... You will remember when you can safely carry around huge numbers of marines and heavy weapons for raiding core world nanoforges, etc. It also makes late game raiding require a bit more planning if you have to go through allied space with illegal cargo that they could see as threatening. All of those are wins as far as I'm concerned.
Right - not saying this is necessarily bad, but it's defintiely a thing where I have a hard time it actually working out in-game in the way that it's meant to/would need to in order to actually do the job. It's easy enough not to get stopped, so to make that a concern you'd need to make stops more frequent and it's just a touchy mechanic; too easy for it to just be annoying. And even then, it's a "hostilities break out earlier than expected" event. Just... without going into too much detail, all the gameplay around this can be used to avoid any downsides too easily, so this feels like it'd only be good
in theory. I'm not sure it's compelling enough to make the player really play around this.
selling them hurts you since you are selling their experience with them
Well, presumably if you're selling them, you want less marines, but you're not losing any per-marine effectiveness. I mean, it hurts you in the same way that selling non-experienced marines does - you now have fewer marines.
(As far as heavy weapons, that's easily justifiable in-fiction imo; but I'm not sure how this is really related to marine XP.)
I'm seriously amazed at this point how you always manage to write up a blog post exactly when I'm not at home. And I even don't go out that often!
Hah, sorry
Also what about those elite lobsters? I don't see them mentioned anywhere in the blog post, I feel cheated
A missed opportunity for funny tag, alas.
Are there any plans to modify/redo the price-checking interface? Coz of right now, you add several factions in and looking to buy\sell stuff becomes pretty clunky, as it only shows top-5 stations-planets.
Nothing I'd call "plans", but I might end up looking at it at some point; IIRC I've got a note about it.
On the "making crew more meaningful" side of things, I have been playing recently with crew prices and salaries turned up 10x. I wanted to have to really think hard before expanding my fleet, and when you're paying each crew member a handsome wage it isn't so easy to just add more ships whenever you want. Also, when a big ship goes down in combat it really hurts . . . which is why the under-appreciated skills/hullmods for reducing crew casualties suddenly become worth taking. In fact, it helps to make salvage skills more relevant in late-game fleets, since you really want to keep casualties low.
Hmm, interesting!
Hey alex, this looks really good! I'm happy to see something cool happen from raiding now.
Thank you!
Then again, you use crew during the entire game, and marines only for raiding. Relatively smaller bonuses to crew might end up being absolutely bigger than those of marines, simply because their bonuses end up getting a lot more often.
I don't think that this kind of math actually works. Even if the total bonuses for crew "matter" more in terms of impact times the amount of times it comes into play, all they'd be doing is making the game slightly easier, not actually introducing the interesting decisions and such. Whereas a large bonus that matters more situationally *can* change how you play where it does affect things. Basically, a whole lot of "doesn't really matter" is still "doesn't really matter", if that makes sense.
Another approach would be having the crew experience be a resource, to be spent on permanent or temporary, ship specific or fleetwide conditions. Or something similar to story points, but that in turn would make story points less unique.
Right, yeah, that'd be a job for story points.
...there wouldn't be an issue with getting rid of bulk of vendor trash, if economy actually scaled non-linearly, like it pretends to, instead of every bigger market being just 200, or, at best, 500 units bigger than previous one...
As I mentioned in the post, that's now a lot easier due to some econ-unit sizes being higher. I.E. if you find 10k Ore somewhere, you can actually sell it for a decent price. The economy scaling non-linearly for the "to cargo units" conversion looks a bit silly just as far as the numbers you get; I don't think it works.
But why Not (spontanious Idea.)
Split Crew from ships to:
Crew (No XP)
Pilots (slight Bonus eg.to top spd)
...
Hmm, I'm not sure this really relates to the topic, honestly.
I don't want to put a downer on things but..
We have't had an update in months, but it seems one has finally arrived!
Alex it seems you are obsessing over the wrong things, clearly the game lacks content in terms of story.
To make sure it's clear, this isn't something I've been working on for the entire time since the last update, or anything close to it. It's just one of the few things that I thought would make for an interesting blog post. Story things are also tougher to talk about because I don't want to spoil them, but that doesn't mean they're not being added.
- Assigning more marine units to a single target is a tradeoff of getting more stuff/increasing disruption time at the cost of taking more losses, right?
It looks a bit weird since one might intuitively interpret it as "use more force to overwhelm the target with fewer losses". Can be resolved by conceptualizing the marine allocation as "time/effort spent trashing the place" rather than actual forces deployed, but this is kind of not communicated to the player so to speak.
The way I think about it is some of the forces are assigned to actually fulfuilling the objective (i.e. grabbing, let's say, Supplies) while the rest are in reserve/provide backup as needed. So in other words, if all your marines are tossing crates into shuttles, they're more vulnerable than if half of them are providing cover, running distraction operations, etc.
- Can a mod add a custom version of the raid objectives window?
Like, I could hypothetically create an invasion mechanic where each industry has a 'hit points' value, and marines assigned to that industry cause it to take damage until its HP drops to zero and it gets captured. Would I be able to make a table to display this information?
Yeah, definitely doable as long as the column names are the same. Each objective is a GroundRaidObjectivePlugin (there's a few types already, for commodities, special items, AI cores, blueprints, ship equipment) and you can provide custom implementations. You can also either edit the list of objectives using a listener, or just provide the list if you're calling the showGroundRaidTargetPicker() method directly yourself.
- Do veteran soldiers sell for more money? It might be cool to train them up strictly to sell them.
They don't, no.
- Do XP losses come out of the average XP level, or is it weighted towards the battle honored tactic of sacrificing rookies? They were valuable meat shields.
It's proportional! On the other hand, you get XP based on the pre-losses number of marines, so that could be interpreted in this way if desired.
