And the only reason I haven't gone and tried to mod that up is because the engine doesn't actually allow hull mods to adjust ammo regeneration rates. (I mean, you could probably do something with checking ammo counts every frame and manually adjusting them, but that would be a pain and a half to implement relative to a simple "+20% ammo regen rate" built into the engine.)
Ahh, I'm not sure how you'd do that per-ship. It makes sense as a per-weapon stat, but weapons don't have mutable stats in the same way.
I asked a question about this early in the thread but I'm going to reword that as a suggestion. For bigger, "clickable" events like bombarding and establishing colonies, I really do think the game could provide more oomph. Here is an example for establishing a colony: in the final button press that will establish the colony, have the next screen display "Your ____ colony has been established over ____ .", with a splash art covering the screen showing the depiction of the event and an unique (industrial/city like?) sound playing. To proceed, just press the "Understood" button or something like that.
It's the little things, as it's usually said. I also like that this would allow the amazing art of the game to take the front stage, at least for a bit. Maybe for after .9?
Yep! There's actually a special "established a colony" sound, *and* another one for establishing your first colony, which also opens up the faction creation dialog.
Regarding "cooldown VS time spent raiding" I think that actually spending time "raiding" would be a better soultuion. Reason is simple - raid is not an instant action and the whole operation shoudl actually take time. During this period one of teh combat fleets may come back home and interfere with the raid.
This reason is coming from a "realism" point of view, but (as I think came up earlier?) lots of other not-theoretically-instant actions are instant, to avoid making the player wait around for things all the time.
And yeah I remember the point about stripping the planet of defenses (not every planet has station, right?) but really you can just *** defense fleets off, make them chase you and then use speed advantage to to reach the planet faster than they do. This way you kind of lure them away and use the short window of time to raid. Should be quite easy to do with fast fleets with proposed mechanics but should be totally impossible IRL simply because "raiding takes time"
Right, not every planet has a station, and a station can't stop raids anyway.
However, whether raiding takes time or is instant is not a qualitative difference, unless it really takes forever, right? All that would change is how far off you'd have to draw off the defenders before having a window to pull off a raid. If it's instant, that window is "get to planet without any fleets being within support range of it". If it takes time, that window just has a different distance attached to it. So theoretically, we could tune that support range to be whatever we wanted and have the same practical effect as "raiding taking time".
Also making raids actually "take time" you can introduce hullmods that would make the raids happen faster.
I don't know that we can count this as a benefit, that seems a bit circular to me
One more suggestion here assuming that raids take time and that some returning fleet can interrupt you - you can allow player selecting ships from the fleet that would actually do the raid (each ship would allow only so many marines to participate in the raid) while the rest of the ships can stay "active" and protect raiding party from all incoming fleets. This way you can make sure that some small interceptor fleet does not stop your 100-ship fleet from raiding. At the same time the ships you have selected for raiding will not be able to participate in combat in case enemy fleet interferes
Hmm - the way raiding works, the ships that are useful for it aren't combat ships anyway, so this wouldn't serve much purpose without additional changes to how raiding works. It just gets increasingly complicated in a troubling way - the mechanic needs more complexity to make the added complexity of the mechanic be worthwhile. That seems like a red flag, design-wise.
(And, for example, a small interceptor fleet wouldn't stop you from raiding, I believe - it wouldn't want to engage. A station plus a small interceptor fleet *would* stop raiding, though, presumably since the small fleet can disrupt any landing operations while being covered by the station.)
All that said, I think "having things take time" could work. It does add a nice element of tension, but it has some downsides as well. In any case, that's not the direction I want to go; the choice for "upfront action, with cooldown as necessary" is a common element throughout many mechanics, rather than being a one-off choice for raiding.
(which is a shame as it would let us play the mission from the other side, to interdict a bombardment fleet or even wipe it out)
Oh, we could totally still do that! It doesn't have to be symmetrical. For example, in-progress combat between AI fleets already isn't, and you can join in.
Is it possible to link bombardments with destroying the battle station, like a dialoge box after the station fight that gives you the bombing options (salvaging after defeating enemy fleets)? It would then make sense that a fleet capable of destroying a station to also have the ability to bomb the planet. The time it took to take down the station could also represent the bombing effort as a bonus.
PS. Happy with the post content as usual.
Well, it's linked to defeating a station because until you do that, you can't bombard. And the choice to bombard is in the same dialog as the choice to engage the station. So I think yes? But to me this is not required for an in-fiction justification, and (as noted earlier) not all colonies have orbital stations.