Since Counterpoint suggested he’s thinking of the future beyond ignition (and a potential politics update after), I’ve been wondering what might be next. It also might be interesting for the devs to see the communities thoughts!
I’m really curious as to what new feature will be next. Combat? Satellites? Exploring?
Personally I suspect Exploring and Asteroid mining would be next, but i’m curious what others think!
Things I would like to see:
Corporate improvements -> Functionality from the added corporate buildings; Ability for more complex contract schemes between corporate partners; Ability for the corporation to do something with its money
Contract improvements -> Contracts that allow for multiple deliveries of items, e.g. 250 DW per week for 4 weeks ; Pre-Provisioned sell contracts (e.g. emergency fuel ad on a gas giant that can be immediately accepted by a buyer)
Player built “Micro Exchanges” -> Idea taken from others here, but an exchange that can only sell like 5 or 10 commodities set by governor. Needs to be significantly inferior to the main exchanges to not kill trading volume on the primary exchanges, but would be nice to run a more open trading system for things like consumables and resource tap products.
Company knowledge / expert system -> Again, have had lots of discussions about this previously, and ideas here taken from a lot of people. We need something that stops a single company from being good at “everything”. I think simplest way to do this is company wide experts that impact all of a players bases. Another way to do it would be some sort of a research tree.
Part of me wonders if Corporate buildings (Shared warehouses etc.) will be part of the politics update. I feel they’ll fit well with the scope of it as I imagine it to be.
Contract improvements would be great. Wonder if the fuel ad issue would be solved by one below.
“Micro Exchanges” or Limited CXs as I think of them, would be great. I hope they can be a really heavily ramping but flat fee to build a “line”. So adding one or two lines, for say RAT and DW, is similar cost to a LM, but adding the 10th line is calling on Rfabs, and 15th needs Afabs and beyond. Of course hopefully governors could charge taxes on transactions for this, especially if there is a small upkeep fee.
Not so sure about a research tree myself (would seem to just help big players). But I could get onboard with company wide experts… But I wonder if a ‘Company Culture’ might be more interesting? Perhaps its chosen from start package stage or has to be actively unlocked. Could be kind of your own company COGC bonus, less powerful but noteworthy when across all bases. I wonder if some rather specific ones might be the most interesting: “Shipsmiths - This company has a unique understanding that all of its work is destined for the stars: +2.5% worker happiness to all ship construction” or “Desert Farmers - Many of this company’s founders were original from earths driest areas so have an innate understanding of modern irrigation: +5% worker happiness to all low water agriculture production”. Of course, +2% Chemistry would be easy, but perhaps not as interesting?
I like your corporate culture idea. That seems really spectacular. And maybe we can tie the faction lore into it and have different cultures between the factions.
Let me expand a little on what I mean by the research tree concept:
When you start your company, you only have the ability to build the habitat buildings (including STO), the resource extraction buildings, and the first tier building(s) that is(are) part of your selected specialty.
Examples: A Refiner can only build Refineries. A Farmer can only build Farmsteads and FPs. A Manufacturer can only build the BMP. Etc.
In order to unlock additional buildings, you have to “Buy” the blueprint for that building. And obviously the blueprint for a Pioneer class building is cheaper than the blueprint for a Technician class building.
But once you have purchased that blueprint, you can build an unlimited number of those buildings. On as many planets as you want to build them. That becomes your company knowledge to use over and over.
What does this accomplish — It encourages you to have a lot of buildings in your specialty, and to stay out of specialties that you won’t have a lot of. If I invest 250K to buy the blueprint for a Laboratory and only build 1 Laboratory, then I will probably never get payback for that building. But if I spend 250K to buy a Laboratory blueprint and then build 5 or 10 of them, then that cost pays back pretty fast.
With the Blueprints being for sale…anyone can choose to get into another business at any time. So it isn’t limiting and blocking. It just adds financial cost to encourage people to leverage the market rather than trying to be entirely self contained. Today it is simply too easy to throw up one of a building (say a PP3), run it for a few weeks to get a handful of the product (e.g. HSE), and then tear it back down. I would like to discourage that behavior.
And if you couple it with some of the corporate changes that both of us mentioned, I think it will really encourage people to be a part of a corporation with diverse capabilities that work together to build out a complex supply chain.
