Nominally, wars, I expect, will be either petty spats between opposing leadership groups or scuffles between the lower ranks because they're bored and a quick raid on the enemy shipyard might be fun (it also happens to be a good way to gather intel on enemy machines and fighting strength). Like that one video mentions, most reasons for wars can be boiled down into Pride, Fear, and Self-Interest. If war isn't profitable at any particular moment it's not in your self-interest to get into a war, if the prize is a large station or a juicy piece of asteroid your losses might easily be recouped and then some by a strategic or economic gain, if morale among the corps is flagging it might be necessary to maintain solidarity and espirit de corps or risk losing the next serious fight, if the enemy is known for agitating, sending proxies to fight unexpectedly, or is just an undesirable neighbor war can be an inevitable necessity to your company's survival even if it would be costly.
Crisis of Conflict: Is there a reason to go to war in Starbase?
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- Jan 16, 2020
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nobody goes to war to lose money in the same way nobody goes to the grocery store to lose money... it's just considered an acceptable expense because the available alternatives aren't as desirable. The shift in the local or global state of the server may very well be a large motivating factor and may even represent a better opportunity at gaining wealth, but the war shouldn't be profitable in and of itself. if gaining more wealth is the goal of a particular battle then war would be seen as an investment. the war itself would be an expense with the hopes that it would lead to additional profit as a result of the outcome. a mission system that profits you by paying you more to attack something than it costs would be a terrible mistake. It should always cost more to build something than it costs to destroy.
It should be noted that in these games the REAL currency is time, as such more time will be spent gathering materials and building stuff than destroying stuff, it must be this way or combat has no purpose, no meaning. if you don't incur a loss by engaging in combat then the game just becomes a never ending power creep. the goal should be to inflict more damage on the enemy than you receive, not gain more than it cost to engage in combat. War of attrition, all wars should be wars of attrition or no one can ever win. if you directly profit from engaging in combat then everyone just keeps getting more powerful. as such it should take a considerably larger amount of time to build stuff than to destroy stuff. I get that you want to spend more time fighting and less time building, but that just wouldn't really work for the reasons i gave.
It should be noted that in these games the REAL currency is time, as such more time will be spent gathering materials and building stuff than destroying stuff, it must be this way or combat has no purpose, no meaning. if you don't incur a loss by engaging in combat then the game just becomes a never ending power creep. the goal should be to inflict more damage on the enemy than you receive, not gain more than it cost to engage in combat. War of attrition, all wars should be wars of attrition or no one can ever win. if you directly profit from engaging in combat then everyone just keeps getting more powerful. as such it should take a considerably larger amount of time to build stuff than to destroy stuff. I get that you want to spend more time fighting and less time building, but that just wouldn't really work for the reasons i gave.
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Note that when I say "easier and faster to lose a ship" we're talking about expected life time, not the actual time to kill a ship. This is why most line ships in EVE are produced in the thousands upon thousands. The assumption is that people are going to lose them in seconds and as such the entire pipeline of a large warfighting organization is to produce surplus capable of handling that demand. It isn't that you're physically assembling battleships faster than you can physically blow one up. Its that you are only engaging in battle with said battleships if the rate at which you're blowing them up does not exceed the rate at which you are acquiring the base materials for new ones, and a "buffer" of enough ships to meet resupply demands without relying on taking ships hot off the production line.
In general your goal is to make a profit, not simply to break even. Production and loss of spaceships and ammo is a line item of that balance sheet, but if it puts you in the red you're either going to change your PvP behaviors or your trading and harvesting behaviors. Any organization or player obeys this rule because failing to do so is failing to progress alongside your adversaries, and failing to progress means being overtaken by the economy or warfighting capability of your rivals.
Over time in EVE this approach has resulted in a market so choked with popular line ships that those ships have been unprofitable to produce for years as said organizations sell their stockpiles of thousands of ships at cost to help fund production of whatever new ships they've decided to start using.
Losing net wealth in a war is called losing that war, and is not usually something people do on purpose. It is something people do on accident by not being as good at said war as they thought they were. When we say wealth in this context we are talking about the total real wealth of an entity, be that entity a single player or a large organization.
Time, as they say, is money. No one is risking that value unless they see a potential return on that investment in some form. That form may be more efficient future mining, or it may be access to new high yield asteroids or the contents of someone's cargo or the raw materials that make up their hull, but the fact remains that avoiding loss is the primary reason for people to choose to avoid a fight.
Here's a quick list of behavior trends of PvP economics from personal experience playing UO, EVE Online, ArchAge, Age of Conan before they added the pvp flagging system, Crowfall, and Shadowbane.
