@Arakasi:
Thank you for your feedback/suggestions! I generally see what you're saying, though it takes a bit after establishing a colony for it to really become a source of income and ships. But, right: the game doesn't have anything I'd call a proper endgame yet, so things are going to go off the rails a bit as you get to that point, that is, once you have a well-developed and defended colony or three.
Firstly, I'd like to say thanks for responding to my thread, I have already gotten more fun and enjoyment out of your game than any number of other 60 dollar games combined.
As for my responses:
Given how quickly the in-game clock progresses, and the ability to reasonably risk-free things to get lots of money (exploration is easy once you get the hang of it, even in certain places), I've found even just an amount of money to offset my running costs is enough to almost completely remove risk of loss - unless I'm stupid and repeatedly suicide my fleet. Perhaps it is just partly down to the monetary and strategic reward of exploration that I have had an easier time than I should.
The odd thing is that there seems to be a lot of the back-end systems in place to make this sort of thing happen - you can get reputation with particular captains, you have reputation with factions, etc. It just doesn't seem to matter when there's little to no consequences for those systems. I mean, the game's obviously not done yet, so I don't know what is planned for these systems in the future, but at the moment they have little function by comparison.
Yeah, I'm not sure what direction that'll go - as you say, there's little function for this right now. Keeping track of the relationship with a specific person isn't exactly a ton of backend work, right? Making that relevant, interesting, useful, and fit together into a cohesive whole is where the work would lie. But I'm not actually sure expanding the game in this direction is a good fit for Starsector.
Mount & Blade is different in that it makes a lot of sense for everything to be lord-centric. That's very thematic for the world it portrays and the lords are a core mechanic, from the ground up. Starsector is ... not like that.
Right, I very much agree that the exact Mount and Blade system is not the right fit, thematically, nor necessarily mechanically - but I think there are lessons to be taken from it in regards to risk/reward. I do think that the fact that you seem unable to lose planets your colonise takes a lot of any potential risk out of the game, and out of starting a colony. This said - I do not actually know what the war mechanics are like in Starsector as it is, having never incurred that much negative reputation from the other factions. I find that I only rarely incur penalties from factions for my colonies defeating their expeditions, and on occasion I get a blackmarket/contraband penalty, and this is usually offset somewhat for completing incidental quests for them, especially bounties I happen to come across while exploring. I'll have to try incur a faction's wrath at some point just to test the system (which seems odd to say, given I've had time to explore the entire sector in many play-throughs).
What I would perhaps suggest is something like an emphasis on a garrison-like system to complement battlestations, with the ability for factions to invade planets and take ownership of them. I think this might be a better route than the emphasis on mercenaries vs ground defenses at the cost of some temporary downtime on some industries (which is currently just a numbers game). Furthermore, instead of sending expeditions it might be preferable if factions got more jealous and declared wars of invasion based on their particular ideologies, and/or material interests, (say, if the Hegemony caught wind of you abusing AI cores, or you begun producing something that the Persian League covets) since expeditionary fleets tend to be easy to play-around, and aren't very interactive.