Pirates

[Mor (OP)]

We all know the benefit of shipping lines, they are free haulers and wealth generators. That suffer no maintenance failures, rarely attacked and generally aren't a concerns unless they grow too big.

My suggestion is simple. If we bother simulating every civilian ship move, lets add some FUN i.e. Pirates or rather pirate events. System with insufficient protection level will have chance of passing commercial ship getting "lost", and subsequently increasing the system danger level.

This will effect those who expand too fast without securing its backyard, for instance. And will cause loss of commercial ships (which some will gladly see),  resulting in Fun events about lost civy ship it can be stated as piracy or more cryptic after all who knows what happens in the dark reaches of space.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

the problem is that pirates make little sense in Aurora, logistically.  Starships are too expensive and too difficult to support, and there's nowhere to hide.  Or at least that's what I've run into when RPing it.  Any piracy from outside a solar system can be stopped by guarding the gates, and there's no way to hide a pirate base within a solar system; there is a finite number of bodies in the solar system and it is not that difficult to check them all.

The most pirate thing i've done is when playing a viking/feudal faction that would assault isolated colonies with hybrid railgun/dropships.  It helped that the faction they raided used a small number of hugeass ships.

7.2 might change this up a bit with remote maintenance bases though, since you could theoretically establish a deepspace repair port. 

[Mor (OP)]

I strongly disagree. Even with current tech you have space tourism and TN tech should make space FAR FAR more affordable and lucrative venture than ever before. Just because we have to abstract/ignore things that aren't adding to the 4x theme and focusing on the state and few mega corps, it doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of detail in between. Space should be teeming with private installations, resources dumps, emergency services, illegal operations, satellites, rely stations, beacons, endless stream of Mass drive packets,space junk etc..  Near orbit we have space port tugs, tankers and shuttles, taking soldiers/workers for shore leave, technicians/custom-duty-officers on board, etc etc...

Add to that a little corruption and you got a huge hay of stack. And that only your home world, what about frontier system where you have not enough assets, can you really waste time scanning for few mobile squatters under each asteroid or making sure that the records of every huller match its transponder data ...

Also its not actual pirate ships, but an abstracted events which can be anything you want: accidents, corporate sabotage, fanatics, theft, etc

[jiduthie]

What if the pirates themselves hid by posing as civilian freighters? Each civilian ship created has a small chance of either turning or being created with the "pirate" flag (pun intended) and every increment it spends outside military sensors but within some arbitrary distance of another freighter has a chance of "capturing" the other freighter's cargo and possibly turning it pirate as well. Active sensors could reveal pirate ships, perhaps for only a limited time after a piracy action, to prevent your PDC's from just lighting them up whenever they returned to a planet, although you could get fancier here if you wanted perhaps making at a pirate scan a specific move/standing order which requires a small resolution active sensor. Basically, space vampires. Hide in plain sight, corner their victims in isolation, and suck em dry.

This would provide incentive to produce vampire hunters patrol vessels, with good range and a decent active sensor but lightly armed because pirates shouldn't be a match for an up to date military vessel, and to actually use them to patrol shipping lanes. Piggybacking on the existing civilian system would hopefully make it easy to implement and be extensible. For instance, pirate bases could present to the player as civilian mining complexes that would increase the piracy chance but only be discoverable by an active/pirate scan. Hell, the pirates themselves could use a hidden-from-the-player(and exempt from taxes!) civilian shipping line that increased its wealth by capturing other ships cargo and thus built new ships according to how successful it was.

Edit: In fact this might tie in to another minor quibble I have with the game, which is the relative futility of recon operations. Right now a recon vessel just uses the same equipment as any other ship just in a configuration suited to its task, and it isn't able to discover all that much about hostile ships. You can get estimated tonnage and speed and from that you can infer distinctions between military and civilian vessels but not much else. Adding a new "nuclear radiation sensor" (Or whatever the good technobabble would be) would kill two stones. Magazines and powerplants would be detectable by this new sensor at distances (much?) shorter than the equivalent active sensor, only one ship could be targeted per sensor, and it would require a length of time for a target to be fully scanned. This would give additional information about hostile forces without being overpowered or obviating the much better intelligence gained from espionage, salvage and capture. Giving pirate ships lower tech missiles or beam weapons could make them easily spotted by this new sensor, but require some kind of investment outside what a player would build normally.

