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[Alex]

Quick thought you've probably already considered and rejected: 

What about allowing Heavy Armaments to be a required component of the raid for more difficult raid targets? The conversion rate could simply be a 1 per 5 units of marines kind of thing so a player would have a general idea of what they would need when planning a more difficult raid. It doesn't compete with Marines but instead complements them and acts as another way to distinguish late game raids from early game raids.

Then just make Heavy Armaments twice as rare as marines and adjust the mission payouts of missions requiring that commodity to match their cost/rarity.

I did think about that, yeah. It's kind of equivalent to just buying more marines, no? They're more rare but you need less of them, etc.

More precise commodity raiding will change the meaning of "procurement contract" by quite a bit! Love it 

Hah, I was thinking the same thing about the phrasing Plus it gives procurement contracts something more meaningful to tie in with.

Actual CR could simply be adjusted by the change in CR limit when this happens, no? I can't think of any problems that would cause.

It's enough of a pain code-wise that I think that'd be asking for bugs. Regardless, though, XP boosting boosting the effect of high CR takes care of that anyway.

... it will just make people wonder why the other doesn't have a similar system.

That's true, but...

It might not be the impression I'm giving off here, but I'm really not that interested in the idea of crew having a ranking system. I know there are good reasons for them not to. I just find it oddly inefficient that one fairly insignificant commodity (marines) would have a unique system that doesn't carry over to the other, far more significant commodity that would benefit from the system just as much, if not more.

... well, marines get this to precisely to increase their significance, and it's a more controlled environment as far as losses taken etc. I don't think it's anywhere near as compelling for crew as it is for marines. Like, for marines it literally more than doubles their effectiveness, and I might even turn that up a bit more! For crew, it'd necessarily only be a couple of percent here and there.

Perhaps, when in storage or for sale, marines could be separated into stacks for separate ranks? For example, storing 100 marines might result in 50 vets and 50 elite, if the original stack was halfway between the two. Withdrawing marines would still result in a lossy conversion, but at least it would give us a degree of control beyond using different storage locations for marines of different experience levels.

It super doesn't work that way on the backend. But, hmm... I think whether trying for something like this is worthwhile or not would depend on how much it turns out to actually matter, and how much of a pain it is to work around.

Alternately, maybe it's time to do away with treating people like chattel to be bought, sold, and stored? Simply disallowing the storage of people-commodities could make the whole dilemma moot.

I don't think that's mechanically feasible, since you routinely need to do this. You'd just end up having to get your marines killed off when you wanted to get rid of them (and likewise for crew), which is scarcely any better Besides, in-fiction, people aren't being sold or "stored" - it's contracts being bought/bought back (or sold), etc.

[dandystar]

Alex be dropping blog post like valve drop their game.

[Morrokain]

I did think about that, yeah. It's kind of equivalent to just buying more marines, no? They're more rare but you need less of them, etc.

Ah, I see what you mean. I was thinking about this having more impact to the campaign than a "super marine" though.

I'd more equate it to siege weaponry. Back in medieval times during feudalism it was one thing to approach a castle with an honor guard and it was quite another to approach it with siege weaponry. There would be very different responses in that scenario and market patrols could act the same way - creating more nuance/trade-offs to the decision making about whether to carry them along. Because it is irrelevant to early game it can have a larger challenge factor within the campaign whereas more marines is just as easy as... more marines.

So Heavy Armaments not only makes a very bold statement to patrols (as in I'd make them illegal for factions like the Hegemony if they aren't currently- I know they were at one time but I can't remember as now I mostly ignore commodities unless I happen along a convenient procurement contract) but adds an extra layer of difficulty to harder raids because they now know what you are up to beforehand and can maybe respond preemptively.

Of course, you could also do this by making having over a certain amount of marines have the same effect, but that is... less clean? It's harder to communicate to the player than: Resource A for raiding up to this point that is easier to access and penalty-free to carry around. Resource B for the big operations late game when factions you raid are your enemies anyway. Its harder to acquire and has political implications, etc.

Why is this worth it to implement aside from immersion for me? It gives players more milestones for achievement and provides more long term goals and challenges. You will remember when you can safely carry around huge numbers of marines and heavy weapons for raiding core world nanoforges, etc. It also makes late game raiding require a bit more planning if you have to go through allied space with illegal cargo that they could see as threatening. All of those are wins as far as I'm concerned.

