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Author Topic: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun  (Read 46867 times)

knogleknuser

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Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« on: November 25, 2018, 12:52:51 AM »

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?



[attachment deleted by admin]
« Last Edit: November 25, 2018, 08:57:39 PM by knogleknuser »
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Serenitis

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2018, 02:33:17 AM »

Okay.
Expeditions (aka 'Invasions') do need a bit of attention, to be balanced away from being solely end game content. Simply because it is possible to get into this while the player is still early/mid game.

Firstly, expeditions should not appear for several months from the founding of the colony. At least.
It takes time for information to travel through the twisted maelstrom of hyperspace, and no-one is going to pay any attention to the rantings of some tiny trader about some miracale colony on the edge of nowhere. At least until some other guys start backing him up.

This could be handled by having a faction scout (or several) wandering about looking for you, trying to verify the existence of this rumoured new colony.
Once they find you (and they will), it could trigger a notification that says "a major faction has discovered you, and is now paying attention".
The first expedition should be basically a tap on the shoulder - A retasked patrol fleet, nothing more than a few destroyers with escorts and enough support ships to keep them fed.
After that, expeditions should scale with market share. Which I'm fairly confident they do already, but that leads to....

Colony material output, and thus market share increases far far too quickly.
All the core worlds have a headstart of centuries, established infrastructure, and several orders of magnitude more population (each).
How is this months old colony with a thousand-or-so people and barely any infrastructre able to instantly claim 1/4 of the market in anything?
There is a fairly huge mis-match between the sector economy and the player economy, and it is this which is ramping up the expeditions to such impossible heights so quickly. The player literally has it "too easy".

On top of all this there is no way for the player to attempt any form of diplomacy with a faction, so the "forever war" continues regardless of how interested in it you are.
This almost entirely puts a stop to any form of exploration, as expedition fleets quickly build to the point that even a maxed station plus several fleets from a military HQ are not enough to prevent troops being landed. To counter this, the player is now relagated to babysitting the colony, which is boring.
And to put the spiteful cherry on top of the bitter cake, you get a reputation penalty for even attempting to defend your colony yourself. They attacked you. They are the aggressors, why is the player being punished twice for being attacked?
Especially frustrating given the invading factions are clearly stated to not have an "open declaration of war", and their fleets are clearly marked as "operating in a legal grey area".

There's nothing wrong with the basics of the mechanic itself. It just needs to start much smaller, and slowly ramp up rather than instantly throw endgame fleets at the player.
And player colonies could stand to be dialled back a bit on thier material output.
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Deshara

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2018, 02:37:48 AM »

quick Q: did you found a colony in the core?
Bc that was my take originally, then when I was planning an expansion I noticed the game had a warning (that I overlooked) that factions in contested systems essentially treat you colonizing near them as an act of war. I started a new game and made my colony in the outter rim and it's way easier. Inner core colonizing is late-game content.
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Quote from: Deshara
I cant be blamed for what I said 5 minutes ago. I was a different person back then

Serenitis

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2018, 02:55:17 AM »

For ref:

The first colony I founded, which got dogpiled almost instantly by multi-capital fleets was ~30ly from the core.
I considered this to be a lost cause and reverted the save.

The second colony I founded, and my first successful colony was created on the 'red' planet which is (in this instance at least) in the far lower-right corner of the map. Something like 100+ ly from the core.
Expedition fleets have been reasonably manageable enough that I felt I could start exploring again. Until the last couple, which have apparently steamrolled the defence fleets and station while I wasn't there.

In both instances the systems had no other faction presence.
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Hypilein

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #4 on: November 25, 2018, 02:57:35 AM »

I bribed the first three or four expedition fleets (either rep or money). The next run I helped defend with my fleet and after that my colony has been taking care of itself using the lvl 1 hightech station and a mostly carrierbased loadout in fleet doctrine (basically a bunch of herons and shepherds). Probably having two (now three) planets colonized in a system is beneficial, even though the lowest one was 150% Hazard. I think the expedition fleets are generally alright, but I agree that a smoother start up would help. I've been playing this game since the first patch that released the campaign mode and this update has felt a lot more difficult, because ship and especially weapon availability is really tough.
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Az the Squishy

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2018, 06:07:42 PM »

Checkout the document, it has all the text. Copy pasting it resulted in a mess.


