The Coliseum

[bobbens]

OK, given that rebalance is being done, and I want a sort of place where to test this sort of stuff more in-detail. I think it would be cool to implement the arena/coliseum concept that appears in some EV plugins. We already have something similar with the "dvaered championship" missions, but I think it could be made much more reliable and interesting.

Concept

A dead-end system in Dvaered space with the arena. It is basically a smallish system with a single jump point and station. The station would sell some basic combat outfit/ships, but not really be special compared to other systems. At the station there would be a series of repeatable missions where you can gain fame and credits or whatever. These missions basically revolve over different forms of combat.

Brainstorming

• Potential combat types
  • 1-vs-1 combat
  • free-for-all
  • team battle
    • can hire guys to split reward?
• Potential combat modes
  • Single mission (one wave)
  • Wave mode where after each wave you get to choose to get a reward or continue (it gets progressively harder)
  • Survival mode where you just have to not die while not going far away from the system
• Special conditions
  • No shield: player has shield set to 0 until fight is over
  • Time limit: have to defeat enemies with XXX time
  • Specific ship category: forces the player to use a specific type
  • Specific ship: the mission gives the player a ship with a specific loadout temporarily
• Bonuses
  • Bonus for using a weaker ship, e.g., taking on destroyers with a corvette
  • Malus for using a stronger ship, e.g., taking on hyenas with a goddard
  • Bonus for taking no armour damage
  • Bonus for taking down the enemy fast
• Rewards
  • Maybe use some sort of currency that accumulates and allows the player to trade-in for stuff
  • Tiers as you progress that allow the station to sell more things to you (but still stuff you can find normally at most stations)
  • Credits
  • Accessory
  • Maybe a unique outfit or ship? Something like a Dvaered Vendetta would be interesting
• Potentially add a campaign related
  • Could be related to the guys that you hire for team battles

Current Status

• System is called "Morrigan" after Celtic goddess related to war
  • Might be more straight-forward to just call it "Arena" or "Colosseum"
  • Located off Dvaer, maybe better to put closer to Sirius space so there is more interesting stuff there to explore?
• Station is called Nemai Station (after celtic goddess of war)
• Simple choose your enemy and fight to the death time mission is implemented. Interface and such is fairly boring and needs work (see attached screenshot). Not sure if it should give you a random choice of 3 enemies per category or something like that. Could be also possible to use the mission computer, but I do think it would end up being a lot less flexible. (please note that monetary rewards are just placeholders)

[bobbens]

Another idea would be to have true tournaments. It should be possible to generate something like 2^n-1 ships where n is the number of rounds, and have them play out with NPCs randomly fighting each other. The only thing that I can think would be necessary is somewhat to run the system simulation code in the background without the player. It should be also possible to just allow the game to set the time compression to make the fights happen at like 100x speed. However, this might get slow if the player has to watch 15 fights in the first round.
Roughly, the idea could be implemented as follows:

1. Generate 2^n-1 NPC ships for a category
2. For n iterations do:
   1. Pair remaining ships randomly
   2. Have the ships fight to the death
   3. Remove the dead NPC ships
3. Remaining ship is the winner

Some Ideas:

• Player would have option to view other fights (likely sped up) or just have it simulate entirely in the background.
• Could also be done without the player by generating 2^n ships and allowing the player to bet (this could be also useful for testing AI and balance)
• Ships could be made to not die, just remain at 1 hp. This would allow the tournament to finish even if the player is not the winner and get some partial reward
• Could also be implemented in a free-for-all style where fights are not between pairs, but groups of 4 or 8.
• Could also be implemented where at each round all the ships fight in a free-for-all and the best 50% of the ships according to something like damage done or time survived pass to the next round

[amylaar]

Is anything ever going to happen at Totoran? Or will the hints about the arena at Totoran changed to direct people to Morrigan instead?

Even if we assume that Dvaered are insane muscleheads, the notion that they pulverize each other in large numbers along with expensive ships on a regular basis for entertainment seems hard to sustain on a demographic and economic basis. It's also not a good tool for
talent finding or training if you genocide the applicants before they can gain experience. So maybe this should be considered a simulation instead? (Remote control could overcome the demographic, but not the economic issues, and would besides require low-latency FTL remote controls to work.) You might enter by going into a booth on a specific Dvaered planet, moon or station, and then you appear to jump in into the (simulated) Coliseum system. The Thurions might have a secret backdoor into the system.

[bobbens]

Is anything ever going to happen at Totoran? Or will the hints about the arena at Totoran changed to direct people to Morrigan instead?

My understanding is that Totoran is a land-based combat place. Since we don't really do land-based stuff atm, we have several options:

1. Do nothing and leave it as is (just lore)
2. Remove it / replace it with Morrigan
3. Tie it more with Morrigan, move the Coliseum next to it and have them be intertwined to some level
4. Add some sort of mini-game or something where the player can interact with Totoran stuff

I'm mainly partial to either 1 or 3. I did rename the system Coliseum and moved it near Sirius so that there is more action down there, but I could move it back next to Totoran, or even move Totoran to be in the same system.

Even if we assume that Dvaered are insane muscleheads, the notion that they pulverize each other in large numbers along with expensive ships on a regular basis for entertainment seems hard to sustain on a demographic and economic basis. It's also not a good tool for talent finding or training if you genocide the applicants before they can gain experience. So maybe this should be considered a simulation instead? (Remote control could overcome the demographic, but not the economic issues, and would besides require low-latency FTL remote controls to work.) You might enter by going into a booth on a specific Dvaered planet, moon or station, and then you appear to jump in into the (simulated) Coliseum system. The Thurions might have a secret backdoor into the system.

