So what to say this year

Skills
We want to implement skills as outlined in previous pub meets. This will only be a conversion of the existing skills although we will then be open to any suggested new skills.

The plan is to allow all officers to be managed through the nexus. So you can skill up officers from anywhere and manage loading them onto ships etc. The only real change here is that officers will be skill caps for wages.

Experience is converting to be the same as the cost to train and so a basic skill will cost ~7.5k exp. 5 skills => 40k.

Star Admiral	5000	None
Admiral	1000	1M
Commodore	500	500k
Captain	200	200k
Commander	50	100k
Lieutenant	5	40k

Lieutenant should cover 5 skills officers for ships. I will be adding some expensive fleet skills at some point.

Agents
We are looking to do all the agent actions on the nexus. The aim of agents it to develop on going mission and contacts to provide a constant source of information when they are stationed at a starbases.

Combat
The first part of agents we will be implementing is officer combat. The aim is to make a simple combat method and roll over the combat dialog from quest.
So you will have:

Damage resistance: For armour and shielding
Hit points: Both from health and (shielding)
Speed: From enhancement, skill and weapon used
Dmg: From weapons used.

This will require officers to have items attached to them and will be limited to a small number.

Exploration
Once we can create combat between officers we can create groups of officers and personnel that can explore planets unseen using a encounter system. This will act like a game within phoenix and will be totally moderated through the nexus.

The movement will be phoenix like and this will provide encounters and a group move around the planets surface. The encounters will depend on the type of planet and allowed encounter groups. So for example moving around a moon you would have encounters based on

[Standard]+++
[Moon]++
[Native]+
[Terrain Specific]++
[Artifact]+

The encounters will range from mini missions, to simple choices, to combat. This will basically be a mini game loop and will not interact with standard phoenix positions unless they wish to.

Agencies
The next step will be to remove agents from the game and replace them with Agencies that were described last year more detail will follow.

New Player Experience
We want to continue doing the fixes described last year for new players. The major change here will be how we handle the inducting players into the site.
We want to allow people to turn up at the site, not sign in and just play a phoenix adjacent game. If they like the game at a certain point they can choose to sign up to the site and add emails etc. This should cut down on people being put off in the first 2 mins by walls of text that do not represent the game.

We currently have 2 options:
[1] Implement a very basic version of phoenix that can run in direct mode: Move ships around, trade fight, explore. To make this viable it would need a totally different control system (which was much more intuitive). It would also have to happen quickly which is out of place with the existing game, so i am unsure about this.
[2] We use the Officer Exploration to add a self contained game where there are a few encounters which end in either taking a ship (and joining the main phoenix game) or looting it and continuing the game loop.

Both have advantages and disadvantages, but not sure which would be best.

Requests
I'm going to spend a month resolving requests from a discord channel - so they are more quickly discussed and sorted.


Bits and bobs
These are just a list of things that need finishing off
[1] Scans on nexus
[2] Template using exact items
[3] Affiliation funds
[4] Auto-route through stargates/wormholes.
[5] Blank Turns in Downloader
[6] Delete unowned turn archives
[7] Email Client - hags sometimes
[8] FoC Class mask
[9] Hits in Asteroid Fields
[10] Jump Ring on nexus
[11] Squadron Error on zero tus
[12] Wait for Tus in squad orders
[13] XML Officer