I have some points I'd like to share:
- The title of the blog post says that raiding should be fun, how do you make it more fun? By having the players interact with it directly and making the player feel their choices/skill influenced on the outcome of the raid intead of just pushing a memorized sequence of buttons and praying for rng. Starsector has an incredible combat system that could easily translate to an atmospheric setting by having some surface related backgrounds, cities, deserts, oceans, etc. Having the option to just push buttons and succeed is good, but If I could take a ship to the planet and aid my marines, thus increasing the effectiveness of my raid while blowing stuff up, I would take the second option everytime. This is a quote from the Kite description "This compact space/aircraft is streamlined for efficient atmospheric flight...", why can't I just take some down there and aid my boys?
- Another topic on raiding is how to make it engaging for the early game, my solution would be limiting atmospheric flight to Frigates and Destroyers. These are the only ships available on the early game and if done correctly could turn raiding an alternative early game playstyle. And as a bonus players can have their shiny purpose build craft for raiding. This brings a question, why would you not bring a something bigger like a Onslaught to a raid instead? My logic is simple, trying to use a ship purposedly engineered for space combat, that was probably built on an orbital works for costs and what-not, thus never saw ground before would like trying to use a battleship on a river. I can totally see a Hammerhead wrecking havoc on an atmosphere setting but something like a Paragon, only if it's falling on the planet as a giant hunk of metal.
- The mission could behave and escalate pretty much like the battlestation ones, the higher tier of ground defenses higher number of defendants and strength of the not-battlestation-defense-structure