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

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Author Topic: Raiding for Fun and Profit  (Read 33986 times)

Wyvern

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #60 on: November 29, 2019, 09:41:50 AM »

Not actually too interested in the raid update, for reasons other people have mentioned - even with precision targeting, it's just not worth the reputation hit to me.  (Though, okay, I will cheerfully raid that one pirate base for blueprints to sell...)
As others have mentioned, this seems like a good opportunity for a story point application.

I'm also interested in crew experience, because I've always thought that was a neat thing... but I don't have any really good suggestions for not making it be a mess, and to some extent, the ability to spend story points to build in hull mods takes care of the "ships you've used for a while end up better than stock" thing.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #61 on: November 29, 2019, 02:04:19 PM »

... 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.

Right - not saying this is necessarily bad, but it's defintiely a thing where I have a hard time it actually working out in-game in the way that it's meant to/would need to in order to actually do the job. It's easy enough not to get stopped, so to make that a concern you'd need to make stops more frequent and it's just a touchy mechanic; too easy for it to just be annoying. And even then, it's a "hostilities break out earlier than expected" event. Just... without going into too much detail, all the gameplay around this can be used to avoid any downsides too easily, so this feels like it'd only be good in theory. I'm not sure it's compelling enough to make the player really play around this.


selling them hurts you since you are selling their experience with them

Well, presumably if you're selling them, you want less marines, but you're not losing any per-marine effectiveness. I mean, it hurts you in the same way that selling non-experienced marines does - you now have fewer marines.

(As far as heavy weapons, that's easily justifiable in-fiction imo; but I'm not sure how this is really related to marine XP.)


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!

Hah, sorry :)

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

A missed opportunity for funny tag, alas.


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.

Nothing I'd call "plans", but I might end up looking at it at some point; IIRC I've got a note about it.

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.

Hmm, interesting!


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

Thank you!


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.

I don't think that this kind of math actually works. Even if the total bonuses for crew "matter" more in terms of impact times the amount of times it comes into play, all they'd be doing is making the game slightly easier, not actually introducing the interesting decisions and such. Whereas a large bonus that matters more situationally *can* change how you play where it does affect things. Basically, a whole lot of "doesn't really matter" is still "doesn't really matter", if that makes sense.


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.

Right, yeah, that'd be a job for story points.

...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...

As I mentioned in the post, that's now a lot easier due to some econ-unit sizes being higher. I.E. if you find 10k Ore somewhere, you can actually sell it for a decent price. The economy scaling non-linearly for the "to cargo units" conversion looks a bit silly just as far as the numbers you get; I don't think it works.


But why Not (spontanious Idea.)

Split Crew from ships to:
Crew (No XP)
Pilots (slight Bonus eg.to top spd)
...

Hmm, I'm not sure this really relates to the topic, honestly.


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.

To make sure it's clear, this isn't something I've been working on for the entire time since the last update, or anything close to it. It's just one of the few things that I thought would make for an interesting blog post. Story things are also tougher to talk about because I don't want to spoil them, but that doesn't mean they're not being added.


  • 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.

The way I think about it is some of the forces are assigned to actually fulfuilling the objective (i.e. grabbing, let's say, Supplies) while the rest are in reserve/provide backup as needed. So in other words, if all your marines are tossing crates into shuttles, they're more vulnerable than if half of them are providing cover, running distraction operations, etc.

  • 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?

Yeah, definitely doable as long as the column names are the same. Each objective is a GroundRaidObjectivePlugin (there's a few types already, for commodities, special items, AI cores, blueprints, ship equipment) and you can provide custom implementations. You can also either edit the list of objectives using a listener, or just provide the list if you're calling the showGroundRaidTargetPicker() method directly yourself.

- Do veteran soldiers sell for more money? It might be cool to train them up strictly to sell them.

They don't, no.

- 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.

It's proportional! On the other hand, you get XP based on the pre-losses number of marines, so that could be interpreted in this way if desired.

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!

Not at the moment - well, I mean, expeditions already aim to disrupt industries, but none of the "stealing" stuff. That'd be kind of separate, really.

Quote
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.

