New Campaigns: Vulcan, Orion, Gorn - piracy, privateer, and merchant marine careers.

arthdayne

Hey guys, wanted to thank you for putting some time into developing some new TOS content in the game. Love the Old School Cool

Not sure what you have in the pipeline, but I thought I'd toss out some thoughts as you scour the cannon material for new ideas for future campaigns...

Instead of expanding some of the oblique worlds and races in Star Trek series, consider developing some story lines closer to home. There's lots of room to flesh out some of the familiar races and that would help keep the game feeling Star Trek.

How about a Vulcan campaign, for example? Player encounters a long lost Vulcan colony and find it fully populated and developed, but troubled. The player's adventure would be in striving to bring the world into alliance with the player's faction. This would give you opportunities to better flesh out the Vulcan presence in the game ... Vulcan itself, the culture, new ships, costumes, weapons, a Vulcan Lockbox Imagine if Vulcan characters could start out on Vulcan?

(Perhaps you could tie the Vulcan campaign into the Kelvin timeline and bring on Zachary Quinto?).

Similarly, the Andorians, Orions, and Gorn would also be worthy cultures for miniseries.

An Orion campaign could be about a struggle between syndicates and the player gets pulled in trying to help the syndicate that is most friendly to their faction. The Orions have their fingers in intergalactic economies and this would give you a chance to flesh out an underworld culture and black market in all three player factions. This might give a way for players to do something other than raw combat grinds all the time... develop an NPC based economy / piracy game where commodities can be harvested, bought, and sold. This economy could be based on players establishing contacts and growing relationships and reputation with those contacts and thereby develop better trade bonuses and find better trading opportunities. Opportunities for new gear, Orion costumes, weapons, and updated T6 ships.

Live long and prosper!

-a

arthdayne

Oh, one more thing, in an Orion campaign, you could develop a new kind of activity: Marauding!

Klingons could take on a Privateer role and raid cargo convoys for commodities and loot while Federation players would defend convoys from raids. New Orion ships, fighters, and skills would give special loot bonuses when raiding (like how the slaver fighters harvest commodities in fights now).

arthdayne

So to expand on the Privateer / Marauding / Convoy Escort career idea...

This could be an activity system beyond STF's, patrols, campaigns, and foundry missions. Players would cultivate contacts who could provide missions compatible with their faction. Contacts would set goals or assign missions such as:

* Guard trade convoy setting out from Vulcan to New Romulus
* Raid X amount of trade materials from Federation convoys in XX sector
* Capture XX tonnage in Klingon cargo vessels
etc...

As players execute successful missions they collect loot and develop reputation with their contacts. Higher reputation leads to more lucrative missions and may lead to missions to establish new piracy or merchant contacts.

Merchant contacts would also develop trade opportunities to buy or sell commodities with more favorable price modifiers as the player's reputation grows with that contact. Certain merchants will tend to have affinities for certain kinds of commodities so that as player's portfolios of contacts grow they can conduct bulk trade missions by buying low and selling where demand is high. As the player acquires their own cargo vessels, the volume of trade they can engage in increases. To employ their own cargo vessel convoys in bulk trade missions, they would have to fly their own convoy escort missions and prevent their ships from getting jacked by NPC pirate raiders.

Ancillary BOFF skills that don't get much usage may be useful in convoy escorts and raids, such as tractor beams, stealth, perception, beam target subsystem, boarding shuttles, galactic map warp speed, galactic map sensor range etc. Capturing a cargo ship would require direct boarding action by the player's away teams.

This idea could be expanded into a new kind of subgame within STO and would provide an alternate means of players accruing wealth and another motivation for purchasing whole new classes of ships. Players frequently complain about lack of variety in endgame activities and this would provide a new dimension of free-form gameplay. This would also give players a reason to spend more time on the galactic map (hunting down convoys to raid) and would provide a reason to populate the galaxy with NPC ships that are actually doing something in the game universe.

It would be kinda cool simply to have a more fleshed out Orion and underworld culture in the game aside from the usual political factions. This would help make the game world feel more present and coherent.

-a

captkelly31

My idea of the Gorn would be they are based on pre-hispanic south american's(except for the sacrificing) and are the KDF's version of the Betazoids, just more actual royals instead of some yammering mogul.