DEV Zoom wrote:I will definitely NOT make every single distance on betas the same. There has to be variance in the value of different outposts and in the strategies involved in taking and keeping them, otherwise the whole thing will reek of staleness.
I agree with this, I always felt that Beta islands (and the game world itself) would benefit from less symmetry.
I haven't had time to pull out the crayons (busy RL) but here's some food for thought Zoom:
1. Consider the robot speeds (~100kph demob immune pre-highway boost) vs terminal - TP distances
2. If someone wants to scout entrances into their Beta they will put down probes, doesn't matter if it's 2 or 5 entrances (5 probes = 5 mil, 1 epriton field = 200 mil)
3. All of Beta being accessible from Alpha encourages risk-averse corporations that base out of Alpha and do pretty much only epi mining and PvP on Beta.
I like that there's a difference between outposts, I'd argue to take it in the opposite direction:
1. Slap a few outposts on some of the unused Gamma islands, have the community polish-terraform them for you on the test server (doesn't matter how long it takes, you placed the burden of responsibility on the community not on yourself),
2. Then expand the design so some islands have a lot of connections and few outposts, some have a lot of outposts and few connections, doesn't matter as long as it's 100% not symmetrical - some real estate can be better then other!
3. Vary the mineral capacity so islands closer to alpha have smaller epi fields (to simulate depletion of resources and encourage corps to venture deeper into uncharted territory & encourage local marketing over hauling everything to Tellesis),
4. Double cargo sizes of all robots (how long does it take for newbies to get indy 10 vs reaching L5 of missions)
5. Only connect Beta 1's to Alpha 2 (encourage people to go deeper into Beta), chain the others Beta's together in a triangle or daisy chain (I will crayon this when I get some time)
Total work for you = tweaking some teleport connections, spanking people like Anni and Ville for not terraforming, copy pasting and editing a few database values, and the game world drastically opens up.