Uniquify factions & systems

[mmamais]

I know my title is perhaps offending. Please, i l explain.

Prelude
You are the great guys who do the hard work (developing, testing), we just sit back and enjoy. So hail to you, you can ignore me completely and you are justified. Just a humble opinion.

Main part
In the game documentation it says somewhere that you began Pioneer as a frontier remake but you aspire to make it better than frontier. I think you did it, it is indeed better in all aspects but one: game atmosphere. I mean there is a huge space of colonized planets by a dozen of human factions, really thousands of stars. And they are all the same. You can do the same things, the only change is availability of ships and jobs (probably depends on population). Industrial, plutocratic, anarchic, whatever system it is all the same (e.g. anarchists have their police like everybody etc).
Frontier on the contrary had 2 factions (plus some independent worlds), each faction had about 20-25 worlds and each world had its own flavour (the Capital, the Jail, the Religious enclave, the communists, the gem-mining world etc). Also, the 2 factions were actually different in philosophy and you could see it in game mechanics (good guys - bad guys lets say). Also, anarchic systems were as such: no police, no laws, dozens of random guys attacking you for fun or to rob you, the way it should be). This made you familiar with the different "neighborhoods" of space, you felt you got to know things, etc. I believe this added to the atmosphere.

Actual suggestions
Perhaps i suggest too drastic changes but anyway, maybe the factions and the systems they control could be greatly reduced, so that you have the ability to design each system as "unique" compared to others. It is impossible to do so when each faction has too many systems.
Maybe you could let all other (huge in number) systems as "unexplored" and the player could explore them for money (just visit or land perhaps in a planet etc).
You could even make factions colonize systems as the game goes by (perhaps one per year). New systems would greatly need raw materials perhaps....
Also, i miss the ability to actually join the navy and do jobs, get promoted and offered more dangerous jobs.

Conclusion
Just said my humble opinion. You are the boss, congratulations for your work, we are here to play!

[bszlrd]

That is on my radar, to build more lore and hand-made systems, with a smaller, more elaborate bubble.
There's also a pirate system in the works. Hopefully it will eventually gain gameplay aspects too.
So yeah, we are on the same page with this, it just takes some time to get there.

[mmamais]

I guess so...it should be a lot of work. Anyway, you are on the wheel.

[zonkmachine]

You want a more fleshed out universe? Can't you just help out creating custom systems and factions?

[mmamais]

If it is easy for a non-expert in I.T. to help, i could help in that. Where should i look at?

[zonkmachine]

Most of it is in the Wiki, here: https://wiki.pioneerspacesim.net/wiki/Pioneer_Wiki
Here is what an addition of three new factions look like. https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... 558671cf53

[impaktor]

TL;DR: we're aware and agree on all of the concerns of the original post.
MODERATOR EDIT: I renamed the topic of this thread to better reflect what is discussed.

Also, the 2 factions were actually different in philosophy and you could see it in game mechanics (good guys - bad guys lets say).

Besides what I've listed further down, what more cold be done to "uniquify" factions? The main difference in Frontier was the Imperial Navy vs the Federation's wording of missions, I think, and the fact that you couldn't jump from Federation space until you've made enough money to buy a ship which could make the sufficiently long jump that would bridge two stars that acted as a "bottle neck". That was a nice feature, sort of how GTA unlocks the map by opening bridges between islands after a while.

Also, anarchic systems were as such: no police, no laws, dozens of random guys attacking you for fun or to rob you, the way it should be).

Have you found a "violent anarchy" system we could test? I believe these aught to have lawlessness = 0 (or 1, which ever is the most chaos), and should have pirates attacking you. This feels like low fruit / easy to fix if it's not already implemented.

maybe the factions ... could be greatly reduced

This is planned. Not sure all devs agree what is "small enough" though, but whatever actually works is fine by me. However, currently the way factions' size / borders are generated are procedural / not easy to hand tweak I believe, so this requires some non-trivial coding.

design each system as "unique" compared to others.

We now have a system editor that lets people with zero code skills design their own systems (orbits, & names of celestial bodies).
(to run it, just launch the: "editor" binary file included in pioneer)

Also, i miss the ability to actually join the navy and do jobs, get promoted and offered more dangerous jobs.

I joined pioneer dev team to implement this. +12 years later I still haven't gotten to it. I have a branch somewhere that has half-implemented medals.

There's also a pirate system in the works. Hopefully it will eventually gain gameplay aspects too.

Indeed, I have a branch, (I should rebase to master).

Can't you just help out creating custom systems and factions?

Indeed we need custom systems, and these can be made by anyone. For making factions unique there needs to be code(ing skill) that changes behavior of markets, mission flavors, wording, ship models on sale, uniform of police, background logo on BBS, architecture of bases & city buildings, etc.


In summary, I'm all agreed on original post. I'd ideally like to have <= 3 (multi-system) factions, like Federation, Empire, Alliance in Frontier (any other factions would be single-system "independent"). Good news is you can start designing your own custom systems right now. I'd recommend replacing an auto-generated real/"star map" system in data/systems/partial/ with a custom one. Ideally consult the internet what is known about the system so far, incorporate that and add & name your own planets and space ports and description using the GUI editor. Then we can add that to the game.