Dude, https://pastebin.com/ is free, and it's just as good, hell, you could just upload a txt file instead or, just copy and post it with:

Code
This nifty code-function which should be more than plenty with whatever you're having issues with.
Or maybe, you can elaborate a bit more.
Because from the question alone, I've no idea what you're really meaning.


PS: Why a zipfile?... Of all things, why a zip?
« Last Edit: November 25, 2018, 06:09:53 PM by Azmond »
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knogleknuser

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #6 on: November 25, 2018, 08:48:23 PM »

I'm updating the post now, I made my posts in word and when I saw how I had to change the layout when I copy pasted it I decided to just upload the word file. Since, docx files aren't allowed I put it in a zip file.

But as I said, I am updating the post now.
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Sutopia

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #7 on: November 25, 2018, 09:03:15 PM »

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.

Fake. None of my colony ever used free port yet still getting raids with free port as excuse.
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Schwartz

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #8 on: November 25, 2018, 09:04:28 PM »

Tbh I think they are (largely) fine. As soon as the penalty for participating in expedition battles is gone, they'll be a fun challenge that won't ruin your rep.

Yes, the other faction should have to pay some kind of price for fielding expeditions. I don't know if they currently do. But if they do, the player should have to pay some kind of price for fielding defense fleets. It's all pretty hands-off at the moment.
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nathanebht

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #9 on: November 25, 2018, 09:09:50 PM »

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.

Fake. None of my colony ever used free port yet still getting raids with free port as excuse.

I had free port as the reason for a raid only when I turned it on. This stopped when I then turned it off. Otherwise, the reason is a particular commodity.
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Hypilein

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #10 on: November 25, 2018, 09:45:13 PM »

It will say what the reason is in the expedition fleet's tooltip. Mine was because of fuel production (I found a Synchrotron early). I only turned the freeport on after I felt that I could deal with increased number of fleets. Generally I agree that the worst thing about expedition fleets right now is that they attack you even when 100/100 commissioned and that you lose rep when you defend in person.
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Alex

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #11 on: November 25, 2018, 09:51:25 PM »

Generally I agree that the worst thing about expedition fleets right now is that they attack you even when 100/100 commissioned and that you lose rep when you defend in person.

(Both on my TODO list, btw.)
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code99

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #12 on: November 25, 2018, 10:19:54 PM »

Generally I agree that the worst thing about expedition fleets right now is that they attack you even when 100/100 commissioned and that you lose rep when you defend in person.

(Both on my TODO list, btw.)
Awesome to hear!

Kinda makes sense if you are BFF with a certain faction, that faction shouldnt attack you. I think ill wait for 9.1 before touching colonies again.
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Schwartz

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #13 on: November 25, 2018, 10:27:02 PM »

I wouldn't like the idea that a positive rep with other factions made you immune to this danger. Because expeditions are a big part of the counterbalance to colony profits. Positive faction rep already makes the game easier, it doesn't need to negate half of the endgame threats too. It could increase the interval between expeditions, possibly.
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Eji1700

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Re: Colony Expeditions are Unfair and Unfun
« Reply #14 on: November 25, 2018, 10:30:26 PM »

SO whats odd to me is i have currently 2 colonies, maxed out.

Both are getting raid fleets, but both have so far managed to never need my help once I got a star fortress up.  This is with raids from diktat/tri/persian.  I've yet to see an expedition fleet that would steamroll my forces.

What determines fleet str?  Is it just how much money you're making in the market?  Both my colonies do not have freeport on and run 0 AI cores, but it still makes me about 200k per cycle (depending on pather junk, which is a different issue).
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