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« on: September 10, 2019, 07:24:02 PM »
I would like to preface this by saying that what I am about to discuss would represent a lot of work for Alex, and may be divergent from his long term vision for this game. As such, I hold zero expectation that any of this be acted upon, but if he gleans even one good idea from my ramblings, then it will have all been worth it.
This all stems from the reality that Starsector has an inverse difficulty curve. Whether you like it or loathe it, the start of a campaign is often fraught with difficulty, while the end game can almost play itself, and most people end a run when they get bored, rather than due to reaching any kind of goalpost.
What I hope to lay out, is just one, out of many potential routes to alleviating this problem.
Admittedly, a fairly high-effort one at that.
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We have colony mechanics now, but as far as I am concerned, they seem to only be a momentary diversion aimed at providing more resources to the player. When a colony is first set up, it is relatively vulnerable, and requires protecting, but only minimal guidance. There are some tools to help it along, and you chose what it builds, but other than that, the colony exists as its own entity, functionally independent of the player, but feeding into the player's pockets. Once a colony has grown to a certain point, it essentially becomes invincible, hiding behind an iron curtain of megafleets and star fortresses, safely printing truckloads of money for the player to utilize. And what do they utilize this money on? More ships, more guns, more colonies to print more money.
Largely, what the end game consists of, is the same stuff that the early game consists of, except the player has a lot more resources at their disposal. They can choose to fight bigger fleets, sometimes bigger fleets come to them, but it all basically cancels out, resulting in the very late game being rather easy, and not that distinct from the early game outside of the fear of failure being almost entirely quashed by that point.
The crux of this supposition, is that a colony should not be a means to simply acquire more wealth, but instead should be a tool required to access the second half of the game.
Early colony gameplay should mirror early fleet gameplay in how totally outclassed you are by most of the parties at play. You just put on your bigboy shorts, and everyone else has been wearing bigboy pants for hundreds of years. And the colony itself should be akin to your first, tiny fleet.
For this to truly work, a lot will have to be done, some things merely need changed, but other things require improvements, and still others, entirely new mechanics. Hopefully I'll hit all the big ones below.
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- Requiring the player to actually pay for the majority of their fleets, investing in them should be a real investment down to the individual hulls, and lost ships should require replacement from the player's resources, automate every part of this that one can, but leave it open to micromanagement, because these fleets must be directible. They should not simply float about the player's systems unless that is what they are supposed to be doing. The player needs the ability to treat them like a resource that they can do other things with. Bring them along into the frontier (for whatever reason) Aid in the defense of your allies, or invade the systems of your enemies, whatever one can do with a fleet, the player should be able to do with a fleet operated by their colonies.
- A far more accurate strategic map that can be interacted with at both the hyperspace, and system levels, nominally access to hyperspace transponders would facilitate your ability to command from a distance, but the idea is that you should actually be commanding an operation at the fleet level, rather than just ordering it be so and letting scripted events handle the rest.
- A complete overhaul in the AI's ability to make strategic decisions, rather than say, Nexerelin simply having a faction pick a random hostile target to raid or invade every now and again, it will have to be able to factor in territory, geography, fleet positioning, intel, strategic value, economic value, etc, etc, all on a fairly constant basis, and the systems it gains or loses need to have a profound effect on its ability to wage a war like this.
- A proper political system that the player can interact with, that simulates and factors things other than the player's colony strength and use of AI cores, otherwise the decisions of the AI to attack, defend, or ignore you would seem entirely arbitrary.
- Dynamic AI factions irrespective of the player's involvement, meaning borders can shift, factions can die or expand, whether the player is involved in politics or not, otherwise you are playing a game with a foregone conclusion, being the only party capable of self improvement makes eventual victory a guarantee, and that doesn't make for very interesting gameplay.
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The TLDR of all this is: The second half of a Starsector campaign should play more like an RTS with a combat layer, rather than just being the same as the early game but bigger. Your first colony should be more like your starting Wolf class frigate on the grand stage of politics and war, rather than a seed one plants and nurtures until it grows into a beautiful, but static money tree.
All this would take the inverse difficulty curve and mix it up into something far more interesting, so that everything you accomplish during the first half of a campaign is simply the prelude to getting involved a far larger struggle that even the best captains can never be 100% prepared for.
