spend most of their time pleading with most of their "minions" to actually do something useful for once)

 

[Craic]

I hear what you're saying, but I think you're underestimating the power of ownership as a motivator. The reason why powerplay and the bsg are floundering to my mind is that, while it gives you a notion of belonging to a system/area and making it 'yours', you don't really own any of it, and have very limited control over it. Working your heart out for a weekly vote on whether your squad's name spreads a little further is hard to ask of players. Working your heart out to build your very own colony from scratch and expand the game-world is something a lot of us would leap on in a heartbeat.

As to the scale issue, I'd again suggest that's an advantage and not a drawback. While indeed players could fly out and start their own colonies far enough from the bubble to never be encountered except by the most intrepid explorer (which is an awesome notion), the need to resupply your colony with materials and populate it with citizens would make sticking close to the bubble and expanding out from there an obvious advantage, and players could be encouraged to cluster, ally, or war with eachother to unlock specific upgrades for their colonies/stations.

To the wealth issue, there's simple ways to make colonizing accessible to reasonably wealthy players while preventing the mega rich from buying up the whole galaxy. Limits of how many colonies a commander can work on at a time, have the cost of maintaining them increase exponentially for each new colony, systems that encourage inter-colony support between players so big fish can help out little fish, etc.

As to your suggestion these kinds of games don't and shouldn't mix, I cant disagree more. Indeed, Elite Dangerous takes the micro-approach: you don't begin as some Emperor, you're just some dude in a ship. As you play however, you earn ranks and reputations with the superpowers, make increasingly massive sums of credits, become a huge business into yourself. Buy the best ships. You engineer them into monsters. You kill your first thargoid, then a few more. You make billions of dollars, and then? What do you do with your money, your sweet ships, your time in the game? What do you strive for? The game is built in a fundamental way around progression, and once players have reached a certain stage there's no progression left, no goals left to set, and goals are vital to maintaining interest.

To become a galactic landlord seems like an entirely logical next step in the game's progression, and a colony maintenance system could easily be worked into the existing mission-board template.

Players want their own piece of the galaxy, and in a galaxy with so many pieces on offer, why not give them a way to take it?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Working your heart out to build your very own colony from scratch and expand the game-world is something a lot of us would leap on in a heartbeat.

Oh, absolutely. I've been out in the Eol Prou nebula for the last three and a half years. Seeing a settlement get gradually built up is really good.

I've been suggesting for a while that ways to develop the galaxy and make permanent changes would be really beneficial to the game ... and then Frontier actually implemented some (Colonia's upgradable engineers, and to an extent the station repair mechanism and Thargoid war) and very few people actually did leap on them in a heartbeat. And there were good reasons for that, but having seen them in action I think they'd apply to most other colonisation/improvement mechanisms as well.

Frontier will need to do something at some point, because in about three years space for new PMFs in the bubble is going to run out. But I've no idea what they could possibly do that would be workable, without spreading out the existing player base even more thinly than they already are.

(One of the things Colonia benefits from is a player density - and certainly a player activity density - quite a bit higher than the bubble average, so actions which lower the bubble's player density are probably bad for everything except the BGS/settlement mechanics)

Limits of how many colonies a commander can work on at a time, have the cost of maintaining them increase exponentially for each new colony, systems that encourage inter-colony support between players so big fish can help out little fish, etc.

That sort of thing ends up with odd incentives where a player with 5 colonies has a harder time of things than a player with 5 accounts each owning one allied colony (who also gets the inter-player alliance bonuses!), despite doing exactly the same things in-game. And sure, Frontier aren't going to object as such to people buying lots of alt accounts to make their colony management cheaper, but it's not really solving the problem.

Similarly it reinforces the power of large coordinated groups (who, equally, can take a colony each and mutually ally all of them) over everyone else. The BGS has this to an extent, but it's limited in practice by expansion rate being strictly linear no matter how many people work on a faction.

Some MMOs would absolutely welcome that sort of "do you support Emperor CMDR Jim or President CMDR Sally, or do you get crushed between both?" play ... I don't think Elite Dangerous would.

the need to resupply your colony with materials and populate it with citizens would make sticking close to the bubble and expanding out from there an obvious advantage, and players could be encouraged to cluster, ally, or war with eachother to unlock specific upgrades for their colonies/stations.

