So yesterday on the Discord there was a rather extensive discussion about the overall progression mechanics in Starsector and whether the latest batch of editions were overpowered in its context. While it makes sense for balancing concerns to be quite rampant given the alpha state of the game, and subsequently for people to want to bring new aspects of the game in line with their own perceptions of difficulty and player effort - it is important to keep in mind the concept of escalating scope and its relevance in the balance of new features which are lacking in context. By viewing the game as a series of stages - each with their own variant types of primary challenges and emphasised mechanics - we can better form the relationships between these new systems and the prior game experience.
As a note, this is written from the perspective of a normal difficulty, frigate start, no tutorial player. This experience seems to well encompass the challenges of the early game without going too far into self-imposed difficulty via the spacer start,utilises some of the same principles as the frigate state - only slower.
Gameplay Tiers
Starsector's progression system lends itself rather easily to a system of tiers, or stages, defined by the primary goals and available resources to the player with regular frequency. As of 0.9a, they are as follows:
- Early Game: Extremely small, low power fleet. Tied to core worlds for missions. Everywhere is dangerous, bounties are barely accessible, hard to explore. Limited fuel, supplies, ships.
- Early Exploration / Bounty Hunting: Have salvaged / bought enough ships to form a reasonable frigate / destroyer (perhaps single cruiser) fleet. Still dangerous roaming fleets (screw pirate armadas), but bounties start to make more sense, and exploration can be done to a relatively safe degree (disregarding beacon systems). Fuel and supply management becomes more planned around this point rather than coming from desperation. At this point you are building capital (both money and ships) to scale up your ability to fight bounties and exploration threats. Still limited in options.
- Commissions / Advanced Bounties: Have a capable amount of ships for hunting most to all bounties. Around the time taking commissions becomes feasible, or when colonies actually become defensible from expeditions. Basic necessities are essentially secure given proper management (IE Keeping adequate funds in case of SNAFU), and the options of the game start to open up significantly in the exploration department. This state of the game can be rather easily maintained in prior versions - most active threats do not present much of a challenge - leaving the player to actively pursue risks in order to obtain the greatest reward.
- Early Colonies: Note: While colonies can be founded earlier, the disruptive nature of expeditions makes especially profitable ones difficult without a good fleet. Making significant progress in dominating market share will and should attract attention which requires the player to have a well established military - but small temporary tech-mining camps far away from the matters of the core worlds should be relatively safe if minimally rewarding in things other than blueprints and a few supplies. Have a colony capable of supporting the fleet without relying on core world missions constantly. Most money invested into colony and its defence. Not a major player in the sector. Transition phase - provides a place to put money after fleet is established which provides a steady and constant sense of progression. Exploration once again becomes a priority as you look for artefacts to improve colony effectiveness.
- Late Colonies: Self-sustaining, self defending colonies which provide a constant source of income. Main player interaction comes through improving with exploration content and dealing with bases. Exploration is still priority for additional colony sites and additional artefacts. Specialised fleets become more sustainable due to custom production. Main threats are Luddic Path cells, Pirate Armadas, and Remnants. Faction wars and raiding would be a things - but there are some issues there. Missing higher level interactions to elicit proper player involvement.
Early game at the moment feels relatively fine in this scheme, there's a significant level of challenge and tactics to be overcome, and it lasts long enough to make getting bast the great limitations feel immensely rewarding. Early exploration and bounty hunting also has the same idea, the sense of progression as you get to fight stronger opponents and explore farther and grow in power - good. Commissions are neat, but good Independent standing is overall better. Commissions would benefit from opening up higher level options for the player in terms of increasing the faction's power and being given the capacity to perform higher level actions with them (for those who don't want to manage their own faction). In the prior version of the game, exploration sort of lost its purpose compared to bounties at this point - but with colonies it is greatly incentivised. The early colony game is nice, though the power of expeditions felt a bit random. Pirate scaling was fine. Luddic cells are rather agreed to be broken for a variety of reasons including the difficulty of locating them (sans cheesy methods and disproportionate effects), so not much has to be said there. In my experience, there was enough expedition spam along with pirates and Luddic cluckery that I was rather busy running everywhere trying to keep the growth rate up whilst defending my bases - and suffering horribly when that failed. Quite some effort there, and for good reason, because the payoff is quite good.
