So I know that most players are in agreement that aetherspace needs to be looked at again, and I eventually want to mock up another report with detailed suggestions for improvement. Before I do that though, I'd like to float some ideas I was thinking about for overall adjustments, and then if these are going in the right direction I can focus on individual skills after that. I'm very open to criticism about these suggestions, but rather than something unhelpful like a response of one word ("No") which doesn't offer any constructive thought - I'd prefer if you could list what shouldn't be there and why, as well as what alternative solutions you might propose instead.

1. Rebalance large and small ship advantages

- Set a constant base speed that ships of any size will move at, only modified by wheel artifact, commander bonus and skills, module damage, empath power distribution and combateer deadspace.
- Reduce the increase in hull that is gained per room slightly (-10), and increase the base hull strength slightly to compensate (+500).
- Increase the base regeneration/empath heal of a ship slightly as the number of rooms increases.
- Increase the % chance that creatures are summoned as the number of rooms increases.
- Decrease the amount of damage that the shield can absorb as the number of rooms increases. (see #1A)

Justification: This is a controversial change, I know. What I want to take into account is that all functions of aetherspace rely on speed save one: ship-to-ship combat once initiated. Because of the rarity of that particular scenario, I believe that someone who heavily invests in their ship should not suffer 95% of the time for such extensive cost. Instead, there should be alternate advantages that small ships have that don't make them ideal for almost every purpose. I think that not attracting as many random creatures as well as being able to take more hits before their (feebler) hull is damaged is a good solution, but I'm open to other suggestions. I think the shield bonus will also improve their capacity for ship-to-ship combat slightly, which is a good thing. To explain the bonuses in-character, a smaller ship is less likely to draw the attention of wandering creatures, and a smaller ship can concentrate their shield energies over a smaller surface area.


1A. Give shield modules more of a purpose.

- Shield modules should absorb a percentage of damage from both beasts and other ship damage attacks based on their level of repair (eg. no damage (base) = 60%, light damage (base) = 30%, moderate damage (base) = 20%, heavy damage (base) = 10%). Edit: Optionally, an undamaged shield might absorb 100% of the hull damage, then drop significantly after that. I'm not sure where the exact levels should lie.
- Every hit that is absorbed by the shield causes slight damage to that module.
- Every room that the ship has reduces the percentage of damage absorption by 1% compounding (or = 0.99^ * . That is, a 1 room ship = 60% starting reduction, 10 room ship = 54.81% starting reduction, 50 room ship = 36.66% starting reduction, 100 room ship = 22.18% starting reduction).

Justification: Currently, shield modules only act to protect the ship against other ship attacks. They do not improve your chances of survival in PvE at all. I don't think this makes a lot of sense, and I also think shields are an opportunity to try to give smaller ships a bit more of a scaling effect when engaged in combat. The actual numbers might need testing, a 2% compounding penalty for rooms would possibly work as well.


2. Revisit aetherbeast attacks.

- Change aetherbeast attacks to have unique messages based on the creature (superficial change)
- Ensure the aetherbeasts have the following options to choose from in their attacks:
** Cause x damage to hull, one module damaged at random (all creatures)
** Cause 200% x damage to hull, no module damage (Slanikk and above)
** Cause 33% x damage to hull, three modules damaged at random (Gargantuan and above)
** Cause 33% x damage to hull, also shock OR worble depending on creature type, useable one square away (Gargantuan and above)
** Cause damage to shield module if present, restore their own health slightly. (Scyllus and above)
- Rescale damage of high-level beasts based on testing so that most ships can stand and fight
- Ensure experience gain is commensurate with player level primarily, also based on risk (ie, ship rating vs level of monster). A level 20 player locked in with a level 80 player in a ship that is fairly equally matched to their target should each be gaining approximately equivalent experience to killing a creature of their individual level. Constant essence gain CANNOT work in a system that circumvents player level advantages and penalties and instead offers collectively shared risk/reward.

