What are you doing to encourage ground vehicle usage? Are there any specific new mission types for this maybe?

So there's been lots of discussions about ground vehicles in our game and how we use them on the mission side. The main thing we face is that when we balance a mission and balance the economy, time is a huge factor in it. And if you can do it in a ground vehicle, you can do it in a ship a hell of a lot faster. So it becomes this thing where we try to make an experience around ground vehicles, but then people just do it quicker in a ship. So then we have to lower the price to not break the economy, and people just stop doing the mission. We want to add a benefit. We want to add a reason for people to actually use ground vehicles. Recently, in the distribution centers, there's massive gas spheres, and the ground turrets will shoot spaceships, but they won't shoot ground vehicles. So we've seen some players using the tanks to destroy them so that they don't have as much resistance. But we also need some tools or features that help us encourage it. A recent thing that we were investigating for ground vehicles was to do with the Kopions that got added to the game. We were having a debate about how the player discovers them. And one of the discussions that we came upon was that maybe the ground vehicle radar would be the only thing that could find these Kopions, so that if you wanted to do the mission, you'd have to land, take your ground vehicle out and use that to try and locate the Kopions. But we weren't really happy with that, so we've kind of thrown it out. But yeah, we're always looking for new ways we can encourage it. And me and Thorsten have been talking about ways that we could do it, so I'll hand over to Thorsten.

Yeah, there are some things that we already started discussing, and I think one of the most important parts is that environment matters. So depending on what environment the mission takes place in, it might be worth bringing your ship or your ground vehicle or even going by foot. So for example, we already have the case where you have to enter a cave and you cannot fly in. We have some where you can fly in. We have some where a ground vehicle also fits in. But in general, if you have a cave mission, the way to go into that cave is by foot. But we want to expand on that in the future. And we don't only want to expand on that by how the environment looks. So for example, a vast forest: you cannot land with your ship, but you can drive into it with your ground vehicle. But we also want to utilize the weather conditions, for example. So a strong wind will block your ship from actually landing safely. So it's better to be outside of that strong wind area, drop the ground vehicle, and then avoid the strong wind by driving in with your ground vehicle. Or with Pyro, you might have already seen it in the CitizenCon demos with the solar flare: when your ship gets hit by a solar flare, it basically drops down because it's turned off. So dropping from the sky is something that you would avoid if you had come with a ground vehicle in that situation. But there are also other things that are related to the weather, like limited sight, where it's safer to go with a ground vehicle versus a spaceship and stuff like that. So there are plenty of scenarios that we are currently investigating, what we can do to actually make ground vehicles more usable or even required for missions.