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- Mar 7, 2022
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Last article, we discussed sensors and their impact on gameplay. In this article, we need to talk about Stations, and their subvariants the Capital Ships and Moon Bases. In Starbase, Stations offer the ability for users to stake a claim on portions of the world and are a natural platform for collaboration, but they’re highly limited right now. Currently, Stations have no designer, offer 10,000 slots of “magic” inventory storage per player, and can only be used for their ship hangars and capital ship docks. I think that all of this should change. Also, only players can own stations, and this should be changed so that companies can directly own stations, with company members with appropriate permissions managing the station and all profits from the stations going to the company bank.
Stations should also require upkeep, which scales with the amount of modules in the station. The type of upkeep can vary between modules, but it would broadly include both electricity and resources. This steady upkeep helps to encourage players to focus on creating a few, well kept and furnished stations, as opposed to again peppering the belt with lots of mini-stations. With Capital Ships providing easy bulk transport of ores, it’s quite possible to set up trade routes between stations where a station can produce or store mined ore from one zone of a belt, and a station can trade for that ore to maintain itself in a different environment where the necessary ore cannot be found. Due to the scaling costs, stations beyond a certain size or number may be unfeasible for solo players to maintain without dedicating hours to the game per day, but this is an acceptable restriction for a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Solo players should be able to access basic and medium level infrastructure, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect players to work together to access the truly top level of content in a MMO.
Lastly, by eliminating magic storage, implementing infrastructure, and overall making stations more valuable, stations become a worthy prize in conflict. Without the possibility of obtaining new loot and infrastructure, sieging stations will only happen because it’s fun, for bragging rights, or possibly if a station cluster is projecting such an enormous field of territory control that it’s occupying a large portion of a moon belt. Now, stations are worth capturing. Players who refuse to engage in any PvP at all and to hire mercenaries to defend them can create stations in the Origin Safezone. However, those stations cannot set up Atmosphere Adsorbers to suck up valuable resources that can be found in any of the moon belts and atmospheres. Improved social tools (a topic for next article) can make it easier for PvE players and companies to find interested PvP players and companies to help secure installations, which lets players focus more on what they enjoy most and bolsters the Massively Multiplayer aspect of Starbase.
Next up is handling safe zones. By default, stations should not have safe zones. This stops players from claiming small hotspots or craters with only a minimal investment in resources. Instead, there would be a shield module for stations. This module would generate a safe zone like what stations do now, but it is more customizable and potentially more powerful with enough input. Station safe zones would have 2 attributes going forwards: size and integrity. The maximums for these values would be set by the configuration of the shield generator assembly. Including more modules in the assembly would raise the possible safe zone size and integrity values, but raising these values would accrue additional upkeep to support the better shield. Shield size would control the size of the safezone, with the lowest value being approximately the same size as Class 1 station safe zones are right now. Shield integrity would be the “health” of the shield and would directly work to counteract the influence of the shieldbreaker on a besieging capital ship. This mechanic will be discussed further in the article on Sieges.
Stations would also mount modules as described in previous articles. Article 5 discussed ship building infrastructure on stations. In the time since then, I hosted a poll on the ANC Discord to solicit opinions on how exactly this should take shape. Although the poll is a small sample size, the responses I have received are that players want a more detailed industry setup. While I think fully replicating Factorio style games is not performance feasible in Starbase, it should be possible to set up Furnaces and Crafters to refine ore into alloys and craft individual parts necessary for ships. Larger stations can naturally benefit from more Furnaces and Crafters, and they can assemble more parts in parallel. This contributes to more ships being built in less time. Depending on how long ships take to make, this could cut assembly time down from hours to minutes, or benefit surge times when large quantities of ships need to be assembled. These completed ships can be moved to Hangar Halls on the station where players can interact with them.
Article 8 discussed Gas Adsorber modules. These could be mounted on a Station or Moon Base and will work to adsorb resources from the Moon or Belt Atmosphere surrounding the Station/Moon Base. These would require both a catalyst and electricity to function, but they would passively generate resources depending on where the station is located. Adsorber modules could be enhanced with a better catalyst, or more could be emplaced on the station to increase resource income. However, there should be a limit to how many Adsorbers can be located in one area to prevent enormous harvester stations generating effectively infinite resources.
