Overall, looks great!
Thank you!
1. Not sure about the cooldown as opposed to having to sit there waiting for the Raid to finish. One of the nail-biters in Mount and Blade was finishing a raid before a Lord showed up. So... IDK, maybe do a bit of dice-rolling and <if enemy fleet or station is near enough> allow it to engage during the Raid, so that there's some risk to doing a stealth-raid with nothing but a Prometheus and a few Valkyries?
The M&B part was tense, yeah. It still feels like just another way of adding RNG to the process, though. And nearby fleets will already prevent a raid, so that part is already there, just front-loaded and not random.
2. So... right now, we can Decivilize everything, then plant colonies? Hmm. Why not just throw in a simplistic invasion feature where you need a pretty overwhelming number of Marines, for now?
I'd just as soon not add in a placeholder I'll need to replace for this. Devicilizing to recolonize doesn't seem very appealing anyway since the main attraction of most established colonies is their population level, which would go away.
3. One mini-game option that sounds distinctly Fun, at least to me, is to have Raids take place as a battle, with the Planetary Defenses as actual objects covering the targets, the Marines advancing slowly and the player fleet having to run interference.
Hah, no
A more detailed response earlier in the thread; basically it's just insanity in terms of time and effort and not desirable anyway.
The mechanics, as proposed, basically mean players will stack Marines and Fuel in giant piles somewhere until it's time to go on the offensive, and then deploy their giant resource pools through clicking on a UI, hitting planet after planet of the Faction they want to decimate; this sounds pretty anticlimactic.
Fighting the faction's fleets and stations - which you'd have to do to achieve this - is the interesting part. So, yeah, stripped of the context that gives the mechanic meaning, it's not very ... meaningful. Like, half the point of its existence is to give you reasons to fight or otherwise overcome the defenses!
4. Obviously, some Factions should be happy you've Raided their enemies. Shouldn't there be some upside diplomatically? I can see that nobody would be particularly thrilled with you if you decimate populations, but if you've crippled their economies or defenses with targeted strikes, some parties will be cheering you on. For example, the Pirates might appreciate it if you bomb Planetary Defenses and make the planet easier to Raid in the future.
Hmm. Probably not, since fleet-to-fleet combat doesn't, either. And it just gets messy, difficult to convey ahead of time, and so on - imagine fighting a patrol or doing a raid and then that changing reputation with 5+ factions, some good, some bad. And that's before mods are involved.
5. Does this mean Pirate Raids can now be expected to be loot-pinatas of Fuel?
Bombarding is not generally cost-efficient. That said, raiders do tend to have some more tankers along, due to the nature of their job, but that's not tied to these mechanics.
6. I think there might be a fleet role for not just the combat side of raiding, but the pick-up-stuff part. Maybe that's a role for the Venture or Hound?
Interesting, hmm. Yeah, "increased value of raided stuff" could be a niche.
7. How about raiding for people? Pirates surely buy slaves; your colonies could use experts (and slaves, if you're evil); this seems like a neo-cyberpunkish thing to include.
No.
8. How about assassinating the Governor or other important leaders?
Hmm - might work better as one-off missions or some such, but it's an interesting idea!
9. Shouldn't some Factions offer Missions where the Mission is, "go Raid X for us"?
10. Shouldn't being a notorious Raider without a major Faction to back you up get some really huge fleets chasing you down? I mean, this is the sort of thing that you'd think would put a huge Bounty on your head.
11. Speaking of which... can't players start accruing a Bounty for their various deeds (i.e., killing pretty much anybody, even Pirates)? Wouldn't that be cool, if it eventually got large enough that huge fleets came after the player, or they had to pay off the Factions they annoyed so much?
Well, all of this is potential content that could be added in at some point, but it doesn't seem particularly tied to this set of features.
(I will add that there's now potential for a limited form of #11 happening in some specific circumstances - but I've already said too much
)
this seems really.. simple?
Thank you! I know you didn't mean that as a positive, but that was rather the point of the design, so I'll take it
To elaborate a bit, I think you get more depth when you have multiple simple mechanics interacting with each other, than you do with specific mechanics having more individual complexity.
For example:
3. enemy capable of sortieing fleets to stop you (risk) station defenses get a shot at you / the ordnance (fair is fair)
This sounds like you're suggesting fleet and station interactions that are specific to raiding and built into the raiding mechanic directly.
On the other hand, we've got these mechanics that are not tied to raiding directly:
-> Stations in orbit
-> Colonies spawning patrol fleets
-> Nearby stations and/or fleets have to be defeated before taking certain hostile actions
And so the end result is more or less the same - you have to face down some active defenses to be able to raid or bombard - but it's not tied into raiding directly, and so is much more flexible. This both means that they can factor into other mechanics as well, where something raid-specific couldn't, and that it can be affected in other ways that add to the depth of raiding.
For a quick example of that, you could draw off the defending fleets - say, by doing an Active Sensor Burst, and then jumping away to quickly approach the colony from another angle. You couldn't do this sort of thing if the anti-raid fleets were a direct part of a raid mechanic.
