Suggestion: Ironman mode.

goteguru

goteguru
We already have Solo mode and Open mode for different playing styles. Wouldn't it be fun to have a Diehard (Ironman) mode?
Ironman mode would be unforgiving. In Ironman your character could die and lose everything (create new character).

You need insurance? Sure, no problem. Pay for it for every single flight! You hit the orbital? The station has been damaged. Pay millions of CR or you get sold as a slave. You paid for insurance, did you? Next time it will cost more, unfortunately. You fly into the planet/sun overspeeding? No "emergency stop" nonsense ... your ship vaporizes in a fraction of second. You seems to loose in combat? You'd better press that emergency catapult button or you die.

Your life saving pod would be a real thing. A real life saver. If you catapult in time, you get the chance to be saved (Fuel Rats would be renamed to Pod Rats and get more popularity :). You could hang in space for a while, hours, maybe days but your cmdr may survive. Or you could choose suicide in your isolation. That case you die, of course.

Your cmdr would have life, story and tragedy. You could save your (ex) cmdrs, remember their heroic life and how they died. It would be real challenge to live long enough to get that mamba or reach Beagle Point.

Your simulation years are over, cmdr. The real space awaits you!

I Would Love It.
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
You can roleplay that (mostly) by yourself, no need for an additional game mode imho.
I mean, it's a nice idea and I would like it, but it needs to come with different CMDR slots and that would mean a lot of changes to the game.
 

goteguru

goteguru
Bigmaec said:
You can roleplay that (mostly) by yourself, no need for an additional game mode imho.
I mean, it's a nice idea and I would like it, but it needs to come with different CMDR slots and that would mean a lot of changes to the game.
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No, you can't. Technically you could, but psychologically and evolutionary we are programmed not to accept defeat. The game must enforce it or it doesn't work. I can beat the temptation to cheat, save-scumming and alike but I have hard time to delete character if the game engine actively support immortal re-spawning.

Moreover, we humans are social creatures. You could earn fine reputation to be the first to reach Beagle Point in IronMan mode, you could earn huge amount of sympathy when you post your last screenshot of your 2 years old IronMan cmdr. If you do the same in the current mode, people would say "and now what?" or "you deleted your character? Are you stupid?".

No. Without engine support there is no community.

I think I'm not alone. There are people who play UFO in Ironman mode, or play Examina with its infamous permadeath feature.
 

goteguru

goteguru
Bigmaec said:
I mean, it's a nice idea and I would like it, but it needs to come with different CMDR slots and that would mean a lot of changes to the game.
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Unlikely. Different CMDR slots would be piece of cake. It's a simple flag in the database. You could even use your dead CMDR in other modes, Ironman simply refuses to load it, that's all. Very easy to implement. (Trust me, I'm a programmer :) ). The HARD part would be to implement different instances for ironman commanders if you don't want them to be killed by the immortal (and careless) ones. Life-saving pods, insurance mechanics would need much more work of course.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Bigmaec said:
You can roleplay that (mostly) by yourself, no need for an additional game mode imho.
Click to expand...
goteguru said:
No, you can't. Technically you could, but psychologically and evolutionary we are programmed not to accept defeat. The game must enforce it or it doesn't work.
Click to expand...
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm not interested in the typical iron man mode, as I believe in the life-saving power of the Remlock suit (taught to me as a child by The Dark Wheel novella). However, I think ship insurance is a bit of a cheat. If there was a "no insurance" mode, I'd play in that mode. But like goteguru says, when that rebuy screen appears, I have yet to have the fortitude to enforce this game mechanic on myself. Despite being rich, I always end up pressing rebuy.

My one concern about such a mode is that I've died more than once due to stupid things. Things like bugs in the game, or wives distracting me in the midst of battle, etc. A possible solution for me would be a game mode that gives me 5 rebuys for the entirety of the game, and once they are used up, they are gone forever. As for your version of iron man mode, I'm not sure how that would work. Perhaps survival could be RNG (you have a 50/50 chance of surviving) or based on an actual "eject" sequence that needs to be executed no less than 10 seconds before ship destruction.

BTW, if you are on PC, somebody could write a program that watches for the rebuy screen and then automatically executes a macro to clear your save. I'm actually surprised nobody has thought of this before now.
 