Per my earlier response, I'm not seeing a way to have that be functionally different than just "having more marines". Even if heavy armaments mitigate losses or some such, it still seems like it'd end up being a math exercise at the end of the day. Being required for tougher objectives, though... I guess the way it could work is if you absolutely *had* to have heavy armaments for certain higher danger levels or objectives. Then it'd be qualitatively different and potentially interesting. Also more complicated, though, and figuring out how many "units" of heavy armaments you have gets a bit tricky, too, especially as far as communicating this to the player.


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.

Well, at some point, there's going to be a threshold anyway, right? With 5 marines more, you have a 25% chance to do it, but without them, you can't try at all? Ultimately it just comes back to "this is a game"... I was thinking about having a story option to bump the raid effectiveness up a touch, but really no matter what you do there's still a threshold somewhere, unless it's just rng from 0 to 100%. And even then, actually, since you need at least 5% raid effectiveness to raid.



I personally don't raid until late game because I don't feel I can "afford" the reputation hit/hostility with the faction I'm raiding. The net gain rarely offsets the net loss unless what I'm losing is negligible because my own colonies can do it better. :P Casual raiding just has never seemed worth it because I can make money through other avenues that actually gain rep with factions.

If story points were still involved, the "surprise" raid wouldn't make it more effective: it would make it more covert (i.e. little/no reputation hit at all). If there were less of a meta-game consequence to raiding, I'd do it more. Maybe it's just me but unless I'm getting something permanent like blueprints or nanoforges, the risk isn't worth the reward. (Then again, I'm not much of a warmonger in my playthroughs).

Hmm, I like this a lot, actually, it's a nice use of story points for a qualitatively different, but not overpowered, effect. Made a note!



Current raids can usually just be spammed after a tactical bombardment to obtain the exact same results plus blueprints/resources and without the negative effects of a saturation bombardment, this also makes me feel like once you can raid something, you're basically beating a dead horse that is your target faction already.

I don't think it'll be as much of a concern given the increasing marine losses, but perhaps it might make sense to reduce/not stack the stability penalties from continued raids.

https://imgur.com/LIBn86k

Firefox. Not much of a problem but if you look at the scrollbar, on the right I have to scroll down a lot of blank empty space after the blog post, if I click on the picture for some reason. Since no one else has the problem, it could be anything casuing it.

Thank you - yeah, that's odd, but as you say, hard to tell what it might be.


To be honest my main problem with raiding early game is marine upkeep. Compared to fuel/crew/supply upkeep of frigate/destroyer fleet (early game), the amount of credits you need to pay any marine force large enough to to get through colony defenses without taking heavy losses is pretty big.

One of the key points in the new system is that while high raid effectiveness reduces losses, low-ish raid effectiness doesn't mean you suffer huge losses, especially not if you target low-danger targets. I.E. you might well use 100 marines to raid for Food, and lose *zero* of them.


Yeah, I think the lack of controlled environment is one of the best arguments against ranked crew, but I wouldn't expect there to be to many complications. After all, crew have had ranks in the past without causing any gameplay problems (at least not that I could discern at the time).

I think that's because crew progression was tuned so you'd eventually end up with mostly elite crew regardless. So, basically, if it's a purely progression mechanic, the concerns about what's better/worse because of it get bowled over because you still end up at the same point, maybe just a bit later, and that wasn't worth worrying much about. I suppose the same approach could be taken here, too.

Well sure, it's a bit of a breadth vs depth thing, right? Marines ranks can have a major effect because they're one of the few variables in one aspect of the game, but crew would have a comparatively minor effect on the aspect of the game that ties in with everything else. It wouldn't take much of an effect for crew ranks to have more overall impact than marine ranks.

(See my earlier answer to SCC! IMO an "overall" effect matters less since it's just moving the baseline difficulty a touch and not really introducing anything *new*, decision-wise.)


Right, properly changing how the player interacts with people-commodities would require an overhaul, which would be crazy for various reasons since the current solution is perfectly adequate and even ideal in some respects. I guess the point I was trying to get at, is that the inventory management GUI doesn't properly support dynamic items, so maybe dynamic things shouldn't be items. Or items shouldn't be dynamic. But, like you said, it depends on how things play out. I do think there's a good chance the inability to un-dilute marines could turn out to be a non-issue.

That's a fair point. If marines having XP turned out to be too much trouble, I could see rolling it back, and changing over to a "track losses over the last 10x raids, apply hazard pay" type of approach which doesn't care about "commodities" directly.
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Racionador

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #62 on: November 29, 2019, 02:56:12 PM »

Ok, I'm loving these upcoming developments to the raiding system but I do feel like the system itself is taking place in a very, err, static envirorment.

