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[DiM]

Hey!
So here's a bunch of stuff i'd like to see in the next update. Please note that there may be *some* spoilers below.

- Ability to auto-resolve battles vs automated defenses that guard various probes, mining and research stations, etc. By the mid-game, my fleet is powerful enough to take out the lesser
 guardians with ease and by the late game, whenever there's guardians i just skip the probe/whatever because i'm sick of fighting the same battle over and over again, especially when i know i'll easily win.
 
- Better rewards for taking out [REDACTED] stations. It's a very tough fight, and unless the said station just happens to be guarding a system with a particularly good planet, there's really no reason to go after them, especially if you've already done it before and there's no novelty. Alternately, make sure the system the station's in is always worth fighting over. Otherwise it's a "boss fight" with no real rewards and nothing at stake.

- Tweaks to distress calls. So far I've responded to about 10 distress calls, and only one of them was genuine. The rest were either pirates, or just straight up nothing. I was pleasantly surprised when i stumbled upon the genuine one though. Great feature, but it should be expanded, or at least made to happen more often (genuinely).

- Tweaks to neutrino detector. Whenever i've bothered even using the damn thing, i can always tell which readings are false and which are genuine because the false ones dont move relative to your fleet, so as you move they stay stationary on the indicator. I presume this is because they are very far off map mechanics wise, but that's just a guess. In any case, it's a very interesting idea that should be more than what it is, so a buff would help, even at the cost of increasing volatiles expenditure.

- More diverse [REDACTED] and automated defenses fleets. So far, there seem to be only fixed fleet compositions for all automated defense and [REDACTED] fleets. I think battling them would be more fun if their fleets were more diverse in their composition instead of the fixed composition they seem to currently have.

- Transverse jump tooltip should also display the cost in supplies when jumping out of a system into hyperspace. Or at the very least tell you that there is one.

- A jump warning for Neutron star systems, similar to the one warning you about fleets on the other side of a jump point. It really sucks jumping into a system and getting immediately pushed away from the jump point, since there's no way of telling where the beams are currently from hyperspace.

- Some sort of indicator that lets you know which discovered debris fields you've already scavenged when looking at the system map.

- A significant buff to the Cobra bomber. As it is, it's borderline useless compared to other strike wings.

- Reduced buoy replacement rate - I've noticed that pathers and pirates who's buoys I've wrecked immediately (and infinitely?) replace them. This is easily exploitable for machinery and transplutonics.

- Cargo pods left by the player should not be unidentified sensor contacts, but get their own marker on the map. I know they do if they are stabilized, but maybe consider adding a different marker for floating ones.

Overall, 0.9a has been a great experience, and i'm super happy with it.

Bug squashing aside, what would you guys like to see in 0.91?

Edit : Some other contributor's suggestions that i strongly agree with :

-QoL improvements:
    -Indicators for upgradeable tiles
    -Allow installation of cores and special items on any planet when the item is within a colonies storage

Also I would really like the ability to mark systems in the intel screen. A own tab with marked systems and the ability to make notes there would be very welcome for exploration.

I'd appreciate it if in the Custom Production Screen it would show how many of that thing currently exists on the production gathering point

                                           

Second edit : I've decided to remove colony and tariff related wishlist points, seeing as they are the subject of more extensive discussion in other posts. That being said, i do want to see various tweaks to balance and numbers of colonies, and a change to tariffs so that they aren't so simple and easy to avoid completely when selling fixed price goods.

[Megas]

Agreed with enemy stations.  They are the golden goose that keeps on giving if you keep it alive.  I wonder if I can raid their stations for blueprints or at least more fighter chips.  If that works, I might raid their stations periodically like a space pirate and suck them dry.

One thing I like to see:  Remove beacons and stray Remnants from systems I colonize and control, or at least suppress them as long as the colony is operational.  It is a slight annoyance having a Remnant duo scout buzzing around like a gnat in the system (that I invaded and set up shop in), occasionally stealing my makeshift relays.

