Nah... there is NO Open-Only in this game.
As soon as you wrap your line of thinking along this simple fact, maybe proposals to revive/reboot the PowerPlay will get some traction.
Make Solo Powerplay PvE dangerous (targeted interdcitions using existing mechanics)
- Thread starter Rubbernuke
- Start date
Nah... there is NO Open-Only in this game.
As soon as you wrap your line of thinking along this simple fact, maybe proposals to revive/reboot the PowerPlay will get some traction.
Which is the point of scaling to effort, small fry don't get a G5 kill squad after them.
Well...it is- the difference is that you have to fight in these missions, while in Powerplay you don't have to, the overpowered NPCs are there to scare you and provide peril- a bit like a Powerplay version of ATR. Which is another "is it vanilla" example- players can get ATR regardless of ED edition.
But its still vanilla- Thargoid scouts are killable with ordinary weapons.
I'm not keen on the idea of scaling to the player, because it gets rid of the "oh crap" moments and is responding to the wrong thing- i.e. your effort for that week and your rank. Plus, I imagine it would take more work to have a scaling mechanism than it would to have hard boundaries.
My proposal here and Open powerplay are two sides of the same issue- NPCs are ineffective and don't scale, while players do. Either you have one or the other- players as NPCs or NPCs become like players.
They haven't given this game mode any attention since since Sandro's proposal (is it three years now?)) so there's no point getting angry about it. They focused on the BGS instead because that was what the majority of players wanted to play.
Well it seems even when you suggest changes that are mode agnostic and are seen in the rest of the game, thats bad too.
But again, it kinda doesn't. It has annoyance attached because NPCs literally cannot succeed at interdicting a player unless the player wants them to. And that's not going to meaningfully change because the only way to change it is super binary and flipping it so that players can never avoid an NPC interdiction because the factor that allows you to succeed or fail at that is hard-baked into ships and not changeable by any interaction by the player. Either a given ship will always evade or never evade.
So adding extra interdiction attempts to delivery doesn't add risk, and adding extra NPC kill teams to everything else doesn't affect powerplay delivery because that's all supercruise and no fire zones.
Yeah, but with the default omni-hostility of all powerplay factions to all others, all it does is mean that you're getting this everywhere in the galaxy, which would grow exceptionally tiresome very quickly.
If it was a limited but shifting set of no-go zones based on your allegiance and activity it would be interesting and fun to work with, in the current system making 10/11ths of the bubble a ballache zone would annoy more players than it would engage.
That is what Powerplay is. It's dull and unengaging and that's why so few people do it, because it's a version of the game's least engaging activity, hauling goods, that is even less engaging than usual because this time you can't even hope to make some money at the end of it because of the fast tracking being the only way to progress at a non-glacial pace.
And I don't think you can fix it whilst retaining the current structure, I think yo have to burn it down and start again.
My suggestion would be to make it much more of focused conflict system. Focus the powerplay factions down to like 6 or 8 to concentrate the playerbase, and concentrate each faction on a couple of target systems.
The process of taking a system should be:
1. The asynchronous bit: Delivery from the faction HQ of war assets to a staging point in the faction's own space near the target system. This takes place over about a week, it's about as hard to intercept as it is currently, and happens in all modes. It helps the faction but doesn't provide anything more than immediate haulage cash to the person doing it (no rank progression)
2. The open conflict bit: This has two aspects, conflict zones in the target system where destruction of an enemy ship reduces their war assets, and deliveries of war assets from your staging point to your forward base (specially spawned megaships in the target system) to top up your faction's ability to stay in the fight. The conflict ends when one side or another has a critical advantage in war assets (like 75-80% of the total present in the system). This takes place over about a day, timed for peak server population (so probably the weekend).
Now here's the clever bit. The open conflict bit is a special hived off instance of the target system that you can only get into if you're pledged to one of the powers contesting it, and it is always in matchmade open play. If you're playing in solo and pledged, then when you enter a system in open conflict, you matchmake into an Open setting in that system. Even if you're solo everywhere else. Also because it's a special instance of the system it can prevent fleet carriers from entering, so everyone has to drop in at the star.
That makes Powerplay into the PvP system people seem to want. It would have direct PvP combat between peer-level engineered combat ships in conflict zones, and haul-vs-intercept from the star to each faction's spawned mothership. All happening at once and all contributing to the same victory condition of driving the other faction out of the system. (This is why it needs to be a short term thing happening at peak times, to concentrate the player base and maximise interactions).