What I mean by that is that during the whole game, only your colonies grow, only you establish actual colonies (counting Luddic path and Pirate bases out since they do not produce and/or demand commodities as far as I'm aware, altough I think you can sell them specific stuff for a lot of money?) and most importantly for me I think, once colonies are gone the faction will not make efforts to reclaim it and/or try getting a new domain.

Current raids can usually just be spammed after a tactical bombardment to obtain the exact same results plus blueprints/resources and without the negative effects of a saturation bombardment, this also makes me feel like once you can raid something, you're basically beating a dead horse that is your target faction already.

I believe an update of this magnitude would require additional game changes to truly fuction as well as it was designed once into the game:

1) Increase the time marines need to recover from a raid. Being capable of raiding the same planet again after just one day (more or less) breaks the system no matter how marines are overhauled. Either give them a fatigued state witch revovers after a week or two (and is reduced the more experienced marines get of course) or just slap a placeholdery hardcap to raiding, maybe once every two weeks?

2)Allow the faction with a planet on the brink of decivilization to send a "stabilizing expedition" to said planet to save it. It would provide much needed longevity to a planet that's been raided to the ground and that would grant the player an admittedly massive market advantage if said planet was a major producer of I don't know, fuel, heavy machinery, supplies?

3)Allow faction planets to actually grow, therefore also increasing their market shares overtime. This would have the player need to become a dedicated raider once he/she has achieved resource monopoly and the AI is going to try and get a bigger slice of the cake. This would also give you guys the opportunity to expand the current survey data mechanic as there currently is no motive behind a faction giving survey missions. Imagine actually having to think before giving pirates survey data of a class V planet not too far from the core systems...

4)The former two suggestions have a problem tough, how do we define and limit the extent of what a faction can do? I'd actually give them a monthly income, just like the player.  It would either grow or decrease based on how many factions are at war with them, how many military fleets it's rebuilding for various reasons, how many expeditions are being funded and also what are the faction modifiers.

5)These modifiers are simple, some factions are more prone on aggressive expension but will always leave many of their settlements to themselfes if they're endangered (looking at you pirates). Some other factions could not only be against any faction expanding outside the core systems in terms of reputation, but they would automatically send expeditions to said colonies as soon as they pop up provided they have the funds for an expedition (Luddic church). You can imagine similar AI behaviours for the other factions aswell, I will not produce any more half-baked ideas since I think the reply is long enough already. Again, I love how many mechanics in this game are costantly being overhauled for the better, keep it up lads!
i with you, the game have a lot of nice features and things to do, but i cant just ignore the fact that factions act like they dont care, what is even the point of having factions with such deep characterization that dont seems to follow their goals?
i a bit worried on that point because everytime someone ask this questions to the guys making the game they seems to avoid at all cost or just give a ''maybe'' answer
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Shad

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #63 on: November 29, 2019, 02:58:25 PM »

Do AI expedition/raid fleets contain marines? If so, at what exp level?
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SafariJohn

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #64 on: November 29, 2019, 03:00:31 PM »

  • 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.

The way I think about it is some of the forces are assigned to actually fulfuilling the objective (i.e. grabbing, let's say, Supplies) while the rest are in reserve/provide backup as needed. So in other words, if all your marines are tossing crates into shuttles, they're more vulnerable than if half of them are providing cover, running distraction operations, etc.

I think this would be a much more obvious if the unassigned marines were called "reserve" or better yet "overwatch". Then it would be clear they're not sitting on their duffs back in the fleet.
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Sundog

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #65 on: November 29, 2019, 03:33:42 PM »

I think that's because crew progression was tuned so you'd eventually end up with mostly elite crew regardless. So, basically, if it's a purely progression mechanic, the concerns about what's better/worse because of it get bowled over because you still end up at the same point, maybe just a bit later, and that wasn't worth worrying much about. I suppose the same approach could be taken here, too.
Right, trying to make it a balancing act where crew competence varies wildly based on combat performance could be cool, but also very precarious. I guess I've been thinking about crew ranks as a replacement for Fleet Logistics 3, which would fall squarely in the progression category. It would be best, I think, if XP requirements for each tier of crew were exponential, so that...
green advances to regular almost instantly (x1 XP)
regular advancement to veteran is just a matter of time (x3 XP)
crew may die off too fast for veteran crew to advance to elite (x9 XP)
That could allow for a bit of the balancing act aspect without getting too crazy or causing much dissatisfaction due to play-styles or fleet compositions that result in more crew casualties than normal.