People WILL fight just to assert dominance/troll, but only if doing so doesn't cost them anything meaningful. They will do this regardless of the reward. If it is remarkably more costly to kill a player than it is to leave them alive, you usually don't see this behavior. If the cost is essentially pocket change, you see it a lot. note that "cost" can be relative. Goons can afford to hand out free cyclones to burn jita for lulz and that's pocket change for them. For a new player those cyclones are a significant investment.
People WILL fight for an increase economic power (more or better resources, the loot from the slain, farming spots, facilities, or more optimized/secure shipping routes) but only if they can afford to immediately replace anything lost in the attempt. (or in the case of systems with unbreakable gear, that the action doesn't really come with a risk of loss at all)
People WILL fight to economically harm major enemies, but only if doing so doesn't cause them to become economically vulnerable to third parties.
People WILL NOT gamble value that they need to secure borders or engage in day to day play. Those costs come first, and generally include multiple redundancies for any equipment or vehicles that game requires. Known best in EVE as "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose"
People WILL NOT willingly engage in combat at a net loss, EVEN IF the loss is greater for their enemy. This is because third parties not involved in the conflict are made comparatively stronger as a result, inviting otherwise manageable opportunists to capitalize on their momentary weakness. Known colloquially in EVE as a "Fail Spiral"
War is always an investment with an expected return. This is why war exists in real life, and as such why it exists in video games.
In general your goal is to make a profit, not simply to break even. Production and loss of spaceships and ammo is a line item of that balance sheet, but if it puts you in the red you're either going to change your PvP behaviors or your trading and harvesting behaviors. Any organization or player obeys this rule because failing to do so is failing to progress alongside your adversaries, and failing to progress means being overtaken by the economy or warfighting capability of your rivals.
Over time in EVE this approach has resulted in a market so choked with popular line ships that those ships have been unprofitable to produce for years as said organizations sell their stockpiles of thousands of ships at cost to help fund production of whatever new ships they've decided to start using.
Losing net wealth in a war is called losing that war, and is not usually something people do on purpose. It is something people do on accident by not being as good at said war as they thought they were. When we say wealth in this context we are talking about the total real wealth of an entity, be that entity a single player or a large organization.
Time, as they say, is money. No one is risking that value unless they see a potential return on that investment in some form. That form may be more efficient future mining, or it may be access to new high yield asteroids or the contents of someone's cargo or the raw materials that make up their hull, but the fact remains that avoiding loss is the primary reason for people to choose to avoid a fight.
Here's a quick list of behavior trends of PvP economics from personal experience playing UO, EVE Online, ArchAge, Age of Conan before they added the pvp flagging system, Crowfall, and Shadowbane.
People WILL fight just to assert dominance/troll, but only if doing so doesn't cost them anything meaningful. They will do this regardless of the reward. If it is remarkably more costly to kill a player than it is to leave them alive, you usually don't see this behavior. If the cost is essentially pocket change, you see it a lot. note that "cost" can be relative. Goons can afford to hand out free cyclones to burn jita for lulz and that's pocket change for them. For a new player those cyclones are a significant investment.
People WILL fight for an increase economic power (more or better resources, the loot from the slain, farming spots, facilities, or more optimized/secure shipping routes) but only if they can afford to immediately replace anything lost in the attempt. (or in the case of systems with unbreakable gear, that the action doesn't really come with a risk of loss at all)
People WILL fight to economically harm major enemies, but only if doing so doesn't cause them to become economically vulnerable to third parties.
People WILL NOT gamble value that they need to secure borders or engage in day to day play. Those costs come first, and generally include multiple redundancies for any equipment or vehicles that game requires. Known best in EVE as "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose"
People WILL NOT willingly engage in combat at a net loss, EVEN IF the loss is greater for their enemy. This is because third parties not involved in the conflict are made comparatively stronger as a result, inviting otherwise manageable opportunists to capitalize on their momentary weakness. Known colloquially in EVE as a "Fail Spiral"
War is always an investment with an expected return. This is why war exists in real life, and as such why it exists in video games.
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There is no intrinsic value in FPS games.
Yet we all shoot each other constantly in those games.
Yet we all shoot each other constantly in those games.
As covered earlier in this thread, the perceived time/effort vs benefit analysis often persuades individuals and groups to behave in certain manners. The community won't know all of the risks or actual cost associated with most actions in the beginning, and that's part of the thrill as the "Wild West" becomes tamed, or at least better understood.