Justification: There are a few key changes in this section. First, module damage in the three mob attacks that exist now should always be limited in number, otherwise you penalize ships that have extra modules. Second, to add challenge and prevent the 'dancing around' tactic to avoid ever being hit, larger creatures should have the capacity to interrupt movement temporarily. Also on this train of thought, a drain type skill might be interesting to directly attack a shield, this is not absolutely necessary though. Finally, experience gain needs to be considered in the context of individual risk and investment. I believe that unlike individual bashing and influence, where your own characteristics determine your survival, aetherbeast hunting is primarily dependent on the ship quality and average crew characteristics. This means that you can lock an unskilled novice into the third turret station of a large ship, and provided the rest of the crew are skillful in their actions, that novice faces very little risk at all. Therefore, I suggest that experience gain be highly level-dependent, so the newbie might gain experience equal to a gnome/fink if a powerful ship fights low level creatures, or a... crab or whatever if they fight a challenging opponent. The gain is always moderate, but the unlimited potential of the mechanics mean that it can be attractive to take a group out for steady and sustainable experience harvesting that is valuable to all involved. I'm not sure how gold accumulation can be balanced based on level without removing the gnome ships entirely, so I have left it as is for now.


3. Add methods of quick travel that benefit all captains.

- Allow wormholes to be created that link two points in space, up to 200 steps apart useable by everyone, and up to 400 steps apart useable by Commanders. In contrast to the original suggestion, I would recommend requiring a crafted item in order to be able to destroy a wormhole, and make it considerably expensive.
- Create an HOMING skill in base Aethercraft, that for 10 ship power returns you to the Aetherplex after 20 seconds. Only useable while docked.
- Allow Bookbinders to create aetherspace maps that can record up to 400 movements (eg, e;e;s;se;e;etc), that can be enchanted with a number of charges then read by a pilot which will cause the ship to glide using those directions automatically.

Justification: Aetherspace is still enormously large and difficult to get around (without causing headaches before long ) and while fusion has taken a bit of a nerf the travel abilities of other captains haven't really improved. Wormholes will allow for rift-like teleportation across aetherspace in jumps, also serving to condense the areas in which you will find other ships. Homing is an ability that makes getting home again much more tolerable - it is the equivalent of a TELEPORT NEXUS command for aetherspace that gives everyone a chance to get back to the main areas of Lusternia if they need to leave the game or there is some event happening. The stored commands would allow for IC mapmaking to be viable, and also reduce the stain on pilots who have already travelled those paths many times before, at a cost.


4. Introduce Aetherspace conflict mechanics, not further Aetherbubble conflict mechanics.

- Consider Aetherspace Imperialism.
- Consider placing a gnome spaceyard/fink junkyard/aetherkelp harvesting platform and so on that are actual regions in aetherspace that function similar to villages. They can be claimed by organizations to provide power, resources and other benefits, and have very strong creatures that move around inside their boundaries such as gnome ships that are hostile to all but the controlling nation. To win the loyalty of a particular aetherstation you would need to successfully defend it from an invading fleet of hostile creatures that happened on a regular basis just like village revolts (for example, each ship declares themselves as representing a certain nation, then the first nation fleet to collectively kill x space invaders in that loyal territory wins it).
- Consider extending nation loyal creatures into Etherealspace and Cosmicspace that float around their particular aetherspace region. When these are killed, they produce a special type of dust that can be traded to an NPC in each nation that will convert it to your type of aetherloyal. There may be 80 creatures in total, which can be stolen and traded between all four organizations as desired. Each creature you have might provide certain benefits to your nation, like fae/angels/demons.
- Consider creating aethership races (now that speed is equally obtainable by all ships), that are begun at random intervals and function like spaceborne hamster-hunts (both violent and nonviolent) in which the ships of each nation must reach certain regions in which there are dozens of tiny little guppie aetherbeasts to be killed, which give you points.
- Consider a new tradeskill or alternatively a common skill that allows communes and cities to put down resources in aetherspace that mature over time. Somewhat akin to herbalism except entirely man-made, the mature specimens would only be collectable by the aligned nation that created them, however they could be attacked by hostile forces to reduce them to infancy (while giving some warning to skilled members of that nation). The details could be worked up if this is of interest, but I have large swathes of kelp farms as my inspiration, which is a functional way of nations claiming aetherspace territory and, if the rewards are significant enough, fighting over it.
- Consider rewards for winning duels in the beautiful, wondrous and beloved Parallax arena. These might be as simple as experience or gold, or alternatively a gambling system might be coded that allowed dividends of fights to flow towards successful crew groupings.

