Yes the player shouldn't be able to make loads of money unchallenged, but expeditions are not the way to do it.
How to prevent expeditions.
1) Don't use free port.
Which is fair enough I guess.
2) Don't produce stuff with high accessibility.
The whole point of player colonies (for the player) is to make money, so this point is a no go.
Now that we have established that you really can't avoid expeditions, since you want your colonies to make money from exports, there is no drawback to free port except the easily worth it -3 to stability.
How to deal with expeditions.
1) Lose money
A. Bribe them: this sort of works until it begins to cost 1 million credit per bribe. Which leads to (Bad Choice):
B. Let the ground defence take care of them: This means your orbital space station is destroyed, which will reduce your
colony's stability, which will reduce your income, which means you lose some money you would have made
otherwise. (Bad Choice)
C. Win in orbit, but lose the orbital station anyways: Same problems as B. (Bad Choice)
D. The enemy wins and disrupts an industry or the extremely important spaceport: (EXTREMELY BAD CHOICE)
2) Lose reputation
A. Use Contacts: You lose 25 hard to get reputation with a factions that likes you. (Bad Choice)
B. Help Defend the Colony in person: Not only does this require the players time and prevents him from doing other
potentially more interesting things, it will also reduce his reputation with a faction possibly leading to hostilities,
which will only further reduce his income. The player also risks expensive repairs or losing most of his fleet.
However, the xp and salvage is nice. (Really Bad Choice)
3) The player needs to do nothing and make no decision.
The expedition has no chance of winning in orbit or taking down the space station it will therefore have literally 0
impact on the player or his colonies. Happens when the expedition is weaker than the defending force (Both of which the
player has little to no control over). Best outcome (Neutral, Status Quo),
but not a choice the player can make.
What the enemy pays for expeditions.
Now, sending some massive fleets with 6 plus capital ships, dozens of cruisers and so on is surely an expensive affair that leaves loads of salvage around for you colonies right? Nope, only you can harvest the salvage, the colonies won't do it, and it costs the AI literally nothing to send these and there is nothing you can do about it, you cannot even annoy them back by sending your own raids/expeditions. This is incredibly unfair and frustrating.
And even if they succeeded, there would be no repercussion on the global economy if the top export planet of multiple commodities suddenly stopped exporting. The only effect it would have, is that its piece of the market share would be up for grabs.
The attacker does not care about reputation.
You could have 100/100 reputation with the faction and be commissioning them and they would still send expeditionary forces, you would think that if they had such a big problem with you that they wouldn't be paying you money on a monthly basis no?
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