Starship Corporation

After messing with the alpha, I think it could be useful to be able to place rooms directly adjacent to each other with no walls in between to save space. So for example I could put all of my fuel tanks in one big room. For balancing it of course would be a security/fire/hull breach hazard as they aren't isolated from each other.

I would think that would make the game too easy if you could just chunk same room types together. On the other hand I would also think it would make it too difficult as well. An over reliance on bigger rooms to save wall space by newer players would end up generating far too much risk and when disaster strikes, for example, a fire. The room gets shut off from the rest of the ship preventing crew from putting out the fire.

Too easy and too hard? In my opinion being able to connect rooms directly would allow at least as much different ship desing philosophies as the different room sizes. Sure, completely open ship would do badly in disasters but it would be cheap to build and easy to maintain, just as ship with all rooms separated by corridors and double hatches would be catastropheproof, but expensive and slow to maintain. Whole point of the ship designing is to find balance between safety and economy, making a desing that best suits the clients needs. Having both extremes available will permit all the options in between.

Ok. Let's put it a different way.

Provide an idea of how to implement you idea. But within the current structure, so that a new player who starts playing the game discovers the feature, but can easily identify the flaws and benefits of having such a room.

With lots of options also comes complications and the average computer game player does not like complicated unless it's easy to understand but difficult to master.
For example League of Legends or Starcraft 2 games are two easy entry level games but are difficult to be a master of, yet both games are some of the most popular online content in the world.

So to implement this into gameplay propose an idea to us.

Well... franky I do not think space ship designing / space corporation management simulator is the most mainstream genre around. SC is is meant for a relatively small niche market, not for "average gamers". It doesn't need to be an easy to learn & hard to master -style game.
In Starcraft and LoL the main point of the game is thrilling, fast paced gameplay where you try to perform an optimized tactic little better and little faster than your opponent, you think stuff like "at 1:15 I should have unit X here because my opponent is probably going to have unit Y there at 1:25 because that's what everyone does on this map", there is very little room for experimenting and innovation.
In SC its all about taking your time to use the pieces you have to make a ship you think might work, then you run the simulations, notice something that doesn't work and make the changes that you think might make it better. What fun would it be if there was only one or two working predetermined ways to build a ship? Because that's how it is if there is only strictly limited number of options available, it would be easy-to-learn-and-easy-to-master -style game and thats something that doesn't keep your interest for very long.


and answer to your question :

Q:"Provide an idea of how to implement you idea. But within the current structure, so that a new player who starts playing the game discovers the feature, but can easily identify the flaws and benefits of having such a room.":

A: well, if common sense didn't tell the player not to put all the eggs in one basket I'd imagine he pretty much notices the flawedness of his design during first collision simulation as his entire crew gets spaced after the first asteroid impact. So... the player has learned something new, wipes his bitter tears of disappointment and gets back to the drawing board.

But this is what will drive the average player away from the game if you assume that "common sense" prevails. Common sense is inherently not common in it's understanding of how it works. There has to be a structure to help educate players on a more complicated ship design, or at least something to point them on how to find out the information for themselves. Currently I think the rooms and themselves with the one ship design we have right now can be easily played around with.

I like your idea but the key thing with it is the idea how it gets implement so a player can take and mould it. The underlying theme of this game is the players create the content so I'm all for your idea but again my concerns are leaving a game open to lots of changes and adjustments will overwhelm players unfamiliar with the genre. To be honest I would like to see this game be a success and easy access and easy to learn is the first step in that process.

I like the idea of merging rooms together. But it may be too much to be able to merge any two rooms together (what's the point in having a water tank in the same room than your bridge and your fuel, except for minimizing survival time ...). Maybe restricting it to merge only rooms of same types (like putting pilots and technicians in the same quarter, or doing one big fuel tank). To allow even more customization we can also have several size/shape for each room (like the corridors, where you put a lot of different pieces to do one complex corridor).

I think it's true that allowing more options like that can be overwhelming in some cases, but this is probably the kind of thing that you want to explain in the tutorial. For example when you introduce the player to the concept of merging room, you can explain the advantages and drawbacks. I think this is the kind of change that can allow a LOT of different design while remaining easy enough to be understood by the vast majority of players.

Tutorial missions/videos with good tips and a campaing that lets the player only use limited selection of buildings, presenting the player new features at manageable pace. That worked very well in games like Tropico 3 and Grand Ages Rome, both games are very overwhelming and leave you completely clueless if you just directly jump into sandbox mode. As there is no campaing yet or in the near future the easiest way for dev to do this would be having the more advanced blueprints purchasable, as they already are. I have nothing against making the landing softer for new players by limiting the early acces to more complex features and giving ingame advice.
What must not be done, is to leave out extremely vital options like directly connected rooms with interesting pros and cons just to make the game seem little easier for new players. If the SC goes on the road of over-simplification it will only lose those core players who have waited a detailed and realistic ship designing /corporation management game for years, average casual gamer whose favourite games are Angry Birds and Modern Warfare 3 still won't like it.
And seriously, directly connected rooms ain't that complex feature "Directly connecting rooms will make them faster to maintain but exposes them to fires, boarding parties and hull breaches. Building hatches and corridors between rooms is safer but requires more money, space and energy" That pretty much sums it up, two sentences that could be shown in the main menu in a hint box. In a game where you need right amount of right kind of crew to keep a generator maintained so that power relay can power the doors to the life support system which keeps the said crew alive as longs as there is enough air and water tanks around and enough crew of other type to keep those in working order etc... Do you really think that putting two fuel storages directly next to each other is what is going to drive the new players away?

Nope. Just playing devil's advocate to get you to flesh out your idea more

I agree that allowing to join some rooms together would be a nice feature. It is not so complex at all if you think about it. This game will need a good tutorial anyways, cause its ment to be complex and it will be liked mainly for its complexity.

It would be especially usefull to integrate corridors with rooms, i.e have a corridor being a side of the room itself. When it comes to merging tanks together I really think that it should be done in a different way. You should be able to put a tank of any rectangular shape and have the game calculate its capacity based on this, with minimum size based on the tank type (for fuel/water/air pumps and filters etc). Fixed sized tanks and cargo spaces will be limiting to ship designs I think.