Articles 5 and 8 discussed Alloy Forges and other Material Processing Modules. These modules are responsible for taking raw ore collected by Gas Adsorbers or by mining ships, and process them into various materials. Alloy Forges would of course generate alloys from raw ore, and would output the alloys into Crafters or Inventory Modules. There can be other modules like Electrolysers that generate Propellant from Ice.
Article 5 also discussed salvaging ships. Those Station Salvager and Ship Disassembler Modules would naturally be mounted on stations. Both would draw on the station’s electrical supply to function, and the Station Salvager would output its products into Inventory Modules.
Article 9 discussed Sensors. Stations can benefit from Sensor Modules as well. I think that Passive IR sensors should not be installable on Stations, Capital Ships, or Moon Bases, as it would be trivially easy to build enormous antennae capable of far outranging anything a ship can mount and capable of scanning large portions of asteroid belts or moon surfaces. This could be justified in lore as stations being hot enough on their own to generate too much background interference. Nevertheless, stations might make use of Radar. Because Radar is an active sensor, a Station/Capital Ship/Moon Base using it will broadcast its location in addition to sensing the area, making it very obvious when someone is taking a look around. These Radar Modules would output their results to Sensor Map Modules on the station in the same way that Radars on ships would.
Hangar Halls could also use a rework. Right now, they’re capable of storing a hundred or more ships in much less space than they would occupy in the game world, any Hangar Hall grants full SSC access, and all Hangar Halls are also Repair Halls. This could be reworked so that Hangar Halls have to be sized according to the ships that they store, or they could be split into Launch Pads that spawn in ships and Hangars that only store ships. Both modules would have to work together in order to spawn/despawn ships and store those despawned ships. The storage capacity could be calculated from ship volume, perhaps with some fixed modifier to account for storage efficiency, and if you want to store more ships you have to build larger Hangars.
Repair Hall functionality would not be built in but would be tied to the ship-building infrastructure available on the station. Repairs are less complicated than full ship fabrication, so a station may not need a fully assembly line to repair a ship, but it should have access to the required tier of Furnaces and at least some Crafters that can make the necessary components. Of course, the more infrastructure available, the faster ships can be repaired. Lastly, SSC Access should be a small upgrade to Hangar Halls and not something built into it.
Origin Stations offer several modules that Player Stations do not right now. These include Propellant Refill Modules, Auction House Modules, Asteroid Deposit Modules, Easy Build Halls, and of course Ship Stores. All of these could be replicated on Player Stations, but they would need some changes to suit the fact that they would be player operated as opposed to developer owned.
Propellant Refill Modules would not have access to an infinite pool of propellant, but they would instead draw from Propellant Modules in the station. Furthermore, the credits charged for a refill would go to the station owner instead of into the void. Asteroid Deposit Modules would work identically to their Origin counterparts, but would pay the station owner and deposit the materials from the asteroid in the station’s inventory. Easy Build Halls would allow access to Easy Build Mode, but would require ship building infrastructure like SSC equipped Hangar Halls.
Ship Stores offer an exciting expansion over their current behavior in Origin stations. Ship designers can license their designs to station owners, and designers can claim royalties on ships built and sold at those stations. Station owners would of course need the appropriate shipbuilding infrastructure, but they could set up shops with any design for which they have a blueprint chip or license. Blueprint chips would mean that the station owner has full ownership of the design and any profits from building the ship would go to the station owner. Licenses would have a negotiable proportionate ownership, and the station owner and ship designer would split the profit from building the ship. This way, ship designers are encouraged to license widely to reap the greatest profits possible, and station owners can stock their shops with wide varieties of ships to entice shoppers.
Auction Houses offer exciting possibilities and interactions with the Territory Control system. On their most basic level, a station auction house would replicate the functionality of auction houses on Markka and Arma and would not be tied to any other station. The owner can set the tax rate for transactions, and all taxes would go to the station owner. However, if the station shares contiguous territory with other stations and both owners (or possibly the same owner) agree, the stations can link their auction houses, which would form a unified market like what all the Origin stations possess.
