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« on: January 04, 2022, 06:56:27 AM »
There comes a time in most games one plays when a colony has to be established. One can have many reasons: found a profitable system, great modifiers with low hazard on a planet, too much storage space is used up by all the cool guns you are carrying, or you simply like the colour of the planet. All valid and relevant reasons. The next thing you need to decide is how you'll set up that colony you've just founded. Are you going to get Heavy Industry right away? Focus rather on stuff that nets you cash? Do you have the reserves to queue up a few structures? Can you do it with multiple colonies without going broke?
Once all that is done, one thing you need to decide from the moment the colony exists is who's going to govern it?
Here comes the part when I rant about what changed in the last few versions regarding colony management skills, administrators, costs vs value, and the good old days in general.
So first off, what new players will have to realise quite soon, is that right off the bat you can only have a very limited number of colonies without penalties (2 governed by the player and 2 more governed by admins). The other thing one can't help but realise is that there is only 1 skill affecting colonies currently the player or admins (in which case it's a watered down version) may get: +1 stuff produced and 50% more Heavy Industry ship production value. Starting out, choices here are hard. For the player, the skill competes with practically every other one, and as it does not affect your fleet in any direct way, it is easy to pass on it. For admins however, it's darn expensive. The production bonus can help if the colony produces valuable commodities, however it's not that useful for all situations.
Now to contrast it with how it used to be, admins used to be able to get 2 skills (out of 3) at max and had lower costs in comparison. The skills were +2 stability bonus, +1 industry production and +20% accessibility bonus (although I am not entirely certain about the third one anymore). You could boost accessibility for farspace colonies, boost stability during a raid or otherwise mix and match admins to maximise profit. This versatility is currently missing.
And now for the meat of the matter: the glowing blue balls, aka Alpha Cores. There are some slight differences between them and administrators. First off, they can command ships. Which is neat. Second, they get the industry skill, without billing you 20k per month. You can also assign them to industries and structures for various kickass effects and so on and so forth. The Hegemony gets a bit *** and the pathers will not stop hassling you, but hey, you were going to have trouble from them in the long term anyway. On, and there is another great characteristic they have. You can have a bazillion of them and and colonise the entire Sector if you so wish.
So considering the above, if the player forced, or at least coerced into using AI Cores in the long run? Sure, initially it is beneficial to only have colonies using admins, so that you don't *** off the Hegemony before you can handle them, but still, if you want to roleplay as an honest to Ludd pather, you cannot claim all habitable worlds in the name of Ludd without AI interference (or editing the settings file for a more reasonable admin number like 200 or so). While combat is undoubtedly the focus of the game, are there others also a bit bugged by this? I know, it's not a 4X game, still, small size 3 outpost colonies at strategic locations should not be too much to ask for, are they?
