The shipbuilding update is the one thing I am really looking forward to, and as you are developing all the mechanisms that will rule ship construction and FTL flight, I note there’s one aspect about the way the game universe is set up that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why is FTL flight restricted to a path through interconnected star systems? Space is a continuous 3D void, and for a civilization that has mastered faster-than-light travel, it seems a bit counterintuitive to be restricted to a zig-zagging starhopping path while travelling FTL. The game has a great approrach to STL travel inside a planetary system (takeoff, land, depart, approach, interplanetary travel) following a realistic orbital mechanics model, so why not consider a more efficient way of moving arround the universe in FTL?
Looking at the universe map, Hortus isn’t very far away from Moria, yet one has to zig-zag along a path through 4 star systems to get there, something like travelling from Paris to Berlin yet having to go through London, New York and Boston to accomplish that.
So, as the shipbuilding and FLT physics are being developed, why not consider changing the starhopping FTL path mechanics in favour of a direct FTL flight between origin and destination star systems? I understand that such an improvement might not be feasable whithin the game structure, but even so consider adding additional links between star systems, providing a more evenly connected star grid for more efficient flight routes.
Building on the original post with both some agreement and some disagreement…
I am hoping that different ship designs have different jump ranges. Some ships can only go 10 parsecs and have to zigzag.
Other ships, maybe because they are smaller, or maybe with more expensive jump drives and higher FF usage, can go 20 parsecs and can thus take a more direct route.
Thanks for your suggestions!
We did consider such a FTL flight model in the very early days of PrUn development but decided against it for various reasons:
- Eventually we want to have some kind of tariff system where the faction/corporation that controls a system can setup tariffs and maybe even restrict which types of ships are allowed to fly through their space. Having direct routes between any systems makes this rather difficult/obsolete
- Just as @I_am_Tex said, to make the direct FTL jump system interesting the ships (or their FTL drives) would need to have some additional properties like max jump distance and so on. We wanted to avoid that kind of complexity when we started out.
For the upcoming ship building release (after Populous) we decided to also fix the current flight system since it has some major quirks and I promised to do that for at least a year or so. The focus is on ship building though, and a major rewrite of the flight system would take too long.
I am not opposed to your suggestion though, I really like the idea and will discuss it with the team.