Ship placement is perhaps the most important aspect of creating procedural missions.  For procedural patrol missions in Eterium, placement is handled by providing a maximum difficulty and an individual encounter difficulty for the mission.  Encounter difficulty determines how many and which type of ships can be placed at a particular encounter (e.g. en route to Nav 1), while the maximum difficulty is the sum total of all encounters.  The latter ensures that a mission will not be generated that consists of several brutal encounters in a row.

There has been a lot of talk about procedural missions lately.  Most recently, Skyrim has been touting its Radiant Quest system.  The Radiant Quest system is a system to offer players unlimited quests.  Of course any game that relies solely on procedural missions would be quite boring.  Skyrim did it right.  They used their radiant quest system to compliment scripted quests and provide pointless side quests to help increase the realism and depth of the world.  I believe this is a great idea and I have been thinking of ways I could incorporate a similar system into Eterium.

When using afterburners the course of the player’s ship adjust slightly and violently making controlling the ship a constant struggle to stay on course.  This is done, not only to add excitement and a feel of power to the afterburners, but also to discourage heavy use in combat.