I’d love that scenario for low-level Bounties
What I’ve been nattering on about is largely scalar stuff at the mid game+ point, where I feel like, other than scary Bounties, there’s nothing that can catch or kill my fleet, unless I’m really deliberately dumb (like when I sunk every single fleet out of Tritach’s current stronghold to see just how big stuff would get and finally died due to CR exhaustion, lol).
In endgame, I feel pretty strongly that players should face huge challenges if they drop into hostile Systems. This feels thematically correct; one would think that everybody in the Sector would have cultural memories and strong psychological biases against letting giant fleets roam loose. In the real world, they’re almost always shadowed and they’re always tracked, as they are strategic weapons systems that move.
So the challenges are:
1. How do the AIs and the player’s Outpost fleets respond to local incursions? One would think it would be as aggressively as the threat warrants, even if the arriving fleet has their Transponder on and is neutral; their intentions are unknown and they’re still a threat.
Right now, the AI seems to be fleet-level; there really ought to some strategic layer, where incoming fleets that represent a large threat get responded to, as best as local resources allow.
2. How do large fleets catch anybody? What actually threatens player fleets?
This is one of the biggest problems in the game design; we have stealth mechanics that aren’t useful and aren’t necessary and a bunch of moribund movement mechanics. But there’s nothing that can catch player fleets and there’s nothing past midgame that can kill them, either.
In Ye Olden Dayes, when we got slowed down by combat, the chief problem was that great players could chain-kill. Perhaps one idea might be a substantial speed penalty while CR is less than 95% of nominal; that, combined with bigger response fleets, would make it nearly impossible to do orbitals to repair and scour systems of response fleets and would make chaining substantially more risky. Right now, at Burn 20, I can swoop, kill a major fleet, then continue the arc without losing velocity.
That, and I’d like to suggest one major mechanic: if starting a battle near a Station or Colony, the local defense forces should join in, if hostile (and preferably, in overwhelming force). That would stop players from camping them so easily.