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Progression, part III: 'Gate' wormholes and lucrative one-shots with a choice of challenges using ranked competitive drones.


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'Gate' wormholes and lucrative missions that you have one shot to complete.  Use the asynchronous competitive game modes Nimbatus uses now; but give the player an advantage in the campaign, permitting active control.  Other advantages may also be available.  A player shouldn't have to be a competitor to be able to beat the campaign, in my opinion.

Like any in-game solar system, provide more than one mission type to gain access.  You might have the option to win a race, beat a sumo bot, or fight a battle with a combat drone. (When racing and combat arenas open.)  Thus a player who hates races shouldn't HAVE to race.

I think that pulling player-designed drones into the campaign will be crucial in forging dynamic and challenging opponents.  Right now any scripted challenge can be defeated with specific engineering counters.

Pulling drones with a certain range of rankings should provide an increasing challenge.  You should quickly dump encounters with very weak drones, but the rate at which the pool narrows will slow down as you advance more and more, so it'll never narrow the pool so much that there's no variety.  Rankings for these drones should increase as you progress; every successive galaxy should shave the bottom 15% off the drone pool.  (Or whatever percent.)  Not taking the upper 85, 70, 55%, but the upper 85%, 72%, 61%, etc. 

This has the advantage of being mathematically simple:  (100 * (0.85 ^ current galaxy number)).  Shaving 10% off the lowest-ranked drones each galaxy, you'll be facing the top 10% of ranked drones after 22 wormholes.  Shaving 15%, you'll face the top 10% after 14 wormholes.  At 20% per jump, you'll get there in 10.

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What happens if you fail this mission that you have one shot to complete? Missing an interesting reward is like failing an exam to me, it feels iniquitous and stays indefinitely as a mark of failure. Which, in a game, is not much to my liking.

Also, I would prefer seeing an upper limit on drone rankings when picking an opponent, otherwise one could have trouble explaining how exactly a new player was faced with the #5 robot in combat arena, #3 in racing and #2 in sumo. Otherwise I suppose that offering drone designs to look at should give a few ideas to even the least creative of us.

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Nothing really.  The mission goes away, the planet becomes just another planetary mission afterward.  I agree with much of what you say, but I feel like risk has to exist somewhere within Nimbatus. I also feel that that risk should not set you back. You should have the opportunity to gain, but I don't feel like you should be actively punished, beyond not being rewarded for the win conditions. 

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Yes.  I would hope for a way to do a "trial run," but your attempt at the prize would always have an element of risk.

Ideally, though, I would hope there would be no such thing as an upgrade you could completely miss - you would just have to pick it up elsewhere. 

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