Sure - but in practice this is probably only going to be something which maybe ten thousand players do, and maybe a thousand do seriously (based on interest levels in other "endgame" content). So there's then plenty of space even close to the bubble, so no incentive for conflict. Conversely, there's not going to be anything in particular to attract unaligned players out to any of these new colonies, so support is going to be pretty much solely about their owner hauling out supplies from the edge of the bubble. And so you also get questions like "if they take a break from the game for a week/month/year, will their colony collapse in their absence?" which again mean it's probably only sustainable for the large groups.

 

[CMDR Junagu]

Reading this thread I'm reminded of my initial impressions of the game when CMDRs very quickly managed to make it to Sag A* and beyond. Whereas some saw this as a stunning achievement I just felt my heart sink and my belief in the game get seriously dented (I also learned a bit about how mental some people are - I tried to get to Barnards Loop in an AspX back in 3300 and after something like a week of endlessly jumping I still hadn't got there. It was pretty dull) . I assumed from the start that the integrity of our ships would naturally limit our range and thus confine us to maybe a couple of thousand Lyrs outside of the Bubble. I'm still convinced that this was supposed to be the way of things but somehow it got messed up and they couldn't change it once some CMDRs had ventured far beyond the integrity limits of the ships. Has the integrity of the ships (not the modules, but the ships) actually ever done anything? My understanding is that it doesn't actually affect anything.

It should be that limitless travel isn't possible, that without repairs and maintenance the ships will disintegrate. Thus exploring takes on a good deal more risk, distant stations and outposts would become an essential stopover and thus very busy places for explorers. It's this sort of thing that would stop the playerbase atomising and vapourising into a thin mist. As Ian Doncaster mentions - the Bubble is already way bigger than the playerbase needs. I'd much prefer it, myself, if the limits of exploration were still far from the core of the galaxy; that the records being set were still just inching forward. The unbounded travel has warped the game a lot imho. Beagle Point and back in an afternoon, or whatever it is, is just daft. And it does seem that most of the secrets and essential places to the fabric of the game's background are placed very close to the Bubble. The later additions of the Formadine Rift etc were all after CMDRs had already bisected and circumnavigated the galaxy (I think).

Every now and then I keep finding myself hoping that with the updates coming FDev will implement a limit to travel based on the integrity of ships, but I can't see how they would pull that one off now. The phrase that has cropped up lately has been that the new updates will massively change the way that players interact with one another, or something to that effect. Something has to change.

 

[Craic]

If dealing with/warring with/allying with other player colonies was necessary to unlock specific upgrades for your station/planet, even if those upgrades were just cosmetic (I.e want a big gold statue of your commander in your station ala the Empire? Win/participate in however many Invasions or form an economic alliance with however many players) I wager folks would be quite willing to cluster and spar over colonies.

As to colonies floundering without your constant support, I'd see no reason to make that the case. My vision would be that after initial investment and completion, the colony slowly grows itself over time via migration, the player choosing the directions in which it grows and then speeding it up/helping it along with various support-missions. Thus focusing on one colony will develop it at a reasonable rate, whereas solo-managing multiple colonies will stretch you increasingly thin and slow down their progress.

I've been playing again a month or two now and the game seems better than ever, but folks are still pretty aimless. I joined a squad with a group of buddies and getting 10 people to join was almost impossible, and not because there was no one to join. Again and again we'd hear the same thing: 'Sounds good, but I really want to make my OWN squad!'

Video-game are often power-fantasies, and elite dangerous- with its tricked out corvettes obliterating eagles in a single PA shot- is no different. Folks spend days of play-time beefing up their own ships, building their own fleets, finding their own undiscovered worlds. Having a planet and station that actually belong to you would scratch the power-fantasy itch in a way that BGS doesn't at the moment.

My buddies and I just recently got in contact with a much larger, more active squadron who are courting us to join, and are far more involved in things like the BGS, 'controlling' multiple systems and many billions. Even they are absolutely salivating over the notion of colonizing; have actually already mapped out their own distant region with a list of earth-like worlds they're just dieing to populate.

Spreading out the player-pop is a risk (I guess), but being spread out is sort of the nature of the game, and not something likely to change significantly either way. I do believe though that a system that allowed you to not just explore the galaxy but also build out into it would bring many old players back and many new players with them, as the appeal- at least to me and many other players I've spoken to- is immense.

Still, it's just a dream, brought on by quarantine and too much free time.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If dealing with/warring with/allying with other player colonies was necessary to unlock specific upgrades for your station/planet, even if those upgrades were just cosmetic (I.e want a big gold statue of your commander in your station ala the Empire? Win/participate in however many Invasions or form an economic alliance with however many players) I wager folks would be quite willing to cluster and spar over colonies.