Capital Ships should be limited in capability from Stations because they offer mobility. If they could do anything that a Station could do, then nobody would build any stations as they could just park a Capital Ship in a location and move it as necessary. Instead, Capital Ships should be focused on transporting resources, transporting ships, and projecting power. Ship shops, Gas Adsorbers, full ship assembly lines, etc. would not be located on a Capital Ship.
Capital Ships would maintain access to Hangar Halls, Repair Halls, and SSC Halls. This would suit their purpose of transporting ships, and they can help perform field repairs to ships. These Repair Halls would need some level of assembly line backing them, but because they don’t need Crafters for all the parts and ship assembly would not be possible, a much more compact setup can be used on Capital Ships.
Capital Ships would maintain access to Inventory Modules to help transport resources and ship parts across the Eos system, but they would not be able to directly gather additional resources. Miners and haulers can of course dock and transfer their resources, but Capital Ships would not be able to gather resources through Gas Adsorbers. This encourages them to continue to travel around to acquire resources for maintenance and to harvest ore from different area than from sitting in place for months on end.
Lastly, Capital Ships would be critical for projecting power across regions. This can be done indirectly, through transporting fleets of fighters and other support ships to help contest areas, and directly through sieges. Stations and Capital Ships will have Shield Modules, but Capital Ships will also have access to the Shieldbreaker Module. This module is essential for starting any shield and is responsible for disabling the safezone around a targeted station. The article on sieges will discuss this in greater detail.
Stations would also consume resources and electricity through active upkeep and maintenance. Rather than having to insert materials into each module with a maintenance cost, this should all be managed centrally through the station’s generators or solar panels and its Inventory Modules. This eliminates much of the micromanagement that would be present otherwise. If a module doesn’t have enough electricity, it would simply stop working. This may not be a major issue if one of your Alloy Forges goes offline, but if you lose power to your Shield Generator, that would be a much more pressing issue. Offline modules would gradually lower their contribution to the station’s IR signature on sensors, but this would not be immediate to prevent station owners from only toggling on industry in brief periods. Alternatively, some sort of startup upkeep cost could be incurred.
Some structures could incur a material cost to continue functioning, which would function as their active upkeep alongside electricity. For example, Ukonium is noted to be a highly reactive material. This could be used in Gas Adsorbers or Alloy Forges to act as a catalyst and be slowly consumed over time. If it’s not available, the module could continue with a stiff penalty to speed or efficiency, or simply not function at all. If the active upkeep for a module wasn’t paid, nothing bad would happen to the module, but it would function at a lower level.
Lastly, all structures would incur a steady maintenance cost to continue availability. For example, Naflite is a conductive metal with wide use in advanced capacitors and energy production applications. Shield Generators could need the occasional quantity of Naflite to continue working. The station’s general frame could require Valkite, as that’s the material for most basic station modules. If a module cannot find a Station Inventory Module with the appropriate resource and permissions, it will break and cannot be used again at all until it is repaired. The repair will consume more resources than always feeding in a steady quantity of the maintenance resource.
Station maintenance should be kept to a level where it’s not ruinously expensive to maintain a small or medium station, but as it’s expanded it must be accounted for and budgeted. As resources run out, modules will gradually go to 0 activity, and then break over time. If Frozenbyte wanted, they could configure things so that if every module on a station breaks and months pass, the entire station could be destroyed. I think that this would have to be carefully considered and is probably unnecessary though. These dormant stations could be identified by a large radar signature but very low IR signature. Pirates could then investigate for possible loot, as the shield is probably down, and the Inventory Modules could be accessible by anyone. However, clever corporations could use temporarily inactivated stations as a trap to lure in enemies.
My suggestion for how to do this would be through experience gain for both the station as a whole, and for some individual components. As stations gain experience, they can unlock new and larger components. As individual components gain experience, they can become faster or more efficient. For example, an alloy furnace could become faster at forging alloys or consume less of the catalyst for each recipe. This experience gain should be directly tied to how much the station and components are used, as this makes progression feel more natural and helps to reduce the notorious AFK Crafting of the most efficient recipes that is experienced right now. As another example, storing enough items in the station for a long enough time could earn the station enough experience in a certain area to unlock larger Inventory Modules.