(See my earlier answer to SCC! IMO an "overall" effect matters less since it's just moving the baseline difficulty a touch and not really introducing anything *new*, decision-wise.)
Yup! I was thinking about conceding that myself, actually, but didn't want to get too wordy. From a purely mechanical standpoint, I do think marine ranks are more interesting than crew ranks for this reason. If I'm being completely honest though, I don't think ranks add much in either case*. At least, not mechanically. However, I do think it's a worthwhile goal to "make marines feel less like a commodity and to encourage the player to care about them," even if the system that accomplishes that doesn't add much mechanical significance. Same for crew, imo.

*Edit: With the caveat that I don't know exactly how it would play out in either case, of course.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2019, 04:25:19 PM by Sundog »
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bobucles

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #66 on: November 29, 2019, 03:42:42 PM »

Quote
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.

Per my earlier response, I'm not seeing a way to have that be functionally different than just "having more marines". Even if heavy armaments mitigate losses or some such, it still seems like it'd end up being a math exercise at the end of the day. Being required for tougher objectives, though... I guess the way it could work is if you absolutely *had* to have heavy armaments for certain higher danger levels or objectives. Then it'd be qualitatively different and potentially interesting. Also more complicated, though, and figuring out how many "units" of heavy armaments you have gets a bit tricky, too, especially as far as communicating this to the player.
Well. The way I was considering it was something like:
- A minor objective takes something like 2 units of marines.
- A medium objective takes something like 5 units of marines
- A major objective takes something like 8 units of marines AND 1-2 units of heavy armaments (the HA get "spent" and don't get refunded)

In this situation, the HA serve two purposes. One is it bumps up the cost of those high end raids. You only get as many blueprint raids as you have HA, which helps gate those late game raids a bit. The low end raids may be easy to unlock, but HA don't grow on trees so the actual "treasure hunt" raids will take some more planning. The other is to protect marine veterancy. Take for example a nanoforge raid that needs 2000 marines. After the raid, 1000 marines come back. That's a cost of $200k, but you also lost half of your marine XP. Ouch. Now say the same raid required 2K marines and 200 HA. After the raid 1500 marines and 0 HA come back. The raid cost is still the same at $200k, but you only lose 25% of your marine XP. Losing XP is a cost as well, so being able to adjust the overall $$ expense separately from the XP expense may be useful.

It can also help justify various lore things such as reputation hit. A normal raid with conventional weapons may be a minor event with minor rep hit, but storming the palace with mechs and tanks and bombers is a serious issue. Even going in anonymous wouldn't fully soften the faction hit.

Morrokain

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #67 on: November 29, 2019, 04:05:54 PM »

Right - not saying this is necessarily bad, but it's defintiely a thing where I have a hard time it actually working out in-game in the way that it's meant to/would need to in order to actually do the job. It's easy enough not to get stopped, so to make that a concern you'd need to make stops more frequent and it's just a touchy mechanic; too easy for it to just be annoying. And even then, it's a "hostilities break out earlier than expected" event. Just... without going into too much detail, all the gameplay around this can be used to avoid any downsides too easily, so this feels like it'd only be good in theory. I'm not sure it's compelling enough to make the player really play around this.

Quote
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.

Per my earlier response, I'm not seeing a way to have that be functionally different than just "having more marines". Even if heavy armaments mitigate losses or some such, it still seems like it'd end up being a math exercise at the end of the day. Being required for tougher objectives, though... I guess the way it could work is if you absolutely *had* to have heavy armaments for certain higher danger levels or objectives. Then it'd be qualitatively different and potentially interesting. Also more complicated, though, and figuring out how many "units" of heavy armaments you have gets a bit tricky, too, especially as far as communicating this to the player.

I certainly can relate to the notion that a seemingly simple thing can snowball into a ton of changes. Fair point there.