Will the enemy be able to do the same kind of raiding to the player? Disruption sounds like a Ludd favorite, and theft would be very much in the interest of pirates. Higher level factions may even want to steal your nanoforges or blueprints. Scary!
Not at the moment - well, I mean, expeditions already aim to disrupt industries, but none of the "stealing" stuff. That'd be kind of separate, really.
What about allowing Heavy Armaments to be a required component of the raid for more difficult raid targets?
That might be a nice way to add to higher difficulty targets. Most simple things can be whacked by marines, but the higher end things also need big guns to succeed. That way the difficulty can reach higher thresholds without automatically demanding thousands of marines from the player. Heavy armaments are also illegal in a way that marines are not, so you'd absolutely incur more wrath as a result of having and using them.
Per my earlier response, I'm not seeing a way to have that be functionally different than just "having more marines". Even if heavy armaments mitigate losses or some such, it still seems like it'd end up being a math exercise at the end of the day. Being required for tougher objectives, though... I guess the way it
could work is if you absolutely *had* to have heavy armaments for certain higher danger levels or objectives. Then it'd be qualitatively different and potentially interesting. Also more complicated, though, and figuring out how many "units" of heavy armaments you have gets a bit tricky, too, especially as far as communicating this to the player.
Only caveat I have is the way unique items can be raided. While I agree with your rejection of a pure RNG system, the proposed one seems a bit weird. With X marines you cannot even try it but with X+5 you are guaranteed to have it?
Why not combine the two systems? Make a rather high required raid effectiveness threshold to even try it and then give it like a 25-75% chance depending on your effectiveness. And then add another threshold which gives a 100% chance of success.
That would keep it out of the early game. But at the mid game players can try for them. And in the end game players can come with overwhelming force for a guaranteed grab to avoid frustration due to bad luck.
Well, at some point, there's going to be a threshold anyway, right? With 5 marines more, you have a 25% chance to do it, but without them, you can't try at all? Ultimately it just comes back to "this is a game"... I was thinking about having a story option to bump the raid effectiveness up a touch, but really no matter what you do there's still a threshold somewhere, unless it's just rng from 0 to 100%. And even then, actually, since you need at least 5% raid effectiveness to raid.
I personally don't raid until late game because I don't feel I can "afford" the reputation hit/hostility with the faction I'm raiding. The net gain rarely offsets the net loss unless what I'm losing is negligible because my own colonies can do it better. Casual raiding just has never seemed worth it because I can make money through other avenues that actually gain rep with factions.
If story points were still involved, the "surprise" raid wouldn't make it more effective: it would make it more covert (i.e. little/no reputation hit at all). If there were less of a meta-game consequence to raiding, I'd do it more. Maybe it's just me but unless I'm getting something permanent like blueprints or nanoforges, the risk isn't worth the reward. (Then again, I'm not much of a warmonger in my playthroughs).
Hmm, I like this a lot, actually, it's a nice use of story points for a qualitatively different, but not overpowered, effect. Made a note!
Current raids can usually just be spammed after a tactical bombardment to obtain the exact same results plus blueprints/resources and without the negative effects of a saturation bombardment, this also makes me feel like once you can raid something, you're basically beating a dead horse that is your target faction already.
I don't think it'll be as much of a concern given the increasing marine losses, but perhaps it might make sense to reduce/not stack the stability penalties from continued raids.
https://imgur.com/LIBn86k
Firefox. Not much of a problem but if you look at the scrollbar, on the right I have to scroll down a lot of blank empty space after the blog post, if I click on the picture for some reason. Since no one else has the problem, it could be anything casuing it.
Thank you - yeah, that's odd, but as you say, hard to tell what it might be.
To be honest my main problem with raiding early game is marine upkeep. Compared to fuel/crew/supply upkeep of frigate/destroyer fleet (early game), the amount of credits you need to pay any marine force large enough to to get through colony defenses without taking heavy losses is pretty big.
One of the key points in the new system is that while high raid effectiveness reduces losses, low-ish raid effectiness doesn't mean you suffer huge losses, especially not if you target low-danger targets. I.E. you might well use 100 marines to raid for Food, and lose *zero* of them.
Yeah, I think the lack of controlled environment is one of the best arguments against ranked crew, but I wouldn't expect there to be to many complications. After all, crew have had ranks in the past without causing any gameplay problems (at least not that I could discern at the time).
I think that's because crew progression was tuned so you'd eventually end up with mostly elite crew regardless. So, basically, if it's a purely progression mechanic, the concerns about what's better/worse because of it get bowled over because you still end up at the same point, maybe just a bit later, and that wasn't worth worrying much about. I suppose the same approach could be taken here, too.
Well sure, it's a bit of a breadth vs depth thing, right? Marines ranks can have a major effect because they're one of the few variables in one aspect of the game, but crew would have a comparatively minor effect on the aspect of the game that ties in with everything else. It wouldn't take much of an effect for crew ranks to have more overall impact than marine ranks.
(See my earlier answer to SCC! IMO an "overall" effect matters less since it's just moving the baseline difficulty a touch and not really introducing anything *new*, decision-wise.)
Right, properly changing how the player interacts with people-commodities would require an overhaul, which would be crazy for various reasons since the current solution is perfectly adequate and even ideal in some respects. I guess the point I was trying to get at, is that the inventory management GUI doesn't properly support dynamic items, so maybe dynamic things shouldn't be items. Or items shouldn't be dynamic. But, like you said, it depends on how things play out. I do think there's a good chance the inability to un-dilute marines could turn out to be a non-issue.
That's a fair point. If marines having XP turned out to be too much trouble, I could see rolling it back, and changing over to a "track losses over the last 10x raids, apply hazard pay" type of approach which doesn't care about "commodities" directly.