[Tartiflette]

I'm not too hot about that whole "marines experience" thing. I feel it leads to more troubles than it is worth. Experience makes marines better but having heavy weapons don't, selling them hurts you since you are selling their experience with them, you can't choose to "keep the good ones" etc. Maybe having "field officers" an entirely different, but rare enough that you can't farm them, type of marines would be preferable? Each officer you have available allow you to raid an additional objective with increased efficiency but you could only assign one per objective?

But by then you start to look at ship officers for marines though...

[Grievous69]

I'm seriously amazed at this point how you always manage to write up a blog post exactly when I'm not at home. And I even don't go out that often!

Anyways I don't get the whole ''if marines have experience, crew should it have as well'' thing. Marines aren't exactly a resource that's always being used, they're more similar to Volatiles or maybe some other resource you use once in a while. On the other hand crew is something you need to have at all times. So I'd make more sense to me to have elite supplies and fuel to go along with crew. That said I'm not a huge fan of that idea (didn't like the system before), because if it were something significant like extra CR or similar thing, then I'd feel super bad when losing crew and I would likely have to change up my ships and reload more often. And if it would be something that just gives +1% to a stat, then I just wouldn't care. My point being, putting extra mechanics to a resource that you ALWAYS need doesn't seem like a great idea to me. I mean it might be really good if Alex comes up with some ace in the sleeve but these are just my thoughts now. Like others, I'm really looking forward to new raid mechanics, I'm just fascinated how you always change something that I didn't even put too much thought about for the better. It's really coming together looks like.

Also what about those elite lobsters? I don't see them mentioned anywhere in the blog post, I feel cheated 

[Ekibana]

Ah, can't wait to play the new patch with all the features. And to think how new raiding system might be integrated in mods like Nex...
Speaking of mods. Are there any plans to modify/redo the price-checking interface? Coz of right now, you add several factions in and looking to buy\sell stuff becomes pretty clunky, as it only shows top-5 stations-planets.

[isyourmojofly]

This sounds really good. I love commerce raiding convoys between the core worlds, so being able to snatch stuff right from the planets themselves will be awesome. Also I love how you're thinking about the scripted missions; I'm really, really looking forward to these.

On the "making crew more meaningful" side of things, I have been playing recently with crew prices and salaries turned up 10x. I wanted to have to really think hard before expanding my fleet, and when you're paying each crew member a handsome wage it isn't so easy to just add more ships whenever you want. Also, when a big ship goes down in combat it really hurts . . . which is why the under-appreciated skills/hullmods for reducing crew casualties suddenly become worth taking. In fact, it helps to make salvage skills more relevant in late-game fleets, since you really want to keep casualties low.

Kind of a blunt approach, but I've found it makes me care about my people dying!

[IAmLegion]

Hey alex, this looks really good! I'm happy to see something cool happen from raiding now.

[SCC]

What you could do with story points is delay punishment. Want to raid a certain well-defended planet? Well, there you go! But you won't escape free, no, for the punishment will come in the form of a bounty hunter or enforcement fleet. The difference is that you don't have to fight that planet's station, or that you can fight at a more convenient time.
Does the raiding menu say, if you can get only weaponry or weapons and modspecs from a given colony/industry, or do you just have to guess?

I'm happy that you noticed inconsistency with crew yourself. Crew experience was nice in that sense your fleet grew more competent along with you. On the other hand, you yourself provide a decent argument against it.

offhand, I’m not even sure what the expected crew losses might be in a big fight.

Then again, you use crew during the entire game, and marines only for raiding. Relatively smaller bonuses to crew might end up being absolutely bigger than those of marines, simply because their bonuses end up getting a lot more often.
Another approach would be having the crew experience be a resource, to be spent on permanent or temporary, ship specific or fleetwide conditions. Or something similar to story points, but that in turn would make story points less unique.

...there wouldn't be an issue with getting rid of bulk of vendor trash, if economy actually scaled non-linearly, like it pretends to, instead of every bigger market being just 200, or, at best, 500 units bigger than previous one...

[Chronosfear]

Hi,

Thats a welcome Change to the raids

But why Not (spontanious Idea.)