And then there's the late colony game. You have your good accessible trading colony, you are at peace with everyone you can be at peace with. Ideally the AI inspections are paid off and you are making a great deal of money each month. Breaking the Remnants is the big focus now, as well as exploring for AI, blueprints, and more locations. After all of the pain, things are finally working out...
"Colonies are overpowered money printers, no player effort."
Ah yes that. Because this wasn't entirely the case before.
The issue with colonies at the moment is the same as the late-game bounty stage in the prior versions - they are a pick for which there is no stone to break. You see, colonies are something which acts on a much greater scope than just a single fleet. Of course the money they make seems quite large if you are only using it on projects which are meant to be accessible without them - IE your singular fleet and its (as trained from its scarcity days) quite minimal maintenance. The solution isn't to make colonies weaker so you are still operating within that minimalist mindset - its to introduce factors which are appropriate to its scope - things which require large sources of income which are impractical with a singular mercenary fleet and have effects which reflect that scale. Getting a colony setup to be self-sustainable should still provide the same reward as it does now, but that reward should just be a gateway into another round of interesting options rather than a mere income source for your standard operations. Thus, a new tier is opened, and then colonies can be balanced in the context of that greater scope - rather than restricted arbitrarily for short sighted gain.
There are a few methods under which this could be done - most involving an expansion of the faction system. I do want to clarify: Commissions should provide an alternative to colonies for players who don't want to bother with the faction aspects of the game (I know there are quite a few out there), but this is mostly focused on the faction system for now. Diplomacy is a system which would add a great deal of depth to colony management and add greater nuance to the system than the current, "keep everyone above -49 for accessibility reasons" logic which is currently the case. I would imagine a system of wars and alliances which invite more powerful attacks than the standard expeditions - but also provide powerful benefits or special missions depending on the factions involved. Alliances would provide bonuses to counter the effects of being at war with other factions - and would incentivise military actions to acquire special resources from their territories / expand your power. Faction wars would not be things you could deal with using a single fleet - so you would need to divert funds into AI fleets which would support your forces in battle and be used to defend / attack systems. These fleets would have a limited range to prevent abuse, and would be expensive for exploration anyway, but they would become a necessity for organised warfare. You could assign officers to command fleets and give them leadership skills via a promotion system perhaps - removing them from your pool and putting them in a faction Admiral list. This war system would also be useful for countering active threats from things other than established factions, considering there's probably some scary things planned in the future which would also need a great amount of power to defeat.
Besides war, there's a few other things which would scale quite nicely with the funds of colonies. For instance - maintenance on the various communications, sensor, and navigation relays you construct and capture would have a cost - those which are not maintained having a tendency to fail after some time (still useful to temporarily capture or construct, but for things like colonies and defended systems - you want something permanent. Large research projects which require the construction of stations in fringe systems and their defence would also be neat, providing more logistical benefits which can be utilised to counter BIG THREATS and initiate more projects. Ideally there would be a threat which escalates based on your faction's power (XCOM LONG WAR) so each benefit would feel necessary, and you would feel the pressure to keep progress going without the odd pseudo random nature of the blimey Ludds. Reinstating old Domain technology is quite a fun concept given the tech starved nature of the galaxy, and having the player play a major role in that feels like a natural progression of the game.
But alas, these are just a few ideas which seems to fit in a bit more than the nerf colonies argument. Increasing the scope of the late game would provide so much more content and depth to the game than trying to stay in the early game mindset. Just wanted to put them out there. Ciao!
Author
Topic: [0.9a] Progression Scope and how Colonies can be "Balanced" (Read 5221 times)