As soon as I saw the faction culture idea I thought: “YES!”. Either perhaps there’s a small faction bonus everyone gets particularly designed for startup. Then they can choose another more general bonus.
Or perhaps they give you access to a few faction specific bonuses to choose from. Patagonian Cattle: +2% PPA production, Incan Steppes: +1% hypdroponic output. For Insitor for example.
Or maybe the general bonuses are unlocked through time like experts. Perhaps experts are put towards bonuses in certain fields.
I’d be really interested in these specific flavour ones, even though not hugely powerful and dwarfed by other factors from planet concentration and experts I think they could add nicely for both flavour seekers and the large amount of min-maxers. (a 1% bonus makes a big difference across 5 bases with 20 production lines, but also doesn’t traintrack anyone).
Ah yes, I quite like this blueprint idea. Also helps beef up and further guide starter packs, as well as, as you say say, stops the throw away buildings. I’m highly skeptical of any research to make something better though as I feel that’s just handing a pass for large players to out compete new ones. If blueprints could then be produced by players, or perhaps the University building (and other education buildings) could passively produce these? Maybe as well, or maybe it is needed to make high level blueprints.
Either you need Techs to make Settler level schematics, Engineers to make Tech, etc. or maybe they’re all same Building Blueprints and you just need 1 for Pio level, 10 for Settlers, etc. with Scientist level buildings producing far more Blueprints in same time as a Tech building.
(Interesting ideas, I’ll try and drum some more players here to get their thoughts)
I’ve also thought that extending the blueprint functionality from Ignition to buildings could be desirable, though hadn’t thought about developing or purchasing or unlocking these blueprints. My thought was to have variations in the buildings, so that purchasing them might make the building faster at building certain items, or capable of making an additional item. Or a POPI building, for example, could add or upgrade wings instead of a generic “upgrade”.
I’ve also heard some discussion of power generation for bases? Is there any intent to add anything like this?
For exploration, I would envision some sort of fog-of-war for an individual player, so that people don’t get overwhelmed at first comparing and researching planets to put their second base on, and give advantage to exchanging maps at some point. I heard a suggestion of having the benefit of a Corporate map to make this organization more interesting and beneficial. It would also implement a sort of trade secret.
As for military, I see the upcoming Blueprint feature as a possible introduction, seeing how you can add some different types of shields and other features. I wouldn’t want to see a tactical military featureset develop that would allow overnight ambushes as in some games I’ve seen, but perhaps some sort of blockade ability or something would be appropriate, allowing for some ships to pass based on features of the blocking and passing ships as well as Corp and Faction affiliation.
This is an extension of Tex’s thoughts, specifically around “to encourage people to leverage the market rather than trying to be entirely self contained”. Although my idea doesn’t necessarily add value to the platform as a whole, or maybe it does, it does augment Tex’s example, and I think it leans into PrUn’s targeted audience and overall gameplay, being a space economy MMO.
I would like to see Price Charts with increased functionality. Having the ability to manipulate charts, with there being hundreds of variations, whether you are looking for a short term market play, or evaluating a specific market from the perspective of being a potential supplier, a fully modular charting platform would be an essential tool, particularly when PrUn goes live, and the financial markets slowly mature over time. I don’t think I need to list all of the variations I’d like to see added, as most here probably know where I’m coming from, but being able to have different technical indicators(overlays) for example, like Divergence, Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands and Stochastic Oscillators, would be very useful additions. In conjunction with adding technical indicators, the end result being technical analysis, obvious I know, would be having the ability to create your own channels, which can help identify entry and exit point, but maybe more importantly, allows you to evaluate risk associated with the trade in question. It’s less relevant for long term plays and suppliers, maybe irrelevant, but for those who enjoy looking for those short and medium term market plays, it’s probably the most important pattern analysis you can use.
Going to necro my own threat a bit here. It’s less than a month so should be okay.
I’ve had some good discussion about future features and thought I should add them to the mix.
Expanding Faction Space
This was talked about in another thread but my basic suggestion is that a planetary project can be built which makes it so a planet is faction space. Though I’m aware ‘faction space’ may be by star, so perhaps it is just applied on the planet or first planet ‘claims’ system. I imagine it being a building that can have multiple levels to make a planet more faction aligned (I believe there’s currently levels of faction space so this would fit?). This instantly makes the whole faction system a bit more engaged and dynamic, I think in a new universe there’s an understanding faction space may need to be a bit larger, but this perhaps could circumvent that with the ability for faction space to grow organically. I can also imagine ‘map painting’ being a general end goal for players (I’m definitely not the only grand strategy fan who plays PrUn!).
