Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.  (Read 4567 times)

speeder

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 364
    • View Profile
Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« on: November 25, 2018, 07:21:43 AM »

First... economy is still bad, I thought it was fixed on this version finally, but no, seemly it is worse even, there are no deficits or surpluses anymore because of the funky mechanics where one market can supply the whole galaxy somehow...

When I made my colony it had extensive ruins, so I build the tech mining... and now I suddenly have 50% of the fuel market share in the whole sector O.o

This results in the second issue:

What I most had fun is doing is exploring ***, I built that colony to have a place to drop off all the loot I was finding exploring, and is why I had every since character point in the industry track (zero combat, leadership, tech).

Yet building the colony dragged me into becoming its defender, because all factions started to send out attacks CONSTANTLY, the "colony threat" intel because of that colony often had 6, 7 items, is just ridiculous, I am still relying on the tutorial money and guys want me to bribe them for absurd amounts of money to avoid attacks with ludicrous amounts of capital ships... I started to resort to salvage and suicide my ships on battles and turned the whole thing into a ridiculous meatgrinder, turned my colony orbit into kessler syndrome incarnate, debris everywhere...

And again the econmy, seemly the production of ships is not tied to the real economy in any manner, as result there was more metal floating around my colony than there was metal being mined on the whole sector, just ridiculous.

In the end... it wasn't fun anymore and I decided to stop playing, I want to go out, explore, have some cool fights, I don't want to spend hours and hours and hours of endless "epic" fights with ships that have 4 D mods...
Logged

Dragon239

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 51
    • View Profile
Re: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2018, 05:43:12 PM »

I won't disagree that colonies have problems, but being forced to defend them past the very early creation of them should not be a problem, or you might be prioritizing the wrong structures.

Why? Because after creating upgrading the space military structures, the orbital station & patrol HQ, they should be able to handle everything thrown at you.
I never have to participate in colony defense unless I actively want to and they defeat everything. You can see on the Expedition info @ the right what their odds are beat you, and that's been overwhelmingly accurate for me.
Logged

speeder

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 364
    • View Profile
Re: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2018, 06:32:51 PM »

I won't disagree that colonies have problems, but being forced to defend them past the very early creation of them should not be a problem, or you might be prioritizing the wrong structures.

Why? Because after creating upgrading the space military structures, the orbital station & patrol HQ, they should be able to handle everything thrown at you.
I never have to participate in colony defense unless I actively want to and they defeat everything. You can see on the Expedition info @ the right what their odds are beat you, and that's been overwhelmingly accurate for me.

Right after building the colony, when it had ZERO defenses, I got sent big fleets.

Eventually I managed to get orbital station, patrol HQ and ground defense... But the AI just reacted by throwing even bigger fleets, even after I maxed out *** with my planet still size 3, I got thrown at me fleets that had overwhelming force against me, always "much superior" and whatnot, at some point the yellow faction (forgot their name... Paragon or something? it is vanilla game) sent THREE full sized fleets at same time, I had a apogee, 3 (D) wolves, 2 (D) mules, and some other crappy ships (all (D) ), when I saw the incoming attack I could quickly build a second apogee and... then arrives on my planet a 3 fleets that have several Eagles in each of them, just absurd.

For the actual battle I parked all my ships around the space station basically, to work as shields and extra firepower, after I won first engagement somehow, while losing almost all my ships, second engament I did same thing... for the third all that I had left even after all recovery with maxed recovery skills was a bunch of small tanker ships, so I resorted to ramming the enemy fleet and lost.

Then they proceeded to bomb the spaceport outright and make my colony give me -120k per month or so.
Logged

Schwartz

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1452
    • View Profile
Re: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2018, 07:27:47 PM »

Expedition fleets need to ramp up, especially if you start a colony early in the game. So you don't get jackhammered by overwhelming forces at least.

Until then you're best off only creating colonies when you're able to support them. This is not totally unreasonable even from a game logic point of view. The game never tells you the possible costs, but a colony isn't some trivial thing that just makes you money. It can ruin you. It should be able to ruin you.
Logged

Euphytose

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 464
    • View Profile
Re: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« Reply #4 on: November 25, 2018, 07:47:02 PM »

I made my first colony when I had 1 million, and that was just enough to cover most expenses. This really isn't an early game thing.
Logged

code99

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 42
    • View Profile
Re: Colonies are ALMOST fun... but lots of work needed.
« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2018, 10:02:35 PM »

I must agree with the OP.

Sure im not the most experienced player around but I hate how colonies are setup right now.
I dont quite understand why so many people seem to attack you so fast. Makes no sense imo.

I infact stay away from colonies even tho I have the funds to build several by now. I like the exploration part of the game and I would love to manage my own planets/empire/faction but not if it means for me to spend all my time defending against endless waves of enemies.

When I heard that Alex was working on planets. player owned defense fleet etc, I was super excited about it. Now tho, not so much. Such a great feature ruined by those attacks.

I hope this whole thing will be tweaked a bit or maybe someone can make a mod that alters the behavior of the other factions  or something.
Logged