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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 33987 times)

Plantissue

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #135 on: December 06, 2019, 05:19:35 AM »

Marines are already armed with guns. It's in their icon.
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Igncom1

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #136 on: December 06, 2019, 11:14:51 AM »

Or generic "Munitions".

Anything to sell it as trading good #718 rather then something actually important.
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puffzor

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #137 on: December 10, 2019, 04:06:02 AM »

If I might make a suggestion - something that bothers me about the raiding system as is is how it is essentially "push button, get bacon" - it feels like just a bunch of dialogue options to skip through to get from point A to point B. Something that would make it really feel like an interaction with the game world instead of a menu option is if it was implemented like mining is in Nexerelin - you must stay in orbit for some amount of time while the raid is in the planning, deployment, and operation stages for e.g. 1 day or more (probably not longer than a week) depending on the complexity, risk level, and size of your operation. I think this would also set up some tension in the early to mid game when you actually care about the system patrols that come when you alert the planet you're raiding.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2019, 04:14:17 AM by puffzor »
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #138 on: December 10, 2019, 04:22:08 AM »

If I might make a suggestion - something that bothers me about the raiding system as is is how it is essentially "push button, get bacon" - it feels like just a bunch of dialogue options to skip through to get from point A to point B. Something that would make it really feel like an interaction with the game world instead of a menu option is if it was implemented like mining is in Nexerelin - you must stay in orbit for some amount of time while the raid is in the planning, deployment, and operation stages for e.g. 1 day or more (probably not longer than a week) depending on the complexity, risk level, and size of your operation. I think this would also set up some tension in the early to mid game when you actually care about the system patrols that come when you alert the planet you're raiding.
Great idea, player should be able to choose how long a raid takes.
Decide between better effectiveness/less losses (slow) VS not getting swamped by multiple reponse fleets (fast)


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Histidine

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #139 on: December 24, 2019, 07:23:48 PM »

Are any changes to recent unrest from raiding planned?
It feels a bit wacky that you can inflict uncapped recent unrest on a market by raiding it repeatedly for a number of days (at some point one wonders how the next raid could possibly make things any worse). Much better way to decivilize a market than sat bombing it, if you're willing to wait a few months for that outcome.

Maybe instead of nerfing this, lean into it: If net stability reaches -X (say -20 or -30) the market decivilizes instantly, since you've destroyed all semblance of order and society on it.
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Megas

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #140 on: December 25, 2019, 04:24:10 AM »

It would be nice if sat bombing is worth it.  It feels good to sat bomb enemy planets, but the penalties are severe (most annoying is indies getting hostile when they should know better not to get involved and become targets too, if their planets were not sat bombed).  The only time I care to sat bomb is when I want everyone dead (and that is easy when their system defenses are weaker than their expedition fleets).

Right now, unlimited spaceport headshot raids as Histidine explains feels like an exploit, and player can do it stealthily for minor rep penalty, then remove Decivilized by building the colony twice.

Sat bombing a habitable and getting pollution hurts when I can decivilize the planet instead and remove Decivilized.

Maybe instead of nerfing this, lean into it: If net stability reaches -X (say -20 or -30) the market decivilizes instantly, since you've destroyed all semblance of order and society on it.
At that point, also treat it like a sat bombing in terms of hostilities.  Everyone knows you did it and become auto-hostile if they care about that sort of thing.  Then again, maybe not.  If pirates and Pather did most of the work (pirates do raid core to the ground since core worlds are helpless against pirate raids without player intervention), and you came along to finish the job like this, then it would be silly if your single raid killed them and you become enemy of the sector.  Come to think of it, unless core worlds can repel pirates raids consistently, this would put a nearly hard doom clock on core worlds and player would need to babysit even more to protect core worlds.  (There is a reason why I want to do kill-em-all campaigns, to eliminate babysitting.)
« Last Edit: December 25, 2019, 05:10:29 AM by Megas »
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SCC

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #141 on: December 26, 2019, 12:05:24 PM »

Perhaps you should add a "forces unassigned to any objective will extract loot and protect return routes, decreasing casualties" line somewhere. Some players might think to assign all available forces every time and would never see that there's benefit to leaving some reserves, even if they mouse over the "projected marine casualties" indicator (where the bonus would be none and so unlisted).

SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #142 on: December 26, 2019, 08:29:19 PM »

Gound Effectiveness Reductions for being over crew capacity?
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #143 on: December 26, 2019, 08:34:29 PM »

Are any changes to recent unrest from raiding planned?
It feels a bit wacky that you can inflict uncapped recent unrest on a market by raiding it repeatedly for a number of days (at some point one wonders how the next raid could possibly make things any worse). Much better way to decivilize a market than sat bombing it, if you're willing to wait a few months for that outcome.

Maybe instead of nerfing this, lean into it: If net stability reaches -X (say -20 or -30) the market decivilizes instantly, since you've destroyed all semblance of order and society on it.

Hmm, maybe. I'm not sure it's something I particularly want to dive into right now; it mostly really affects Nexerelin, I think, and there you've got a better view of what's best. If/when there's a bigger reason to look into it for vanilla, though...