Justification: Because we need a reason to use this amazing system!

So... what do you all think?

No comments?

It's 9AM and it's been up for an hour.

And by 9AM, Shiri means it's 1-4AM for the Americans, so most of them are sleeping.

Aetherspace will require too many revisions to ever become good. Imagine how long it would take them to code all your changes, Avaer.

I dont mean to burst your bubble but aetherspace is forever going to suck.

It's true that it won't be easy, but the last set of changes only took a timeframe of months, and they were just as extensive as this lot. I think there's cause for optimism, the admin team have demonstrated they can produce surprising quality and depth before, no reason they couldn't here as well!

I'm wary of this idea for two reasons. It seems the issue of balancing small against large is predicated on the fact that right now, there's almost no ship-to-ship combat and no reason for it, which means small ships have all the advantages. This leads to the idea that the game is counter-productive: the admins want us to spend more money but are discouraging us from doing it.

I think that a better solution is not to make major changes like this to rebalance in favor of large ships or in favor of aetherhunting, but rather, to focus on making it so ship-to-ship combat is more practical and happens more. If we make changes based on the idea that it doesn't, and then ship-to-ship combat becomes important, we'll have to go back in and rebalance again. Too many of the skills already existing are only useful in ship-to-ship combat to abandon it.

I agree that right now it's not perfectly balanced to where big and small ships have their values, even if ship-to-ship combat were more prevalent, but it'd only take some small tweaks to achieve that, given an increasing importance of ship-to-ship combat. The key thing is, if both small and large ships have their benefits, this doesn't discourage people from spending more. It encourages people to spend even more so they can have both battleships and scout ships, which also serves the admin's purpose of getting us to spend money, even as it makes aetherspace more realistic and more interesting. Far better a good tradeoff than an arms race.


Who could disagree with this?


Superficial but probably quite expensive in both coder and builder time. Definitely not worth the use of that time for other things.


Do we really want to make aetherhunting require specialized empaths even more than it does now? You'd better have some huge incentives for empaths thrown in if you're going to be making them even more necessary and expensive.


As a commander I don't think I like this. Pilots will have nothing to do but sit there and then go pick up the dust. I like that the pilot's job is just as important in aetherhunting as anyone else's is. I don't see the use of dodging as a problem at all; in fact, it's one of the greatest virtues of aetherhunting to me, since it requires some real strategies particularly when there's several aethercritters of different types around at the same time. I'd hate to see aetherhunting reduced to a clone of the bashing grind. That wouldn't add challenge, it takes it away.


Making it depend on ship rating runs the risk of making it not profitable to buff up your ship since it just reduces your experience when you use it. That would have to be very carefully balanced.


This is a brilliant idea. It makes sense, it gives bookbinders something to do, it allows Flashpoints to have an advantage while still offering something to everyone else that makes it not a crippling advantage, and it's very cool. What do you think about making it so there's skills in Empath and Combateer to to let you use these when locked into the command chair, and the one in Empath comes a lot earlier than the one in Combateer, to help balance the appeal of those two alternatives to Commander?


I'd also like to see better options simply to have ships able to find one another. Empath has some of that, but not enough to make things like piracy viable. Imagine an Empath skill that lets you sense not ships so much as large sources of dust or auronidion even at great distances... sources which are probably ships, but you don't necessarily know what ship. (Which gives you a reason not just for piracy, but for empath communications skills.)

