1
Suggestions / Fine tuning the colony threat mechanic
« on: September 04, 2023, 09:41:29 AM »
First of all, I quite like the new system, since it can develop into something very interesting, I also like the way you can bribe your way out of problems both short and long term, letting players basically avoid it if they don't like interacting with it.
However I think the "imma fite em" part of the system is quite out of tune. Each fleet destroyed lowers an insignificant amount of progress, and even if I go out of my way to try and find something to kill I end up empty handed, at least in my experience.
tl;dr: make threat gain literally disappear for a while each time you go boom boom on a station instead of just reducing it, or provide a way to engage bigger fleets for better threat reduction without having to wait until events while suffering the colony malus.
Disrupting Pather cells by blowing up their station also offers a paltry -20 per cell, my colonies generate that amount of heat per month, and I'm not given the chance to blow up a station per month. This makes it so that no matter how proactive I am about dealing with the issue, I'm neither given the chance for proper combat (since I only find a few tiny fleets), nor properly "rewarded" by this system for the combat I do (they barely reduce hostility), bribing is just too superior to the supposedly intended objective of this system according to Alex, which is to generate instances of combat.
I like where pirates are balance wise (they might even be too innocuous), but pathers need some adjustment. First I think that while stacking Patrol HQs or their upgrades shouldn't solve the issue outright, each patrol HQ should diminish the pather hostility per colony, since pather hostility IS gained per colony tech usage.
Maybe give them diminishing returns, or maybe give them a percentage based reduction, so the colony still generates hostility, but not as much.
The final consideration would be, how to give the player a better chance at fighting off the threat effectively, so that if they were so inclined they can keep even an empire at 0 threat by actively dealing with hostiles. Having disrupted pather cells generate 0 hostility might fix the current balance for example.
My suggestion would be to generate fleets proportional to the monthly gain of hostility, not just the amount accumulated, that means if you suddenly get a higher hostility gain, you also get a proportional opportunity to reduce it.
Another way would be to force an event to happen if the player frustrates attempts to raid and sabotage the system through hostile methods too many times, maybe some sort of "tolerance" meter, parallel to the threat gain, that way you'd still trigger hostile events without always eating up the accessibility and stability malus.
I write this mostly because, while I imagine that there might be a lot of interesting features planned for the future of this system, its important that whatever temporary current implementation fulfills its objective of causing interesting engagement and instances of fun, which in this case would be combat.
In the meantime I personally engage with it as a form of tax, I pay money to get hostiles off my back, simply forget about it and pay with the slightly reduced productivity of my colonies, or do the quests for either side, which I think are honestly so great that any other way of dealing with this system seems like an outright loss, and that's just talking game flavor wise, giving lobster to Kanta is the zenith of Starsector dialogue choices and that's not even up for discussion.
They are even better gameplay wise since they don't even have downsides at least yet.
The only reason to avoid doing the quests would be role-play, but the ability to roleplay a proper enemy to the pathers and pirates is very limited, since they are hardly a real threat most of the time, and you can't actually destroy them if you'd so choose.
However I think the "imma fite em" part of the system is quite out of tune. Each fleet destroyed lowers an insignificant amount of progress, and even if I go out of my way to try and find something to kill I end up empty handed, at least in my experience.
tl;dr: make threat gain literally disappear for a while each time you go boom boom on a station instead of just reducing it, or provide a way to engage bigger fleets for better threat reduction without having to wait until events while suffering the colony malus.
Disrupting Pather cells by blowing up their station also offers a paltry -20 per cell, my colonies generate that amount of heat per month, and I'm not given the chance to blow up a station per month. This makes it so that no matter how proactive I am about dealing with the issue, I'm neither given the chance for proper combat (since I only find a few tiny fleets), nor properly "rewarded" by this system for the combat I do (they barely reduce hostility), bribing is just too superior to the supposedly intended objective of this system according to Alex, which is to generate instances of combat.
I like where pirates are balance wise (they might even be too innocuous), but pathers need some adjustment. First I think that while stacking Patrol HQs or their upgrades shouldn't solve the issue outright, each patrol HQ should diminish the pather hostility per colony, since pather hostility IS gained per colony tech usage.
Maybe give them diminishing returns, or maybe give them a percentage based reduction, so the colony still generates hostility, but not as much.
The final consideration would be, how to give the player a better chance at fighting off the threat effectively, so that if they were so inclined they can keep even an empire at 0 threat by actively dealing with hostiles. Having disrupted pather cells generate 0 hostility might fix the current balance for example.
My suggestion would be to generate fleets proportional to the monthly gain of hostility, not just the amount accumulated, that means if you suddenly get a higher hostility gain, you also get a proportional opportunity to reduce it.
Another way would be to force an event to happen if the player frustrates attempts to raid and sabotage the system through hostile methods too many times, maybe some sort of "tolerance" meter, parallel to the threat gain, that way you'd still trigger hostile events without always eating up the accessibility and stability malus.
I write this mostly because, while I imagine that there might be a lot of interesting features planned for the future of this system, its important that whatever temporary current implementation fulfills its objective of causing interesting engagement and instances of fun, which in this case would be combat.
In the meantime I personally engage with it as a form of tax, I pay money to get hostiles off my back, simply forget about it and pay with the slightly reduced productivity of my colonies, or do the quests for either side, which I think are honestly so great that any other way of dealing with this system seems like an outright loss, and that's just talking game flavor wise, giving lobster to Kanta is the zenith of Starsector dialogue choices and that's not even up for discussion.
They are even better gameplay wise since they don't even have downsides at least yet.
The only reason to avoid doing the quests would be role-play, but the ability to roleplay a proper enemy to the pathers and pirates is very limited, since they are hardly a real threat most of the time, and you can't actually destroy them if you'd so choose.