For my clarification, though, were you more responding (in the first post) to the idea of patrols responding more aggressively to heavy weapons- rather than the first part of the idea which was having them be required for high end raids late game? I ask because in the second response to bobucles you seem open to it. Or well, you were at least a little open with reservations but you get what I mean. I checked and confirmed that heavy weapons are already illegal in with the Hegemony and Sindrian Diktat, and I think that is enough of a deterrence to just carrying them around early game. I could also see making them illegal in the Luddic Church as logical, as the player would still be able to travel freely near tachyon and league patrols.

Either way, thanks for the dialogue!- and for your explanation of your thought process on the subject.  :)

If you are more open to the first idea, I think the easiest way to communicate the need for heavy weapons in later raids would be in the tooltip of the commodity itself, and in the context of missions including them. (ie We need these heavy weapons to go after a blueprint we desperately want and can't do it with our marines alone)

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errorgance

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #68 on: November 29, 2019, 04:14:36 PM »

If you're selling experienced marines to a planets pool of marines, does the planets marine exp level increase too?

if so, would different planets marines have different exp levels? would different factions have different default levels?

could ship crew receive exp this way too? after all, you've just created a seriously hard "why not this too" issue with the marines getting exp, but not sailors.

can there be training industries you can build on your colonies for increasing your base marine stats? if so, then would marines stored on planets without good training faculties lose exp over time until they hit bottom?
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #69 on: November 29, 2019, 04:58:24 PM »

i with you, the game have a lot of nice features and things to do, but i cant just ignore the fact that factions act like they dont care, what is even the point of having factions with such deep characterization that dont seems to follow their goals?
i a bit worried on that point because everytime someone ask this questions to the guys making the game they seems to avoid at all cost or just give a ''maybe'' answer

I've said a bunch of times that making it into a 4x is not a direction that I want to go at all and that most of the dynamism/changes would come from story-related things. There's some room in between - I could see occasional events such as an invasion or a colony being established or some such - but certainly not as part of each faction trying to "play the game", as it were.

(I don't really want to get into a fairly off-topic discussion in a thread that already takes a bit to stay on top of. Like, it could be an interesting topic of conversation, just not here...)


Do AI expedition/raid fleets contain marines? If so, at what exp level?

Their ground forces are abstracted - and have been - to the point where that question doesn't really come up. They just have a certain "strength" as far as that's concerned; whether that's made up of fewer elite or more regular marines is kind of moot.

I think this would be a much more obvious if the unassigned marines were called "reserve" or better yet "overwatch". Then it would be clear they're not sitting on their duffs back in the fleet.

They're marked as "forces held in reserve" on the "marine losses" tooltip, yeah.


crew may die off too fast for veteran crew to advance to elite (x9 XP)

Yeah, precarious indeed. E.G. that *might* lead to players feeling like they've got to play with high-tech, shield-reliant ships only so they never lose crew... again, not necessarily bad all around, just incentives that weren't planned for so it has real potential to get weird.

From a purely mechanical standpoint, I do think marine ranks are more interesting than crew ranks for this reason. If I'm being completely honest though, I don't think ranks add much in either case. At least, not mechanically.

The thing I think it does mechanically is make it so you're incentivized to pick less dangerous raid targets - to gain XP and minimize losses - instead of it being a pure math problem of "loot - cost of marines lost = profit". Getting more done with less marines I think *should* tilt this far enough towards mostly conserving marines being better that you don't really have to do this math. It's either "go for a safer target", or "I need this synchrotron to *actually use*, so it's not a question of profit". At least, that's the goal here, so it's not a grimdark math problem every time.

However, I do think it's a worthwhile goal to "make marines feel less like a commodity and to encourage the player to care about them," even if the system that accomplishes that doesn't add much mechanical significance. Same for crew, imo.

Yep. IMO for crew it doesn't add much else and further encourgaging minimizing avoiding crew losses strengthens odd/unexpected/undesireable incentives, but, right, we've already covered that.

I do wonder, though, if making both marines and crew sell for zero credits wouldn't be a good idea. It'd make sense, and it'd avoid the problem of diluting marine XP just because you want to both 1) have some marines and 2) ship some marines elsewhere for a profit.


