Need more ways to "lose"

[Skeeter]

Game starts being way to easy when ur into the millions and can make loads more. It would be good if there was ways to lose the game but not end it either by losing money, stations, ur fleet in sensible scenarios so there's always risk that you have get it back again and gives you a sense of crap I've lost so much I need to rebuild from the beginning or thereabouts in some ways. Without actually just really starting a new game.

Maybe a message comes through saying you owe loads of tax randomly or some reason you have to give or auto take away money randomly through ur game life. Maybe a way to kill half ur fleet by a invasion or repossession due to a law u break. Stations, erm fail health checks and get shut down till you pay to be sorted or accidents happen and u get a message saying ur complex was too big and overloaded a generator and blew up so ur 20 factories linked gets screwed.

Stuff like that.

Don't just let the player get better and bigger without some set backs along his career. It's boring.

[Alan Phipps]

I think one obvious mechanism would be if a major race or faction in a system holding some of your property became hostile towards you due to some incident that you are thought responsible for (real or mistaken identity). They could destroy or disrupt your local trade and assets, and it could then be a new mission to find and achieve one of the successful ways to get back into their good books.

The problem though with any sudden in-game bad news or mishap is that relief is always available by a simple reload to before the RNG woke up and made it happen. Even if the event is timed and 'sticky' through such reloads, you can still turn back the clock to give yourself time to plan for and avoid some of the worst effects.

[Killjaeden]

Maybe a message comes through saying you owe loads of tax randomly or some reason you have to give or auto take away money randomly through ur game life.

While i totally agree that the game needs to have possibilities for smaller and larger setbacks, this suggested way is propably the most awefull way to implement this that i could think of. Players will feel cheated if they just have some random crap happen to them that comes out of nowhere and can't be influenced at all. RNG bull is never liked. It works in short lived rogue-esque games. Not in games where a single save game can have well over 1000h playtime.

First measure to increase set backs is to make it so that there are as little as possible "you are dead, reload savegame". Especially in combat. You died and lost your ship? Try again. This is a problem. If the player could lose his ship without dieing he has a setback that doesnt force him to reload.

Mount and Blade did this very well. When your warband loses the battle you are taken prisoner (though sometimes you can manage to escape before that) and the enemy party will carry you around for some time. Time is accelerated to make waiting less boring. During this time you have no controll over your posessions. At some random point you can manage to escape the enemies warband with some ****** gear. Also, if the warband that took you prisoner is defeated you are freed (unless the victor is also an enemy of yours).
This means losing your army and the fight is a temporary setback instead of a forced reload&retry.

If players had ejector seats (or in larger ships escape pods) they could lose the ship but still survive. As ejected pilot / in the escape pods they could maybe make it to friendlies, or they could be captured.

To enable economic setbacks, investments into stuff needs to have a the potential of failing. This is tricky, because ES have said they dont want to have running costs for stations/personell. So even if market prices drop to rock bottom - the player will never lose anything out of that. He will just gain less or no money during that time. But as there are no running costs that doesnt matter - because having no money has no destructive effect.

If the player loses a lot of ships or stations - in X3 he would propably reload, because it is such a pain to setup. If there was automated replacement of casualties this would only result in monetary loss (and temporary fighting power or trading power) -> losses are more acceptable -> reduced propability of reloading in case of setback.

[iforgotmysocks]

The game has always been easy as there was no real threat.
It could be better if the player was aligned to one faction and factions would fight to extinction, but i doubt that this is going to happen without it being modded.

[Killjaeden]

The game has always been easy as there was no real threat.
It could be better if the player was aligned to one faction and factions would fight to extinction

The game needs powerfull opponents at the later stage of the game - because like i said, the player can't lose anything without opponents (except deliberately crashing stuff into asteroids). It doesn't need to be "eternal war for extinction". It can also be a trade war between different larger factory conglomerates (if the player more powerfull). Having certain large scale war events is also a way, but it doesnt need to be eternal. But it is very difficult to pull off, because it can sometimes not phase the player at all, or wipe everything of him out.

But that's also where a difficulty option menu could come into play.

[Karvat]

The possibility of ejecting after being destroyed, or at least respawning in another of the ships owned by the player (especially now, with the addition of the teleporter), is certainly a good starting point to prevent the player from reloading the game
But that's not all, I agree with adding a more consistent regression system in the game, but it should not be random as a message that the player CAN NOT PREVENT in any way
A good solution could in fact be simply to increase slightly the number of incursions by the xenon in the commonwealth, or small khaak fleets (especially if kept more powerful as in XR rather than in X3)
And certainly a good idea could be the introduction of a new system of competition that pushes some IA to attack some player stations maybe in the form of pirate ships (not to lose the player reputation with the races only for defending his structures)

[Encrtia]

I completely agree with Killjaeden, in every regard.

