If the fox fails to catch the rabbit, he can then find another rabbit to chase. If the rabbit fails to escape the fox, then it is dead. No more chances. It is not until the fox has failed to catch a rabbit for several weeks that he will die, whereas the rabbit only has to fail once, and the effects are permanent. TL;DR - The fox can afford to fail; the rabbit cannot.
I would love to see gravity fields so that ships will require fuel to remain stationary and fall towards planets when they run out. A new component could be made (Inertial Stabilizer perhaps?) that could spend fuel to cancel out any gravitational effects. Just let us have CV crash landings!! How cool would that be? Also, I'd prefer that planets take time to get to. Right now if you have the crystals you can go to any planet almost immediately. This cheapens them and reduces the feeling of being in a vast Universe. Cool down time for warp engines is one way to solve this. Another is to force ships to be outside a gravity field / far away from a planet to make the jump. These ideas would be easy to modify and giving server owners control over the specific values for distance / cool down time would be ideal. imho going to another world should take time and resources. It was cool to make it easy at first because all ppl wanted to do was to explore those cool worlds you had made. Please allow server admins to make getting to new worlds expensive. For me, 5 min of travel time between worlds would be ideal. Then, if you're going, you have a reason to go and you'll have to be more prepared for the trip.
Gravity: Already exists. Ship hover: Already exists. Fall to ground: Already exists. Unless you have a ship with inadequate bottom thrusters, it will maintain its altitude in a gravity field, and yes it does use fuel because its increasing the thrust to balance out, which in turn eats fuel. And if you run out of fuel, your ship turns off, and you fall to ground.
The Procedurally Generated Galaxy is later down the road sometime... a change in Warp Mechanics to make it more legit will likely come packaged with that. Until then, there's no real reason to take forever to traipse around a band aid fix Solar System.
My bad, I wasn't very clear in my original post. What I mean was have gravity fields in space with the acceleration towards the planet decreasing with the square of the distance from the center of the planet. The inertial stabilizer would basically allow ships to behave the way they currently do, but would use up fuel to make it happen depending on their distance from the planet. The closer a ship is to the planet the more fuel would be required.
Bear in mind that this is probably the main limiting factor in terms of game speeds - not a specific design decision to make all distances show up in a handful of kilometers. The problem is also likely even worse than LifePizzas actually describes above, because many aspects of the collisions in a game like this aren't ship-to-ship - but Block to Block, which means the size of your blocks is the limiting factor factors on maximum motion per frame. So, no, you're not likely to see any 'kilometer-per-second' style space combat in this game universe. Besides, that combat system would almost certainly be dominated by kinetic kill missiles. Engines attached to a generator and a fuel tank, designed to accelerate insanely fast and simply smash straight through any vessel, no matter how large (kind of like real life...). Amusing - but it kind of makes it a dramatic waste of time to construct all those cool looking giant space cruisers when a $5 K-K missile will reduce it to a cloud of expanding shrapnel. I prefer my space combat to be much less realistic than that. Even as it stands now, the offense to defense ratio in the game is dramatically in favor of offense. A team fielding a group of minimalist CV's with big guns stuck haphazardly onto them would crush a single large 'well armored' cruiser for the same resource costs. If you were taking combat seriously in this game, it would quickly devolve into fielding swarms of cheap, disposable ships, because the build/repair time for the big ones is completely untenable compared to their survivability, which is minimal either way. Maybe if big CV's could mount shields, auto-repair systems, and armored gun hard-points they'd be viable against SV's or minimalist missile frigates, but that's not currently the case.
I think any form of planet is okay. With an implemented weather system, each planet could be entirely different. I think it'd be cool to go into gas giants and set up huge gas mining stations, or go to a water world with a pre-built submarine and build huge underwater bases to mine for seaweed and produce bio fuel. Just don't stick to one solar system. PLEASE, do not. Make it possible for us to warp to other solar systems with 2 or more suns, for example.
Aww... & will probably be a long wait for being able to do anything about this. Maybe this & the Procedurally Generated Galaxy could get consolidated together. Still so much Foundation left for the Devs to Craft though, so might as well not hold the breath.
My suggestion? Make all celestial objects and the distances between them as large as practically feasible. It will never be "large enough," nor will it ever be "realistic;" so just make them as large as they can be. You guys got the source code, so you are in the position to tell us what those number are, not the users.
Since everything is procedurally generated, developer and artist hours are probably NOT dramatically increased if they give us a game world that is 100 billion versus 1 billion or 1 million pixels wide, tall and high. What matters is how the thing performs on servers and 'typical' user machines. Thus, we users are in no position to make informed suggestions other than "we want it big." They can, with their development environment builds and presuming they have a few different pieces of hardware laying around to test on, TEST what the impact of various game world sizes is on performance. They can also decide what are reasonable performance indicators. That is all I'm saying: we users are in no position to make any informed suggestions about the scale of the game other than: "make it as big as you can make it and still run on -insert specs of user's rig/users server-
How much AU one could travel per Pentaxit could always be adjusted perhaps. Plus maybe someday there will be such a thing as T2 Warp Fuel Tanks... &/or capability to use more then just one.
I would develop different kinds of engines. So first will get you to the astroids, 2nd will get you to the moon, 3rd will get you to other planets within the solar system, 4th will get you to other solar systems and (maybe at some time in the future) 5th will get you to other starsystems. Each should only be able to produce with the resources you get from the previous exploration. E.g. get sath from astroids to fly to moon to get crystals to get to other planets to get XXX to (e.g. activate worm holes to) get to other solar systems... I find it strange that small ships fly faster than big ones in space. In Orbit I can imagine, but not in space (other laws of physic and larger engines will get you further). But from a gameplay perspective (fights) I udnerstand you want to be able to have a far more manuverable small ship vs CV. But I would look at Acceleration, manuverability, etc. not max speed. Just make it take (a lot) longer for CVs to get to the max speed.