In this situation, the HA serve two purposes. One is it bumps up the cost of those high end raids. You only get as many blueprint raids as you have HA, which helps gate those late game raids a bit. The low end raids may be easy to unlock, but HA don't grow on trees so the actual "treasure hunt" raids will take some more planning. The other is to protect marine veterancy. Take for example a nanoforge raid that needs 2000 marines. After the raid, 1000 marines come back. That's a cost of $200k, but you also lost half of your marine XP. Ouch. Now say the same raid required 2K marines and 200 HA. After the raid 1500 marines and 0 HA come back. The raid cost is still the same at $200k, but you only lose 25% of your marine XP. Losing XP is a cost as well, so being able to adjust the overall $$ expense separately from the XP expense may be useful.

Marine losses from blueprint raids (and similar) are high, so that already gates them in the same way, no?

As far as protecting marine veterancy, hmm, that's more complicated. At first glance this makes sense, but - this just means that a high-end raid now 1) costs more and 2) results in less marine losses. But, since HA is required, it's not like there's a choice there, so it's just... different. But not a lot different. It really feels like more "looking for a use for HA in raids" than "using HA to solve a design problem with raids", if you know what I mean.


For my clarification, though, were you more responding (in the first post) to the idea of patrols responding more aggressively to heavy weapons- rather than the first part of the idea which was having them be required for high end raids late game? I ask because in the second response to bobucles you seem open to it. Or well, you were at least a little open with reservations but you get what I mean. I checked and confirmed that heavy weapons are already illegal in with the Hegemony and Sindrian Diktat, and I think that is enough of a deterrence to just carrying them around early game. I could also see making them illegal in the Luddic Church as logical, as the player would still be able to travel freely near tachyon and league patrols.

I was responding to the part about patrols, yeah.

Either way, thanks for the dialogue!- and for your explanation of your thought process on the subject.  :)

:)

If you are more open to the first idea, I think the easiest way to communicate the need for heavy weapons in later raids would be in the tooltip of the commodity itself, and in the context of missions including them. (ie We need these heavy weapons to go after a blueprint we desperately want and can't do it with our marines alone)

Yeah, that'd be the natural place for it!


If you're selling experienced marines to a planets pool of marines, does the planets marine exp level increase too?

Nope! Marine XP is really presented as - mainly - being a factor of a well-established command structure, procedures, familiarity with your style of command, etc - rather than being an intrinsic property of the marines.

could ship crew receive exp this way too? after all, you've just created a seriously hard "why not this too" issue with the marines getting exp, but not sailors.

No! But also, I see your point and it's probably the most compelling argument against marine XP. Per the blog post, it's something that I was already thinking about (hence the "Crew" section, there, with reasons for not doing it).

can there be training industries you can build on your colonies for increasing your base marine stats? if so, then would marines stored on planets without good training faculties lose exp over time until they hit bottom?

Building that much stuff around this seems like... let's put it this way, while I'd like raids and marines to be more important, I think there's a world of difference between that and them being important enough to warrant building up *that* much more mechanical content around them. The changes now are making them more important by making what they do more useful. What you're talking about here isn't doing that - rather, it's working with the assumption that they're already so useful that they warrant more of their own supporting mechanics, and I don't think that's the case. That'd only really be the case for a few core mechanics in the entire game; for other stuff it's building a castle on a foundation of sand. I hope that makes sense!
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Morrokain

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #70 on: November 29, 2019, 06:02:20 PM »

Marine losses from blueprint raids (and similar) are high, so that already gates them in the same way, no?

As far as protecting marine veterancy, hmm, that's more complicated. At first glance this makes sense, but - this just means that a high-end raid now 1) costs more and 2) results in less marine losses. But, since HA is required, it's not like there's a choice there, so it's just... different. But not a lot different. It really feels like more "looking for a use for HA in raids" than "using HA to solve a design problem with raids", if you know what I mean.

Its a small detail, but it doesn't quite gate them in the same way since they are two separate commodities and one is illegal in places and another isn't. You already responded to how negligible this is to the overall strategy, true, but if HA were made more difficult to acquire (Maybe not even sold- or rare on black market only? Or found almost exclusively in weapon caches or ruins, etc) then that could provide a more unique difference.