[Vandragorax]

I don't usually agree with KJ but yeah I do as well (and with Karvat). It isn't fun to have some random stuff screw up a heavy time-invested game like X. Also while the idea of station sectors randomly becoming hostile to you, then you have to complete some mission to "prove your innocence" or something seems fun in concept, in the reality of the game it would just boil down to "oh no another one of these, now I have to drop everything and go rescue that random sector before I can carry on doing what I was in the middle of". It would be tedious and just a distraction.

If we want "better" ways to fail, I would suggest Egosoft focus more on warfare alongside the already quite established economy structure of the game. As somewhat mentioned above too.

With better warfare AI, we'd have to be seriously careful about who we declare war on, how many allies each side has, or we could actually be targeted by AI trying to destroy our assets. Think something like a Total War game where you don't want to declare war on all your neighbours at once, but be rather careful and take them down a bit at a time.

The other aspect could be something similar to Eve. If we get destroyed in a ship, we'd be able to come back via some kind of clone but it would be extremely expensive, and we'd have to replace the ship we lost as well.

This sort of thing would encourage more recklessness or experimentation on behalf of the player, and would actually result in lost assets without simply having a "Game over" screen and having to reload before losing any of the assets. This method of lost assets with the player being part of the action would also encourage a use for all the money we build up at the same time providing us with meaningful "Game over" screens, because it would mean we died at a point when we couldn't afford to activate our next clone, or buy another ship for ourselves.

Not saying that those systems should be implemented exactly as they are in other games, but some variation on them to help the end-game would be a nice fit imo.

[Blower68]

What I'm thinking about is the possibility of completly destroying the game because one ore more core ressources are missing.

If you for example capture each ship with a specific ware - or destroy the only available factory of such wares than possibly the economy will stuck or crash.

No "God" should fix such an issue. If the player is to aggressiv than he might be failing.

Let's start the Think part

[Axeface]

If players had ejector seats (or in larger ships escape pods) they could lose the ship but still survive. As ejected pilot / in the escape pods they could maybe make it to friendlies, or they could be captured.

I agree with everything you said, a while back I made a suggestion thread about this specific feature. I fully expect that in X4 egosoft are going to make the transporter (once you have it researched) automatically transport you from a ship that it's blowing up (hopefully they explain why npc's dont use it too.... huge power drain or something?) - but what happens before we have it researched? And what about NPCs? (they should care about their own lives), X4 needs ejection and escape pods, emergency services and insurance.

So... Imagine the player ship is exploding/disabled - Ejection/transportation/Escape pods are all automatic when a ship explodes. When this happens a distress signal is sent and someone will jump in/fly to you and zap you inside their ship (emergency services/911/ambulance, we have it in real life, why not in X? ;p ) - then, the game should fade-to-black and have you docking at the nearest station - where you can now call one of your ships, or even, a new fresh ship is waiting for you already if you have some kind of insurance. This feature set should work the same for npc's. All this would just reduce the use of save/load which I utterly hate.
All of this would work great along with an 'Ironman' mode, not to be confused with dead-is-dead, that saves automatically every so-often.

Heres the thread I made a while back in case you havent seen it https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=396957


EDIT: Oh... to make things less controllable X4 should also have 'dynamic' rep, where its not possible to be adored by absolutely everyone - if the Split love you, the Boron are not going to like you. Not to the point of being hostile, but just not your best friends.

[Zetoss]

Seems it has been partially suggested already but something that makes sense, can be influenced and can devastate a player would be pirates actually paying attention to your assets. Build a profitable station with no defense and they will eventually launch a large scale attack, blow up half the station and run off with any cargo that leaks out of the ruptured storage modules. Have a whole mess of turrets on the station and a fleet guarding it and no pirate would dare go for a frontal assault. Becomes a matter of having to choose a balance between profit and protection. Unlike Xenon you can't just blockade a gate and call it a day, pirates should be lurking just about everywhere.

Xenons are a wildcard that could be put to use too, they'd likely attack more randomly since they're technically just malfunctioning AI and don't understand what they're doing, once they know where your stations are they have a probability to select them as random targets regardless of how well defended you are, another difference between them and pirates should be that Xenons can send significantly bigger fleets. Your only way of completely avoiding losses is to either make sure they never find out where you've built something or fortify the position to counter an attack - or just post massive fleets at all gates. Not sure what state the game is in at this point but some of what I've mentioned could already be sort of "in there", maybe?

One thing that satellites could be good for is to watch for fleets on the move, if the fleet is hostile it could trigger an alert to the player saying "Hostile fleet detected, moving towards [gate/direction], estimated N% risk of targeting your station at [location]" and that would be pretty gosh darn cool. Not sure how much of a pain it would be for the coders to make that happen but it would be a really nice touch and encourage use of sat networks.

As for random events that just suddenly jack your money or force other unavoidable babysitting it's the worst bull imaginable, I've permanently uninstalled several games for that exact type of thing-I-have-to-censor-myself-insanely-much-to-talk-about.

