Thanks for the update Steve, and thanks for the very interesting videos and campaign.
Looking forward to the next one.

Quote from: Jovus on April 03, 2020, 09:08:57 AM

I would, eventually, love to see NPRs making sub-system claims on areas they have settled out to share, like a home system (or other system where both want colonies, if diplomatic relations are good enough).

Much like the exclusion zones you placed around the Solarian bodies: "Everything in this quadrant of the asteroid belt is mine, stay away. This planet and its moons are mine, stay away. Everything around this star in the binary is mine, stay away. But if you do that, I don't see any reason we can't live together peaceably."

Obviously that's post-release pie-in-the-sky stuff, and probably wouldn't come up very often in a player-facing fashion anyway except for multi-faction starts.

Maybe you could code based on BKM distance rather than just the system? I don't know if possible but this should quite get the feature you are describing. In this way to actually colonize an entire system you'll need multiple little mining colonies and colonies in general rather than just a big colony on 1 planet only.

Still, I don't know how the system claim would work though...I personally like the way it is structured right now but it is true I haven't played it yet, so I guess without testing on hand it's really hard to come to a conclusion.

I think Steve said he tried but issues with micro from ships getting to close doing other things was an issue. I guess it would be alright if it just ignored distance to that system body though, only checking at ends of orders. So you don't have to worry about regular traffic getting too close and upsetting an NPR, but if you end fleets on waypoints or extended orbits or normal orders at those worlds they will get mad.

I would, eventually, love to see NPRs making sub-system claims on areas they have settled out to share, like a home system (or other system where both want colonies, if diplomatic relations are good enough).

Much like the exclusion zones you placed around the Solarian bodies: "Everything in this quadrant of the asteroid belt is mine, stay away. This planet and its moons are mine, stay away. Everything around this star in the binary is mine, stay away. But if you do that, I don't see any reason we can't live together peaceably."

Obviously that's post-release pie-in-the-sky stuff, and probably wouldn't come up very often in a player-facing fashion anyway except for multi-faction starts.

Very hard to evaluate though. I think that after extensive testing on a live release we will probably know better what, if anything,  should be done about this particular issue.

Yes, I agree.

One concern an empire could have is that being locked out of an arm means that their available systems will be, on average, farther away and more difficult to exploit. While there may be a theoretically infinite number of systems down a single arm, having two arms means you have twice as many systems that are logistically feasible to use.

Once an arm is sufficiently large, its mathematically very unlikely for all of it to be a dead end, barring hitting the limit on total stars. So if you're cut off from a particularly large expanse of known space, without having something comparable you can access, you run the risk of finding yourself stuck in a dead end spur of the galaxy while the empire that cut you off expands without competition.

However, if you've only explored 2 or 3 stars beyond that chokepoint and don't know about any further systems, then its hard to tell if you should be concerned about the cutoff or not.

Quote from: chrislocke2000 on April 01, 2020, 10:43:53 AM

Yes interesting progress. Given the limited number of available routes out of Sol it looks like the NPRs are not putting too much value on expansion options otherwise I would have thought they would be against claims that create more bottle necks.

They are checking on bottlenecks that cut them off from systems of value. When I claimed Sigma Draconis, the NPRs had nothing of value beyond that system.

Longer term I might add a consideration simply on number of systems cut-off, regardless of value.

(Stating the obvious, but to put it on the screen: ) Of course, a simple check on the absolute number of known systems effectively claimed because the only known access is through a claimed system, while it would alter the perceived magnitude of what the claimant is demanding, doesn't really capture the threat aspect of what is given up in acceding to the claim. Possibly percentage of explored space, or of discovered jump chains that are believed to be open? *shrugs* Or maybe it's simply that when there are few known options for exploration (below some threshold) each is valued just for that, which would fit into the existing code rather than needing a significant addition. Might be affected by the number of empires known to be competing for them, too.