Loot drops, unique foes, and rare items

Also prisoners/survivors.

The devs have said that they're working on making the economy more meaningful at all stages of the game (the SC2 end-game was pretty much economy agnostic). I can imagine that extending from a single economic entity "resource unit" to a more varied approach could factor in here.

Yeah combat in SC2 became meaningless and  monotonous late in the game. After you'd acquired all possible techs and allied with everyone you were usually so rich you had more money than you knew what to do with. And at one point at end game resources just became infinite. Incentivising combat is a must for this reboot. 

I am okay with better loot as long as the loot is locked into place well before the battle begins. This would discourage save scumming (Save/Reload if you didn't get the item you needed.)

I agree the standard loot for defeating foes and scouting planets was a bit boring. The unique story items you got for completing quests and following major rumors is what really shined (like the quasi portal).  More loot variety would be great, as long as it doesn't just boil down to +1, +2 stat number crunching and endless inventory clutter. Honestly, I'd rather settle for rare but meaningful loot with unique stories and mechanics, than plentiful and varied loot with minute bonuses.

I entirely agree!

Yeah incremental bonuses by number are boring.  In this genre of action game I'd like to see loot that does something to gameplay but isn't overly OP'd.  ie,

Exceptional Loot

- modules that change the flight pattern and/or behavior of weapons fire (zig-zag, speed, kinetic push-back, etc)

- ship captains

- intact weapons (that can be jury-rigged but not de-engineered)

Regular Loot

- minerals/materials

- ship parts (gathering enough of these allows you to put an associated ship together, or maybe some of these can be swapped with existing ships)

- prisoners/personal (good for knowledge or new crew members)

- extra landers

- pieces to personalize your ships

- etc

Of course, I'm only speaking to items that are not critical to any storylines or quests.  

Guys, let's not turn this new SC into full fledged RPG.

For me, its difficult to start or get involved with threads and have much of a voice/opinion until I see more of what Stardock has planned.

As soon as I see what Stardock's team has come up with that they think is a winning formula, then we'll all have a much more defined opinion of constructive criticism on how to shape the development. 

I want to be able to trade crew for tech....

...along with a whole set of consequences for doing so

Should be able to complete the game as both Space Savior and Space Asshole.  Resources as a whole should be tight enough that finding a Rainbow World should be a huge deal, and keeping it's location secret from other species an even bigger deal!

You want to shop at the Druuge outlet mall.

Quoting Hunam_, reply 7

Guys, let's not turn this new SC into full fledged RPG.

Why not?

I'm a little skeptical of a high emphasis on "loot" in a space adventure like Star Control.  So many games on the market feature loot, you don't need to play SC to get that "fix."  SC focuses on great story, exploration, and awesome space combat.  Keeping it simpler will keep the game defined in its proper niche.

However, if loot MUST be done, then extremely random loot reinforcement should be the way to go.  Say, 1 in 20 battles yields any interesting loot, but the other 19 are standard fare. Those numbers would be subject to some randomness, but you get the idea.  The reason for that is that according to psychology, random reinforcement does wonders.  Predictable loot would also grow as tiresome to many as no loot to others, but having a small element of randomly wonderful results from winning a fight means that any given fight COULD be something great waiting to happen, and that fits better with human psychology.

I know I wouldn't want to find thousands of useless items like you do in a game like Path of Exile.  It is appropriate for that game, but piles and piles of junk dropping everywhere would just be annoying in Star Control.

Yeah PoE and SC2 are opposite extremes for loot drops, tons of (useless) items versus just money all the time.  There needs to be a middle ground with SCR, to keep combat/exploration ever interesting but not dilute the game with the management of an endless variety of gear.  IMHO, Borderlands 2/pre-sequel has the right mix of quantity and types of drops

I think that part of the problem of inventory management arises when all the stuff the player has is clumped into a single discreet inventory. It makes management a pain once the stuff accumulates. Giving the player options to sort through the inventory by various criteria alleviate the issue only slightly at best (and can make it even more obnoxious at worst).

This can be remedied without sacrificing any depth by compartmentalizing the player's possessions into entirely separate portions of the interface. As an example from SC2, the minerals and artifacts have almost nothing to do with each other. The minerals got a very handy list that showed you at a quick glance how much you were carrying of each type; imagine if while you were scrolling through your artifacts to use your portal spawner, you had to scroll past the iron, cobalt, yttrium, xenon, and radium you have before finding it in a single list. Many games work this way.

Suppose the game includes ship mods that you can collect; they belong in an interface that you'll only ever see when you're actually modding your ship (or when you simply want to check which mods you own). What I'm saying is that the entire notion of a single "inventory" should be avoided. Keep each aspect of the game in a whichever portion of the UI where it makes sense to put it.

Do this right, and you can easily get away with having a very deep, diverse system of loot/resources/mods/collectibles without overburdening the player.

