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[Pappus]

As it stands I feel like it is better than before, but the core problems have not been cleared.

1) Crew & Marines being a commodity that you can drag and drop within seconds into your ranks at absurdly low prices.

This leads to being able to raid basically instantly. Go to tach, purchase 400 marines and voila you have infinite money on your hands with massive xp gains to boot.

1.1) Refilling marines is a chore. I feel they should never die just to spare us from going somewhere and slapping a stack onto our stack.
-- Wound them instead and have them take time to recuperate.

1.2) There is no hierarchy structure either. It me! Your general! After you slapped 2000 of them into your inventory. If you feel like it you could be directly commanding 10.000 too. It just depends how many beds you have...
-- I suggest that there should be a limit. You can maybe field 200 yourself and each officer gives +x with skills allowing for more. So that ground support ships actually matter. A raid force should not be established the moment you randomly plunged together 2-3 civilian transporters.

1.3) Because it is a commodity that constantly costs you money it pitches you into raiding more and more and more although maybe you don't want to especially since you don't want to sell your trained up raiders.
--Maybe marines should be a part of battle/ combat transport ships and not have an extra cost attached to them. If you want to raid you build a fleet that is suitable to raiding and it becomes available that way.

2) The entire raid action itself doesn't really exist in a gameplay sense. If there is no defenders, then click click, check the goods available, go back twice and check where you could sell the stuff nearby best - if anything stands out - click click click ok. Done.

If there is defenders you are instantly annoyed, because just to remove 3-4 4 dmod lashers you have to attack the starbase.

-- This is a big one but maybe make raiding take time. You initiate the raid and then a stream of little ships automatically goes back and forth to the target. The longer you stay the more loot you get, but the defenders are coming in. They might have to find you first though in which case your sensor profile makes sense to optimize. Maybe you have styles to shoot for as in slow and sneaky and brutal/open.

On a sidenote I really don't think that players should be allowed to enter any coreworld space with an legit combat fleet. The superiority of the ruling house has to be established, but how can they, when they allow you to casually fly around with an entire army inside the sectors. For this I suggest that when you go to a coreworld with a fleet that has e.g. a capital ship, then the capital ship cannot be used in combat it is "waiting in hyperspace". If you jump out of the sector by any means it is back.

If you forcefully enter with your capital ship, then the moment you enter the sector a call for help goes out and an army of the ruling clan comes to mop the floor with you.

Like there has to be a difference between a legit smallscale raid and showing up with your entire army and leveling the place. Those are not the same thing, but currently they play the same.

3) It is hard to understand what you really do due to the economics being basically fake.

I know it is technically possible to create a shortcoming by raiding e.g. the big fuel produces but you have no explanation anywhere what 5 vs 6 fuel icons even practically means in terms of production per cycle or even need.

What does demand of 5 fuel mean? 1000 fuel per month? 500? If I wanna use raiding in such a way I need to understand it and the explanations are surely lacking.

4) The quests are not lucrative enough and they don't explain to you well enough who you are going against. They say a city name, but it is a hassle to find it.

[notabot]

-- This is a big one but maybe make raiding take time. You initiate the raid and then a stream of little ships automatically goes back and forth to the target. The longer you stay the more loot you get, but the defenders are coming in. They might have to find you first though in which case your sensor profile makes sense to optimize. Maybe you have styles to shoot for as in slow and sneaky and brutal/open.

It already works sort of like this in my head would love to see it in gameplay.

And I too would love some clarification as to what the damage you inflict actually means in practical terms.

[NaniByte]

You can make these type of arguments for every system in the game. Can a sandbox type game like this always be improved? Of course it can. There has to be a line somewhere. And everybody has suggestions. But ideas are cheap.

[Pappus]

You can make these type of argument for every system in the game. Can a sandbox type game like this always be improved? Of course it can. There has to be a line somewhere. And everybody has suggestions. But ideas are cheap.

With the difference that multiple systems are subpar for the same reasons and these ideas are not code heavy to implement cause they are all based on stuff that already exists or is so easy, that it does not matter.

[Zapier]

I like the thought of actually having ships meant more for raiding being necessary rather than any transport capable of hauling thousands of marines being enough. Basically make the ships with ground support packages more necessary. Instead of them supplementing the marines they become more of a limit to how many get used like with current crew systems. So if you had a Valkyrie, using default ground support package supporting up to 100, then at most you could deploy 100 marines in a raid, even if you had 500 marines with you.

It wouldn’t change how crew and marines are certainly more of a commodity feel than some versions, but it would make raiding more of a fleet choice setup. Would give more reason to allow a sort of “marine assault package” hull mod that would give a thematic change to ships not normally designed for raiding and in some way limiting usable marines to more easily defined numbers.

This would also play into the raiding taking time approach by meaning raiding fleets are perhaps more vulnerable due to split roles. Smaller frigates with assault packages maybe raid faster and larger ships with noticeably larger marine support take longer. Maybe this is too niche though.

I do kinda like the idea of just omitting marines at this point was n favor of something more like the above. Your fleet contributing x amount of capable marines per ship/hull mod/type. Maybe have it more of consuming supplies as you raid like it depletes CR. Low tech ships deplete fewer CR but generally less effective raiders and high tech use more CR in raids but more effective. This could somewhat discourage over raiding for the sake of doing so for practically free gains in some cases.

Dunno. Always some other way these things could work but would they feel better or worse, more balanced or unbalanced? Who’s to say. It’s like how I miss the old boarding to capture ships and would love to see that come back to add some risk to taking a chance at picking ships up rather than the automatic grab, mothball if necessary, move to the next. Anyway...

[Badger]

Some really good ideas here. To remove marines as an annoying resource you could tie marines to specialized ships which have a complement that is replenished at port.