Thank you all!
This is cool. How do NPC raids work? Will we be able to set raid type/effectiveness in faction files?
They don't, mostly. Pirates will raid stuff periodically, but it's unlikely for a pirate raid to be successful enough to actually raid a planet. If they did, it would achieve the same external effect as a player raid, i.e. a stability penalty based on the fleet size. As of right now, nothing is coded to bombard a colony, though I'd expect this will come up at some point.
If there's more organized faction warfare, this would have more relevance, but right now faction hostilities are at about the same level as they were - nominally hostile, but no actual task forces going between systems etc.
Any special sounds/animation effects play out when selecting raiding/bombardment, especially the evil kind?
Something on this scale deserves something more than just a button click in my opinion.
Afraid not! At least, not at the moment.
Sounds pretty good, I kind of wish there was some granularity involved with bombardment like there is with the raids themselves, especially on the fuel side but with vastly diminishing results. "You have 58% of the fuel necessary, bombardment efficiency reduced to 15%" kind of deal.
Hmm, why? If it's a feel issue, i.e. "why can't I bombard at all when I have 99% of the fuel", then let's say that in-fiction, the fuel required to bombard is just a touch over what the defenses have the capability to stop. So, if you're using 1000 fuel, only 1% of it or thereabouts is actually hitting.
Obviously the issue is that you have to keep some fuel in reserve for the return trip which makes me wonder why choose that resource in the first place? A dedicated one would have interesting implication too: you might not be able to acquire it if you are enemy with the factions that produce it (that might even get outraged if you use it), it takes valuable storage space while currently a Prometheus seems enough to level quite a few colonies by itself, it avoid some unfortunate situation where you find yourself stranded after a bombardment...
I think having a resource with multiple uses is more interesting since it creates more interesting tradeoffs - "I want to use it for X, but also need it for Y; which is more important right now?". I also don't want to add *more* resources, though I guess an existing one - such as transplutonics or volatiles - could be used instead of adding a brand new one. Fuel also has the advantage of being readily available, so while it's an expense, it's not something that has to be meticulously planned in advance, in the face of potentially unknown costs. Also, as you say, running out of Fuel is bad, and I really wanted bombardments to have a tradeoff that explained why they're not common.
And, finally, Prometheus brought fire to humanity.
My second thought: "...That's -really- not an option I see myself ever using."
Yeah, same! I'm being pretty careful here to make sure it's not actually a *useful* option. I mean, it might be a good move from a purely strategic point of view in *some* set of circumstances... but even if you're trying to decivilize a world (which is about as evil, really, just less hands-on), raiding it into oblivion would be more efficient.
My third thought: "Unless maybe if we find a REDACTED manufactory/hive-world? Okay, that might need some good saturation bombing."
HMMM. Haven't had a chance to expand how REDACTED works, but I'd be lying if I haven't been thinking along similar-ish lines...
Establish a colony on Chicomoztoc?
No, man, no. That's too much. You can't just take the biggest world humanity has left (for all we know), grind it to a paste and NOT tell us what it did take! I assumed it's because you got your 999999 units of fuel and then kept clicking [SATURATION BOMBARDMENT] until it's all dust. How much fuel did that use?
Maybe I just found another barren-bombarded world on the fringes, decivilized, with ruins, and named it Chicomoztoc? You don't know!
Personally I'm not too hot for making Sindria a military powerhouse by an accident, but then again, if something allows you to go fast in space, it's most likely even better as a weapon.
Will factions recolonise their past worlds? I also thought that core systems were off limits for colonisation.
Sindria uniquely appreciates the monetary value of fuel, so I strongly suspect they would be against wasting it. They are, however, one of the factions that don't go insta-hostile when someone *else* uses their fuel - already paid for, naturally - for saturation bombardments.
Maybe one question. Why fuel as the ressource for those actions? Supplies would make more sense, although i guess it's a fairly "overused" ressource already.
I think I mostly covered it in the reply to Tartiflette; if not, let me know!
Perhaps again borrow the same thing from Nexerelin? A "loading time" where the player fleet must stay still to fully perform the action, similar to how we put sniffers on comm-relays. This adds a delay between raids, or rather before a raid, while also leaving the player vulnerable to an approaching defense fleet. Probably more interesting than a "Nah, wait a day or two to raid again" message.
Right, yeah. So I stepped away from that, including for installing comm sniffers, because it's just a pain to make sure all the possible "you got interrupted" cases are handled exactly right in the code. And it takes away from the immediacy of being able to do something. So, yeah, a cooldown makes a bit less sense, but it's *roughly* the same thing, with an added benefit that it doesn't bother you at all unless you're repeating the action.
This feels like it’s the end for the Tri-Tachyon. I can see many a player launching targeted raids at industrial centers with the aim of stealing production chips for high tech ships and the advanced nanoforges that the Tri-Tachyon are bound to have, as the sectors most technologically advanced faction.
Question, is there a limited number of chips in the sector, or will the factions keep spawning new production chips for their ships and weapons.
I ask as situation 1: could lead to a situation where the factions are attritioned to death, each raid reducing their ability to mount in space defenses and making it easier for fleets mostly carrying ground troops to make it to their targets.
Even in situation 2 that slow death as the ability for a market to produce ships to protect itself is slowly reduced as each raid takes more chips than can be replaced in the intervening time. Not to mention situation 2 guarantees everyone paragons and astrals on demand.
(I think maybe there's an assumption that factions engage in these sorts of raids all the time? That's not the case.)
To answer your question, though - getting a blueprint doesn't take it away from the faction, but an item like a Nanoforge or an AI core *is* taken away from the colony that was using it. That could indeed do major damage to a faction. For example, if you take the Nanoforge from Chicomoztoc, that'll have a major (and probably permanent) effect on the quality of Hegemony ships. They're getting by with a 5-1-1 officer/ship quality/ship quantity doctrine largely on the back fo a pristine Nanoforge; take away that +50% ship quality and things get quite a lot worse. But, well, I like the idea that identifying and targeting a faction's weak point can produce this sort of result.
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Topic: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses (Read 68825 times)