While I agree that it'd be nice to incentivise combat I feel I have to state firmly that I _loathe_ diablo-esque loot systems. One in every twenty battles drops something nice? That'd make me feel like I had to grind combat to make my ship viable, combat can be fun in a lot of games but the instant it feels like an obligation and not something to seek out or avoid for it's own sake, I start to resent it.

Loot drops, rare items, and special bosses work for a game like Diablo.  I don't think it would work out in a Star Control style game.  I don't want to spend 4 hours grinding (RNGesus hates me) for the Hellbore Cannon of +4 tracking before I can take down Death 001 when/if he spawns.

A boss fight in this game doesn't necessarily have to require the mothership.  Early game bosses could be designed to be "picked apart" little by little by the ships the player is likely to have at that point in the game.  I think at least a half dozen or so boss fights throughout the full game would be great, if they are well-designed and fun fights.  The way the ships are so unique makes it kind of easy to design boss-type fights that particular ship will be good at dealing with.  A good early "boss fight" might be a raid on a star system, where you have to destroy or disable defenses like maybe a minefield, a few defense satellites, and a base station (weak base).  This would be easy to balance for the ships you know the player is carrying early in the game.

The mothership in SC2 is like a flying combat god.  It's the fastest, most agile, most durable, has the most energy and the most powerful weapons (guided bullets!).  I think the idea was that it would allow players who did not like the space combat to effectively skip it with by using the godly mothership.  That might be an idea they want to carry over into the new game.  It's a game design feature I call a "safety valve".  In this case, people who like the space combat can use the satellite ships in fights that are hard but winnable using those ships and those who don't like the space combat but want to play this great adventure game can use the mothership to effectively skip the space combat.  And the people who use the ships in normal fights would still use the mothership for the endgame boss fights that only that ship can win (although those fights might be designed to require the use of the small ships to pick apart some defenses before using the mothership).

There are a lot of interesting scenarios like a convoy raid, system defense, base defense, "juggernaut" (i.e. a massive giant super ship), starbase (i.e. massively giant super base) that might be used as a type of "boss battle" and fit into the storyline in a really cool way.

Good point - different battles require different strategies/ships. 

Maybe we should take a different perspective, liken the command ship to the Galactica and the associated fleet ships to Vipers, essentially a slow moving but uber powerful carrier/battleship compared to fighters and frigates.  The command ship and its guns would be too large/bulky/slow against small single-pilot enemy fighters which can easily harass the command ship.  So, you launch your own fighters to deal with them.  But, when you encounter a Base Star, you bring your big Battlestar weapons to bear. (See BSG episodes 11 & 12)

I guess I should have used Star Destroyers and Tie Fighters in my analogy, given the coming movie... but you guys get the idea.

For the record, I am anti-loot.

Love the BSG analogy.

I like loot, but I think it would be nice to avoid inventory tetris in this game. After all, I should be able to just have a cargo hold, not some pockets like a diablo character (deep, halberd holding pockets, but still.) 

So what I think would be the most satisfying is

- standard loot like gains to various materials needed to manufacture stuff
- standard loot like money  

and the periodic rare loot

- ship members?
- new ship plan?
- rare custom version of an existing alien ship that could be lost after that one ship is destroyed?

and unique loot/result!

- an encounter 
- a quest starting item
- a new navigation point (a station generated where the random encounter happened, etc.)

I think if there was enough variety to make combat exciting and something I would be willing to even seek out, then it could be done while avoiding any actual inventory management. The rare "loot" doesn't need to be inventory based at all.  

oops, double post

Oh, I like this idea.  People have mentioned having officers and/or ship bonuses and I haven't really thought that fit with SC... but doing it this way does.  You could meet different characters that join your crew.  A little icon of them could display on the ship, like the landers did in SC2.  If you hover over the "officer" it shows what bonus it he gives you.  Then, they are generally "strategic bonuses" rather than tactical bonuses to your ship.  So if you had Fwiffo, for example, he might halve the fuel cost of running away from combat with the escape key.  A Syreen officer might have replaced 4 crew on any ship at the end of each battle, etc.  

A lot of players liked keeping one of each ship in their alliance really for no reason at all.  These officers would replace that representation of your alliance on your ship and the player wouldn't want to keep ships for that purpose for no real reason at all.

I like the idea of officers done something like this.  Ones you have to find as NPCs, represented on the ship display by icons and giving strategic bonuses instead of tactical ones.

Upvote for Officers/Captains.  

This idea might get to 'micromanagementy' but also selecting different officers to explore planets affects that gameplay too (ala ST:TNG), ie Captains and Commanders are needed for any level of diplomacy/negotiation, Science Officers are required to analyze/retrieve artificacts, Security officers lessen the hazard of dangerous life forms, etc.