So, I know piracy right now is a bit...skeletal...you try to break open hatches and steal the cargo. But that is really the weakest kind of piracy there is.
Real pirates went after plunder (booty), sure, but often the bigger prize was the enemy's ship itself.
Consider this scenario - A wing of 3 friends take down a Python, capture it, and limp it back to port where they sell it. CARGO AND ALL.
Let's go down the list of challenges involved that would make this so much fun:
[/LIST]
Disabling the ship
Now let's break each one out:
1) Disabling the Ship. You would need to knock out the reactor of a ship, and then arrest the ship's inertia (tractor beams? magnetic harpoons? docking with the ship and using your own thrusters to stall it?). This would probably be sorta challenging, especially if you were a wolf-pack - coordination would be tough!
2) Capturing the Ship. Next you have to get someone aboard the darn ship to pilot the thing. Maybe an NPC hireling. Maybe you. Maybe your buddy. But how do you liberate a ship from an NPC who is probably still alive and aboard? You'll have to capture it somehow. Now, obviously if there was some kind of FPS add-on to the game you could do it that way (boarding action would be awesome, no doubt). But since that isn't likely to be forthcoming, you could just resolve it via a dialog box with options depending on what you've outfitted your ship with. Maybe you'd have options to hack the ship. Maybe options to have your NPC hirelings board the ship. Lots of interesting options can be done with a dialog box and just leave the actions "off screen".
3) Manning the Ship. Now you've got to install a pilot. For this you'd need to either be able to slave the ship to your own (attach one to the other either physically or with some kind of control-tether) or actually put a pilot aboard. If you have spare crew, perhaps the latter is easier and makes more sense. Or you man the new ship and have NPC crew control your old one (this mechanic already exists with the fighter mechanics).
4) Right now, no matter how screwed your ship is, you can reboot the ship to get 1% operational capacity out of the ship. This would make this step less challenging, but it is still a tense moment, especially if you consider how vulnerable you might be inside the new ship. I would suggest needing some kind of repair mechanic to replace the reboot. Say repair limpets, or sharing your auto-repair unit.
5) Depending on how you handle all of the other steps, you can determine how your return journey with your ship will be. And that's the fun of it. After all this work to salvage the ship, can you get it back to port? If yes, you get an awesome payout. If not, crushing defeat. Risk v. Reward. And that reward is what bring us to...
How not to break the economy
Right now, if this were implemented, the exponential grind that typifies the game would be subverted in a number of ways - not all of them "bad" but most of them posing a challenge. For instance, if a group of 3 friends in Cobras can take down an Anaconda and successfully capture it...then their group has successfully skipped a LOT of gameplay to get an end-game ship. This would seem like a big problem, but I'm not so convinced it needs to be. Consider that the ship would need to be re-registered to the new owner. Perhaps that requires credits. Then repairs. Newbies might not be able to afford the repair cost of the new ship, let alone the insurance for it. So they'd likely be left to sit on it until they can repair it. They could break the ship down for scrap and re-sell it, but the value of the ship and parts should be proportional to their individual health percentages. A 4 million 2e Turret Cannon should not be worth 4 million if it has 2% health. It should be worth 2% of 4 million. And repairing it should cost a sizable portion of the actual front-end cost!
So I would suggest taking the training wheels off repairs, insurance and ship registration, and if you do that, the effects of actual piracy might be mitigated somewhat.
Real pirates went after plunder (booty), sure, but often the bigger prize was the enemy's ship itself.
Consider this scenario - A wing of 3 friends take down a Python, capture it, and limp it back to port where they sell it. CARGO AND ALL.
Let's go down the list of challenges involved that would make this so much fun:
[/LIST]
Disabling the ship
- Disabling the Ship
- Capturing the ship
- Manning the ship
- Getting the ship operational
- Getting the ship back to port
Now let's break each one out:
1) Disabling the Ship. You would need to knock out the reactor of a ship, and then arrest the ship's inertia (tractor beams? magnetic harpoons? docking with the ship and using your own thrusters to stall it?). This would probably be sorta challenging, especially if you were a wolf-pack - coordination would be tough!
2) Capturing the Ship. Next you have to get someone aboard the darn ship to pilot the thing. Maybe an NPC hireling. Maybe you. Maybe your buddy. But how do you liberate a ship from an NPC who is probably still alive and aboard? You'll have to capture it somehow. Now, obviously if there was some kind of FPS add-on to the game you could do it that way (boarding action would be awesome, no doubt). But since that isn't likely to be forthcoming, you could just resolve it via a dialog box with options depending on what you've outfitted your ship with. Maybe you'd have options to hack the ship. Maybe options to have your NPC hirelings board the ship. Lots of interesting options can be done with a dialog box and just leave the actions "off screen".
3) Manning the Ship. Now you've got to install a pilot. For this you'd need to either be able to slave the ship to your own (attach one to the other either physically or with some kind of control-tether) or actually put a pilot aboard. If you have spare crew, perhaps the latter is easier and makes more sense. Or you man the new ship and have NPC crew control your old one (this mechanic already exists with the fighter mechanics).
4) Right now, no matter how screwed your ship is, you can reboot the ship to get 1% operational capacity out of the ship. This would make this step less challenging, but it is still a tense moment, especially if you consider how vulnerable you might be inside the new ship. I would suggest needing some kind of repair mechanic to replace the reboot. Say repair limpets, or sharing your auto-repair unit.
5) Depending on how you handle all of the other steps, you can determine how your return journey with your ship will be. And that's the fun of it. After all this work to salvage the ship, can you get it back to port? If yes, you get an awesome payout. If not, crushing defeat. Risk v. Reward. And that reward is what bring us to...
How not to break the economy
Right now, if this were implemented, the exponential grind that typifies the game would be subverted in a number of ways - not all of them "bad" but most of them posing a challenge. For instance, if a group of 3 friends in Cobras can take down an Anaconda and successfully capture it...then their group has successfully skipped a LOT of gameplay to get an end-game ship. This would seem like a big problem, but I'm not so convinced it needs to be. Consider that the ship would need to be re-registered to the new owner. Perhaps that requires credits. Then repairs. Newbies might not be able to afford the repair cost of the new ship, let alone the insurance for it. So they'd likely be left to sit on it until they can repair it. They could break the ship down for scrap and re-sell it, but the value of the ship and parts should be proportional to their individual health percentages. A 4 million 2e Turret Cannon should not be worth 4 million if it has 2% health. It should be worth 2% of 4 million. And repairing it should cost a sizable portion of the actual front-end cost!
So I would suggest taking the training wheels off repairs, insurance and ship registration, and if you do that, the effects of actual piracy might be mitigated somewhat.