Well, since there isn't much I can do to help the actual coding of the skillsets, I thought while I wait I might offer some suggestions for the broader scale use of aetherships and aethercraft.

As we all know, at the moment they are nothing more than glorified transports. There is absolutely no need to invest in anything better than a one room ship, as in almost all ways that count, this configuration is superior to all others. However, eventually aethership combat and interaction will become a possibility, and we need to consider -why- engaging in aethership combat would be important. Here are a couple of random ideas.


1. Dock raids.

All nations have a single dock that extends from the Prime plane into aetherspace, and which is linked to their room of portals. Allied ships can dock at these ports and transfer power between the ship and nexus. This proposal involves enemy ships attacking those docks, in order to disrupt and harm the organization to which they are connected.

There would be a number of steps to complete in order to actually cause detriment to an organization.

First, the enemy armada must disable the natural protections of the dock - the equivalent of an algontherine's shields, though they do not quite function in the same manner. They have an absorptive power of three hits per two (?) seconds. If they receive three or less hits in this time, no damage is suffered by the dock, and the organization under attack will be unaffected. It is only additional hits within this cycle that will cause damage, such that any attack will require multiple, coordinated ships to be effective.

As soon as the dock begins to take damage, a certain loyal in the city or commune will begin to warn the nation that the dock is under attack. The dock itself would have a certain 'health' level, perhaps around 4000-10000 hull strength. It will not regenerate, and requires a simple quest be performed repeatedly in order to restore hull strength. (In Serenwilde, every 5 pixies may cause a certain kind of amber to fall from the trunk, which is used in the room of portals to restore 250 hull strength to the dock, or something like that that means effective power loss occurs without being too damaging).

At this stage, the nation under attack may respond in two primary ways. The first and most obvious is to launch their own fleet in response, and defend their organization by aetherspace combat. The second is for times when there are not captains available, or ships are too far away to reach the dock in time, and involves purchasable 'modules' that can be placed throughout the city or commune. Any citizen above a certain rank can use these modules, which are similar to the gun turrets of a ship. They can launch attacks into aetherspace in the dock location only, of three types only:

* a damage attack (causes 1/3 that of a normal ship turret, on a balance 1.5 times as long)
* a freezing attack (causes a delay of 0.5-1 seconds on a random module on an enemy ship on a balance twice as long as a ship turret)
* an entangling attack (has a chance of hooking an aetheric anchor to a targetted ship - pilot must spend balance to unhook it before leaving, but means the locked module cannot be used again)
* a draining attack (has a chance to drain 1 energy from the ship's reserves into the organizations nexus, on a very long balance)

The modules themselves could look like anything, I personally like the thought of enclosures which are entered, and then protrude into aetherspace when locked. It would be good if the attacking ships could perhaps target these defenders, and with enough damage cause them to be unuseable for a short time (without harming the inhabitants).

If the dock is damaged critically, the portal room of the organization becomes unuseable, and the waves of aetheric energy that radiate from the rift will also interfere with the nexus, preventing transversing or linking until the dock is repaired. At this point, the enemy armada can attempt to siphon power directly from the enemy nexus. This is slow, and has a very small chance of overloading the collector and destroying the ship.


2. Aether farming.

Throughout aetherspace there are certain convergences of resources, like villages, that can be claimed by a certain organization. Nebulae of aetheric filaments, or ethereal kelp, or something less silly. A small gnome station at each of these resources operates the collecting and harvesting continuously. In exchange for the protection (or service, in their eyes) of a nation's fleet, the gnomes will provide a small tithe to the winning commune or city.

In order to choose the most effective guardians against disruption by the aetherbeasts and pirates, the gnomes stage a wargames which pits the various nation's ships against each other, until only one remains.
If these tournaments are initiated by players (for example, after a certain base time elapses from the last tournament... "Show us the scales of one hundred dead dragons, and we might consider a change in allegiance.") it will also provide an effective 'arena' for having some fun with aethercombat that potentially involves large scale tactics and interactions.


So, thoughts? Any other suggestions?

It's a good idea, except it's only putting battles around a certain area, like the docks, and the gnome aetherbubble. The dock raids idea is good, except it'll just be like normal raiding, when you get a crew, go waste a dock when no one is around that can command an aethership, really, until fighting other ships is worth something, it'll just be a waste of time.

