Progression, Research and Overclocking

The progression system in SE1 barely counts, because it barely exists. It can be almost ignored since even if you want to build a block you haven't unlocked yet, it's not much effort to build the block behind it. There is a smaller progression system in the fact that Uranium and Platinum are unobtainable on planets, so if you start on a planet you can't use them until you get to space, but that's only a single roadblock rather than a whole progression system. I think that SE2 would strongly benefit from an in-depth progression system, so that's what I'm suggesting here.

The progression system should accomplish three primary things IMO:

- Acting as a secret tutorial where progress through the progression system teaches the player how to play the game, without doing so in a way that would make the progression system unfun or uninteresting to experienced players.

- Acting as an incentive to experience every part of Almagest rather than just needing to set yourself up on a single planet and also in one place in space to get Uranium and Platinum.

- Acting as a benchmark for how far you have progressed by demonstrating that some formally difficult obstacles have become easy to overcome and some formerly impossible obstacles have become merely difficult.

In aid of that, I think the following systems should be considered for SE2

Difficulty regions:

In SE1 every possible spawn had an associated difficulty, because some spawns, like starting on the moon, had additional challenges that other spawns like starting on the earthlike planet didn't share. I think that's great, but I think it can also be more granular to prevent it from being you beat a planet then you're done, we want people to go back to a base they already have on a planet once they've progressed further in the game to beat challenges they couldn't when they first built the base. To that end, I think planets should be given difficulty zones. The idea behind them is that in some parts of a planet, you have sparse settlements and ships and the ones that are there don't have too much in the way of defences, whether the base belongs to a faction you're friendly with or enemies with. As you get deeper into a faction's territory though their bases become more common and better armed. It should be balanced in such a way that you can't start on a planet and then easily fly straight into the heart of enemy territory without making progress on other planets first as well. These wouldn't be hard or visible borders so much as they would be something you can only figure out by exploring, and seeing that as you continue in a particular direction the bases get harder and harder. Maybe with a really big, really visible (with antennas and beacons and stuff) base in the middle for each faction on a planet as like the ultimate goal to conquer or trade with.

This is the most important detail for goal 3 as having a range of difficulties when it comes to challenges to overcome makes it clear to the player how the difficulty of a challenge changes at the end of the game compared to the beggining.

Research

The base premise of research should be something that manages to carry both goal 1 and goal 2 by itself. Goal 2 is pretty easy because you can just make it so that you need research done in different environments in order to continue progressing by making it so research on just one planet or just in space simply won't unlock everything.

For goal 1 however, I had an idea. I think the example of research that did that the best in another game was KSP. In KSP because of the way that research worked you would set yourself a goal, need to master what you had available to you to reach that goal and overcome some challenge. That then unlocked stuff further down the progression tree enabling you to take on grater challenges. I'm not a big fan of blocks being locked behind research like in KSP but I'll talk on that in the rewards section.

Exactly mimicking KSP doesn't quite work because just getting a ship part to a place and activating it isn't a challenge because you can just travel there and then build the ship part. Instead, we need to figure out a way to make it so that each research challenge is something that needs to be planned for then executed using the tools within SE2. My idea for that is to work on state-based things. For example, keeping a ship of at least x kg in the air for a minute straight is a great challenge anywhere with gravity. Travelling different distances can also work. Slightly more destructive things can also be fun and make failure slightly more rewarding, like giving research for crashing a ship into the ground at various speeds.

Having this allows the game to "teach" players how to play the game by presenting a series of escalating challenges that start from a point of not needing that much thought but can end at a point where achieving a new research challenge takes planning, preparation, building a new ship just for that challenge and then successfully executing your plan, which should be fun even for experienced players as long as they can condense the experience and skip steps (like unlocking a bunch of weight-based challenges at once by beating a heavier challenge before they've even beat the first one).

Rewards

Coming up with a reward for players for research was difficult, to the point that I almost considered giving up on the third goal and just saying that research should be treated like a high score, or at most something you can sell at outposts. I don't want to lock decorative or functional blocks behind it, because not having all of the tools at your disposal when it comes to building a ship is really annoying and doesn't add to the fun of the game. I did get an idea for rewards that won't limit your ability to build though!

My idea was to take this one step deeper with block options. The idea is that when you first start a game you can put things in groups, rename them, and do basic things like that. Enough control that you could build a fully functional ship that works perfectly acceptably. But more advanced options like thrust override or anything to do with automation is locked. So by progressing further into the game, you unlock these options, and can better specialise parts of your ship that become more and more automated and complex, with one additional detail. Overclocking. One of the late-game options you can unlock for blocks is overclocking where you boost some functionality of a block at the cost of another. For example, you could boost a reactor's peak power output at the cost that it needs more Uranium per MWh. Or you could underclock it to boost the MWh produced per Uranium rod, but at the cost of having a lower peak power output. Overclocking tied to automation should allow you to take a ship that you could build at the beginning of the game and make it way more effective and powerful, without limiting your build options at the start. This lets your ships and things scale with the difficulty of the greater NPC challenges without gatekeeping what you can build at the beginning of the game, just how you can use it.