I would also take the current modules out of powerplay and replace them with new modules that have the current engineering effects that only work against players anyway baked in, whilst stripping those experimentals out of the engineering system. That would reinforce even more that Powerplay is the intended PvP mode, because the components you get for doing it are only really applicable in PvP anyway because NPCs barely care about things like heat buildup. (Probably supplementing them with some others, like an FSD interdictor that forces the drive into full emergency cooldown even if you submit, a shield cell bank that causes laser weapons hitting whilst it's active to overheat and damage themselves as the inverse of feedback cascade rails, and a defensive utility module that causes heat buildup in a ship that is performing an interdict, so there are ways to throw off an interdict without fully escaping by making it too costly for the pursuer to continue, but only at the expense of some other defence elsewhere)
All the suggestions seen on this matter revolve either around open-only stuff or around the idea of make solo harder... basically the same variations of Mode Only.
Like this very thread "Make Solo Powerplay PvE dangerous"
The only way is to try- at the very least it means failure is much more of a problem, certainly for more sluggish ships.
And again, its based on effort- the more you do, the more the opposition want to take you out as you become more and more important to them. You should be a marked person, just as any gang member is outside of their own territory is. Plus, not all powers are hostile to each other- Imps and Feds won't be, while independents and Alliance have more of a challenge.
Which is a great idea, but not what this proposal is about- this proposal is a bare minimum sticking plaster to inject some life into the feature, and shore up one aspect thats been left to rot. The other related part is defection police- these should be G5 because they are after you- at the very least my suggestion should be applied to them, otherwise is yet another failure.
I admit the title is a little misleading, however, for Powerplay to be anything different to the main game, it has to offer something different. It has to offer challenge beyond its CG mechanics, it has to offer more action than a regular mission. But it does not, and it sits as a forgotten feature in the shadow of the rest of the game that has seen changes.
Solo mode is really PvE, hence why I'm asking for the PvE element to be augmented- it can only be done in a narrow number of ways.
I dont really care about the power creep - all of them should be tied to the CMDR equipment score and not some bogus 'time played" stat or outright demand engineers inn the first place.
After all - we paid for Horizons and it's content and not a lazy absorption of power creep into the base game.
Its a bit late for that, and making ever convoluted ways to try and get round the problem don't help.
Same for Open. It can be as PVE as it gets
Open is no different than solo when it comes about less circulated systems.
And it is even less different if we get into balance the instancing issues, block or even firewall manipulations to obtain a Solo experience in Open.
So any changes to PP have to be absolutely mode neutral. Nothing like Open that or Solo this.
This literally only affects the Type 9. And maybe that only if you were parked when they tried the intercept. Every other ship is agile enough to consistently escape NPC interdict. You actually have to try to lose in anything with more SC agility than that. (Maybe the Anaconda and Type 10 as well, but those ships are much more likely not to be rigged for pure cargo, the Cutter is the other ship likely to be so rigged but that's more agile in supercruise than a Conda and is able to always escape if the player isn't AFK or asleep)
In Elite that doesn't "take you out", it just vaguely inconveniences you into a rebuy. And it only really inconveniences people who haven't lazy-mined their first billion or two, otherwise it's just a rather expensive form of fast travel.
It doesn't seem to solve the problem it sets out to because its only meaningful effect happens exclusively when you're not doing the thing it is supposed to inject life into.
Your other suggestion of pushing station drop zones out to 20-25km would be much better for this goal, whilst also being able to add life into many other interactions as well (chiefly smuggling and stealth).
Then nomenclature aside, this idea is mode neutral, just like missions, Thargoids, ATR and the rest of the game is.
And you'd have to see how that goes down- i.e. test more aggressive NPCs,
And in Powerplay time and efficiency are the most important things- if you can't depend on timings, or have to alter how you do things then the changes have worked- I could use this argument to nullify your proposal- that in the end all combat is pointless.
In reality its making your life more complicated- right now you go to a combat expansion, undermine, haul in perfect safety. Having assassins after you is at least providing pushback.
I would replace this proposal with extending drop zones in a heartbeat- I fully agree it would be better.
I genuinely can't get my head round PP, I keep thinking it's maybe because I'm not in at the start so maybe missed the tutorial...was there a tutorial? Maybe there should be one (in game)? It all sounds very machiavellian and possibly good fun...
