Gibbonici

Yeah I know what you mean about the punishing players thing, especially in a multiplayer environment. One of the most horrible things in Minecraft was dying in lava during a deep mining expedition and losing the lot ;) Mind you, it did make those mining expeditions really, really tense! Speaking of Minecraft, the thing that impresses me most about Avorion is that it has that same elegant immediacy to it as Minecraft has. The gameplay (so far) is simple and stylised yet easy to relate to in the same way that Minecraft is - it all makes perfect sense and every interaction is instantly rewarding. That's a rare thing in space games, as most of them tend to confuse complexity for depth (the X games for example, and even Eve Online) and all of them have multiplied what Elite had back in the 80s without actually adding very much to the formula. What you've done with Avorion right from the start is take a different direction with the space-sim gameplay. I've got to say, as a gamer whose been gaming ever since there were videogames to play, it's really exciting to see someone doing something different with a genre that could be awesome but has been pretty much stagnant for decades. Keep it up and you could have a killer game on your hands here :) Anyway, I don't want to hijack the thread so I'll leave it there ;)

Perhaps if you keep the global storage but make it so that players can only trade from cargo ships? Similarly, cargo blocks could be required on stations before they're able to trade with players and NPC ships. Cargo blocks would need to be loaded with whichever resource(s) the player wants to trade, and when the trade is complete the cargo block's inventory is updated as required. If a cargo block is destroyed in combat a proportion of it's cargo would leak from the ship, allowing for some cargo resources to be destroyed with the cargo block. The main kink in this idea would be where and how do you load your cargo blocks? The obvious answer would be from an owned station (with its own loaded cargo blocks) but that would mean that a player wouldn't be able to trade until he's built a station. Maybe that's not a bad thing though - it would certainly encourage players to build stations and it would force them to defend them too. Especially if resources loaded onto a station couldn't be sucked back into global storage.

Wow, awesome ships! Makes me a bit embarrassed of my fleet of tiny, cobbled together fighters ;)

Hello, I'm new. And human. More or less.