Looting
Looting involves monsters looting monsters or system users, users looting the same, and tiebreaking.
When monsters loot corpses, they gain exp based on the level of the corpse, and the corpse is destroyed. Items are destroyed (although I may change that). Ties between monsters currently make no difference to outcome.
When users loot monsters, both the faction base and the users gain system currency (called sysres). The base also gains a corpse, and the users can gain mana, depending on the mana type of the monster and the users’ mana affinity.
When a user loots the corpse of a user, the contents of the corpse are salvaged to the owner of the corpse. Ties between users make no difference.
Ties between monsters and users are broken by total levels: whichever side has the most gets the loot. If levels are equal, each side gets something, but as not as much as they would have otherwise.
Monster Processing
The base has a new monster processing room with projects to turn monster corpses into useful crafting materials. The higher the level the project, the more items can be extracted from each corpse, and the more corpses can be processed per project run.
Since the idea is to exterminate monster spawners, I intend that defeating the primary spawner of a monster will unlock a farming option at the base for that kind of monster (say, an abstracted teleport to the home plane of that monster), that way the source of the materials doesn’t vanish.
Note that corpses and extracted materials don’t have levels; only finished items have those.
System Currency
System currency, or sysres, is the game’s “premium” currency. Faction users can use it to buy one-time death protection for items or mana, exchange it for prestige, and possibly buy other useful things with it (like skill levels).
The base can use sysres to instantly complete high-priority projects that don’t have enough resources to start otherwise.
Another possible use is storage overrun compensation. If there’s one item for sale in the shop, and two users buy it on the same turn, a duplicate is deliberately genned so that both users get what they bought without needing to do a tiebreaker.
If that mechanic looks too unbalancing, I might charge the base sysres each time.
Base Elevator System
The base core room, which has the System Pylon, now has an elevator nexus to all the internal rooms of the base. The navigation dialog also shows what actions you can do in each room, so you don’t have to pop in and out of each room to check.
That should make moving around the base easier for the player and the NPCs.
Surface Access
The System base is underground, and the core room now has a tunnel to a heavily-defended surface gate room. It has a recessed blast door and two LMG turrets, allowing them and any defenders to used ranged attacks on the surface zone outside the gate.
The core room also has a blast door, and the System Pylon itself is now a powerful AoE turret (that ignores friendlies).
Planned Scenario System
I’m planning to make the game a series of scenarios, in which the System base connects to a sector so that resources can be gathered and monsters killed to improve the base and its users.
For now, I’m thinking that if the monsters make it to the core room, and do enough damage to the Pylon, the base will prematurely disengage from that sector and engage the next.
This should allow me to do diverse scenarios, without trying to fit them all into one simultaneous world. I’d like to allow the base to choose the next scenario, but that means creating more scenarios, so for now, I’m shooting for a simple series (easy to hard).
Ideally, the demo will be the first scenario. :)