Goals
Interacting with Stations should be a critical component of any Starbase player’s experience. Whether it’s simply using station services provided by others, building your own station, or working with a company to manage a company station, every player should be incentivized to move beyond just the Origin Stations. This means expanding stations past just a foundation block and a hangar as well. Right now, the foundation block provides the magic inventory, a safe zone, and a transponder. I propose that the first two functions be removed from the foundation block and other modules can fill that role. This way, the foundation block is just that: a foundation. By encouraging players to invest and customize their stations, this encourages a number of behaviors. Firstly, by making stations more expensive and larger, it cuts down on people dropping stations down to mine in a safe zone or create a quick ore dump that can be decommissioned and revisited later. Combine this with sensors, and creating a bunch of tiny stations with no generated safe zones just leaves the field open for someone to come in and loot the station. Larger stations with greater ship and foot traffic also offer opportunities to personalize stations with various “nonfunctional” rooms and benches where people can hang out together as they pass through like the benches in the Origin SSCs.Stations should also require upkeep, which scales with the amount of modules in the station. The type of upkeep can vary between modules, but it would broadly include both electricity and resources. This steady upkeep helps to encourage players to focus on creating a few, well kept and furnished stations, as opposed to again peppering the belt with lots of mini-stations. With Capital Ships providing easy bulk transport of ores, it’s quite possible to set up trade routes between stations where a station can produce or store mined ore from one zone of a belt, and a station can trade for that ore to maintain itself in a different environment where the necessary ore cannot be found. Due to the scaling costs, stations beyond a certain size or number may be unfeasible for solo players to maintain without dedicating hours to the game per day, but this is an acceptable restriction for a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Solo players should be able to access basic and medium level infrastructure, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect players to work together to access the truly top level of content in a MMO.
Lastly, by eliminating magic storage, implementing infrastructure, and overall making stations more valuable, stations become a worthy prize in conflict. Without the possibility of obtaining new loot and infrastructure, sieging stations will only happen because it’s fun, for bragging rights, or possibly if a station cluster is projecting such an enormous field of territory control that it’s occupying a large portion of a moon belt. Now, stations are worth capturing. Players who refuse to engage in any PvP at all and to hire mercenaries to defend them can create stations in the Origin Safezone. However, those stations cannot set up Atmosphere Adsorbers to suck up valuable resources that can be found in any of the moon belts and atmospheres. Improved social tools (a topic for next article) can make it easier for PvE players and companies to find interested PvP players and companies to help secure installations, which lets players focus more on what they enjoy most and bolsters the Massively Multiplayer aspect of Starbase.
New Modules
To start the conversation of what stations should offer, it’s best to begin by discussing how they can add in what was removed from the station foundation block. Right now, stations offer both the magic inventory, and the possibility of collaborative inventory through either crate “ships” or through factory halls stacked with dozens of ore crates. Replacing both of these workarounds with proper Inventory Modules would be highly desirable. These modules would have a set capacity, can be linked together, can interact with other station modules, and can have complex permissions set like sectioning and per-user capacity. For example, a station owner can place a 200-crate Inventory Module. Now the station’s Gas Adsorbers can output to this module, and Alloy Forges can pull from it. Furthermore, the station owner can view the station’s inventory and decide how which slots different classes of modules can access, and how many slots different players and companies can access. For example, Alice the station owner can decide that her friend Bob can access just 10 slots of her station’s inventory, but her company Best Company can access 100 slots per player. Company stations would have similar controls and could vary access by rank, role, etc.Next up is handling safe zones. By default, stations should not have safe zones. This stops players from claiming small hotspots or craters with only a minimal investment in resources. Instead, there would be a shield module for stations. This module would generate a safe zone like what stations do now, but it is more customizable and potentially more powerful with enough input. Station safe zones would have 2 attributes going forwards: size and integrity. The maximums for these values would be set by the configuration of the shield generator assembly. Including more modules in the assembly would raise the possible safe zone size and integrity values, but raising these values would accrue additional upkeep to support the better shield. Shield size would control the size of the safezone, with the lowest value being approximately the same size as Class 1 station safe zones are right now. Shield integrity would be the “health” of the shield and would directly work to counteract the influence of the shieldbreaker on a besieging capital ship. This mechanic will be discussed further in the article on Sieges.
