Starship Corporation

There's one very important question with regard to the online, multiplayer, part of Starship Corporation:
Why would you buy someone else's ship design, instead of using your own?

Presenting: Patents

In real life, we have patents to enable companies to recoup the cost of, and to make profits from, research and development. Without patents, companies wouldn't innovate. Since as soon as they release a product, it would be copied by competitors - without them having to make the same investment.

So how would patents answer the opening question, in a positive way?

Here's how it could work:

Obtaining Patents
Patents can come from two sources.
1. Buy/Sell them on the online patent market.
2. Research new patents.

But, first, an important rule! Galactic law states that no one corporation may, at any time, hold more than 10, (or developer decided number of), patents. In order to obtain new patents - an existing patent must be sold or scrapped. But beware! Selling a patent will prevent continued construction of any ship design that incorporates it. If you sell a patent to someone, there is no guarantee that the buyer will ever want to sell it in the future.

Buying and Selling Patents
Players may put patents on the intergalactic market for any given price, (auctions?). A player that buys a patent will gain exclusive access to it. The player that sold a patent will free a patent slot in their corporation.

Scrapping patents
A player may choose to scrap a patent, in order to free a patent slot, instead of selling it. Scrapping a patent causes it to become unowned and any player may then gain it through research.

Researching Patents
A corporation may invest funds into research. After a fixed period of time, (hours?, days?, weeks?), the result of research will be a randomly chosen patent from unowned patents in the patent database. The patent database is an online database of patents that stores information about the patent and who is the current owner, (no owner = unresearched). The more funds invested, the better range of possible patents that research will provide.

Using Patents
There would be a 'Patents' tab in ship design.



In this tab, all patents would be shown as selectable icons. The tooltip would show the bonus that it provides. Patents can be only applied to the room that they upgrade. Maximum 1 patent applied per room. Below is an example of a "Bridge" room with a patent upgrade applied, (with an icon to indicate this):



Deleting a room from a design will, of course, remove any applied upgrade to that room. Patent upgrades are added to rooms after they are placed into the design.

What patents will be possible to research?
Firstly, not new rooms. This is to make implementation into the game more feasibile. Patents would upgrade existing rooms in a design. If randomly generated when researched - potentially millions of upgrade combinations could exist. But, preferably, every patent would be uniquely generated by the developer, (likely using his own random patent generator algorithms), and then players try to research and trade them online. There could still be millions of different patents, but this would prevent generation of duplicate patents, (which wouldn't make sense and would eventually break the patent system completely).

Some broad examples of possible patents:
Crew reduction:
Bridge: -1 Pilot for maintenance.
Small Medic Bay: +1 medic provided.

Stat' Boosting:
Medium Power Generator: +2.05% power output.
Cannon: +4.32 fire rate, -10 cooling requirement.

Trade off patents:
Air Tank: +5.07% air storage, -35 seconds maintenance timer.
Sick Bay: +12.72% heal rate, +30 power requirement.

The developer would have to give each positive and negative modifier a weighting, in order to generate patents with a suitable research price range, (the range of funds investment that a patent can be chosen by the game for giving to the player). In addition, the weighting could also adjust how much extra cost the upgrading of a room with a patent costs. Every patent must increase the cost of a ship design that uses them.

Further Notes on Game Balance
Richer corporations, (long time players), will have better patents through game progression. But they still will have only 10, (or developer decided number of), patents. This ensures that no player can dominate more than one niche area of ship design. In addition, patentless, basic, ship designs will always be cheaper, (than an identically designed ship), with ship price increasing in line with the quality of its applied patents. This means that mid-game players, unless they are at war with each other, may tend to buy ship designs from players at a broadly similar game progression level - since the ship cost will reflect what they can afford. Although, this depends on cost scaling and the desirability of upgraded ships. Newer players may purchase ships with smaller upgrades, if the cost of research is too expensive for them to obtain mid-range quality patents at that stage of the game.

Players must not be allowed to focus research on any area. The result must be completely random, within the price bracket that their invested research funds puts them in. This is to ensure that players will want to trade patents or to attempt to use what they have. The cost of repeatedly scrapping patents and researching new ones would suitably discourage players from attempting to acquire their desired set of patents purely through researching.

Patent ownership would need to expire, if not sold as part of a ship design over a long period of time, (Maybe, 6 months?). This enables patents held by inactive players to be returned to available research.

I really like this idea.

yes yes yes

your idea is good. i dont know how or if it can be done in the engine now but there is an other way to do nearly the same feature.
it can be done by adding moore different rooms. so you have to choose for example if you by the pilot quaters type A (10 power, 5m² and 4 pilots) or type B (30 power, 6m² and 6 pilots)

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More different rooms would be great, since it allows the shape of rooms to be different. But I'm concerned about the feasibility of dynamically generating rooms. Dynamic generation of room graphics - how would that work? Still, could be feasible... could be feasible...