Another way to play

[mickleroi]

Hi all, I've just started playing DW the other day and so far I am extremely impressed with this game. I won't spend time gushing, though. I'll get right down to business! There is a suggestion I'd like to make. This game has a HUGE level of detail in the galaxy and the ability to completely run itself without the player. What I would like to be able to do is turn off control of the empire, lose access to it's funding and resources, and just take one ship (or a small fleet) around the galaxy while a massive 4x game is played out around me. I know you can sort of do this already, but what I'd like to propose would be the ability to travel around and make money through trade/discoveries/bounty on pirates/privateering etc. without having the funds and military of an entire empire waiting for me when something goes wrong.

I know, it seems like I'm saying "Hey, let's take Master of Orion and turn it into Freelancer!" but hear me out!

The game engine appears to be able to support this sort of play, it would just need some tweaking. You would have to be able to have an empire that can survive with no colonies, the ability to manually pick up trade goods from a world (or mine them depending on your equipment) and sell them elsewhere, the ability to buy new ships from a colonised world not under your control and to upgrade your existing ship to a new design at the same. The civilian AI already does all of these things, we would just need to give the human player these options in a menu.

There might need to be some slightly different diplomacy options, for example the ability to sell secret locations to the empires of the galaxy or to sell your military services to the highest bidder. Again, the AI already does this (in the form of pirates), so the feature is already in the game.

This sort of play would allow you to then turn the game back into a 4x game if you were to build up enough power as an independent trader to conquer a world or buy a colony ship.

I have tried digging around in the game files to mod this in, but it doesn't look like it is possible to do it with mods. All the stuff I need to change seems to be hard coded. So I'm putting the idea out there, hopefully someone who can help notices this post and is as enthusiastic about it as I am!

Thanks for reading guys!

[Igard]

Welcome to the forums, mickleroi. [:)]

An interesting and ambitious idea indeed. I can imagin playing a game like that would be cool, but it's a bit different from what we've got now.

Don't know if we'll ever see the code opened up to an extent that you can mod something like this, but it's worth keeping on the back burner for now.

[J HG T]

1) Nice idea!
2) Have you tried Space Rangers 2: Reboot?
3) Having Freelancer and SR2 type heroes you could hire has always been my secret dream in pretty much every 4X game. Alongside with leaders and commanders of course.

Oh, and welcome to forums!

[Data]

Nice debut, mickleroi, welcome to the game and forum. We also have a modders wishlist and a poll going on so you can start lobbying [:)]
Elliot is very receptive and you / we could get a nice surprise on this.

[mickleroi]

Thanks for your replies, guys. It's good to see that there's an active community for this game!

I may have to start doing that, Data. I reckon it shouldn't be too difficult to implement these ideas (just a bit of hard work), and if I had a set of modding tools or access to the code I could probably do it myself. So on that basis I shall get my lobbying boots!

Thanks again for the welcome, all!

Oh, and J HG T; No, I haven't played any of the space rangers series before. It looks like fun, I just never got around to it.

[Data]

If you get into DW you'll have even less time but I also warmly recommend SR2 Reboot...that expansion really put the icing on the cake. [:)]

[J HG T]

ORIGINAL: mickleroi

Oh, and J HG T; No, I haven't played any of the space rangers series before. It looks like fun, I just never got around to it.

Believe me, it's excellent cult-classic. Just be careful if you decide to get it, it destroys your social-life and freetime. Its hook's sharp and tasty.

[jrhindo]

Maybe a way to have something similar to mickleroi's suggestion would be to switch over the private sector to the player and give the empire to the AI.

[Data]

That would be some idea...or have the option to do it at whatever point in time you'd like. Be all you can be [:)]

[Shuul]

Space rangers is one of my favorite games, especially its text based quests, also its made in my country (Russia), and i love it:)

[Data]

You should indeed be proud, Shuul, russian developers have some great potential. And I'm not just talking about SR2 but also Precursors and other space related awesome games...I raided russian forums for SR2 [:)]

[Torgrim]

Can hope that the devs make an "rpg" version of the game basicly you are one man one ship and the whole galaxy at your feet to do what you like.

[Data]

You can do that even now (lock view on a single ship you control) but it's not like an rpg game.

[Torgrim]

Well you can't really play as a "single" captain like an RPG but it would be something the dev should look into, huge potential if they make it work.

[Data]

More than huge but I'm afraid it would be also a huge effort. One can only hope...

[bertipa]

Good idea.

Could work also for non-players empire: a few commercial Megacorporation that add complexity to the game but just using mechanism already in place.