DrkTemplar wrote:Whale Cancer wrote:I was thinking about this on the bus.
Have you considered using linked quests to increase ship difficulty? For instance, you could have an encounter with a very easy ship. When it is beaten, it triggers two quests that each lead to an easy ship battle. Defeating one of those ships triggers two quests that each lead to a medium difficulty encounter, etc., This is one way to 'fake' scaling difficulty. The amount of quests beacons that will spawn will be large, of course, but that could be part of the challenge (as it would be hard to avoid the quests as well as hard to keep track of which quests are the harder encounters).
Just a thought.
Let talk about this idea more. I'm curious though, how would it be different than just having weak ship events, medium ship events, and hard ship events? I was originally planning on removing or editing the quest events because they can trigger in a different sector, which you would never get to. That is an assumption though, I haven't been able to test getting a quest in the "next" sector, and than loading up the hidden worlds.
Let's say the player's ship is capable of defeating only easy ships, and only some of the time. If they encounter a very easy ship, they defeat it. This triggers as many quests are you want that are battles against easy ships. Now, how this works with quest markers that show up in the next sector is an interesting question. This would have to be tested. Of course, if a couple of the quests do end up being 'lost', it isn't really a big deal (although ideally it would trigger in the crystal sector and all you to chain all the way to 'very hard' ships). Now, the player can either go to these quest markers on purpose or because there are enough of them they make navigating around problematic. They now have to fight an easy ship. They may or may not win, if they do then medium ships start popping up at quest markers triggered by the destruction of the ship.
Additionally, the secret sector start beacon could be programmed to trigger the creation of these ship battle quest beacons. You could creatively use bluetext options to trigger initial appropriate ship battle events. I would do this by having an <eventList> that checks any number of subsystems or weapons. For instance, one of these events might check the shields subsytem; if you have 4 shields than it spawns easy battles. Another <eventList> item could be checking weapons system power. If you have only 2 weapons it might spawn only very easy quest beacons (or if you had 8 power in weapons it might spawn only hard quest battle beacons). To be clear, since this is an <eventList> each time you get to a new sector it would check something else randomly; that way, the player can't game their system upgrades, weapons, etc., to keep building up their ship against easier opponents.
The alternative seems like it would be too random. Ships capable of challenging a well built ship (let's call such a ship hard or very hard under my schema) would just annihilate a beginning ship. Turns the game into Russian roulette.
As a super bonus trick, you can replace the Quest graphic with a blank png so that the player doesn't know where these ship encounters are.
I think this solves the scaling problem, it just means a fair amount of work to implement.
EDIT: I am going to be releasing part of my FotF mod which adds cruisers (i.e. the player ships) as enemy ships soon. You could re-jig this a bit and use them as 'very hard' ships.
Contribute to help save the Whales from their various diseases! *DELAYED* Should release the skeleton with the main quests attached by the end of the week (By NOV 9)! *DELAYED* Don't listen to my dates! Things always seem to come up!