I'm considering paying for at least a month or two further of play, but I'm unsure if I want to. One thing that would help is knowing if there are player-operated capships in the game, and how I can go about acquiring them if I choose to.

the VO wiki mentions only one capship that is PC controlled, and it's unclear if that only applies to turrets or the whole thing.

Currently capital ships are only controlled by NPCs, but there are ones that you can dock with and take control of the turrets.

i dont ever want to see player owned capships in this game unless the devs make it work briliantly.

Worth adding is that player-controlled cap ships are on the way, and have been for a long, long time, but that we have no idea when they will finally be implemented.

Been on the way for about a year and a halfish.

Capships are a bit like buses ...... you wait for ages then 3 show up in B8 all at once.....

I'm with Bean. Cap ships need to fly well and be relatively glitch-free before they are player-controlled. Otherwise there's going to be 45 minutes of celebration that they're released to us, followed by weeks of bitching and years of references to what a mistake it was to release them too soon. They need a better pilot interface, probably some automation to help them steer convincingly, some better defenses, etc.

I would say come back and check in 2-3 years for that :)

I predict the arrival of player-controlled Tridents before the end of 2007.

sweet :)

RelayeR... no... really... I must call bull... I'm willing to bet a subscription on that.

relayer are you dyslexic? i think you meant 7002

Whistler is absolutely correct. But that stuff has all been coming for about a year and a halfish.

I think Whistler's prediction may be painting a brighter picture even than is true. I know the the first inklings of PC Capships span back to mid-04 when a1 would fly the original cruiser around.
At that point there was talk of making PC Capships a reality, something the Devs at that time acknowledged was a plan for the future that they were already beginning to explore, even going so far as taking some notes from the message boards about what the players would like to see.
I can't see good capital ships getting into the mix up for another year or so most likely. The problem is that you'll have massive imbalances between the massive cruisers and the little newb buses.

For now, I say to take the turrets with happiness. I would suspect the Devs would release a date if it was going to be less than a year because they would at least have an idea, and it'd be a great selling point for them to finally be able to say.

I predicted something? I think you mean RelayeR.

Let us not forget that the devs have had to deal with the unexpected failure of the Deliverator (due to previously undocumented bugs with LISP) this year. Repairing that was a major priority that put them behind schedule. Very little work was done on the cap ships during that time. Their past performance on this is not a good predictor of what is to come.

Realistically, we'll implement more use-cases for existing capital ships before we make them player-pilotable. Ie, more "border skirmish" kind of stuff. We've spent a lot of recent time on server side optimization and expanding/improving the server cluster to make this sort of thing possible, since big capship battles are fairly resource intensive. Ie, the work that we have been doing has this specific goal in mind.

So, expect the first stage to be.. more uses of NPC capships (dockable, with controllable turrets, etc), followed by the appearance of PC capships, which are actually owned and operated by players. The former will let us better prepare for the latter.

Relayer's estimate is slightly optimistic, but not impossible either, and is certainly more realistic than all the naysayers who think it's going to take us several years ;). I've talked elsewhere about making baseline Tridents available more quickly (even very quickly), but I would like to see how the NPC-side usage shakes out first. I know as soon as we make PC capships available, it will become the #1 goal of our entire userbase, and I would like them to be both worthwhile and also not blow up the game.

Would one of those interim stages be putting the capships back into the convoys? It was way cool to be flying those missions with a Trident, Teradon or Constellation in tow.

incarnate,

could I petition for guild owned space stations before the cap ships? It seems something much easier and faster to implement since they dont need to be flown and controlled etc. and it would give players and guilds finally a home, a place to be based at and places to attack. Please please please!

M. Duncan

PS: could you make the price somewhat expensive yet not in the billion credits range.

ms: Yes, capships in covoys and other locations (like appearing in more and lower-level missions) and stuff will be part of this. I hope to use the assets we have as widely as possible. We have not, to date, largely due to technical issues.

mdan: actually, player owned stations would not necessarily be easier. There's the issue of making sure areas don't get overcrowded, and then there's whole concept of "being based at" and "places to attack".. I mean, there's no station conquest system as of yet. I have notes for one, but it hasn't yet made it to the Trac system yet.

That said, it is possible that some "simplified" version of player stations could appear before, or around the same time as, player capships. But I'm not currently sure what form it would take. Frankly, for the moment I think Guilds could use things like.. an actual bank account, and other related mechanics.

We're trying to go about doing this the "right way".. we really need a crafting system to do some of this higher level stuff properly (we do not want it based purely on money), and creating that basic crafting mechanism is actually not very hard.. it's mostly a design issue. But, we need to redo the types of minerals and ores in the galaxy and their distribution, take into account specialized Hive drops (currently in the works) and roll it all together to make the proper background to actually acquire and sustain large-scale craft and stations. This does not mean it'll be insanely difficult to acquire/build/maintain (as I've heard complaints that it is in other games), but it won't be easy for the better stuff.

Most Importantly: This is not just about making new Stuff To Buy, this is about adding new gameplay elements and making sure they work in concert with what's already there, to create a more vibrant Whole Game.. instead of a basic game with a bunch of random and unrelated offshoots (we have too much of that already). If we just hack a gameplay feature together, we generally end up with a feature that's only interesting for its own sake and has little greater meaning or value. We've done that before, and it sucks, so we're trying to do something better.

Anyway, this is not going to take forever (or years and years), parts of it will show up this year, along with the overall game plan and order of execution (yes, the game Trac, finally). We really are wrapping up most of the boring infrastructure work, like I've been saying in the newsposts.. and it's really a good thing that we've gotten that stuff done, as much of a chore as it has been for us (and boring for you guys).

I don't know that we'll have PC capships by the end of the year, but there will be meaningful and obvious (and fun) gameplay changes by then.. which will be goals specifically for the purpose of more interesting player-owned content. We haven't much gameplay change for this entire year, so.. that'll be nice.

Inc:Frankly, for the moment I think Guilds could use things like.. an actual bank account, and other related mechanics.

Definitely Very much so :)