Player City Refresh

Introduction​

Player cities and personal housing are some of the biggest reasons that Star Wars Galaxies feels like no other game out there. It's not just a shared world where people can adventure, it's also a world that you can really live in and make your own. This is a part of the game that we know we need to preserve and make sure that everyone can take part in for the long term, so we take it very seriously. In the first Developer Diary we ever published, Proactively Preventing a Housing Crisis, on Oct 29, 2021, we shared that our long-term goal was to implement mechanics focused on “catalyzing community and player interdependence while building upon the existing player city experience.” From this goal, the Development Team created tenets, or principle beliefs, about how our housing mechanics should function. Among them are:

1. Counteract Urban Sprawl
2. Require Interdependence
3. Create Value
4. Different Values than Live are Necessary
5. Build Hubs of Industry

In the nearly five years since that first Dev Diary, the game has evolved, the community has grown, and we're excited to give player cities some more attention. As things stand now, once a city hits Rank 5, there really is not anything to strive for – Rank 5 is the Player City "end game." We want to change that. We saw what everyone did when we really opened up the Storyteller items for decorating, and we want to make even more options available.

In our next major update, our goal is to improve the core mechanics of the Player City system. The two biggest changes will be:

• Additional City Ranks (up to Rank 8)
• New City Specialization system

We have also updated the infrastructure to allow us to make improvements more easily and more quickly down the road.

There are a lot of features for cities we are excited about, so today we are sharing the core set of features that are coming soon. With the infrastructure changes, we look forward to more fun updates for housing and cities in the future.

CITY Ranks and Sizes​

Currently, Rank 5 (Metropolis) is the highest a city can attain. That will soon no longer be the case! We are expanding the maximum rank to Rank 8. As your populations grow larger than 40 (Rank 5 requirement), you have new goals for Rank 6, Rank 7, and for the industrious few, Rank 8.

The original plan over 2 years ago was to maintain the current 5 rank system, but increase the citizen requirements for each rank. There would be better things available at the existing ranks, but there was a good chance that some cities would be losing some of the benefits/perks they had because they couldn’t meet the new requirements. (The situation where mayors could place a shuttleport at Rank 3, but not use it until Rank 4 was an anomaly of the initial rollout of the system and how we rolled it back. This will no longer be the case.)

We didn’t want to do that to people who worked hard to grow their cities. Instead we felt that we could accomplish the positive goals with more ranks and not take anything away. So the first 5 ranks of the city system are essentially the same (more details below).

What do these new ranks get us?

Well, to start:

• Slightly larger city radius (Rank 8 will be 500 m, but there are more details below.)
• More terminals
• More trainers
• More safe houses

Yeah, those are fine, but we waited this long for just this?

This is where the new city specialization system comes in -- which we will get to in the next section.

What is changing in the original 5-rank system?

One of the issues we wanted to tackle was the Rank 1 cities that were popping up that were essentially private estates for just a few players. It only took 2 players to meet the minimum requirement for a city. This was not the intention of the system. This could be used to block others from making legitimate cities on the core planets that have strict restrictions on the number of cities (like Tatooine and Naboo). To counter that, we are adding the requirement that to place and then maintain any Rank 1+ city, you still need at least 5 citizens, but they must be from at least 5 different accounts.

The number of Rank 7 player cities will be limited much like the Rank 4 player cities are currently. This limit will be based on the maximum number of cities allowed on a planet.


Since we are adding 3 more ranks, we also had to adjust their titles slightly, so don’t be surprised if your Rank 5 “Metropolis” starts showing up as a Rank 5 “City.” Only the title is changing, your city will still have the same perks as before.

CITY Specializations​

The revamp on city specializations is probably the biggest change we are introducing with this update. We have put in place a system that not only expands your options now, but will allow us to add more later that could tie into future features like those that could offer Jedi support or GCW benefits.

Why update City Specializations?

