Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[pairedeciseaux]

Scope

This is kind of a reply to the colony discussion that currently sits in pages 28-30 of the 0.95.1 patch notes thread. Putting this here because (A) I am a crazy person, (B) patch notes thread is not the appropriate place for this, and (C) here I'm exploring another route.

I find it interesting (if not disturbing) that one of the main concerns in this colony discussion seems to be about cost and revenue.

And... I suspect this is actually something that bothers Starsector creators: this features has a much more interesting potential, that unfortunatly was not fulfilled. Have you ever asked yourself after managing colonies for a while: why am I doing this for anyway? If first answer is "money", then, to be brutally honest, we are talking about a game design defect and a less than ideal management of player expectations.

At this point, I'd like to remind you guys about this:

A primary gameplay role  of player-built colonies is getting the player into trouble.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/2018/06/12/pirate-bases-raids-and-objectives/

Wait, what?! I don't want to get into trouble, get your fleet off my lawn, I just want more money!

Ok, ok, let us leave the jest here.

The first paragraphs of this one are also very much relevant:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/2017/12/21/colony-management/

Forum chatter

Inside spoiler below I have quoted some messages from pages 28-30 of the 0.95.1 patch notes thread, when the discussion was not purely about money.

Spoiler

Of course one could argue that a tiny colony takes too much baby sitting or something like that.

With only four colonies, I place colonies where they can be self-sufficient and at a good location, not necessarily where they can mine the most resources for the most profit.

Defenses are the expensive part, but that's more a question of how much you are willing to babysit.

Game has literally one (1) questline, you dont really need colony to complete it, even though encounters are made for super late-game and/or specifically tailored fleets to counter them.
(...)
Im questioning the necessity of the whole colony gameplay now, what's the point? To give exploration some meaning? Just make "production slots" bar encounter more often. As of now mods handle colonies better.

With regards to late game, it seems quite likely that there will be new things added that give you incentive/reason to have scaled up colonies. You have to remember you are playing an alpha, just look at that juicy greyed-out orders tab.

It's enough of a chore already when waiting for defenses to build and colony size to increase. Lately I barely bother with them, I just use them as a place to stock up on supplies/fuel and to hoard all my weapons and LPCs.

Weird how different people seem to have wildly different experiences with the current colony system...
(...)
Then again, I'm not looking at colonies as a primary cash supply - which, I mean, they do supply some if you haven't messed things up too much, and that's useful, but the primary purpose for colonies for me is to keep my stuff, and to allow production of things I've got the blueprints for. Income is a nice bonus, but not a priority.

Personally,I do like fiddling with colonies,but they take the fun out of the game when they re fully equipped. Nothing can get past a fortified colony with a Star Fortress and multiple fleets patrolling it.

I guess it comes down to what people see colonies as in terms of gameplay.  Are they a tool?  Are they a goal? Are better colonies a reward for exploration gameplay as well as routinely defeating Remnants?  Are they optional or are players expected need them every game unless they're playing really well?  Are they intended as a credit sink for players already doing well, or a support for players doing poorly?  Are they intended to solve problems or create problems to be solved (like, hmm, now I need a gamma core to reduce the ore requirements for my refinery to reduce my upkeep costs)?

Heavy industry is the only (non-defense) industry that does anything more than making money, and commerce as the third industry with any boost (cores, items, story points) already makes more than any other industries. If you don't care about money, then I guess you just spam heavy industries? Nothing else would do anything.

Early-game colonies (what are we defining as "early?") would only work if they funneled combat to the player and generated income. I would love for starter colonies to be especially "ripe" for pirate activity but likewise, a system bounty would just perpetually be in effect until the colony hit a certain size or or other conditions were met. That would make starting a colony a bit of a defense game but also generate income and funnel the player into combat.

And has been said ad nauseum since colonies came out: they've always been a means to end but the end isn't here yet. It is my hope that a true endgame will require a system-spanning empire and the use of hundreds of thousands of credits per month to have a prayer. Until then, colonies will always be a bit purpose-less because nothing in the game currently requires the benefits high-end colonies provide.

The way I see it, colonies were added to the game before there was a use for them, and now they are nerfed into irrelevance until such uses are added, presumably because Alex doesn't want to remove them outright and face the outrage. 

[close]

Let me do a quick summary of what colonies are used for according to those messages:

• defending them = actual gameplay, yay! ... but sometimes perceived in a negative way: "babysitting"
• a way to use loot obtained from exploration = okay, just small organic well integrated tie-in
• supposedly do some late game stuff in future version of the game = uhhh, wait and see? 2023 release?
• storage = yep
• production of ships and weapons = yep

That's it!