More importantly, Starbase currently promises no extrinsic reward, all accomplishments are highly intrinsic especially wealth or materiel accumulation which always hold natural value (or rather they are highly extrinsic valuables based on their promised intrinsic utility). Ultimately, the biggest determinant to how much reward builds investment on itself, and thus how much of an existential threat large factions will present, depends on how well resourcing and manufacturing can be industrialised.
The only sandbox games I've ever played with meaningful conflict have been when there are important static points of interest or nonrenewable resources worth building a base around. From the sound of the current state of Starbase, there isn't really any of that. There are rare asteroids, but they can seemingly pop up anywhere, meaning any given region of space has just as much value as any other. It seems like the only factor to consider for base placement is how far away you want to be from the starting stations.
Keep in mind, all the asteroids are non-renewable. So even though material is plentiful, the amount around wherever you set up will diminish over time as it is mined out. This means you have to travel further and further to get more resources. Eventually, your neighboring faction might be worth quite a lot - going to war and taking all their stuff might be more 'economical' than traveling far out for more resources. It might take time for these kinds of conflicts to develop, but each rock you mine in Starbase is meaningful. It will not respawn. It will not come back. That rock is yours.
Hopefully asteroids over time respawn, this could be a bad thing to many players, but many people have to consider this, that building ships requires asteroids so having less asteroids to mine, means less resources available, which decreases the amount of ships in wars making them more conservative, but less fun with only a limited amount of players having the opportunity to participate. Hope people understand this problem if asteroids don't respawn
The amount of asteroids is practically unlimited; the issue being eventually you eat away at all local resources. You will have plenty of stuff to make ships, for war or for creativity or fun. The only thing will be the travel time to go and get resources. As such, shipments of resources will actually be valuable to actual people. You won't just be selling to some faceless vendor in town. You will have people bidding on your stuff, because you spent the time going out there and hauling back the stuff they need. This will keep the economy flowing. It's much like a city - a city does not grow any crops, or produce any food, but consumes a ton of it. They get that food from shipments from the outside.
If your goal is just to do your own thing, then travel 1-2hr out from your nearest mega-station and you will be surrounded by more asteroids than you could mine in an entire year. The lack of respawning is not an issue, it will just make the economy work, because it will take time and effort to bring those materials back to the 'cities' for people to use who would rather not spend their own time mining. There will be demand for every type of player, because the resources are never free. They always take time to get.
If your goal is just to do your own thing, then travel 1-2hr out from your nearest mega-station and you will be surrounded by more asteroids than you could mine in an entire year. The lack of respawning is not an issue, it will just make the economy work, because it will take time and effort to bring those materials back to the 'cities' for people to use who would rather not spend their own time mining. There will be demand for every type of player, because the resources are never free. They always take time to get.
I agree with you on some points, but I am not sure if you are accounting for the thousands of players that will be mining, later in the future, it would be way harder to find anything useful considering most asteroids with industrial materials or metal ores have been mined out, driving up the price on many items, and also mining could possibly become unprofitable to mine at all with the great distances to go. It makes the economy work, but at what cost?
No... you just don't understand the scale. There's something like 900 trillion asteroids in the ring.
It would take several thousand years to mine it all out assuming a gigantic population.
It's unlimited in the general sense, but you can mine out everything within 30m of you or so, making it inconvenient.
It would take several thousand years to mine it all out assuming a gigantic population.
It's unlimited in the general sense, but you can mine out everything within 30m of you or so, making it inconvenient.
It has been my personal experience over multiple titles that players will pay whatever cost is required if it means getting rich, or pay someone else to do it for them.
Hauling and mining is a legitimate career path almost exclusively because a lot of people just don't want to do it. There have been laughable attemps by the industrial sector to strike or price fix in EVE that have always gone absolutely nowhere because the fact of the matter is that pvp combat may be inherently difficult and risky, but for the most part hauling and mining is simple to do. Not everyone can successfully pvp but almost everyone can successfully mine or haul. Some types of mining or hauling may be able to command a higher price due to riskier runs, but in a nutshell it is largely boring and uneventful busywork. When the industrial sector tries to hold ship producers hostage, said same ship producers just laugh, jump in mining and hauling ships, and do it themselves until the miners come crawling back begging for their jobs.
If six months down the road your ten minute mining trip becomes a two hour mining trip you may find its not worth your time to do the mining any more. If some enterprising individual is shipping in massive quantities of what's rare in your back yard but common in theirs you may find it more economical to simply pay them for it than waste time trying to find the 1% of local space rocks that contain it. This isn't because the universe is anywhere near running out of materials, its that the universe is becoming varying degrees of less convenient. There's always going to be more rocks than everyone can mine, but there won't always be rocks you can mine near the station your stuff is in. This means you're either moving all your stuff, taking a trip, or paying someone to take a trip.