Split Crew from ships to:
Crew (No XP)
Pilots (slight Bonus eg.to top spd)
If you have enough pilots, No Bonus/Malus
If you have less then requierd add similar Malus, since
"Normal" shipcrew ist maning the fighters and is way less trained in fast high g Combat manuvers

I know fighters are still very strong and this would add top their Power but WE could balance IT again.. and again. Like Always.

[Ryan390]

I don't want to put a downer on things but..

We have't had an update in months, but it seems one has finally arrived!
Alex it seems you are obsessing over the wrong things, clearly the game lacks content in terms of story.

I think a lot of people want to see the game move forward in the correct direction, Star Citizen is currently suffering from the same symptoms.
Elite Dangerous on the other hand was developed in such a way that all the core mechanics got released and then polished afterwards.

Personally I think the combat system, progression system, mission, reputation, skill points etc.. (All of that stuff) - is good enough in it's current incarnation.

We are years down the line now, how long do we continue to apply polish to features which already exist?
Can't we focus our efforts on the features which are crucially missing? 

[Histidine]

It always felt a bit strange that loot raids were like "hit everything in the colony at once and grab everything lying around". And that doing this was able to take things like nanoforges, which you'd expect to be massively defended. Nice to see that's getting changed.

Although now I get to figure out how to give Nexerelin's invasion mechanic a similar system. Oh joy!

Questions:

• Assigning more marine units to a single target is a tradeoff of getting more stuff/increasing disruption time at the cost of taking more losses, right?
  It looks a bit weird since one might intuitively interpret it as "use more force to overwhelm the target with fewer losses". Can be resolved by conceptualizing the marine allocation as "time/effort spent trashing the place" rather than actual forces deployed, but this is kind of not communicated to the player so to speak.
• Can a mod add a custom version of the raid objectives window?
  Like, I could hypothetically create an invasion mechanic where each industry has a 'hit points' value, and marines assigned to that industry cause it to take damage until its HP drops to zero and it gets captured. Would I be able to make a table to display this information?

[bobucles]

Two questions about the veterancy system:
- Do veteran soldiers sell for more money? It might be cool to train them up strictly to sell them.
- Do XP losses come out of the average XP level, or is it weighted towards the battle honored tactic of sacrificing rookies? They were valuable meat shields.

Will the enemy be able to do the same kind of raiding to the player? Disruption sounds like a Ludd favorite, and theft would be very much in the interest of pirates. Higher level factions may even want to steal your nanoforges or blueprints. Scary!

What about allowing Heavy Armaments to be a required component of the raid for more difficult raid targets?

That might be a nice way to add to higher difficulty targets. Most simple things can be whacked by marines, but the higher end things also need big guns to succeed. That way the difficulty can reach higher thresholds without automatically demanding thousands of marines from the player. Heavy armaments are also illegal in a way that marines are not, so you'd absolutely incur more wrath as a result of having and using them.

Crew XP

Officers kind of do this already. The same ship gets better guns/speed/defenses due to the officer in command having an effect on his crew. If crew also had XP then you'd be double dipping on the experience system.

Boosting ship CR doesn't really make sense because it doesn't really do anything for battle. A better crew is more likely going to give stuff like superior PPT and overall faster repairs, but those are already solved by player skills.

[The2nd]

A very welcome change!

Only caveat I have is the way unique items can be raided. While I agree with your rejection of a pure RNG system, the proposed one seems a bit weird. With X marines you cannot even try it but with X+5 you are guaranteed to have it?

Why not combine the two systems? Make a rather high required raid effectiveness threshold to even try it and then give it like a 25-75% chance depending on your effectiveness. And then add another threshold which gives a 100% chance of success.

That would keep it out of the early game. But at the mid game players can try for them. And in the end game players can come with overwhelming force for a guaranteed grab to avoid frustration due to bad luck.

[isyourmojofly]

Why not combine the two systems? Make a rather high required raid effectiveness threshold to even try it and then give it like a 25-75% chance depending on your effectiveness. And then add another threshold which gives a 100% chance of success.

Doesn't that encourage savescumming? The optimal play is to get to the 25% threshold and save/load until you get what you want. It also reduces the value of investing in the resources to get 100% chance. It would feel to me more like busy-work just to eliminate all risk, rather than amassing a strike force to swoop and steal what I needed.

In my mind the threshold doesn't represent "x +5" but more an order of magnitude. So "100 marines" is a company with infantry weapons, "200 marines" is a battalion with air support and heavy weapons, and "1000 marines" is a full field army.