Online ideas (No, not co-op)

[Dongsmasher]

Hi everyone, I just recently got Kenshi on Steam and holy man I am salivating just imagining the possibilities.

I had an idea while playing and please bear in mind that I have literally no idea how development works, but I know that this would be difficult and would take time. That said, I would love the idea of somewhat-online play.

No, I don't mean actual online play - the nonstop pausing would drive most mortal men mental, for one - but a couple of fun online capabilities would be great. Specifically, I was thinking that a friend could give you a "seed" - a custom-generated code that would bring a snapshot of his faction/town/NPCs into your game.

You see where I'm going with this? I'm actually honestly getting excited thinking about how cool that would be. Let's say your friend John has made a town, Johnville, and his loyal Johninites are centered around weapon production. Can you imagine how neat it would be to see Johninite weaponry showing up in your shops, complete with the proper stats? Or maybe your pal Nick is all about crafting building materials - stop by Nicktown and pick some up on the cheap.

Just an idea, but I think that would be a cool idea, and a nice way to avoid what I imagine is a true hell of programming netcode and whatnot.

[Tolwrath]

so basically a method for easy sharing of your game world / save game? Also Nicktown sounds like it might be copyrighted by Nickelodeon or something. But it might be a fun place to visit if they still have that fetish for slime.

[Dongsmasher]

Exactly, yeah.

[Jake_j_a]

Basically, being able to start a new game with the current game-state as a current game, only NOT playing as that faction.
This would be AWESOME, the 'seed' save should contain options such as what AI type to play the current player faction as (bandit, merchant, military etc.) as well as options for how much of the game state to transfer over (just the player faction, region, or the entire game world as it's developed over time!)
Hey, now I'm getting excited with this idea!

[jtgibson]

I was about to jump in here with tooth and flame and then discovered it was actually a pretty workable suggestion.

It wouldn't be something as simple as a seed by any reckoning -- it'd be a full-on save file -- but creating a special save file that you could just plop into your folder to have that "content" loaded into your game would be very interesting in its own right, since other players could share their factions as rivals -- and since it's still a single-player game, you have only yourself to blame if you download someone's ridiculously overpowered faction and they slaughter you.

[Clawdius Talonious]

It might be easier if there was a fairly simple way to export your save to the mod maker, I haven't worked on any mods myself so I'm not sure if that is already a thing. If not, I could see it being added, and once the game world is given more life via faction warfare etc, it might be nice to seed the world with more colonies. Of course, to really get a good spread on locations of peoples outposts, it would be nice if we could set our import/spawn city to somewhere besides Brink so that people wouldn't be so inclined to put outposts between Brink and Traders Edge, or Brink and Clownsteady, or Brink and Capital etc.

[Booter]

yeah i actually like this idea, im not sure if im a bit off on a different path but if you had fully customised your faction to act in certain ways then everyone whos linked to kenshi online through steam or whatever would have a chance to have their own world "seeded" by one person from a different worlds player faction. that npc character would then do his utmost to spread your faction in another world like a virulent disease. idk if you have ever played it. but they did something very similar in Spore. and that was years ago. i personally would find it both annoying and amusing to find that some jokers faction called the penisites had begun a revolution in one of my towns and were running rampant.

[Dongsmasher]

yeah i actually like this idea, im not sure if im a bit off on a different path but if you had fully customised your faction to act in certain ways then everyone whos linked to kenshi online through steam or whatever would have a chance to have their own world "seeded" by one person from a different worlds player faction. that npc character would then do his utmost to spread your faction in another world like a virulent disease. idk if you have ever played it. but they did something very similar in Spore. and that was years ago.

This is kinda what I was thinking as well, but I didn't/don't know how full-on with Steam Chris is willing to go. It would be incredibly cool if there was just, say, an option to add colonies from my Steam friends who have the game, but that would involve netcode and therefore a loooooot more dev time. At least I think.