Stations would also mount modules as described in previous articles. Article 5 discussed ship building infrastructure on stations. In the time since then, I hosted a poll on the ANC Discord to solicit opinions on how exactly this should take shape. Although the poll is a small sample size, the responses I have received are that players want a more detailed industry setup. While I think fully replicating Factorio style games is not performance feasible in Starbase, it should be possible to set up Furnaces and Crafters to refine ore into alloys and craft individual parts necessary for ships. Larger stations can naturally benefit from more Furnaces and Crafters, and they can assemble more parts in parallel. This contributes to more ships being built in less time. Depending on how long ships take to make, this could cut assembly time down from hours to minutes, or benefit surge times when large quantities of ships need to be assembled. These completed ships can be moved to Hangar Halls on the station where players can interact with them.
Article 8 discussed Gas Adsorber modules. These could be mounted on a Station or Moon Base and will work to adsorb resources from the Moon or Belt Atmosphere surrounding the Station/Moon Base. These would require both a catalyst and electricity to function, but they would passively generate resources depending on where the station is located. Adsorber modules could be enhanced with a better catalyst, or more could be emplaced on the station to increase resource income. However, there should be a limit to how many Adsorbers can be located in one area to prevent enormous harvester stations generating effectively infinite resources.
Articles 5 and 8 discussed Alloy Forges and other Material Processing Modules. These modules are responsible for taking raw ore collected by Gas Adsorbers or by mining ships, and process them into various materials. Alloy Forges would of course generate alloys from raw ore, and would output the alloys into Crafters or Inventory Modules. There can be other modules like Electrolysers that generate Propellant from Ice.
Article 5 also discussed salvaging ships. Those Station Salvager and Ship Disassembler Modules would naturally be mounted on stations. Both would draw on the station’s electrical supply to function, and the Station Salvager would output its products into Inventory Modules.
Article 9 discussed Sensors. Stations can benefit from Sensor Modules as well. I think that Passive IR sensors should not be installable on Stations, Capital Ships, or Moon Bases, as it would be trivially easy to build enormous antennae capable of far outranging anything a ship can mount and capable of scanning large portions of asteroid belts or moon surfaces. This could be justified in lore as stations being hot enough on their own to generate too much background interference. Nevertheless, stations might make use of Radar. Because Radar is an active sensor, a Station/Capital Ship/Moon Base using it will broadcast its location in addition to sensing the area, making it very obvious when someone is taking a look around. These Radar Modules would output their results to Sensor Map Modules on the station in the same way that Radars on ships would.
Existing Modules
Existing stations have modules that can benefit from a rework and many Origin Station modules can be ported over to stations to enhance their functionality. Factory Halls on stations would see a diminished role and could possibly be removed entirely. From what I’ve seen, most are used either for crafting benches, ore storage, or mounting turrets for mining asteroids. However, these functions should be replaced with modules to accomplish similar purposes, as working within the confine of a Factory Hall can sometimes prove difficult. For example, Storage Modules would take the place of large crate blocks in Factory Halls and would offer far more flexibility when interacting with other station modules.Hangar Halls could also use a rework. Right now, they’re capable of storing a hundred or more ships in much less space than they would occupy in the game world, any Hangar Hall grants full SSC access, and all Hangar Halls are also Repair Halls. This could be reworked so that Hangar Halls have to be sized according to the ships that they store, or they could be split into Launch Pads that spawn in ships and Hangars that only store ships. Both modules would have to work together in order to spawn/despawn ships and store those despawned ships. The storage capacity could be calculated from ship volume, perhaps with some fixed modifier to account for storage efficiency, and if you want to store more ships you have to build larger Hangars.