So, right - the raid mechanics themselves are simple, but they tie into lots of other campaign mechanics, and the
interactions that are added by having them have more depth.
seems like planetary bombardment is something that would be rare and a large operation (both militarily and logistically) making it "click a dialogue option" and then resolved instantaneously just seems really weird. ideally it should be it's own campaign where there are a few steps with plenty of opportunity for the defenders to interfere with your attack (or for you to interfere with theirs)
Well, that's how just about everything in the game works. Stripping a research station for salvage? A few clicks in a dialog. Establishing a colony? Same. And so on. But, as mentioned, the "do the raid" action is really only part of the raid. Preparing for it and overcoming the defenses are where the real meat of it is, gameplay-wise.
1. bigger fleets with heavier guns bombard better (really, any sort of actual heavy bombardment shouldn't even be possible unless you have very heavy weapons or weapons exclusively designed for the task)
Did talk about this earlier; not tying it to a fleet's combat capability has some benefits. Mainly avoiding adding otherwise-useless one-off stats for how good a combat ship is at it, or deriving that stat from something. And it'd have to cost a resource - probably fuel - anyway - so it just seems extremely unnecessary. I think the in-fiction justification for it is solid, too, though of course you're welcome to disagree
Posted my thoughts in the suggestion area, spoilers, it’s not too far off from what the others suggested, with just a bit more to it, It’s like you said though, in the current game it’d be mostly adding nuance and alternatives, so I agree with you that other features are of higher priority, (just what exactly would you rather work on next? )
I do hope you find time to implement something like this in the future though, I think this could be one of those features that doesn’t so much as add to the game, as multiply everything else.
Thank you, I'll check it out when I have a chance!
Second thought on using fuel for bombs, if you can make an antimatter bomb out of fuel, why not something else, like mines? it’d bring more continuity for fuel use as weapon since a singular use is an oddity, while two uses is the start of a pattern.
Besides, aren’t minefields are already planned?
Minefields are in 0.9a, yeah, as part of the layered defenses of a star fortress. Mechanically, it wouldn't make much sense to tie them to fuel, since they're not something directly tied to player decisions and the logistics of managing a station are fairly abstracted behind an upkeep cost anyway.
Not sure if this one flies wth me, Military ships should be better at bombardment, or there should be at least some ortillery capable weapons that should, at the very least, help with raids. But the Jury rig part is the one that I dislike. if it is a jury-rig, there should be better ways of doing it. Hell, there are transuranics in game so, why not just build some fision-fusion* devices and call it a day? specially if the targets are in planets with atmo?, or grab a few hulks from the last battle and send them down the planet.
So, I am not sure if I understand what is the pro of completely uncoupling bombardment from ships. I can see a few pirates making Jury-rig devices and droping off an airlock, but a ship with bombardment tubes and proper ordnance should be able to do things better (admittedly, both things should be things held zealously by factions, and would need acquiring them though difficult ops and missions for the player) or how the jury rigged method could serve for other than terror strikes or saturation attacks
The benefit of uncoupling military capacity from bombardments is this:
... Otherwise, it's tempting to start, say, calculating bombardment strengths of various ships and so on, and it just ends up being a lot of stats and number crunching without a particular benefit.
As soon as that concept exists, you've got to measure it somehow. Say a cruiser is capable of ... 3 points of bombardment. Or something. But what if it has no weapons mounted? What if half its weapons are mounted? What if it's a carrier? What if it's civilian? Say we get past all that and figure out the bombardment capability of a fleet. What does it actually mean? It probably shouldn't influence the effect of a bombardment, because 1) you could just repeat it and 2) bombardments are pretty binary anyway, in terms of their effect.
So it would probably have to influence the cost, or it might mean that a certain amount of capability is *required* to be able to bombard at all, in the presence of a certain level of defenses. In either case, this bombardment capability would have to be scaled to and compared against the ground defenses of a planet.
And after we work all of that out, we still have a new stat for the player to worry about, and probably one that needs to be displayed on the ship tooltip, and the total in the fleet UI somewhere. Both of these places are prime UI real estate and *certainly* don't need more cluttering up, especially for something that's not super common.
"Bombardment just requires a resource" is a way to sidestep all that. You still need a combat fleet to overcome the fleets and orbital defenses, and the cost is still influenced by the ground defenses. So it's functionally about the same, and it avoids all these complications.
*which from what I understand is the best way of getting the most bag for your buck if you want to erase a few places in a planet
Well, if we've got anti-matter as a power source, it's going to be a lot more bang for buck in terms of converting mass to energy than fission or fusion. But this is straying too much into "realism argument" territory, which I'd say needs a mountain of salt when applied to a game with basically battleship guns mounted on spaceships.
Yeah, the fuel cost, if we go by the jury rig justification makes sense, but the way I saw it a limited bombardment needs some degree of finesse, so it is actually a skill if you want to hit something in particular as opposed to carped bomb the place, thus I felt that it having a higher material cost made sense, but this was me interpreting the fuel cost was based off maneuvers or some bombardment mode to weapons.
Yep, gotcha.
Mmmm, planetary raids. 0.9 is gonna be great.
fuel makes sense, one would assume planetary defenses would be the kind of stuff you do NOT want to get hit with.
Yep! In theory, undefended colonies on no-atmosphere planets probably could get bombarded by ships directly, but yeah, I'd imagine ground batteries can easily outmatch any ship-borne weapons or defenses just due to not being so space-constrained.