Right now, each city at a high enough rank can get 1 city specialization. While there are a number to choose from, it is obvious that some are just a lot more useful than others, and there are only really 3 that most cities take: Research Center, Improved Job Market, and DNA Laboratory. Yes, sometimes one of the others can get picked, but those are really outliers.

We want to create a system where mayors will have to really think about what to take, not because there are so few to pick from, but because there are so many good ones to take. City planners should need to think about trade offs.

Player cities ideally have different styles and not just the same Research Center that the other 50 cities have. We want cities to be unique. We saw what players did with the Storyteller decorations, but now they’ll be able to do that with game mechanics.

To do all this we needed to give the cities more specializations to choose from and more opportunities to make these choices.

Since not all specializations were created equal, we decided to split them into two categories: one for those in high demand that everyone will want, and one for those which are not as powerful game mechanic-wise, but add a lot of flavor. Those categories are designated as Major Specializations and Minor Specializations.

We also made sure to create a plan that allows for each city to earn multiple specializations as they grow.


In addition to creating the two categories of specializations and increasing the number available, we did a full pass on the specializations themselves. We kept the good ones, boosted a few to make them better, discarded the ones that were not so useful, and added several new ones. Our hope is that we created enough variety to make it hard to choose. We also structured things under the hood to allow us to easily add new options in the future. Our current plan is to have 25 specializations to choose from in total, but that is subject to change.

Some of the specializations will grant a bonus to all citizens of the city anywhere in the game, while others will grant a bonus for all within the city limits, whether the character is a citizen or not.

We don’t want to ruin the surprise, but here are a couple of teasers for the new specializations.

Sample Major Specializations

• Improved Job Market: While taking missions within this city, increases the credit payout of missions taken by 15%. (This was one that was good enough already.)
• DNA Laboratory: While within this city, mutation chance is increased by 1% and the time required to incubate and hatch a beast is decreased by 3 hours per session.
• Science Center: For all citizens of this city, Reverse Engineering Chance is increased by 5, and any experimentation has a 20% bonus to the final result roll. (This replaces the current Research Center.)
• Enhancement Center: While within this city, duration of doctor buffs is increased by 1.5 hours, entertainer tick speed is increased by 3 minutes, and the performance proc chance is increased by 15%.
• Flight Academy: For all citizens of this city, the number of Duty Tokens earned in space will be increased by 10%. Additionally, this city's shuttleport will provide direct travel to the Idiot's Array Lounge.

Sample Minor Specializations

• Manufacturing Center: For all citizens of this city, Factory Speed is increased by 20% (no matter where the factories are).
• Command Relay: For all citizens of this city, control score gained anywhere for this city's aligned faction is increased by 5%.
• Lucky Star: All citizens of this city feel extra lucky at finding Rare Loot Chests.
• Sovereignty Expansion: The radius of the city is increased by 100 meters. (This is only available at Rank 6 or above, and this will allow for a city to have a maximum radius of 600 m at Rank 8. This is only available if there is not another city within that extra radius)

NOTE: All values are subject to change as these undergo testing. These are preliminary only.

Weekly maintenance costs on the specializations will vary based on the usefulness of the specialization.

Questions?​

What about starports?
We looked at offering a starport as a city feature, but there was concern that it would isolate players from the main gathering locations such as Mos Eisley. It also would provide a huge and permanent advantage for cities with a starport over those without. With that being said, we have been brainstorming ways we could offer starport services as a perk without the negative side effects.

What about terraforming?
We have been looking at ways to provide some form of “terraforming” to make the terrain much more friendly for structure placement. This is going to be an involved update and so we have put this off for now as we didn’t want to wait any longer on the city updates.

Why only 600 m maximum radius?
The short answer is that we have a number of established cities that would overlap if we included a larger city radius. We could move a city to spread them out further, but we wanted to minimize that as much as possible.

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These changes will soon be available on Test Center, so watch for an announcement of when you can check them out and then provide us with your feedback in the SWG Restoration Discord.