Repair Hall functionality would not be built in but would be tied to the ship-building infrastructure available on the station. Repairs are less complicated than full ship fabrication, so a station may not need a fully assembly line to repair a ship, but it should have access to the required tier of Furnaces and at least some Crafters that can make the necessary components. Of course, the more infrastructure available, the faster ships can be repaired. Lastly, SSC Access should be a small upgrade to Hangar Halls and not something built into it.
Origin Stations offer several modules that Player Stations do not right now. These include Propellant Refill Modules, Auction House Modules, Asteroid Deposit Modules, Easy Build Halls, and of course Ship Stores. All of these could be replicated on Player Stations, but they would need some changes to suit the fact that they would be player operated as opposed to developer owned.
Propellant Refill Modules would not have access to an infinite pool of propellant, but they would instead draw from Propellant Modules in the station. Furthermore, the credits charged for a refill would go to the station owner instead of into the void. Asteroid Deposit Modules would work identically to their Origin counterparts, but would pay the station owner and deposit the materials from the asteroid in the station’s inventory. Easy Build Halls would allow access to Easy Build Mode, but would require ship building infrastructure like SSC equipped Hangar Halls.
Ship Stores offer an exciting expansion over their current behavior in Origin stations. Ship designers can license their designs to station owners, and designers can claim royalties on ships built and sold at those stations. Station owners would of course need the appropriate shipbuilding infrastructure, but they could set up shops with any design for which they have a blueprint chip or license. Blueprint chips would mean that the station owner has full ownership of the design and any profits from building the ship would go to the station owner. Licenses would have a negotiable proportionate ownership, and the station owner and ship designer would split the profit from building the ship. This way, ship designers are encouraged to license widely to reap the greatest profits possible, and station owners can stock their shops with wide varieties of ships to entice shoppers.
Auction Houses offer exciting possibilities and interactions with the Territory Control system. On their most basic level, a station auction house would replicate the functionality of auction houses on Markka and Arma and would not be tied to any other station. The owner can set the tax rate for transactions, and all taxes would go to the station owner. However, if the station shares contiguous territory with other stations and both owners (or possibly the same owner) agree, the stations can link their auction houses, which would form a unified market like what all the Origin stations possess.
Moon Bases and Capital Ships
Moon Bases and Capital Ships are treated in the game as variants of stations, and I think they should be handled similarly from a design standpoint. Moon Bases should be largely identical to Stations, with the exception of needing supports to hold the base up against gravity and support the other modules. Capital Ships should maintain some differences from Stations.Capital Ships should be limited in capability from Stations because they offer mobility. If they could do anything that a Station could do, then nobody would build any stations as they could just park a Capital Ship in a location and move it as necessary. Instead, Capital Ships should be focused on transporting resources, transporting ships, and projecting power. Ship shops, Gas Adsorbers, full ship assembly lines, etc. would not be located on a Capital Ship.
Capital Ships would maintain access to Hangar Halls, Repair Halls, and SSC Halls. This would suit their purpose of transporting ships, and they can help perform field repairs to ships. These Repair Halls would need some level of assembly line backing them, but because they don’t need Crafters for all the parts and ship assembly would not be possible, a much more compact setup can be used on Capital Ships.
Capital Ships would maintain access to Inventory Modules to help transport resources and ship parts across the Eos system, but they would not be able to directly gather additional resources. Miners and haulers can of course dock and transfer their resources, but Capital Ships would not be able to gather resources through Gas Adsorbers. This encourages them to continue to travel around to acquire resources for maintenance and to harvest ore from different area than from sitting in place for months on end.
Lastly, Capital Ships would be critical for projecting power across regions. This can be done indirectly, through transporting fleets of fighters and other support ships to help contest areas, and directly through sieges. Stations and Capital Ships will have Shield Modules, but Capital Ships will also have access to the Shieldbreaker Module. This module is essential for starting any shield and is responsible for disabling the safezone around a targeted station. The article on sieges will discuss this in greater detail.
