Politician Archive

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• Space Combat - city facilities in role of combat support, staging, recovery...


• Storage of ships


• Space Stations as cities

What do you think about these issues? Do you have other concepts you'd like to share?

I think it is critical for player cities to have some sort of starport available to them. They are hurt now because of the lack of starports, but with people owning their own ships - it is going to be much more important. For the majority of the people that buy ships, it will probably be the biggest investment they ever make in the game. For all practical pursposes, they will call the place where they dock this ship "home". If that is required to be in an NPC city - our player cities will be hurt significantly.

Having a starport in the city of course opens huge opportunities as well, from building the ships, repairing them, staging group launches whether it be for a quest or a faction raid, etc. A city that cannot take part in these things is going to be a dead one.

I think the space expansion will be an extremely important point for player cities - it will either put them on the map, or kill them

Perhaps rather then a starport we should get a "starport." It won't allow shuttling between different worlds throughout the galaxy like normal ones do, it won't act as a secondary shuttleport, it will basically be a landing strip, garage and storage shed in one. Player owned starships will be able to land here and take off again. There will also be an area for artisans/mechanics to repair and possibly even craft spaceships as well.

I don't think it would be right to have space stations an extension of player cities but rather new cities all on their own.

Arrya: I think that allowing player cities to act as spaceports for player-owned ships serves two great purposes: One, it puts the focus on player cities for inter-planetary travel. Two, it gives you a great reason to travel via player-owned ship instead of via the public inter-planetary shuttles. The convenience of going from player-city A on Tattooine to player-city B on Corellia or Dantooine or wherever, instead of player-city-A to Mos Eisley to Coronet City to player-city-B, would make player-owned and operated shuttles very competitive against the public shuttles.

PsychoticChipmonk: I agree that having expanded-function spaceports for player cities is a great idea. I don't know if the crafting of ships needs to be done in the spaceport itself, but definitely repair, refueling, all those things. For crafting of ships, I'd like to see that as a huge cooperative effort, that multiple crafters could all contribute to, and having a "dry-dock" facility as part of a player city would be a nice feature to see.

I agree with all of the above!

I also would like to suggest the following:

1. The Docking Facility / Spaceport: Mayor's should be able to levy a tax on its usage that goes into city funds. I know some cities that have good people running them, but have really struggled with the costs.

2. I think that Cities should be able to have one or more space-stations as satellites to their operation. What I mean by this is that where people in a city have contibuted to building a Space Station, they Mayor of that city should be able to control it using the terminals and processes used to control the city. For example, someone banned from a city, should also be banned from that cities spaceports.

3. I think that if a ship is in combat and returns to its 'home-base' in a player city, it should be safe from attack, protected by that cities defences.

4. Each ship could be 'registered' to a player city to take advantage of the above. Unregistered ships would be subject to more scrutiny by the authorities because of this. Regsitered ships would have to pay some form of tax. Also, cities and associations could have some sort of 'fleet' of ships registered to them.

5. Space stations should have some sort of trade function where cargo can be sold.

They are my five random ideas!

There's more here than I have time to say, I'm afraid. I think the primary issue is that we're dealing in the dark. I don't actually know what space expansion is going to involve, aside from space. Is it a replacement for the current shuttle system? Is it in addtion to that? Player cities definitely need some form of interstellar travel, and can form a great backbone for the crafting/repair/resupply of spacecraft.

Space stations are essentially cities in their own right, and should prove a great addition to the social fabric of the game. Most all of the SW universe takes place on ships or stations rather than planetside, which is a big part of the SW feel of the game.

Has there been consideration of a planetary council which would negotiate trade/treaty agreements with other planets? I'd love to see Naboo able to say put a 10% tariff on all trade to/from Tatooine, for instance, in response to sheer d00dism. (I'm kidding, but the idea might work...)

Let's get more info on SE, and we'll be able to give you more info on what we'd like to see in SE. Right now I don't know enough to ask the right questions, much less provide answers.

Can we just hope that the actual system is anything like that cool, Chibi-Bar?

Arrya: They are as close-mouthed about the SE with us as they are with you. And yeah, e3 sounds like a really good guess to me too.

Defense contracts, the station adminstrator can set up defense alliances with player characters. This would create defense missions for the base. Essentially player generated missions for pilots to defend the station from NPC ships attacking it.

Delivery contracts, the station administrator can set up delivery contracts with smugglers/freight pilots to deliver the goods to cities that the station has supplier agreements with.

The more skill the administrator has the more contracts he can have with player cities, defenders, delivery.....

NPC missions for adminsitrator. Set up alliances with rebel or Imperium. Each has consequences.