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Para Handy

Para Handy
goteguru said:
Respect. You have exceptionally strong will. :) May I suppose you would still appreciate official support for your game style, maybe a list of your RIP commanders...
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Nope - it is just OCD requiring seeing Insurance Claims = 0 any number there makes my brain itch. ;)

Old Duck said:
...........
BTW, if you are on PC, somebody could write a program that watches for the rebuy screen and then automatically executes a macro to clear your save. I'm actually surprised nobody has thought of this before now.
Click to expand...

There is an "eject survival calculator" sort of thing from @mossfoot - never used it myself. Here is the thread on it:

Pilot Ejection Table - For those who want some risk in their game!

You've no doubt heard of IronMan play (dead is dead), but perhaps you find the idea of restarting with such unforgiving absoluteness to be a bit unfair. At the same time, maybe the thought of always surviving an ejection no matter what (as the game currently stands) takes some of the thrill away...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

PC app - http://www.mediafire.com/file/tnlj3c6s053t50z/EDIMRanGen22.zip/file

Web-based thing - http://www.trainsimdev.com/elite/
 
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PhanttoM

PhanttoM
Pfft, ironman mode. I've deleted my savegame dozens of times for lesser things than dying. (Like getting a bounty or fine on me)
Took me a couple of years of starting over, but earlier this year I finally made it to Triple Elite without any fines or bounties and of course, no deaths.

Granted, it's extremely easy and much faster to reach triple elite nowdays.
 

Bloodsign

Bloodsign
PhanttoM said:
Pfft, ironman mode. I've deleted my savegame dozens of times for lesser things than dying. (Like getting a bounty or fine on me)
Took me a couple of years of starting over, but earlier this year I finally made it to Triple Elite without any fines or bounties and of course, no deaths.

Granted, it's extremely easy and much faster to reach triple elite nowdays.
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Playing that way would require remarkable foresight and self control. I can't even be bothered to live real life with that level of attention! ;)
 

PhanttoM

PhanttoM
J.States said:
Playing that way would require remarkable foresight and self control. I can't even be bothered to live real life with that level of attention! ;)
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That's actually a good way of putting it.
I would have said that it requires raw factual knowledge of the game mechanics, both the good and bad. All the failed attempts taught me something. That's what gives foresight.

One time I had had gotten really close to triple Elite, when I carelessly took off from a station and ended up ramming a ship above me, which incurred a fine.
Most of the time it came down to losing situational awareness during combat and ending up hitting a non-wanted ship — both cases of losing that self control.
 

MickyG1982

M
Old Duck said:
BTW, if you are on PC, somebody could write a program that watches for the rebuy screen and then automatically executes a macro to clear your save. I'm actually surprised nobody has thought of this before now.
Click to expand...

They probably have, but were too busy making one that emailed frontier support directly complaining that the ship loss wasn't their fault & it was definitely FD's and that they demanded their money back if they didn't get their ship and all of it's data / cargo / mission / rep etc back and their criminal record wiped.
 

Deide

Deide
I love the idea of greater consequences for defeat, even to the ultimate end of character deletion.

Cockpit ejection is essential in my opinion, but I'd also argue that default "defeat" of larger ships should be "disabled and derelict" instead of exploding into a million pieces - especially in combat with NPCs. Perhaps there were small shrapnel explosions during the dereliction that could kill you if you hadn't ejected in time, or perhaps you just get disabled without any hope of self-repair.

Then you could set your own distress calls once the danger passes and you've been robbed or lost a battle, and wait for NPC/Player intervention that takes you back to a nearby station. There, you get in your backup ship (or free Sidewinder if you have no ships or are able to transport one there) and go salvage your wreck if applicable. Two forms of salvage could be modules that need repaired or if you're lucky enough to have only sustained a small amount of damage, repair the hull and power systems in multicrew, and get your crewmate to fly it back to a station. Or something like that. I realise now as I'm typing it that it's not all that well thought out, haha.

Of course, there would still be the possibility of complete catastrophe and explosions rendering your character dead if you didn't eject in time, at which point you're gone for good.
 

Ronzer

Ronzer
I like this idea quite a bit, especially the being jettisoned part, and hope for a remlok rat to save you. Add in some sort of beacon system, aside from making a post on an internet from 1200 years in the past.
 
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