These suggestions make me want to re-read the Gap Series. >_<

When I first started in Lusternia, I was told that aetherspace was this cool idea that was put in, loved for about 5 minutes, and then gradually became mostly ignored and seen only as a nuisance and a reason to afk/read forums and/or raid slightly easier. From what I've seen, that seems fairly accurate...

The aethervillages and ideas connected to that look really cool.

What would you suggest the minor tweaks actually be, because there certainly may be a better solution? For one thing, I really do NOT want the difference in ship size to be as clear cut as "adding rooms increases SvS ability while decreasing SvE and utility", which is exactly what it is at the moment. Small ships must have some role in combat, particularly if there are mechanisms introduced that involve fleets of ships going against one another, and large ships cannot sacrifice utility and the ability to enjoy the system without requiring a group of attacking players to do so. Owning two ships for different purposes is prohibitively expensive if you want to make sure that both of them have all modules and multiple artifacts, and to predicate the entire system on the fact that captains have available and will use that scale of resources just for starting functionality I believe is wrong.

An analogy is having two separate experience tracks for PvP and bashing/influencing/travel/NPC defence - with the more you gain in one the more you lose in the other. Regardless of what enticements there are to engage in ship-to-ship combat, the rewards will NEVER equal that of hunting, siphoning or quick access to aetherbubbles in terms of time in use. This means that the differences between small and large ships should be focused on advantages and disadvantages that are equally spread across SvE, SvS and general utility. To me, it is obvious that speed cannot be one of those advantages or disadvantages.

Edit: To clarify, by the shield changes I'm suggesting I'm envisioning that small ships will be able to take on larger ones as well as be able to weather hits from creatures as well. Ship-to-ship, they do the same damage to each other in terms of turret blasts, but the small ship can greatly reduce the damage they take as long as the shield module remains operational. For them the focus is on keeping that critical defence up, for the larger ship they have the hull strength to allow the shield to go down and focus more on healing the hull directly. The same thing is true in hunting, a smaller ship needs to focus more on keeping their shield module repaired, while a larger ship has more flexibility in diverting attention between the shield and the hull. Like I said, I'm not sure if the numbers are quite right to create this situation, but that's what I'm aiming for!


I'm more thinking about these as afflictions that will wear off after a certain amount of time. A creature shock may only last about 10 seconds or so, a worble might last a bit longer but only acts to slow the ship. Irrespective of whether all ships can do it sometimes (speed is uniform) or small ships retain invincibility (speed remains inversely proportional to size), dancing around a mob without ever being hit leads to a vastly imbalanced risk/reward scenario. We need some mechanism for creatures to sometimes hit the ship, and provided that with the proposed shield/hull/damage changes most ships can weather at least a few hits I think this will be a positive improvement.


I agree that manoeuvring to avoid a greater proportion of hits should still be something that pilots can do, and I don't want to change that. However, being able to avoid all hits is quite different, and there is basically no skill required for this - as long as you move fast enough the large areas of unrestricted movement will allow you to easily keep away from any number of following creatures. (Dragons are an exception at the moment for large ships, because their speed is so great.) If there is a skilled commander piloting the ship, I usually never have to heal once as an Empath. I think the situation need to be tweaked, so that you can still move to evade some hits, but you're not going to be invincible while you do so.


That's certainly a fair comment. Remember though that unless the other revisions go in though that buffing up your ship reduces your potential experience gain anyway.


Er... I was hoping it would be either available to anyone or in common Aethercraft somewhere, since it would still be useful to Commanders in lieu of flashpoints. I'm also not sure how I would feel basing the enticement of Empath spec on piloting skills.