Also, considering each resource operates on two different storage mechanisms they have separate logistical considerations. If blueprint raids and nanoforge raids required HA, that eats into your cargo storage whereas marines don't. Marines require upkeep pay while HA don't, etc. So, if the storage requirements for HA are severe enough, the player would be forced to bring more freighters. That's a pretty big consideration to make when you can go for a logistically easier to manage raid. Commodity raids, by extension, should probably not cost HA if that were the case. Spitballing: That even introduces things like a logistical hullmod that could reduce or remove cargo space requirements of HA. Might compete too much with the cargo space one, but maybe let them be combine-able for a Raider Freighter type specialization? Anyway, getting off topic here.

What I'm getting at, mostly, is there is a lot there that can make the differentiation unique, but true enough, this is also more in line with:

Quote
It really feels like more "looking for a use for HA in raids" than "using HA to solve a design problem with raids", if you know what I mean.

Generally, I agree its ideal to do the later over the former, but in this very specific case I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. If you have other ideas to use the commodity that does the above, then absolutely that is preferable, but in the interim this may prevent an immersion breaker which is not really a bad goal when you think about it. It feels strange from a logical point of view that you would only use marines for raiding when you've got HA aboard your ships, you know? It is especially jarring considering I'm pretty sure the procurement missions hint that the buyer is going to use them that way. Maybe that was my own extrapolation I can't remember. For me at least, it would break immersion worse than the marine veterancy vs crew veterancy juxtaposition.

(As an aside on that: Though I kind of feel like crew veterancy causes too much power creep for the player when combined with officers and skills, I get what people are saying about it seeming off that crew experience isn't also a thing. I do love the idea of marine veterancy, though, so I'm all for that change.)

Now, you could also just as easily solve the problem by simply removing HA from the game entirely, and replace that item in the missions that require them with marines... That would certainly be a simpler approach, but probably a less... er, fun? approach in my mind. Definitely don't blame you if that were the taken route, though ;D
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #71 on: November 29, 2019, 06:29:25 PM »

This really feels like making things way more complicated just to try and make HA a bit more strongly differentiated from marines.

Just, design-wise, if one finds oneself having to adjust a ton of other things to make something work, that's usually a sign that it's not a great idea, or at least that one needs to make sure the payoff is big. This feels the opposite - the payoff is pretty minor, and there's a lot of stuff that needs to be tweaked just right/assumptions that need to hold up to get even that amount of payoff. And that's in addition to making the interaction more complicated and needing to convey more info to the player, too.

(A great idea would more likely let you remove or simplify some things... so, say, if there was a use of HA that simplified the raid mechanics? That'd be really exciting!)

And if the reason for this is "immersion", then, let's see: the HA commodity represents stuff that's not quite put together - sure, it's mechs, tanks, and hovercraft, but they're not fully assembled. You might put them together (with some difficulty) shipboard, but doing an atmo drop with them? Not going to work. Someone on the surface you deliver to, though, has the luxury of time and space, and for them, they may even represent an increase in mobility rather than the opposite. That seems like a much simpler solution :)

Quote from: new Heavy Armaments description
Armaments ranging from heavy squad-level weapons to mechs, tanks, and hovercraft. Private use is banned on most worlds. Largely disassembled and not suitable for use in quick raids.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2019, 06:34:16 PM by Alex »
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #72 on: November 29, 2019, 06:43:00 PM »

Please make Marines required to clean out Mining/Research/Orbital Habitats!
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #73 on: November 29, 2019, 06:55:57 PM »

What are you looking to accomplish with that suggestion? What would improve, gameplay-wise? What do you think might be the possible downsides?
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #74 on: November 29, 2019, 07:08:45 PM »

I think the whole heavy armaments thing ties into some ideas that have been floating around in other threads. It feels a lot better to get resources as rewards if they have some significant use beyond selling them, and this seems like the natural place for heavy armaments to be used. That's not a reason in itself to make or significantly alter an entire mechanic, but it seems to me like a compelling reason to really look for a good use of heavy armaments.

I think that it could be used as a good gating mechanic to allow early game raids without making them OP (getting nano forges and Paragon blueprints super early). I think it would be better to just have a required amount of heavy machinery for certain targets (probably military ones). They wouldn't affect the strength calculation, they would just be required in addition to marines for certain tasks like stealing blueprints and nano-forges (similar to how heavy machinery is required for certain tasks in addition to crew/supplies). In order to make this really meaningful, I think heavy armaments would also have to be become more rare. Then it would feel like when you found some in a station, you just found an opportunity to steal a rare blue print rather than some money with extra steps.
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