Distress calls are false too much.  I had one in my 0.9 game, and it appears to have been nothing more than a frigate wreck guarded by Remnants.

[Megas]

- Reduced colony income OR increased optional expenses like bribes to ward off inspectors/invaders. Once you get one or two good colonies rolling, having money becomes just a matter of time (you can just wait for money to come in while guarding the neighborhood ) , and by the late game, money in general becomes completely irrelevant as monthly income in the millions is not difficult to achieve, and it doesn't require any sort of work to maintain.

Did you get high income without skills and/or alpha cores?

[DiM]

- Reduced colony income OR increased optional expenses like bribes to ward off inspectors/invaders. Once you get one or two good colonies rolling, having money becomes just a matter of time (you can just wait for money to come in while guarding the neighborhood ) , and by the late game, money in general becomes completely irrelevant as monthly income in the millions is not difficult to achieve, and it doesn't require any sort of work to maintain.

Did you get high income without skills and/or alpha cores?

I don't know, since i founded my first colony with a bankroll of 1M credits, i just bought everything and it was profitable from the start. I did have skills, but no alpha cores.

In any case, even without the cores and the skills, let's say income is cut in half, that's still enough to not have to worry about money ever again, who cares if you get 1M or 500k per month ?

[Eji1700]

Disclaimer- patch is bonkers fun.  So glad all of this was added.

1. A little more steady growth to the colony game.  As it stands right now it seems that you go from totally unable to get one off the ground to millionaire mogul overnight (at least once you know what and how to build).  This also feels pretty required since it's SUPER easy to wind up outproducing nearby factions, which brings me to-

2. Ramp up on faction hostilities and defenses.  I was pirate raided, i had a space station and my starting low/mid tech fleet to defend.  Good fight.  Shortly after the league decided I was making to much heavy machinery and sent a conquest, 3 gryphons, and a boatload of other ships at me.  For the record my "picket" defense at this point is 3 fighters and I can't seem to get the colony to make any more defensive ships, so i'm on babysitter duty.

Attempted the fight, lost badly, reloaded my save, kited the enemy fleet for 5 days while my battlestation upgrade finished, took the fight again, won pretty handily (and stole their conquest when it was done, then used it to clean up survivors because i'm spiteful like that.)  Now once I get the star fortress upgrade, i'm done with that system.

I think the problem here is two fold:

A. Enemies don't screw around.  Why they're sending an invasion force at my planet on first offense I do not know.  A fleet half that size would've given my in system defenses trouble, so i'm forced to either use money/influence/or my own fleet to defend.  Further why would I spend 100k on a bribe when that can go towards a battlestation/star fortress.  The fights are cool (stations are a great addition to the battles), but it's sort of annoying to have to stop what i'm doing to babysit a system that really isn't a threat at all yet.  It's compounded by the fact that the in system defenses don't seem to scale well at all compared to your production, EXCEPT for the station which is a huge power spike each upgrade (i'm running the mid tech one).  I've got something akin to the deathstar orbiting my base and a couple guys on big wheel trikes patrolling the system.

B. System development is all about money.  Want to set up?  Money.  Want to expand?  Money.  Want to defend?  Money.  Time to upgrade?  Money.  Sure the money causes different things to happen in the system (produce x good so you can build y thing) but there's no tech tree, no required infrastructure, no extra requirements.  Just money money money.  So show up, dump a pirate base bounty or two into the system, and now it's defended for life and as good as it's going to get barring farming AI cores and finding the occasional piece of special equipment. I was shocked for example to find out that the 2 pristine nanoforges and 3 corrupted ones were all but useless except for one since it can only be used in heavy industry.  There really needs to be more routes and options for getting a colony off the ground, and it'd make a lot more sense if some of that required the colony to grow first.  My 100k a month star fortress/ground battery/military command super base is just hitting stabilization 4.  

Both of these would help with colonies going from "not viable impossible to defend money sink" to "God fortress money printer" instantly and make it really feel like you're growing a base.

