12
« on: April 30, 2021, 08:21:49 PM »
Generally, the new raiding system does its job just fine, but it turned out to be much less exciting than I was hoping, and it has a few problematic quirks. My suggestions:
Complications and Opportunistic Objectives
Unlike ship battles, raids are never tense or exciting because success is a foregone conclusion, with gains and losses both being very predictable. Raids basically boil down to a complicated financial transaction. We have a variety of ways to get "discounts" for the cost of raids, which I think is great, but raids themselves are much like a cheaper version of using the black market. I think raids should be more eventful and unpredictable, with interesting, difficult decisions to be made. To this end I suggest raiding events: simple, randomized text events that occur after we commit to raids. For example, raids could be complicated by ambushes, mishaps, opportunistic objectives, or bad intel. Events would display a blurb and prompt us for orders about how our marines should react to the situation. Functionally, this would usually be a choice about which resource should be sacrificed in order to achieve the objective (e.g. green marines, vet marines, commodities, relationship, credits, etc. Ground support ships might even be attacked, risking permanent damage or destruction). In most cases we should have the option to abort the raid to avoid any meaningful losses, or spend SP to achieve the objective without significant losses. Events shouldn't be all bad, of course. Sometimes opportunities should arise to allow us to achieve an additional, secondary objective. For example, our marines might discover Pearsian League prisoners while raiding Jangala if there are currently hostilities between Heg and PL, and we could choose to rescue them for PL rep at the expense of some fuel (due to the surgical bombardment necessary to accomplish the goal). Other opportunistic objectives could be blueprints, ships, weapons, or anything, really. Some events might make us choose between our original objective and a different, emergent opportunity. It might take some tricksome wordplay, but I think it would be possible to make events like this very diverse without custom events for each combination of sacrifices and/or objectives.
Better Feedback About Consequences
While some costs of raiding are made apparent (marines, rep, economic impact), there are some that are not. I think the risk of decivilization is the biggest downside of raiding, but it isn't mentioned anywhere as far as I know. For something that can permanently make the game world less interesting, decivilization is far too easy to cause accidentally. If hostilities against a market might result in it decivilizing, I think a simple, highly visible warning should be displayed after clicking "Consider your military options."
Similarly, it's difficult to tell whether or not a raid will have a net benefit to the experience of our marines. I have no idea what determines how much experience they gain or how heavy losses need to be for experience to decrease. The actual formula behind how crew losses are calculated is fairly opaque as well. I've read that losses scale proportionally to the number of marines in inventory? I'd have to test that myself to be sure, in spite of conducting dozens of raids. I don't have any solid ideas for improving feedback for this. Might be best to just "eh, oh well"
A Way to Raid in Spite of Idling Fleets
I like how we need to sneak into markets to carry out raids if we want to avoid engaging the defenses, but sometimes that's made impossible by some fleets that can't be lured away or scared off. It's frustrating to wait for a fleet to finish "preparing for patrol duty" and fly off only for another patrol to spawn and prevent raiding. It would be nice if there were some way to get around this. The simplest solution would be to ignore such fleets when checking for defenses. The awesomest solution would be allowing us to raid in spite of defenders, but having defenders attack our raiding party of ships in a pursuit scenario. I know this would basically necessitate an overhaul of the raiding system, but I'm not entirely joking. I'd love to have a reason to put weapons on logistical ships.
Quality Over Quantity
It's strange that the hegemony, an authoritarian empire spanning many star systems, would allow a known deviant like me to waltz up to their most populous world with the capability to permanently cripple its primary industry. Also, the way raiding capability is simply purchased is somewhat uninteresting. Finally, it's simply too easy to make a killing by raiding, which is only limited by money, which we can easily get by raiding. I think all three situations could be improved quite a bit with the right type of gating mechanism. What if markets with structures or industries that improve ground defenses could only be raided with a sufficient amount of a highly illegal resource that is very difficult to acquire, similarly to how surveys require heavy machinery? Predictably, I'm thinking of heavy armaments (I know possible roles for HA in raiding was a hot topic at one point, so I apologize if this exact thing has already been suggested). As it exists currently, heavy armaments wouldn't do the trick, because they are easily acquired and only considered illegal by one or two factions. For HA to work well as an interesting key for raiding well-defended markets, factions would need to treat them like a true threat to their stability. They would need to be very hard to find, even on the black market. More importantly, patrols would need to conduct routine inspections regardless of black market activity, especially if our standing toward the patrol's faction is inhospitable or suspicious. Raiding codes might reduce the amount of HA required to raid a market by a flat amount, perhaps making it possible to raid a market with basic ground defenses without any HA at all.
Done. Thanks for reading and considering!