This also requires those services be competitively priced because anything that looks like a gold mine is going to be swarming with other players sooner rather than later and that's the backbone of all mmo economies. Unless you're willing to violently co-opt a specific market you're going to be in direct competition with multiple other players willing to copy your economic plan and do it for 2% less.
Hauling and mining is a legitimate career path almost exclusively because a lot of people just don't want to do it. There have been laughable attemps by the industrial sector to strike or price fix in EVE that have always gone absolutely nowhere because the fact of the matter is that pvp combat may be inherently difficult and risky, but for the most part hauling and mining is simple to do. Not everyone can successfully pvp but almost everyone can successfully mine or haul. Some types of mining or hauling may be able to command a higher price due to riskier runs, but in a nutshell it is largely boring and uneventful busywork. When the industrial sector tries to hold ship producers hostage, said same ship producers just laugh, jump in mining and hauling ships, and do it themselves until the miners come crawling back begging for their jobs.
If six months down the road your ten minute mining trip becomes a two hour mining trip you may find its not worth your time to do the mining any more. If some enterprising individual is shipping in massive quantities of what's rare in your back yard but common in theirs you may find it more economical to simply pay them for it than waste time trying to find the 1% of local space rocks that contain it. This isn't because the universe is anywhere near running out of materials, its that the universe is becoming varying degrees of less convenient. There's always going to be more rocks than everyone can mine, but there won't always be rocks you can mine near the station your stuff is in. This means you're either moving all your stuff, taking a trip, or paying someone to take a trip.
This also requires those services be competitively priced because anything that looks like a gold mine is going to be swarming with other players sooner rather than later and that's the backbone of all mmo economies. Unless you're willing to violently co-opt a specific market you're going to be in direct competition with multiple other players willing to copy your economic plan and do it for 2% less.
The persistent PvP games I find the most compelling are the ones where there are game-motivated reasons for factions to form and fight. This is usually caused by resource locality and scarcity (which in turn creates "territories", and the wars over them). Hopefully, high-value resource distributions in Starbase will be stratified enough to create discrete regions worth fighting over, because there's for sure no lack of space or low-value resources overall in the game. Space is big and asteroids are trillions.
There will be wars regardless, but I worry about the longevity of large-scale PvP if there's no reason to fight other than boredom. Sure, it's fun to put holes in those other people's ships, but will it be fun putting the same holes in the same people's ships after six months of putting holes in their ships? I think it would be far more meaningful if, after putting enough holes in enough ships, you get a new piece of territory which allows you to build better hole-making ships.
There will be wars regardless, but I worry about the longevity of large-scale PvP if there's no reason to fight other than boredom. Sure, it's fun to put holes in those other people's ships, but will it be fun putting the same holes in the same people's ships after six months of putting holes in their ships? I think it would be far more meaningful if, after putting enough holes in enough ships, you get a new piece of territory which allows you to build better hole-making ships.
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This is a concern. One thing that can make it boring is if your attacks have little to no impact, because the enemy has just amassed more 'stuff' (including respawns/spare endos) where every attempt is just futile in actually taking over an area. Combat should be very dynamic, and taking an area should be quick if you've made the right moves. If the defenders can amass too much defense where the offense finds it pointless to attack, then the attackers never attack, and territory never changes hands.
I wonder after this if focusing on gas stations is worth it anymore, after a long time the gas stations will become unprofitable to operate, sure you can move, but moving every 3 months can be very annoying. But yes raise the gas prices and have less people buying gas, but the problem with this is gas stations near large asteroid field will benefit greatly since more people will come here since there will probably cheaper gas prices. Yes this creates competition, but I m restating my earlier point to what cost. Have large wars over some large asteroid field just to be able to have a cheap and affordable gas station there, sure but you could possibly waste more trying to defend it than earn profits from it. Sure move gas stations every time and your other gas station is useless since no one wants to buy from it. I know there is trillions of asteroids but trying to fight over each one will waste them pretty quickly. Hope someone will have a solution to not raise prices to almost unaffordable buying from it and not having to keep moving where your gas stations are located.
There's "quick" in terms of how much real-life time passes between "I want your thing" and "now I have your thing", and there's "quick" in terms of how much in-game time passes between those two states. The longest-lived persistent PvP MMOs tend to decouple the two, leaving room for more of the former, while respecting your time by condensing the latter.
As far as infinite wars of attrition, that's usually caused by infinite storage without space or time consequences.
As far as infinite wars of attrition, that's usually caused by infinite storage without space or time consequences.