Sure - everyone would do enough invasion swaps with their friends to get all the upgrades. Clustering near people who actually might try a serious invasion of you, on the other hand? That's just a recipe for putting in weeks building up a system only to lose it very quickly once it's done.

My general experience from watching the BGS has been that most groups will only attack when either certain of victory or with nothing to lose - any long drawn out conflict basically just becomes a battle of who gets burnt out first, and so is to be avoided. No-one's going to successfully put territory down near a large group, while the large groups will tend to want to avoid fighting each other - especially when there's plenty of uncontested space or lone-commander systems to sprawl into.

Powerplay, meanwhile, has had relatively stable alliances between the Powers for a very long time - and started out for the first several weeks with everyone basically agreeing not to attack anyone else, because no-one wanted to paint a target on themselves as the sole aggressor, and there was plenty of space for everyone at first.

Thus focusing on one colony will develop it at a reasonable rate, whereas solo-managing multiple colonies will stretch you increasingly thin and slow down their progress.

Right, but setting the amount of work required for the "reasonable rate" is going to be the killer problem for this. Players have vastly different expectations of this, and a very small number of players will do a very large amount of work - especially with something that, I absolutely agree, would have the prestige and attachment of one's very own settlement!

If you look at trade profits by PC squadrons last season, which isn't an unreasonable proxy for hauling work which might support a colony, over eight weeks they made
1st: ~200 billion credits
10th: ~70 billion credits
100th: ~17 billion credits
1000th: ~2 billion credits
10000th: probably about a million credits
(Similar patterns are present on the combat and exploration leaderboards, or on the CG "top X" places boards, there's nothing special about trade)

If Frontier make colonisation accessible to the sort of player who's part of a 1000th-placed player group (who is still in the top 10% of all groups, so 90% of players/groups needn't bother), then the top squadrons are literally 100 times faster than they are, By the time that smallish group or active lone player has their first system down, the nearby top squadron has grown to a 100-system regional power and is eyeing them up as an easy invasion target to get another system cheaply, and maybe some nice statues. Thousands of new systems a cycle are being placed, too.

Even if Frontier only make it accessible to a top-100 player group (therefore putting it out of reach of 99% of players immediately, and getting a lot of "grind" complaints from a lot of the rest), then the biggest player groups are still ten times faster than they are, and can easily sweep them aside. (Still no incentive for the biggest groups to risk fighting anyone their own size, though!)


I really want Frontier to find some way to make this work, because I agree that "new settlement" stories have been some of the best ones in the game so far. I just have no idea how they can do it without either making it uncontrollably rapid, the preserve of a few major groups only, or (as now) by Frontier intervention only.

 

[Craic]

If it were me, I'd make achieving one colony relatively accessible, even for a Solo player. Put in some 'foundsitfirst' legal framework where your first colony is yours forever and cant be invaded, but any further colonies can be invaded and are at risk. That way players can build their own personal home system and say 'that's mine', to get and keep that sweet 'I built this baby' fix. Even if they stop at one there could be years of potential play in upgrading your colony/starport/system, building mining outposts on surface planets, equipping a security force and station defenses, battling or perhaps welcoming pirates. RNG events could pop up; pirate raid! Thargoid attack! Drunken orgy on star port develops into riot! And you could either rush home to help defend or hope your security boys can handle it. There's a lot of potential, even from a solo, single colony perspective.

If you choose to expand from there, you lose your 'findsitfirst' priveledges, though would only be highly vulnerable to invasion if you choose independence. If you're near enough to a power's frontier you can pledge to them, making your space their space and expanding their frontier, giving you their protection and making invasion far more difficult, while also growing the bubble.

There's a lot of ways to make traffic and trade between player colonies far more likely as well. What if, for example, a well established player colony could produce one of those dreadfully annoying 'mission-only' commodities essential engineering/tech, making them highly desirable stops? What if player stations were allowed to stockpile and sell a capped amount of materials, allowing those willing/happy to grind mats to turn it into big business, and those not remotely interested in the mat-grind to buy what they need from other players?

That way, it's all golden. If players want to just build their own little home somewhere, awesome. If players want to make a business out of expanding the borders of the superpowers, awesome. If players want to group up and create their own independent bubbles, either on the borders of the existing bubble to try and make war with it/others or across the galaxy to start their own isolated society, awesome. All/any of this would be awesome to my mind.

Could it grow out of control? Maybe. As you say, the game is massive, but who knows what devoted players can do. Still, if it gets out of control, and things need to be scaled back at some point, there's an easy fix for that too: Goidpocalypse.