Factions

[alexanderson1993]

There's been a bit of discussion about factions scattered around, but I figured now was as good a time as any to bring it all together.

I've talked briefly about factions in this blog post, so its required reading: https://thoriumsim.com/blog/thorium-novas-lore

Factions are a huge part of the gameplay. They impel the narrative and random encounters. They give the crew opportunities to make friends, or enemies. The interactions of factions will play a big role in mission writing as well.

It's difficult to know exactly how factions will evolve as the project is built, so I'll paint a few broad strokes that we can fill in later.

Factions will have a few defining features:

• A color which is used throughout the UI, such as with communications frequencies, ship icons, etc.
• A logo to represent the faction
• Anything else?

Factions also store the reputation they share with other factions. This is a positive (friendly) or negative (hostile) number, with 0 meaning ambivalence. They also have a default reputation that defines how the faction responds to other factions that haven't been specifically defined.

At a certain point, a faction ship near a different faction they feel hostility towards will automatically choose to attack the opposing faction. Likewise, if third ship from another faction that is friendly towards the ship under attack witnesses said attack, they might choose to defend their friend.

At some point we'll build out a random phrase generator, and those random phrases can be assigned to factions for different interactions:

• A friendly faction contacting a ship: "How can I help you?" "Good day to you!" "I was an adventurer like you once..."
• A neutral/antagonistic faction contacting the ship: "What do you want?!" "Get out of my face!" "Who are you looking at?"

Systems and planets can be assigned to factions. When a system is assigned a faction, non-player ships associated with that faction can be automatically spawned in the system. I'm not sure how else these faction associations will affect gameplay, other than mere faction identification.

Ship plugins can also be associated with factions, making it possible to have certain types of ships that are only used with certain factions, providing an opportunity for diversity among ships.

I also mentioned in the inventory items discussion (#243) that certain inventory items can also be attached to factions, to make those items only appear on ships of that faction.

There's a lot of other things we could do with factions, but I've not given it much thought, so I would love to hear what everyone else thinks. Chime in below!