[Idea] Dynamic World

[Invoker]

Difficulty: Insane.

The main purpose is every your action will have influence on universe.

The idea includes my previous + randomized wrecks and Durandal's idea about low-chance NPC loot too.
It is large and affects quite a lot of game aspects, so let's begin from...

Every ingame faction will have its power expressed in number.
Depending on the number, faction NPCs would have their stats changed: attack, defense, regeneration, mastery and spawnrate.
Same effect will be applied to players of the faction, increasing or decreasing their combat stats.

What does affect faction power? Well, whole variety of things:
First of all, count of NPC ships. No, in dynamic world it is not infinite, but limited for each faction, and if you kill them, they will die forever, spawnrate decreased too.
New ships are being built at faction bases automatically from variety of materials, but guess what, they are not infinite too. Materials for ship building and other things should be produced from simplier materials, and they get to bases with NPC transport convoys.
But from where they are coming? From factory bases, which produce the basic materials from raw ones, such as ores,
gases, e.t.c, they are being mined by NPC mining ships and delivered to factory to run the whole production chain.
All the trading of faction members increses its wealth, no matter who trades: NPCs or players, to make your faction powerful - trade and fight for it.

Second thing is manpower. I speak about crew. No ships without their pilots or bases without population. Each new ship drains some crew from base. New crew members are coming generally from planets, but they slowly spawn across all bases too.
And humans need food, oxygen and water, these goods should be delivered from producing factories to bases placed far from sources of supplies. Without them, crew begins to die. You may even specifically sabotage transport convoys to drain base out of resources until all crew dies and it becomes non-dockable.
But remeber, NPCs in dynamic world can call for reinforcements and if you become too hard pain in thier ass, few fleets of cruisers will come for your miserable soul.
After all crew died base begins to restore its functionality slowly after supply convoys are free to pass and remember, all processes in dynamic world can be fastened or interfered by players, but after maximum few months of non-interference, everything will become as it was before.

Third is base count, in dynamic world you can destroy stations, but it is hard. By damaging base you slowly decrease its defensive power, count of crew and resources inside, but if you begin violent assault with intention to totally destroy it, the base will send distress signal to nearest systems and insane count of ships will come, snub and capitals, all to defend their home.
If the attacking side still surpassed defensive in firepower, the base will be destroyed, with wrecks everywhere and its resources floating in space. But after few days, NPCs will come to establish building site and without any interference it will be rebuilt in week and returned to previous state in another week. You may prevent them from doing it or help to restore the base faster.
And planets are impossible to destroy, they are great power source, providing most of crew and supplies and if destroy docking ring, it will be rebuilt in less than day, there will always be strong NPCs around habited planets.

There may be question: what happens if all resources of faction were exhausted, all ships killed and all bases destroyed with all players abandoned it? Well, restoration time may take quite a lot of time, there will still be very low basic ship recruiting rate, so faction won't die totally and after few weeks you'll find NPCs rebuilt their first base in some rarely visited system.

All the dynamic world system also implies dynamic economy, the price will be the more, the more base needs some commodity, for example to support crew inside or produce new things from commodities. Remoteness from sources of resources has also influence on prices.

Plus, would be nice to allow players to build bases with biodomes, refinery factories, with also tradelanes, docking rings, moors and even jump gates.

P.S. All the described above is pretty possible to implement, but imagine how much effort it will require. Requires strong server and calculations of NPC life even when no players see them.