[BigBANGtheory]

Don't just let the player get better and bigger without some set backs along his career. It's boring.

I definitely agree with that.

You shouldn't be able to roll through the galaxy causing havoc with no consequence imho, having said that a pacifist play style could be a good challenge too where you put in a ton of effort to maintain peace and profits.

[Tamina]

auto take away money randomly

The only thing I can imagine are random events happening in the universe, clearly communicated to the player able to counteract this event.
I.e.: "Due to higher Xenon activities in [Area], the local intelligence agency is expecting an attack in the next few hours."

Communicating game mechanics is key point of every game.

[Karvat]

I fully agree with Tamina, one of the best solutions would be random events clearly communicated (or not, even only warnings of likely threats are fine) but certainly counterable or even avoidable by the player as Xenon raids or other types of threats.
If the player could not counteract these events it would become a rage game, the feeling would be the same as when, in X3, once the autopilot was inserted our beloved Kestrel was going to crash, forcing us to reload the game and lose the progress (this is also the reason why collision damage is better if it remains deactivated)

[Seanchaidh]

Perhaps players who build large industrial empires should have to deal with pressure from union organizers (who try to get the workers a larger share of the profits) and ah, "non-price competition" from other business empires (bounties on your ships to make them more attractive to pirates, for example). Rich people problems, essentially. Game needs more of 'em.

[Karvat]

Or for example: in a situation of duopoly, where one station belongs to the player and the other to the AI, clearly each station would derive greater profits by sabotaging or eliminating the other or transports of the other
At this point the AI could be enabled to hire pirates to put the player in difficulty

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Does this not boil down to "more intelligent behaviours" of the opposition, with more developed "economic and building strategies?"

For instance lets take the Xenon. They now have factory complexes. So lets assume they are building their own fleets.

So in my imagination things would go a bit like this...

The Xenon start small, in very inaccessible areas of the universe. They have production facilities. So they start with scouts and fighters. They zealously guard their territory, trying to ensure that no enemy craft discover their factories.

As time goes on they produce mining craft to exploit local asteroids and build larger more varied structures. Their aim is for a shipyard and the ability to produce larger spaceships.

Now in my fantasy they are terraformers so what they really want to do is transform a moonlet, moon or planet and add this to their production capabilities. Once this is accomplished, they can now bring vast quantities of material and tech goods into their production cycles. This is the point at which they then set out to capture further territory. (Note this does not require planetary landing for the player, it is part of a narrative, and would require something like the landers the Terrans had. Also in my imagination the destruction of such planetary resources would require a specialist ship and weapons.)

Now we can expect Xenon invasions. However these have to be more "intelligent" than previous behaviours. The Xenon don't just destroy, they have a purpose. To gain and hold territory.

Also in my imagination, at various points in the above development of the Xenon forces, the player should be able to join a factions military to engage and destroy the Xenon.

It should be possible to completely destroy all of the infrastructure of the Xenons, to obliterate this particular infestation.

However in some small obscure corner of the universe there might be a new incursion beginning....

[Skeeter]

I'd rather lose in more ways than just wars or invasions, economic disasters, natural ones, infiltration by spy's doing sabotage etc.

[Sandalpocalypse]

I don't think the game needs ways to lose, any more than sim city needs ways to lose. But it does need ways to be set back. Losing player ships would be ideal.

Balance is a concern though. In all previous x games, gain from battles is scaled for zero losses; that is to say, the reward from doing a mission is scaled for their being no expenditures during a mission, and thus to the player flying only their own ship and taking no or minimal damage doing it. Prices for ships are also balanced around them being player ships, for the most part, so attempting to win missions using your own ships was very dangerous in terms of profit since any significant losses would wipe out your gains. This actively discouraged players from doing anything but bringing the strongest player ship they had and only that player ship.

Perhaps fight mission rewards should be designed in a more 'cost-plus' manner - where you get a degree of insurance or additional money for losses incurred during a mission (up to a point, of course).

[Patholos]

We need way to experience defeat that DO NOT make us wanna reload our saves because the micromanagement of rebuilding our fleets are 2-3 hrs of just menuclicking.

Nothing is more satisfying than having your fleet decimated and you needing to retreat, but you know that

* the industry/factories you built are producing war material by the thousands
* the logistical network you set up with hundreds of transport ships are resupplying your shipyards
* shipyards who are rebuilding your fleet while training the new cannonfod..recruits in how to stay alive long enough to launch nuclear missiles at close range on an enemy carrier.

It doesn't matter if I lose 10 or 100 or 1000 or even 10000 ships.

If the logistics and gameplay allows me to resupply and rebuild smart and effortlessly, I will bury the problem with enough bodies and wreckage eventually.

THAT is how you lose and then win. And that is what X sorely needs.

Which is why I play Litcube.