This is a good idea, and certainly can't hurt... but given the scale of aetherspace and the speeds involved at the moment I'm not sure that it would be useful that often. It would definitely be very fun to have the Empath do a 'deep space scan' sort of thing periodically to ping for where other ships or creature swarms might be, but I would think this would also allow for hunting ships to be aware of incoming threats early enough to get away as well. Still, it would be fun!

Also, thanks for providing such detailed comments, I appreciate it muchly!

Thinking about it some more, I wonder if one of the admin would be willing to explain what they intended to be the functional roles between small and large ships - that is, in what roles and purposes they were intended to shine, and what tasks would they be awful at attempting?

I've always just assumed that aetherships would work like RL ships. Small ships are fast and maneuverable but they can't carry much or take a lot of damage. Great big ships are better equipped to take damage and can carry more firepower, but they're big and cumbersome. The ones in between do in between.

That doesn't make sense? Seems reasonable to me.

Not necessarily, I've used the example of Star Trek starships in the past. A tiny runabout might be able to hide better, but its not going to outrun a Defiant class ship, nor handle itself better in fighting hostiles.

I also think its important to look at roles here rather than just what seems like an easy distinction to make. The system has to have balance, otherwise we end up in the state we're in right now.

Edit: Actually, I'm trying to think of any sci-fi movie/show where a tiny ship is more dangerous than a big, highly advanced one, because the tiny ship goes so blindingly fast that it never gets hit, while the big cruiser just gets continually pounded away at. Battlestar galactica might be close, but then the big ships are SO defensively and offensively more powerful than the small ships that it doesn't bear any resemblence to the Lusternian system. Certainly the tiny scout ships would not have all modules or multiple crew.

There are any number of Star Trek examples where the "smaller" Star Fleet ship beats up the much bigger and bulkier enemy ship. Usually shown by it flying along faster than the enemy ship, soaking a few hits / dodging a few, and unleashing a devastating blow at weak points.

Same thing happens in Stargate with their ships.

Further, it's pretty much a sci-fi standard that the larger a ship is, the slower / harder to maneuver it is. Y'know, that whole mass thing.

PS: Death Star?

Meh, I just don't see that interpretation leading to any form of meaningful balance. There are other interpretations for ship size, and I think they are better used.

In the same way that a magic-user should really be able to beat a sword-wielding warrior every time (come on, click of the fingers and their heart/brain gets mushed), the speed difference between ships does not lead to a fair system.

In terms of balance, you're right that it doesn't work out. In terms of science fiction standards (the comparison you were making), it is pretty well established. The SW universe also has Y-wing bombers that carry the capital-ship killers, and are used against larger, more advanced ships when your own capitals can't stand up to them. The Rebel Alliance heavily depended on their smaller ships.

Of course, this also isn't exactly scientifically accurate. You could perhaps compare to, say, airplanes however-- speed and agility versus firepower and destructive capability (fighers versus bombers).

Well, I do think there are examples out there of sci-fi imagery that is not necessarily counter to what I've suggested, but ultimately the balance issue is the most important. I'll just have to leave it rest on that argument.

You shouldn't consider all the Sci-Fi stuff, it's obviously a trap!

I was just having an interesting discussion about the difficulties with movement spam in aetherspace, and I had a thought.

What if an ATCP-enabled client could receive aetherspace map data that way, so any number of plugins could be written to display it in a separate window without clogging up the main one? Something like "Ship.Position 20 -300 Ship.Plane ethereal Ship.Nearby (-2,3,mine) (5,3,ship) (-1,1,beast) (-2,-1,beast)". The Nexus client could have an inbuilt map display window identical to the MAP one that's there now. People that don't have an ATCP enabled client can just enable the map-per-movement display as there is now.

There is admittedly a major problem with this that I can see right away: the limited information as in the example above would rely on a client-side version of the full plane aethermap, as well as give positional coordinates that aren't available using the regular method. An alternative is just to send the whole viewscreen via atcp ("Ship.Map XXXX XXXXXX\\nXXXXXXXX @ XXXXX" etc), but I'm not sure it would be a good thing to be sending so much through that protocol. It's quite possibly a better option though, and it would need to be a CONFIG option that you could turn off and on.