3. Maybe this already exists, but I really want a "fire weapon group X" button.  I've realized that with most of my weapon setups I have maybe one or two weapons groups i want to manually fire.  The rest I either want to toggle the autofire on or off, or I want to fire a salvo as long as I'm holding a key (for something like missiles/rockets/hephestus).

Edit- totally forgot but using the colony should require a bit more as well.

Want to build a conquest?  Ok find the blueprint, and then spend money.  I'm ok with it costing hard cash, but I feel like it should be super expensive (due to importing) if you go that way, and get cheaper the more of the proper resources you have (ores/rare ors/ weapons/ transplutonics/etc).  Would go a long way towards making resources matter more.

[Megas]

@ DiM:  If you used skills that expanded your colony limits or added income, then you paid for that high income.  Unskilled, my first colony is barely making money.  Rather, it started making a decent profit (more than Galatia stipend), but as I added more structures for a more self-sufficient colony, expenses started eating away at profits.  (175% hazard is painful despite the planet having a huge motherload of resources.)  Also, I started to devour my own colonies' supplies and crew as I fight bigger and stronger fleets.  Now, unless I take Industry skills, I cannot expand anymore without 1) expenses exceeding income and 2) aggravating major factions enough to set my colony on fire.

I have trouble keeping up with enemy strength progression without skills.  I tried to play without skills, but simply Coordinated Maneuvers and Electronic Warfare (and Fleet Logistics) alone was not enough.

[Megas]

One more thing about beacon systems.  If you clean out the Remnants and control the system, it would be a nice touch that, if you cannot remove the beacon, then have it show green (instead of yellow, orange, or red) and without pinging, and add some graffiti to overwrite the warning text to let visitors know that "My faction is here!"

[Algro]

My experience with the colony has been great so far, but it comes with some problems.

The current save of mine has 5 colonies, the capital at 7 stability pumps 320k per month. The moon has 300k at stability 6 and a gas giant in the same system with -50k. To get this I have spent millions on production and incentives with maxed out relative skills. It was a blast throughout the entire process and I loved the ability to have a giant stockpile of resources for your own personal use (Tariff-free). There are problems though, but once fixed, it will make the process even more enjoyable.


Here are the problems I've had:

1) I have three colonies in the same system, all being bigger then 5 so they attract A LOT of expeditions. The result is a litter of massive battles (Imagine 4 big blobs of one faction, 3 of another and 5 of your own with your spaceport, it was overkill). With my fleet of several capital ships, I tried one and the largest battle took 40 minutes and many engagements to complete, I spent almost all of my CR and concluded by LEAVING the battle without the salvage. Why? The enemy fleet of logistic ships was so large they had their own separate fight. They would retreat every time, spending CR on both sides, I had to leave or risk spending all my CR.

2) The process of the beginning of a colony and making a full-fledged sector market leader has too few steps in the process, it is as simple as placing the right things based on the colonized planet (note tiles like farming/mining are a one-step process) and volla, you just wait for it to grow.

3) I would love to customize my stations, but as of current, I haven't found the option to do so yet. This is a problem b/c the High-tech variant is still using mining lasers as their main armament based on what I had in the early days.



Here are some solutions that may help with the above problems:

-Have each of the tiles include more steps and have more unique tiles. The current version automatically improves production as the colony enlargens, but this makes it lackluster form a players perspective. If players were to have control over the farms and mining like upgrading from a spaceport to a megaport, it shows more clear signs of progression. What's even better, include unique upgrades to these tiles if certain conditions are met, like specialized mining facilities.

-As an extension of the step above, make planet size, and population size the major determinators of how much and how specialized the tiles the colony can build (Or planet size a contributing stat for how fast the colony grows). This would in effect create more meaningful choices because colonies are limited to what they can specialize with. The current build lets size 3 colonies on tiny moons to have the capability to match that of a habitable planet with size 7 structure wise, so with the appropriate money, the player only needs to spam all structures in one go and leave for two months to finish all upgrades.

-Stability 10 planets should not have so much expeditions coming every month, its a battlefield with salvageable ships floating everywhere, like really, everywhere, not to mention the debris ring the game has artificially made.

