Salvage Gameplay Leveraging New Persistent USS

[wstephenson]

Salvaging USS works currently but is limited by the randomness, and lack of variation, of the salvageable USS that you can find.

There is no progression, nor does it offer the salvage player much control, reward decision making or risk taking.

The 3.3 features, the Orrery map and new USS that persist between drops to normal space will allow more elaborate salvage gameplay, along the following lines:

• Instead of randomly generating USS in front of the player as they fly around a system, a set of USS are generated up front.
• The USS are findable by scanning, and displayed on the Orrery map
• The USS are spaced out around the system, and some information about the possible type, and levels of threat and reward is available to the player by scanning the system
• The USS have visible time-to-live timers. After these expire, the USS will no longer be locatable.
• Thus, the player is presented with a a) prioritisation problem to decide which USS to salvage and b) a travel problem, to figure out a shortest or optimal path around the system to visit as many USS as possible before they expire. This is the important difference to existing single-target salvage missions.

This gameplay would be presented to the player in the form of a timed salvage contract for the current or another system belonging to the giving faction, including a number of 'ship loss records', indicating type and potential value of the wreck, along with a completion bonus if all wrecks are salvaged, and at higher difficulty levels, a penalty if a minimum percentage of wrecks are not salvaged in time. With increasing difficulty, more USS are included in the salvage contract, and the time limit (computed from the overall estimated travel time to visit all USS) is tighter. The player is being paid to 'clean up and investigate' so most cargo can be kept, but in some cases (eg rare artworks) the cargo would be returned as part of the mission for a higher fee.

Salvage USS would have a range of scenarios, not all details of which would be obvious to the player, but ship choice relevant details would be (eg large cargo hold required):

• Simple salvage with a number of different flavours: cargo, personal effects, black box, military, research, high-value
• Miner salvage in asteroid clusters and rings, valuable metals and minerals to recover
• Attack aftermath with pirates returning to collect the rest of the booty
• Search and Rescue of survivors in escape capsules with shorter timers and larger bonus.
• Large freighter losses with large numbers of containers
• Wildcat salvagers competing with the player, who may target player limpets, may escalate into combat, but not especially powerful ships
• Risky salvage where contacting wreckage causes damaging explosions
• Debris fields containing mines

 

[Hydrino]

I support this suggestion!

Would +1 your rep but just did in another thread.

I hope FD continues to focus on core gameplay/ careers and emergent play (squadrons) as they are doing with Mining and Exploration in Beyond Q4 update.