Some Feature Requests

Hi aruta,

Commenting on your requests in turn:

- Planets around the stars who can be explored once you enter a solar system. (Make nebula's explorable?)
A: I'm kind of tempted to add this, because it would be kind of cool to have all the planets. But on the other hand, it makes the user interface much more complex, and adds a lot of art requirements for the planets. And ultimately, I'm not sure if it would add that much to the gameplay - scanning/exploring each planet in turn would be fun the first couple of times, but the 100th time you enter a new star system, you probably just want to know if there's anything interesting going on.

- XP/items/perks/stats for captain and crew
A: Well, they do have stats/perks in the form of skills. XP would be a fun (and potentially quite easy) thing to add - but should stat gain from XP be indicated somehow? I'm not that fond of "X is now level Y" pop-ups, especially because the game avoids visible stats in general. (In something of a bid for realism - real life doesn't have HP and XP.)

- Sandbox mode. Unlimited fuel for example. Or just a lot of it (own mining plant?)
A: There will be difficulty levels in dev 10. I'm currently planning on Easy, Medium, Hard and Random. (Random turns off the balancing sub-system and allows pure chance to take its course.) A large part of the difficulty level will be how tight fuel is - Medium will be about as tight as it's now, Easy will pretty much guarantee you can visit every star at least once, and Hard will be, well, hard.

- More stuff to find. Maybe honor points? Or raised science skill for finding new lifeforms in stead of only fuel rewards to balance things out?
A: Oh, there will be lots more stuff to find. :) Obviously, the expansion will have a lot, but the base game will also steadily gain a few encounters with each dev release to keep things interesting. There will also be bigger game sizes - at the moment it only goes up to medium because there just aren't enough encounters to yet fill a really big map. I'm thinking that Fleet HQ should occasionally reward you with another crew member if you do well.

- David