Yeah, I was thinking a bit about that. It's weird that combat is so pointless and dangerous most of the game and then suddenly you have an "anything goes" system. I was going to just hand-wave it away with "video game logic", but there are several options here:

1. Have all ships be escaped with special escape pods and have rescue crew in the system. This would allow explosions and fancy stuff, while being able to side-step why the player doesn't die. Insurance covers everything for some reason.
2. It is just a simulation. This seems a bit anti-dvaeredy and more za'leky.
3. We make it so ships don't die and they basically "retire" when they go down to 1 armour. Would be somewhat less spectacular.
4. We say that is is half-simulation half-real. The combat is real, but all ships are equipped with software or something that doesn't kill ships and instead plays an explosion hologram or something while not showing the ship in the sensors. So effectively it looks real, but nobody dies / ships are not destroyed.

It all is a bit hand-wavy, but since the explosions are cool (and will be cooler the day we convert them to fancier shaders), I'm a bit partial to 4.

That said, if we do write a campaign on it, having it be a simulation that gets hacked or glitched up with backdoors and stuff could be very interesting as a plot.

[amylaar]

How about if it's a simulation, but almost everybody (especially the Dvaered participants) think it's real? All the participants have to wear special spacesuits, ostensibly so that the action can be holvised for the benefit of the spectators, and to have a chance to resscure the loosers. When a participant dons the suit, they get drugged and wired up to the simulation machine. When a pilot still has their (simulated) ship at the end of combat, the (simulated) jump out of the coliseum system is used to give their real ship the proper post-batle status and install them in the spacesuit there. Otherwise, the survivor gets picked up in a simulated rescue vessel, and on jump-out of the system is when they get placed into a real rescue vessel, while their original real ship gets sold off (if insurance is in place, they just sell it to the insurance company - if it is even a separate entity). Some of the worse-off loosers (live human bodies) get sold off for experiments/parts to the Za'lek and Soromid to pay for the simulation engine and to further boost profit margins, while at the same time giving the proper level of danger for Dvaered enjoyment - of course the narrative is that the've been burnt to a crisp and/or lost in space.

[bobbens]

How about if it's a simulation, but almost everybody (especially the Dvaered participants) think it's real? All the participants have to wear special spacesuits, ostensibly so that the action can be holvised for the benefit of the spectators, and to have a chance to resscure the loosers. When a participant dons the suit, they get drugged and wired up to the simulation machine. When a pilot still has their (simulated) ship at the end of combat, the (simulated) jump out of the coliseum system is used to give their real ship the proper post-batle status and install them in the spacesuit there. Otherwise, the survivor gets picked up in a simulated rescue vessel, and on jump-out of the system is when they get placed into a real rescue vessel, while their original real ship gets sold off (if insurance is in place, they just sell it to the insurance company - if it is even a separate entity). Some of the worse-off loosers (live human bodies) get sold off for experiments/parts to the Za'lek and Soromid to pay for the simulation engine and to further boost profit margins, while at the same time giving the proper level of danger for Dvaered enjoyment - of course the narrative is that the've been burnt to a crisp and/or lost in space.

That might be a bit too devious. Although I am getting a feeling that making it a simulation is a better idea. It would allow us to make everything more streamlined, e.g., teleport player / enemies to start positions, and also do funkier things like all sorts of in-system effects without having to do too elaborate justifications. It would also allow to change the type of system completely radically every combat. This would also allow us to get rid of Morrigan station and the Coliseum system and move stuff to Totoran. When the player accepts the "mission", it could automatically take them off, and run the combat stuff until either the player dies or wins, at which point it could automatically return to the landing screen. I think it could also be done with minimal C-side API.

It would still allow some pilots to swear it is true and that things that happen in the simulation become true in real life or something, which could give a lot of fancy plot ideas.

[amylaar]

Another advantage of simulation and half-simulation is that you can have things that are too strong for the game balance to exist in general; you can have them compete in a separate category, or with handicaps (e.g. outnumbered). (You can always have weaker stuff, and have them compete in some sort of featherweight class; the Llama and the starting outfits show how that works fine in the game, it's just not competitive so you have to use better gear in dangerous areas.)

Soromid bioships are grown, but how about breeding them? If you can improve them like livestock has been improved from the early neolithicum, it's be a game-breaker if they'd compete in the world at large, but if they are contained in the simulation and run in a separate category, there should be no problem with that.

[bobbens]

Yes, I have a working version in main. You have to enable it with var.push( "testing", true ) in the console. It has no real explanation and lots of place holders, but the fighting itself does work well. Currently you have 3 different categories (light, medium and heavy), which progressively get harder as you clear waves. You do end up fighting against lots of different set-ups. The ships are fixed each wave, however, their loadout does change. You do get bonuses and such if you fly weaker ships or clear it faster. Please note that it is still very much WIP, but I am using it to look into the rebalance stuff.

I do think it would be nice for Soromid bioships to have something like the EV mechanic in pokemon. That is, you have a fixed amount of total points and as you do certain things you increase specific attributes. So you could jump a lot to increase engines, or do lots of damage to increase DPS, or take lots of damage to increase armour. However, breeding does seem to be a bit out of the scope of the game. Furthermore, I'm not sure we need that much complexity and mechanics for the bioships. However, this is more suited for a different discussion :)