Edit2: Sorry, I'm kinda running with this at the moment, and this last bit will probably elevate this idea firmly into "pie in the sky" territory if it wasn't there already, but this could also have interesting diplomacy implications. Granting letters of marque to shipping lines against another empire with which you have a trade agreement could be tons of fun as well. Relations would be damaged each time they managed to detect a pirate from your empire within their space, regardless of whether or not you were actively encouraging piracy within their borders. Lax security within your own borders could potentially provoke war, which I really like the idea of because right now its trivially easy to remain friends with NPRs and it would add an interesting 'cold' war option.

[drejr]

the problem is that pirates make little sense in Aurora, logistically.  Starships are too expensive and too difficult to support, and there's nowhere to hide.  Or at least that's what I've run into when RPing it.  Any piracy from outside a solar system can be stopped by guarding the gates, and there's no way to hide a pirate base within a solar system; there is a finite number of bodies in the solar system and it is not that difficult to check them all.

The most pirate thing i've done is when playing a viking/feudal faction that would assault isolated colonies with hybrid railgun/dropships.  It helped that the faction they raided used a small number of hugeass ships.

7.2 might change this up a bit with remote maintenance bases though, since you could theoretically establish a deepspace repair port.

I've considered running a pirate faction to cull my shipping lines keep things more interesting, and this has always stopped me. Even supporting a FAC takes over 100,000 workers - that's a lot of pirates!

Hostile civilians that spawn a limited number of pirate dens in out of the way spaces and small ships using tech known to the player would be interesting.

[Felixg]

Well, with the inclusion of Civilian hangars in 7.2 the pirates could have a few Jolly Roger fighters hidden in a cargo ship that could pop out and disable a civilian ship to steal its cargo, they wouldn't need much in the way of maintenance or production for fighters, it would just take them a while to churn out new ones.

[Mor (OP)]

This suggestion isn't about adding pirate ships* but an abstraction of piracy or any other forum misfortune that can befall civilian shipping in vast reaches of space.

The basic concept is similar to how colony unrest work i.e. if you neglect some aspects of your colony management your productivity will suffer, only for space. Specifically, if you fail to provide sufficient security across the empire, your civilian shipping will suffer**. Which I hope would add another challenge for later game, add flavor, and reward your attention to details.


* if you want actual pirate ships, use search. There have been a couple and iirc they were deemed impractical.
** Its the basic concept, if you like it we can expand upon the factor that contribute to it, and its effects.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

There is a mechanic for that though. Well, two mechanics, sorta:  the population security requirement (scales with pop) and the system security requirement (civilian shipping avoids a system if it fears it owing to hostile actions there).

It would be really weird for piracy to be an abstract when civilian shipping isn't.

[Mor (OP)]

Yes. Planetary Protection Value (PPV) is a system wide value, determined by the Empire assets in the system. And system Danger Status, which marks active combat zones, presumably its increased when you fight skirmishes and then gradually reduce over time.

As for abstractions, there are many things that affect ships that are abstracted e.g. maintenance failure. When your engines blow up in a spectacular firework show, you can invent whatever story you want, but under the hood its all one big abstraction. Overall you had insufficient MSP and got frakked by the RNG. What the difference between that and getting a message about one of your commercial ships blowing-up\vanishing on your frontier system because  you can't spare the ships(insufficient PPV for example)?

Edited.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Maintenance occurs beneath the notice of the player other than MSP, but civilian ships are not abstracted at all other than their construction.  The danger of abstraction is the occurrence of known impossibilities: a system whose access you control absolutely, yet if your ships leave civilians mysteriously start exploding.

[jiduthie]

civilian ships are not abstracted at all other than their construction.