But what’s the point of faction space? Well even with current game mechanics this would actually be a good mechanic to provide some added stability to aspects of space. But it’s also easy to imagine this system slotting in with other systems very well. Faction space could easily take on more meaning, perhaps adding a slightly population upskill increase, negating a small unsettled space happiness debuff, whilst providing a raise in taxes, but also a protection against some raised taxes. Governors could perhaps once a term change the faction, maybe to only ones that border the system, this could tie in with players able to change their factions with benefits only applying to faction aligned players.
I think all in all it is a seemingly simple feature with a lot of legs to tie in with other systems dynamically.
Voting Systems
I have avoided talking of politics themed updates since I assume the devs have those fairly ironed out (if you don’t please say I have lots of ideas!!) but I really want to push the idea of different voting systems for factions or as someone suggested different planet populations (if you couldn’t tell I’m much more interested in bring out factions than pushing corps down everyone’s throats (any engagement in faction systems will also make corps more engaging)). I think Esabab suggested the idea of a different voting system for populations and i think this makes realism sense and gameplay sense. Have a COGC style vote for low population planets with ADMs (To be honest I wonder if ADMs should be scrapped as buildable and every planet gets one when settled), then the planet at a certain population level (be it POP level or base count) moves to it’s factions voting system. Maybe one/some factions go to 1 base 1 vote, maybe some even keep COGC, maybe some prefer seniority, i can think of a few more obscure but interesting ones. Don’t get me starter upon super-structure politics, think Presidents, Parliaments, Electoral Colleges.
Overall I think this again could really add a great system that combines dynamically with others and adds a really interesting divergence. Faction space expanding, changing voting systems, forcing different policies, changing the economic underlyings, sounds like fun 
Terraforming/Dynamic Planetary Shift
It’s clearly on the vague roadmap, just looking at the planet info sliders. How hard would it be for these to be able to be slowly added. I’m thinking Montem just getting a few degrees hotter over a whole year from all it’s factories and metallurgy. Then perhaps Promitor getting 1 more O per cycle after a year of all its FRMs pumping Oxygen into the atmosphere. Etherwind losing 1 H2O per cycle as everyone pumps the water off-planet. I’m thinking slow very gradual changes, ones that one player doesn’t cause, but 100s do. The type of things that show the universe is dynamic and changing. These changes can of course be intentional, positive and negative. Perhaps some governor decisions to prospect for materials, to reduce CO2 emissions, slow or increase changes already happening.
I think this would help provide a good rebuttal to the constant reset model. Your base of planet X won’t always be useful for mining Iron, but may actually become a great planet for Farming. Encouraging a dynamism and the sense that the universe is in many ways an actor/element that people need to factor in to plans. Throw in some even ‘latent goods’ that can be slowly prospected. Montem perhaps has quite shallow Iron veins, only lasting a year as a competitive output, but who knew it had such aluminum veins buried deep? Katoa was never meant to stay fertile, but to see the Farms turn to Ammonia lakes was certainly a sight.
Then add the possibility of somewhat dynamically rendered low-res graphical overlays onto the spinning planets? The type that all Hydrogen Gas giants look the same, and all barren hot rocks look the same. But this would provide a really neat graphical addition. The temperatures, gas, and mineral contents being used to add to a multiplier that assigns a graphical wrap. But perhaps that graphical detail is a step too far.
I still don’t really see what factions do, other than saying what planet you started on. So I would like to see this idea get developed a little more. Something like placing additional taxes or tariffs on members who aren’t in that faction could be an interesting development and work more on the geopolitical level. Then there would be a bigger drive to have a governor of the planet and inter-faction trade, or even establishing leaders of factions to sort over deals like that would be an interesting idea.
Terraforming would be an interesting idea. The only issue I see with that if for minerals like LST, FEO, CUO, etc. These deposits take millions of years to form and are chewed up in a relatively short time. A farming planet has the ability to put some nutrients back into the soil (even if marginally) but you won’t be able to get those metals and minerals back in a reasonable amount of time.