-QoL improvements:
    -Indicators for upgradeable tiles
    -Allow installation of cores and special items on any planet when the item is within a colonies storage

It's getting long so I'll be making a new topic for this specifically

[Schwartz]

Same situation as Megas. Great resources on 175% hazard. It makes a surplus of 100k after a ton of investments in cores and skills.

Not all colonies are created equal. If you found a great low hazard planet, you were lucky.

[Megas]

Same situation as Megas. Great resources on 175% hazard. It makes a surplus of 100k after a ton of investments in cores and skills.

Not all colonies are created equal. If you found a great low hazard planet, you were lucky.

I finally spent nine points to max the two empire-building colony skills, and I have a huge breather to continue play.

[Igncom1]

I have 4 colonies right now, with 2 fully upgraded with infrastructure.

They only bring in about 80K a month, but the full defences mean that nothing but the biggest expedition fleets can truly challenge me.

I abandoned my mining worlds after realizing that I won't be able colonize many worlds so I now stick to a set of guidelines. For any world of habitability up to 150%, the world needs 500 value in the intel screen. Any world 175% habitability needs around 750 value. I don't go for harder worlds as the costs are just too great.

This leaves me with worlds that are all self sustaining and fully fortified. Might be less money then I could get, but otherwise my fortress worlds give me a nice tithe to play around with. Which is nice, but now I need to explore and routinely hunt down pirate/ludd bases. Which could be fun, if I wasn't having problems.

I have killed both the

Spoiler

Mothership

[close]

and

Spoiler

one of the AI battlestations

[close]

, which have no decent loot at all.

I also need to pursue

Spoiler

This red planet quest, but It was guarded by an AI battleship

[close]

, which is on the other side of the sector to my "Commonwealth" so I'll need to build up a proper expedition fleet of my own to go down there.

As for my fighting problems, I'm finding it hard to find a reason not to just spam my

Spoiler

4 salvaged 14th Legion Battlecarriers

[close]

in every major battle. The battles I fight that are serious now are of such scope that those and some Auroras I had my shipyards build for me as escorts are all I am using in every battle. Nothing else is capable of surviving. Maybe my gear is just not that great and so on, but nothing else really seems to work. Could be I have forgotten how to play.

Maybe I just need to find some more research stations, as my last 20 systems I have explored only had those deep space probes which net me nothing truly of worth other then free supplies and fuel to keep going.

[DiM]

So what would you like to see in 0.91 ? Or do you feel you need to play some more before you can add to the wishlist?

[Algro]

For me, colonies must be either low hazard or high value for the hazard rating, but even still I'll try finding low hazard planets.

Why? Hazard is the multiplier for upkeep, if you do find a high hazard high-value planet it will only be profitable to have a megaport, a star fortress and some ground defense with ONLY planet specific resource structures.

On the other hand, low hazard planets are profitable no matter what you make, so they are your main fuel facilities and orbital works.

Adding to the wishlist:
-The ability to research ships by breaking some apart, aka. artificial blueprints
-Some tools to lower hazard rating and unstable population
-The ability to buy out expeditions for a month to a year
-The ability to take out the Ludd cells, maybe a dedicated structure like the secret police

[TaLaR]

On the other hand, low hazard planets are profitable no matter what you make, so they are your main fuel facilities and orbital works.

Since imports cost nothing, are resources even that important? As long as you don't get your imports blocked of course. Processing industries bring enough profits on their own.

So you do need to have in-faction resources for total war against the sector, but otherwise it seems ignorable. You are guaranteed to keep trade with your commission faction (as long as it isn't Hegemony with their anti-AI fixation), independents and free ports.

[Igncom1]

If I was to suggest anything, it would be to give appropriate rewards towards taking down hard targets at the sectors edge. Killing battleship level enemies out there is expensive, very expensive. So it needs to provide some kind of boon.

At the very least the

Spoiler

Mothership gave me a pristine nanoforge

[close]

what was cool.