SpaceportI argued against someone else's ridiculous rationale for it in another thread, but there
is a balance problem with the degree to which a spaceport is a market's Achilles heel. Among other things, when you have a choice to disrupt
1) Spaceport
2) Literally any other structure or industry on the market
then 1 is almost always the objectively superior choice, because it is effectively equivalent to disrupting all the other industries as well; they can neither import needed raw materials nor export their output.
In fact, raiding the spaceport can be cheaper and better for lowering a market's defenses than using a tactical bombardment (especially when preparing for an invasion in Nexerelin, where you'd like to be able to use the defense buildings afterwards). This is especially true given the severity of commodity deficits on the military base/orbital station/ground defenses' stability bonus: 1 point shortage = -1 loss of bonus, rather than being pro-rated or such.
I'd recommend lowering the -100% no-spaceport penalty to -50%, which is what I've set it to in Nex. The spaceport is still perhaps a more attractive target than it should be, but its disruption isn't utterly debilitating to the affected market, as it can still import a small amount of commodities in-faction.
Luddic Church, independents' heavy industry(mentioned
here before but I think it went unnoticed)
I get that they needed heavy industry to enable the player to raid for their blueprints, and to make their ship quality not abysmal. But was it really desirable to give them both an Orbital Works with corrupted nanoforge? That puts them on par with Tri-Tachyon (which is supposed to be the second-tier industrial power in the Sector). I'd either take away the nanoforge or downgrade the industry to Heavy Industry.
Small synchrotron coresPoorly thought out idea:
Synchrotron cores are important for the player to be able to access, but may be a bit too common as a jackpot item at present. Also, unlike nanoforges, there's no granularity between no bonus item and the +3 bonus item.
I was thinking we could have a "synchrotron sub-core" item that gives a +1 bonus, and when you have a number (3-5) you can combine them into the full-scale core. The full core could be made very rare in exploration, but you could still raid for one, or just accumulate sub-cores in the course of normal exploration.
Ships on open market and black marketPeople have pointed out the narratively improbable degree to which you can find military-grade ships up to battleships, often pristine or nearly so, outside the military submarket (including on stability 10 black markets). (
famous illustration here)
It's nice to be able to buy good ships, but the current state may be taking it too far. Among other things, commissions become meaningless for acquiring ships (since everything in the military submarket can be procured elsewhere for a fraction of the effort) and serve largely as a source of cash income.
Idea: ship availability on open market is limited to lower-FP ships within that size class, adjusted by number of D-mods and things like Civ-grade Hull. So pristine Falcons or degraded Auroras might infrequently show up, but not stuff like intact Dooms. For black markets, the limit would work similarly but be tied to local stability (lower stability = more chance of high-end military stuff "disappearing" from official inventories).
Hegemony inspection and changing hostility stateThere's an issue involving the following scenario:
- Hegemony is hostile to player
- Hegemony launches inspection, action is fixed at "resist" so player takes no action
- Player stops being hostile to Hegemony
- Action now defaults to "cooperate"
- Player doesn't notice until inspection comes and goes, "WTF my cores!!!"
Not sure how to solve this, perhaps the default hostile state should be remembered when the event is started while Hegemony is hostile?
Core world procgen planets should be less goodOtherwise you have weird cases where factions haven't colonized highly attractive locations in their own systems. This also applies to Duzahk, which often has a terran-grade world in it that the player would have to be nuts not to settle at first opportunity.
DTC/ITU nagThere are still some revealed cases (and who knows how many undetected ones) where new players don't know that Dedicated Targeting Core/Integrated Targting Unit are almost mandatory for cruisers and capitals. I think the only place this is even explained are in the hullmod's tooltips, which you certainly can't count on people reading.
Idea: If you refit a cruiser or capital and it doesn't have DTC/ITU, display a help popup explaining that they probably should be fitted outside of certain specialized builds (like how there's a popup if you've changed the weapon loadout without changing weapon groups). Then we just have to hope the player doesn't close it without reading.
Pirate Activity condition tooltip should display actual base's location if knownCurrently it just always says "The pirates most likely have a base somewhere relatively nearby." (even when the base is not actually nearby, as per the intel text)