That's a good point, actually. I take it you mean that defeating an enemy ship should convey some sort of individual or collective benefit on the winners.

If it was simply averaged experience similar to defeating the opposing crew in regular combat, would that be sufficient?

Edit: In regards to raiding when no-one is around... I did try to prevent this problem somewhat. To raid with this implementation you would need a -minimum- of six people, meaning that it could not be anything but a significant, coordinated effort. There would be fewer incidents of one or two people deciding to have some fun while no-one is around, on a whim.

Well, it would be nice if that, and if they had some power collected half of it was either dropped there as a node or whatever they are called, or half was transfered directly into your collectors, if any, and maybe some commodities or something, to make ships eventually be able to pay for themselves, like iron, steel, wood, and the like since you did just blow up the ship.

Ah, good idea.

With the dock battle, there's also the possiblity of having two set turrets on the Dock in Aetherspace for defence, so they'd still have a chance to defend themselves, the turrets would have to be stronger, do more damage, and probably faster then normal ones, since there would only be two of them. You could also have the turrets useable by anyone of the org, so you wouldn't actually need to have aethercraft up to be able to use them.

What about if there was commodity stocks in this village like things that were open rooms people could land at and steal from, and the reason that the villages would want the protection would be because of that, and so people could just go in and kill the guards and gather stuff from their stock room and leave and sell it elsewhere, and when that happened it would lower how much the village-like-thing liked it's protector organization so it would have a harder time getting the village-thing next turn around?
Then there could be pirates! Of course, it would have to be really hard to defeate all the guards and everything to get there. Well, not hard, just really time consuming and tricky, cause if it's hard people are going to come up with a way of defeating it easy, like how people are able to take down many many guards without getting too much injured, so it would have to be something time consuming and tricky to do.

I'm still waiting for Aetherbubble villages

Aether villages seems logical. Or even just commodity shops - Ladyfinger could sell sugar and rock candy and the like from her mill, and whatever-that-snowman-was could sell ice.

Just...something to make my aethership worth it. Harvesting power is fun and all...but it can be a bit wearing after two or three hours.

I just think that unless They come up with something interesting for aetherships/aetherspace, or something more integral to the game, it's going to go the way of figurines, just something that rich, bored people do, and can never find anyone to do it with them.

They already have made aetherships vital parts of the most recent event about faethorn. So I don't think they will ever die out because of stuff like that and it seems they do plan to expand stuff about them and make them even more important to the game.

Well then you've got the problem of unemeied people entering that area and stealing the stuff or things like that. And if there isn't an eye sigil, dreamweavers would have a field day...

So you'd probably have to have the gaurds either automatically kill anyone who tries to enter that isn't from the org controlling it, just to make sure people who aren't enemies yet can't sneak in.

...Eyes don't stop dreamweavers, I think. They stop souls.

they stop dreamweavers from coalescing and enveloping (picking up items in dreamform) items (I'm going more with the enveloping items thing)

Figurines were always doomed to failure because there wasn't much point to using them, nor much strategy or interaction possible. Aetherships won't 'die out', this is true... but there is -so- much potential in the vast implementation of aetherspace and aethercraft, I don't want to see that ignored. As I've said repeatedly, I'm hoping for aetherspace combat to be as rich and challenging as regular combat, but with more of an emphasis on strategy, teamwork and the ability to react to an enemy strategy.

Figurines are just pokemon.

Aetherships are power generators.

I get people asking what aetherships are, etc, quite often. Most people know jack about them, and I believe that if they don't get cool stuff with them, they're not going to be used much. However, I'm hoping we do get cool stuff.

Oh, and about figurines, I asked the three envoys I know to put in a change asking for comm cost to be lowered and all miniature skills to be lowered in the skillset. A lot.

I just can't wait until we get specializations...

Well I've given chair privs to members of my clan but no one seems to use it. Mainly because people don't seem have the lessons to put into Aethercrafting.

Perhaps if guilds promoted the idea of learning Aethercrafting to master for the experience earned by killing the creatures novices would become more interesting in it, Ok they might get set back a bit on their guild skills but it's probably the best way to get more active crew members

Luckilly, it only costs 30cr to have a fair number of skills.

It's easy, faster, and more efficient just to hunt normally than to gain experience through aetherships. Unless you are under about level 30-40.

For newbies though, I suppose its an exp goldmine.