Economy
Stations would offer opportunities for both profit and expense for the station owner and visitors. The station owner can profit by selling services and goods to visitors. Whether this is by offering a public propellant refill stop, the greatest ship designs in the whole world, or an auction house part of an extensive network, all of those transactions offer the opportunity for the station owner to charge a fee to users. This fee can be used to invest in further expansion, to support the station maintenance, or anything else.Stations would also consume resources and electricity through active upkeep and maintenance. Rather than having to insert materials into each module with a maintenance cost, this should all be managed centrally through the station’s generators or solar panels and its Inventory Modules. This eliminates much of the micromanagement that would be present otherwise. If a module doesn’t have enough electricity, it would simply stop working. This may not be a major issue if one of your Alloy Forges goes offline, but if you lose power to your Shield Generator, that would be a much more pressing issue. Offline modules would gradually lower their contribution to the station’s IR signature on sensors, but this would not be immediate to prevent station owners from only toggling on industry in brief periods. Alternatively, some sort of startup upkeep cost could be incurred.
Some structures could incur a material cost to continue functioning, which would function as their active upkeep alongside electricity. For example, Ukonium is noted to be a highly reactive material. This could be used in Gas Adsorbers or Alloy Forges to act as a catalyst and be slowly consumed over time. If it’s not available, the module could continue with a stiff penalty to speed or efficiency, or simply not function at all. If the active upkeep for a module wasn’t paid, nothing bad would happen to the module, but it would function at a lower level.
Lastly, all structures would incur a steady maintenance cost to continue availability. For example, Naflite is a conductive metal with wide use in advanced capacitors and energy production applications. Shield Generators could need the occasional quantity of Naflite to continue working. The station’s general frame could require Valkite, as that’s the material for most basic station modules. If a module cannot find a Station Inventory Module with the appropriate resource and permissions, it will break and cannot be used again at all until it is repaired. The repair will consume more resources than always feeding in a steady quantity of the maintenance resource.
Station maintenance should be kept to a level where it’s not ruinously expensive to maintain a small or medium station, but as it’s expanded it must be accounted for and budgeted. As resources run out, modules will gradually go to 0 activity, and then break over time. If Frozenbyte wanted, they could configure things so that if every module on a station breaks and months pass, the entire station could be destroyed. I think that this would have to be carefully considered and is probably unnecessary though. These dormant stations could be identified by a large radar signature but very low IR signature. Pirates could then investigate for possible loot, as the shield is probably down, and the Inventory Modules could be accessible by anyone. However, clever corporations could use temporarily inactivated stations as a trap to lure in enemies.
Station Experience
In the past, I’ve seen a few articles detailing ways to make stations unique and strengthen people’s attachment to them, and I’m going to share my opinion on this. Making stations unique beyond their blueprint is important because it helps drive motivation for sieges, adds another reason for people to collaborate on stations, and increase the ability for people and companies to market their stations. The way to do this is by including a time element to stations as opposed to simply material cost. This needs to be carefully tuned to avoid turning it into another AFK Crafting Research Tree, but it can be done. By including a time element to stations, it encourages owners to fight back against besiegers as opposed to packing everything up and recreating the station from blueprint in a different location.My suggestion for how to do this would be through experience gain for both the station as a whole, and for some individual components. As stations gain experience, they can unlock new and larger components. As individual components gain experience, they can become faster or more efficient. For example, an alloy furnace could become faster at forging alloys or consume less of the catalyst for each recipe. This experience gain should be directly tied to how much the station and components are used, as this makes progression feel more natural and helps to reduce the notorious AFK Crafting of the most efficient recipes that is experienced right now. As another example, storing enough items in the station for a long enough time could earn the station enough experience in a certain area to unlock larger Inventory Modules.
Closing Thoughts
Stations have the opportunity to be a driver for collaboration and to advance the state of the game widely. With a variety of infrastructure, players and corporations can attract visitors and make quite a profit from establishing public waystations and other opportunities. Maintenance costs and requiring a module to generate a safe zone also encourage fewer and more developed stations than widely dispersed stations that consist of just a foundation and maybe a Hangar Hall. Next article, I plan to discuss Social Tools that will enhance how players, companies, and alliances interact with each other and manage stations.