Astroflux Thoughts

Astroflux – Present game

I would classify AstroFlux as an excellent game engine/mechanics, but would call it an incomplete game because there is so much amazing potential to what has been established. The existing content is designed for a player to go into the late 20’s early 30’s before the game either gets difficult or repetitive. Now, this is really based on a single user perspective which doesn’t necessarily group up too often. Grouping up could allow the more difficult regions to be overcome (Sark in partic
ular).

The Great

GUI – very clean and intuitive to use
Play Style – easy in, easy out action game
Weapons – Nice assortment, variety and effects
Systems – well organized and provide varying difficulty when appropriate. I love the little details like the planets revolving around the sun.
Artifacts – ability to make your ship capabilities different than other players. Though end game may look very similar for PvP situations

The Good

Resources – readily available and I can’t really argue with the costs

Leveling – gives you a bump in capabilities. This could be easily be changed to have bigger or smaller increments – based solely on where you want to go from here.

Planet Exploration – I like it and early on the resources are very helpful. I’m not sure where it is going long term, but it’s an interesting distraction and a reason to get to a planet when it might be difficult to clear out the creatures.
Replayability – it’s just a good shooter in every way and form. System response time seems reasonable, but a large load could affect that. Still, it would be a great problem to have.

The Bad

What has been achieves deserves to make you money, but there is no compelling reason for people to necessarily buy flux. We need to correct this so you can fund further development to turn this from a fun platform to a real game.

Astroflux needs to be developed into a game that continues with its action based play style, but turned into more than what it currently is. It really needs some long term game design. It needs something to lure players in and keep them there once they have maxed out their level/ship. It needs resource sinks and player cooperation (guilds/factions) & player battles (with meaning if possible)

Leveling – Downside is that a level difference of 12 gives you 100% changes to the stats and makes level differences quite significant

The Ugly

PvP is terrible because there is no penalty to being a pirate. You can have the best of everything. You basically lose nothing when attacking because you typically have the advantage of first strike or determining the timing of the encounter. In my mind a pirate is a rag tag ship that can take on wary travelers, but not usually capable of bringing down a military vessel (unless it’s the smallest of vessels).

Opinion – Player population has dwindled to a point where this game may vanish.

Artifacts – Remove the resist all artifact or allow the resist all artifact to drop, but have it on a timer so it will decay and maybe be unusable in about a week. This might make fighting a bit more interesting while allowing an artifact to be powerful. Or make the artifact space

Repairing ship damage – comes from existing resources. No resources, then no repair. This will somewhat help

Engine Thrust – comes from existing power and not based ona special ability. This would make following & firing on a ship much much harder

Opinion of what could make this game greater

This will be a very high level overview and I won’t go into great detail

Multiple starting systems

Let us have something on the order of 5-6 races within the game. The different weapons can be grouped to “belong” to a certain race and then they could all have similar base weapons, but let the more advanced weapons come at a later point. Very similar to how it is now, but not all weapons are available to all races.

Weapons from one race to another may not be compatible without some research/technology. Otherwise, you may not be able to pick up a weapon from one race and just add it to your existing ship or there is a chance of failure to make it work.

Don’t allow the starting races to easily meet other races. They should be on the verge of the late teens, early 20’s before the can/should engage in pvp. Similar to the existing structure where Hyperion – Arrenius is the starter area.

Within a race you can be military/police/free trader. These will each have different ship designs/capability. For example free traders have more cargo and bigger pickup radius for debris/loot (like buying the tractor beam option, but permanent). Police/military will have different options as well.

Free Space

The area between starter areas should contain a certain amount of free space where npc creatures can be found in abundance. The existing Gellan System seems like the right idea (Krittilian-Vibrillian/Sark ought to do). Though, I think this area would have to be way way larger.
I could see this area ultimately becoming the battleground for players and/or where guilds will try to establish bases. A base would be a player craftable items and a building that gets created by a guild pooling resources. Then the ships that are generated would act similar to existing pve battle stations and can be attacked by other players (and/or pirates). These structures and the ships that are produced can have many different levels and possible weapons.

Warp gates from each race will only have 1 entrance to free space. Other warp gates would have to be established, but a group of players would have to physically traverse the systems to set up a destination warp gate?

Guilds-Factions

This is ideally an end game and maybe a long term goal would be to turn all pve establishments over to a controlling faction. That way there can be strife within a race to capture a system.