Not true. Their fueling is also abstracted. And even if it was true that only their construction was abstracted that would hardly preclude pirates. Construction is the hard part. Given that there are civilian ships and they are constructed independently, its not too far an 'abstraction' to imagine that pirates could also be constructed independently. The 'abstraction argument' is a strawman. The game itself is an abstraction, by definition. None of use are really in space directing ships to and fro. The argument is whether further abstraction would increase or decrease immersion and the quality of the game. The goal of a good simulation is to highlight the interesting bits and abstract the uninteresting. Swabbing the decks is very necessary but uninteresting. We abstract that by adding crew quarters and engineering spaces. Overhauls for commercial ships too micro? We make abstractions so commercial ships can operate without constant oversight.

We're all here because Aurora simulates things to a detail that other space sims take for granted. That's a good thing, but we ought not to lose sight of what a good simulation is.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Uh, I don't think we need to get into a philosophy argument here.  And that is not what strawman means! :O

Civilian ships are physical in the game. They exist on the same layer and under the same rules as all NPC-controlled ships.  For a civilian ship to blip out from an invisible, non-physical, abstract pirate ship violates the simulation -  and will inevitably result in gamey 'impossible piracy'.

[Mor (OP)]

Civilian ships are physical in the game. They exist on the same layer and under the same rules as all NPC-controlled ships.

  For a civilian ship to blip out from an invisible, non-physical, abstract pirate ship violates the simulation -  and will inevitably result in gamey 'impossible piracy'.[/quote]

EVERYTHING about civilian shipping is abstracted. They require no resources/infrastructure to develop, construct and maintain (e.g. Your fleets will grind to halt if your systems run dry on Sorium, not so civilian ships they will keep flying and multiplying like nothing happened) They also suffer no accidents, morale problems etc., and are limited to 4 generic designs with colonization and performance in mind...

Because the only reason why civilian ships are physically in the game and not abstracted as trade lines, is to fill your main and vast theater and give you a strategic goal (so you have to protect yours from raiders and user theirs as target practice)

Here, I am looking to expand those goals and adding immersion, by adding common factors like crime, dissent, attrition etc., called here "pirates" because who doesn't like pirates, argh?. I think that:
* Physical: Within the current mechanics and level of abstraction, its very hard to add pirates physically without adding a host of sensor checks (performance), micro management and impossible scenarios, which would make many people grumpy.
* Abstraction, by using events that are based on already established mechanics, you can cover larger host of events, add flavor, with no added micro, and make the relevant decision more meaningful.

[jiduthie]

Uh, I don't think we need to get into a philosophy argument here.

I'll stop arguing when you stop disagreeing with me!

 

And that is not what strawman means! :O

Care to elaborate? I did my best to try to explain why I thought the point against abstraction wasn't really pertinent.

 

Civilian ships are physical in the game. They exist on the same layer and under the same rules as all NPC-controlled ships.  For a civilian ship to blip out from an invisible, non-physical, abstract pirate ship violates the simulation -  and will inevitably result in gamey 'impossible piracy'.

Again, civilians do not operate "under the same rules as all NPC-controlled ships." They operate under a layer of 'abstraction.' I'd prefer a system like the one I outlined a few posts up to the simple random events that Mor seems to be advocating. However, I really can't see why pirates should be a a flat no go because they might require 'abstract' mechanics and am completely unsympathetic to the argument that they must be more 'abstract' than the current rules governing civilian shipping lines.

[Mor (OP)]

I'd prefer a system like the one I outlined a few posts up to the simple random events that Mor seems to be advocating.

The reason I support Abstraction over Physical manifestation, because with current mechanics you can't fool sensors,  falsify transponder data, use "stealth" ships (too OP), represents various factions or anything other than spawn a whack em all micro hell. Physical pirate ships means endless patrols and sensors checks preformace overhead.

As for Abstraction, what I like about DwarfFortress is that most mechanics have an impact on several levels, making choices mater (and generally have nice flavor description on top), that why I like Aurora ship designs and fleet management, in contrast a lot of the Empire management has very limited effect, especially in space.

Unlike your suggestion, my main goal is not (small random chance of) creating pirates. Instead I want to tie in existing mechanics with consequences. For example: Security situation in sector Sigma is deteriorating, commercial ship has been lost, locals blame bordering xeno scum, demanding additional fleet assets.