Perhaps you should add a "forces unassigned to any objective will extract loot and protect return routes, decreasing casualties" line somewhere. Some players might think to assign all available forces every time and would never see that there's benefit to leaving some reserves, even if they mouse over the "projected marine casualties" indicator (where the bonus would be none and so unlisted).

Maybe? I feel like the tooltip is pretty comprehensive and you'd also see the projected losses change as you assign more marines, so it might not be necessary.
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Amoebka

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #144 on: December 28, 2019, 11:28:17 AM »

Not sure how I feel about the experience dilution. It seems like marines are going to be a lot more important and have uses during exploration random events, which would naturally encourage players to always keep a small elite squad with them. That would, however, mean that you could never trade marines, because every time you transfer some from planet A to planet B your own squad's experience gets reset.
Maybe freshly bought marines should by default be considered "just a trading commodity" and not have/share experience, and then players can press some button to permanently add them to the experience sharing pool if they want to?
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #145 on: December 28, 2019, 11:54:03 AM »

As of right now, marines in your fleet keep all the XP, so e.g. if you have 100 elite marines, buy 1000 marines, and then sell 1000 marines, you're still left with 100 elite marines - so, hopefully, this sort of thing would be a non-issue.

(This is different from how it was at the time of the writing of the blog post.)
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Deshara

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #146 on: December 29, 2019, 03:31:09 AM »

Quote
Hiring new marines dilutes the experience and reduces the bonuses (no experience is lost, it’s just redistributed). It’s also possible to drop off experienced marines in storage, or in cryopods, and have them retain their experience level.

that's exactly what a game I'm ripping off shamelessly does, Ultimate General: Civil War! And it worked wonders in that game to make me care about my regiments -- your regiments gain XP over the campaign but they also take losses, you have to manually replenish your regiments in between missions out of your available pool of recruits and the more you fill a regiment with recruits the more you dilute that regiment's overall XP down to 0. You can replenish a regiment with veterans that doesn't dilute XP but unlike recruits they are not free, and bc you need money to buy guns for all regimental replenishment (and upgrades) and bc the AI is actively competing with you over the campaign to defeat you forcing you to go into each mission with $0 in the bank, there's a heavy resource cost to maintaining veteran regiments of any size that scales with how poorly you did in your last mission, so all the incredibly experienced regiments you have will be small, and all of your green regiments can be as gigantic as your store of guns to equip them, which means that when you get a regiment of veterans up to the max size you value it, because getting that regiment up to that size has not only required a lot of money, but has required multiple missions of cultivation -- getting them into the battle to get them XP, but also keeping them safe & sacrificing green regiments to defend them from losses.
And because it's rare and hard-won and easily lost once you've got it, the game has the capacity to let you go hog wild once you've gotten them -- in a civil war game of musket-era soldiers you get this regiment of two thousand men, experienced enough to know how to land shots and operate their guns, armed with modern magazine-fed cartridge rifles able to annihilate an enemy regiment from 100%-0 in the space between the start of their charge and when they would have met your men blade to blade if they weren't dead to the man. It's amazing, in the "this is why this method of warfare is dead, you are getting to play the death of a way of life" kind of way few games have every pulled off.

ANYWAY! So my question to Alex is: It sounds rn like you're having marine XP be a global fleet-wide statistic? I think there might be interesting possibilities in having XP tracked per marine stack, that you then assign to objectives in raids by the stack so that you can have a stack of veterans that you assign to high-priority & low-risk tasks and green stacks of marines that you assign to low-priority & high-risk objectives. This would of course require de-coupling the binary "you require ___ many marines to attempt this objective, if you have that many the objective is automatically won & the difficulty scales casualties" system it sounds like you're going for... maybe, maybe it might not.
Additionally, the moment I make the "per stack XP" suggestion the thought pops into my head of having special missions & objectives in raids that can only be done by stacks of marines of a certain XP level -- right now while it makes sense to have raid effectiveness correlate smoothly to XP it seems a bit weird to have the XP thresholds be purely cosmetic, seems like it wouldn't be v hard to have late-game raiding content gated behind having marine stacks of an adequate size brought up to veteran or elite rank over the course of a campaign
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #147 on: December 29, 2019, 06:38:59 AM »

Not sure if right but I think it is done through different types of marines, Recruit/Veteran/Elite instead od Metals/Organics/Drugs.
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #148 on: December 29, 2019, 08:22:55 AM »

It sounds rn like you're having marine XP be a global fleet-wide statistic?

Right, yeah.

I think there might be interesting possibilities in having XP tracked per marine stack, that you then assign to objectives in raids by the stack so that you can have a stack of veterans that you assign to high-priority & low-risk tasks and green stacks of marines that you assign to low-priority & high-risk objectives.

"Stack" is way too fluid and ephemeral a concept for this. It's just fundamentally not how stacks work - they combine (at times automatically, i.e. sorting/mass transfers), are split, or disappear entirely.

Besides, having tried more or less this with crew experience levels, I have no desire to repeat that error :)
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #149 on: December 30, 2019, 01:23:23 AM »


It sounds rn like you're having marine XP be a global fleet-wide statistic?
Is it the same for crew XP too?
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