That way it is possible for some clients to externalize the map data separate to the combat/chatter spam.

I'd love to spend six hours together defining what I think it should be, but I don't have the time, which may seem like a cop-out, and maybe it is. I do agree that making the tradeoff be nothing but SvE versus SvS (handy abbreviations) is a bit simplistic, but better that than no tradeoff at all. I always imagined that small ships should be good at scouting and getting places quicker, faster ships at bringing force to bear, taking damage, and hauling more people/stuff. It doesn't have to be that way -- your Star Trek analogy makes clear that speed doesn't have to work that way -- but it seems that's the model that Lusternia had in mind and it's just as viable and just as well-precedented. (Which makes me think maybe smaller aetherships shouldn't be able to move as many people... which would be quite a change! And have ramifications I'm not able to think through right now.)

Anyway, as I imagine it, smaller ships wouldn't be able to have all the modules (let alone artifacts). You'd have the tiny ships of 1-3 rooms which could just be about getting places, bigger ones that have room to have the modules and artifacts but which were still fast and not powerful (like mine), and destroyer-class behemoths.

I personally don't agree that it's impractical to have these kinds of ships have different roles in fights just because it's impractical for one person to own all three (or however many) sizes. First of all, the admin want to encourage you to spend, so that's a factor. Second, even if you owned all three you couldn't fly them all at once: but if you can't own all three, can your city? Armadas as a cooperative thing run by clans or cities seem like a very good thing, and I don't see a proposal leading to them as a bad thing about that proposal, quite the contrary.



Ah, that's all right then.


Maybe I don't do enough off prime, but my experience even in fairly wide-open spaces is that you can avoid most or all of the hits in a small ships some of the time but not all the time, because all that moving is what brings more creatures out, so all the dodging is also what causes more critters to appear. Once you have 2-3 creatures or more, your only choice to avoid hits is to run away; otherwise, you weave to greatly minimize the damage but not to avoid it entirely.

Maybe if I had better combateers I could simply do my dodging in a straight line away instead of weaving around and between the critters. Or maybe if I stayed in areas with a single creature type (so all the critters moved the same speed) it'd be easier to just stay one room ahead of them all since they'd stay together. I'll be the first to admit my experience has been seriously limited by my lack of active crews with extended attention spans. But my experience shows that it's possible for aetherspace to work where dodging works as it does now but doesn't avoid damage entirely... so if there are places or situations where that's not true, maybe those are what should be changed, instead of getting away from dodging as an integral part of the process.


I was suggesting it'd be available to everyone; this is just a way it would become available to Empaths earlier than to the others, as a means of encouraging people to have a reason to become the former. That would require it to be in the specs, not Aethercraft, admittedly. Perhaps it could be in Aethercraft as a slow-and-limited form, then a better-and-faster one would appear in the specs, earlier in Empath than in Combateer, to get best of both worlds?


Seems to me that "getting away" is already way too easy and "finding your prey" is way too hard -- it makes the 16th century Spanish Main seem positively claustrophobic -- so adding something to let you find another ship (not creature, just ships) that's laden with goodies, and then to head towards them without them realizing until you're close enough for them to show up on the usual "The H.M.S. Wombat is to the south" thing, would be more than adequate. The Wombat might be big enough to stay and fight, or small enough to try to run. There has to be some chance for the attacker to catch the quarry though! Right now there isn't; hence, no piracy, even though the admins have given us all this tasty loot to get if you do get someone.

Another thought: make it so something you do in aetherspace gives karma, and something to offer your god. That's another way that aetherhunting falls short of everything else you can be doing with that time. I'd hate to just tack it on -- every time your ship blows something up you get esteem, for instance -- so hopefully you can take one of the other ideas you're proposing and add this in, so that it actually makes sense.