At the least, I have two main suggestions to fix what I see are some fairly serious design and gameflow / difficulty issues in the current version of SS. Progress bars, use them on things! And a system defense fleet AI manager rig! Now time to explain what I mean by these.
So right now, one can go around survey, salvage, saturation bomb, and raid places with nearly basically reckless abandon. This trivializes Remnant systems as long as your fleet is faster than theirs. And also trivializes attacking factions (once the battlestation is destroyed). As I see things, any such actions, should kick the player back into the campaign map for a moment once started and start ticking down a progress bar giving a chance for enemy fleets to intercept the player and prevent them from doing the action! And this ties into the next point which is a much larger scope suggestion but would do so much for the game.
When I say "system defense fleet AI manager" what I mean is basically coordinated defenses and patrols. So right now we got the hidden mechanic of the more patrol fleets you destroy, the faster they spawn. This is all well and good but in the end doesn't really mean much due to how the AI works combined with the usually fairly small size of such fleets.
I propose that instead defense fleets work more like this in terms of behavior:
- A fleet with its transponder off is detected (could be NPC or player) *right away* divert a single defense fleet (closest one) to intercept it regardless of where it is in the system. Also only do this if the faction cares about transponder usage heh.
- If the unidentified fleet gets into combat with the defense fleet? *Right away* it calls for backup, and other military fleets in system divert to the location and attempt to join the battle. This would not care about transponder laws for the faction.
- It scales the number and size of these fleets to the relative threat factor so it doesn't end up a gank fest and unfair to players. So it would always send enough to be roughly equal power ± randomized a bit, with a hidden scalar mechanic for the player only where if he keeps messing with the faction it will skew the called reinforcements to be stronger than the player fleet assuming there is enough assets in-system to do so.
- Of course, if the hostile fleet has its transponder on, it skips the "patrol car pull over" step and goes right away to allocating defense fleets to intercept them.
- If the fleet does actions that are especially heinous. Like raiding, killing many fleets, and *especially* saturation bombing? It will start pulling defense fleets not only from within system, but also nearby ones in hyperspace and or other star systems if they are reasonably close. And also skew the number of and strength of intercept fleets in favor of them regardless of earlier rules.
Basically, right now factions don't really do anything about the player (and hostile NPCs). One can just raid over and over until a colony is decivilized and nothing happens as the factions pretends nothing is happening! Where instead they should go, wait there is an unidentified fleet at X location, lets go check it out. Or there is a genocidal maniac at Y location with enough firepower to glass Jangala, dogpile and hit him with everything we got before he uses it!
The idea of the progress meters for significant campaign actions as initially stated, along with actually intelligent defense fleets? Would be really cool, making more "sense" and believable actions, and help to fix the inverse difficulty curve issue. I also feel this would fit within Alex's vision, while I was tempted to blab about believable offensive actions as well as defensive. As Alex said, that might not fit within the eventual scope of SS while I feel intelligent defensive actions would go right in regardless of what the final state of the campaign ends up as
Edit: Typos...