Resource become paramount to factions to keep their battle stations supplied, building weapons and ships to patrol the station (shields, …) This would be on of the game sinks as a battle station would have a limited supply of resources and when they run out the station can no longer produce defensive ships. Meanwhile, stations near planets/asteroids will be able to provide an income to the guild.

The guild will need to constantly get resources to be maintained. It won’t be easily sustained by 1-2 users or the guild won’t get very far if it is. Players will need to donate resources, which could hamper their ability to get weapons

Research

Guilds and even individual players can research newer technologies and there can be multiple weapon types, new weapon types, ship construction, artifacts, …Warp gates, battle stations, no real limit here and lots of depth can be added to this. The base framework that is pve can be taken over by players and then improved.

Ship Types

probably limited by race and have variety within a faction.

The ships may only be able to deploy certain weapons

Each one can have a range configuration (like levels 1-6 in present, but maybe expand these from 1-10 and then only allow each race to get a range like 1-6 within . Thus 1-7, 2-7, 3-8, 4-9, 5-10

For Example you could have a quick strike vehicle that has engines that range from 5-10 (so they essentially start at level 5), but has armor limit of 1-6 and maybe shield limit of 1-8 as well? Turning speed which represents a maximum range (5-10 as well). For cost purposes level 5 = other peoples level 1. The engine could have a power limit of 1-6 so it can’t have a huge upper limit on firepower
Have a juggernaught which can have max shields and armor, slowest turning radius and speed. Could employ limited power (which could represent the fact that more power is needed to make it move)

Pirate Faction – Perma PVP
Not able to get the maximum of each system/weapon available to empires.

PVP – existing pvp (less organized thoughts I had before, but just put in)
Suggestions (not necessarily all of them, but some in consideration of the existing system)

Can’t get maximum category for any ship component. This would be represented by the fact that pirates generally don’t have access to the best possible gear and/or they have to salvage the gear from opposing players.

When killed, get a 10 minute penalty – consider it jail time

Lose considerable xp maybe even a level

Warning system for when a hostile is within “X” distance of a non pirate. This shows up in the min map as a blicking red dot at the edge of the screen

Regular players can eject cargo. This will force the pirate to go or the booty or go for the attack. The ejected cargo should have a very short life for the pirate to be able to pick up

“Opinion – Player population has dwindled to a point where this game may vanish.”

I think you hit the nail on the head right there. The PVP system killed the player numbers early on because people got sick of being killed by pirates and the developer only made a half-assed effort (exp protection) to remedy the problem. So everyone took off.

The game has zero visibility on Kong now and is unlikely to regain it so if the developer wants to do anything they should suck it up, take the advice of the few players like you who stuck around and suggested improvements, and make Astroflux 2.

You compliment how the core gameplay is great, but then you go on to list a ton of unneccesary changes to the core gameplay. While I like some of them, too many changes will make the game less enjoyable for me. I don’t want to rely on other people in guilds to have all the best benefits.

Also, why nerf resist all artifacts? They never protect much as a single resist artifact, so they aren’t overpowered.

Originally posted by GhoullyX:

You compliment how the core gameplay is great, but then you go on to list a ton of unneccesary changes to the core gameplay. While I like some of them, too many changes will make the game less enjoyable for me. I don’t want to rely on other people in guilds to have all the best benefits.

Also, why nerf resist all artifacts? They never protect much as a single resist artifact, so they aren’t overpowered.

The OP didn’t say to change any of the gameplay, but suggest reasons for keeping people in the game. If you want this ti be a social game, then guilds are going to be a reality (because you want them to feel invested in the game). And the fact that they have levels and upgrades lends itself to being more of a progressive game.

With a small development group, it might make sense to turn this into more of an action based game, but how do you keep people in it? They (developers) seem to be in the middle where the action is great and there’s free/open pvp. Perhaps they should move away from the leveling and more towards the action and make it tournament-style based. Turn it into a true action game where there’s a clean reset on ships and/or work progression in a slightly different means.

the PvP thing really did kill this game. the first time I saw PvP on this game, pretty much everyone was a pirate, and I was police since I didn’t know they had an advantage.

Police advantages: none other then more safe zones.
Pirate advantages: EVERYTHING except less safe zones.

I agree, this game has a very slight chance of making it alive because of the PvP.

I’ve been police since I’ve started, and while there is a lot of PvP in Arrenius, it’s easy to avoid the people marked in red on your map. And a person doesn’t get any more credit after killing you 3 times in a row.

And there is a lot less pvp in galaxies beyond Arrenius, and most are friendly duels with consent of both parties, or experienced players chasing out looting noobs who bought their way into a galaxy that they shouldn’t be at yet.