I get what OP means about bringing pve into it more, but maybe instead of engineered pve characters, just have higher rank (dangerous, elite etc) NPCs according to the amount of PP materials in the cmdrs hold?
I get what OP means about bringing pve into it more, but maybe instead of engineered pve characters, just have higher rank (dangerous, elite etc) NPCs according to the amount of PP materials in the cmdrs hold?
Not really. Player response when the AI is inhumanly good in a direct contest of skill is relatively universal and negative. Look at any driving game with aggressive rubberbanding or AI that never makes mistakes and corners inhumanly well. (Making AI convincingly rubbish in human ways is one of the big challenges in driving games). Or when AI micro is too good in an RTS. Players will be turned off by it because it doesn't feel like the AI is playing by the same rules.
Also, as noted, it's very deterministic. The outcome of increasing the AI's skill at interdiction to a meaningful degree would be that a Type 9 can never avoid interdiction. How do you think most players would feel if they knew that nothing they can do from the second the interdiction minigame starts will change the outcome? It's fixed, if you start being interdicted by an AI ship with better supercruise than you (all of them) you already lost the interdiction.
And as noted, this won't affect you whilst you're doing the most common form of powerplay and that it would theoretically have the biggest impact on to be forced into combat, because NPCs can't force you into combat. If you're doing expension combat or undermining then you're rigged for combat and it's less of an impact, and you're actually doing combat anyway so there's already some risk involved however minor. But it's most likely to affect you when you're not doing powerplay activities at all if it's a persistent system whenever you're out of your power's space.
Yeah, but the pushback comes when you're not doing the thing it is supposed to be pushback against. That's the key downfall of the suggestion, the one thing it is supposed to be maximally targeted against is the one thing it doesn't meaningfully affect.[/quote][/QUOTE]
Last edited:
I'm fairly neutral on the idea, but I would add two points:
- difficulty of NPC opposition is already determined by combat rank (and at the two highest ranks these already use engineered modules do they not?)
- not all players are at the same skill level (ie while you might find NPC combat somewhat trivial, this is not universally true across the playerbase, especially when solo facing wings of NPCs)
I'd not introduce the opposition engineering until Ranks 3, 4 and 5 if it were me. Also, NPC interdictions are relatively easy for a seasoned player to defeat anyway, but once you ramp up the difficulty such that interdictions are harder to defeat, it then becomes more of an embuggerance than anything else - either lower skilled players are constantly getting pulled out and never get anywhere, or more experienced players just get annoyed by multiple interdictions in succession (unless they're looking for the combat).
So I don't see the point really. The only sure way to oppose others in Powerplay is to play Powerplay using exactly the same collection and delivery mechanics you mention - and outperform your opposition in those activities, rather than worry about the level of difficulty others are faced with. Just my opinion.
What I would like to see is better use of Military Strike signal sources to provide an improved alternative to the collection and delivery phases and better support both PvE and PvP combat between Powers. Maybe instead of just deciding on Expansions, Powers could vote for surgical strikes or some form of special ops mission on particular opposing Power systems, from which the scale of success or failure for either side could prompt some particular result, like a damaged station needing repair, retreat of the ruling faction in that system, and so on.
If you have to run the gauntlet of interdiction and have a chance of failure, thats all it has to do for that aspect. Chain interdictions, anything that makes the flight less routine- in the current design thats all that can be done for SC.
I'm not talking about making interdiction rock hard- its making it so that if you lose you'll have a fight on your hands. But you will also face opposition elsewhere too.
Undermining will be affected- i.e. while you are attacking you'll face a counter attack from aggressive and capable NPCs.
BGS will be affected- just like BH or pirates you'll be hassled.
Hauling will be affected- you have much more incentive to not lose, and cannot assume a bare trading layout could survive if you fail.
[/QUOTE]
Its like a global challenge- just as ATR is.
Last edited:
The problem with Powerplay is- should it be just a delivery race? Because thats all it is, and has nothing to separate it from a poor repetitive CG or a basic shoot or haul mission.
SC interdiction is not ideal, but then, what else is there which can be done to fill that gap? I'd love drop zones to be bigger, but that affects more of the game. At least here its containable and optional if its fiddled with.
Quite frankly its dull taking off, seeing nothing, pressing the same 50 keys and landing seeing no opposition despite being a rank 5 ace. I'd love an Open only Powerplay, but at the same time the PvE part has to at least be functional and right now its not. You shoot a bit, collect a bit and then.....just truck it- that has led to the feature just languishing.