Addressing existing uses, getting into trouble

Well, I am not convinced any currently released version of the game succeeded at providing a set of compeling and sustainable gameplay opportunities related to player created colonies. Keywords here are compeling and sustainable.

Okay, I can set an arbitrary goal "once my first colony reaches size 5, campaign is won". I'll get a few raid from pirates and maybe one or two industry disruption attempts from competitors.

First pirate raid may be compeling, because that's new (unless I already helped a core world defend against a pirate raid). But after that it quicky gets repetitive.

Actually let me expand a bit on this. You are told a raid is coming. Then depending on your fleet's location (and strength), you will:

• defend colony somewhere within system or even while orbiting the colony
• catch raider fleets in hyperspace or (unlikely) catch raider fleets in their starting system
• destroy pirate base before raider fleets are launched
• do nothing! because your fleet is too far away or too weak to deal with this, or your colony can defend itself, or you just don't care

Positive: it feels rather organic because given your current situation you are presented with more or less options.

Negative: it feels rather gamey procgen repetive non-sense after a while (... which is not specific to raids, by the way).

Yes, as long as the game triggers the "babysitting" feeling, that's not sustainable. Some tweaks were made over the years, but I think the core issues remain since 0.9.0. Any ideas to improve the those existing "defense events"?

Add some alternative ways for player to learn about them? Through contacts?

Colony raids could have different attack patterns: fleets travelling together + entering system all together at the same jump point, spliting / going different routes / entering system from different jump points.

They could also have more varied fleet compositions: crazy frigate spam, carrier-heavy fleet, and so on.

Special fleets like the one encountered in a fringe system during main quest line (phase ships madness).

Raid fleets could have an admiral/contact that you could actually talk with, not necessarily leading to combat depending on dialog options and your previous actions in the Sector! Maybe some might become ally to the player fleet against other invaders! (told you I'm crazy)

Other uses (MOAAAR TROUBLES!)

So I guess we want more compeling opportunies. Not just the same events occuring again and again. And we want this to be sustainable, for the duration of a campaign. Any ideas how to achieve that? Idea expressed by FooF in spoiler above is interesting (system bounty).

What about colony-related missions? Setup one colony with a specific lab industry there for the academy, hire a contact as colony administrator in a core word and escort him toward colony while sustaining attacks from his former employer, have a colony become an auxiliary military base and/or production center for a major sector organisation and ... face the consequence from other groups, have your fleet directly handle delivery of colony goods from/toward your colony while sustaining bandit attacks, and so on.

Siege-type events where colony's system jump points are guarded by hostile fleets until dealt with by player fleet?

Histidine et al. will forever be heroes for what they brought, well before colonies were introduced in vanilla. The conquest warfare tied to dynamic reputation/standing/alliance meant a fair amount of additional opportunities while improving the "living Sector" feeling. It could become repetitive, but looking back it felt quite nice. Speaking about this in the past tense because I haven't played with Nexerelin for a while. I am not saying going the 4x route is what Starsector needs. My point is, adding more varied and compeling opportunities would really help vanilla.

Indeed the general idea is: more varied opportunies/events means less repetition, better organic integration as long as those are compeling. Sustainability is attained, leading to better campaign replayability. And... duh, finally give colonies a substantial gameplay purpose.

So, what would you like to see added? It's time to collect all the crazy ideas, shoot!

[Megas]

Events are predictable.  They occur like clockwork.  Nothing short of total core kill matters because they keep coming.  Even with total core kill, there remains the immortal zombie pirate and pather factions.  When colony defense becomes annoying (possibly events proc too frequently and regularly), total core kill looks very attractive and becomes the yet another checklist goal for every long-term game.

If I want to use cores, I seriously consider sat bombing H off the map so that I never need to think about inspections ever again (they got too greedy demanding story points for bribing).  Even so, I would think twice before using them on a size 4+ world because I do not want to chase Pathers, who cannot be purged from the sector.

Because I do not want to chase pathers, items that add +8 to pather interest, namely hypershunt tap, is useless for my colonies.  (I would sell it to a core world that is dumb enough to install it and gain perpetual shortage and a pather cell.)

Also, aside from player colonies, because core worlds have mediocre defenses, it is up to the player to defend the core worlds from pirates at times.  While 0.95 toned down the pirates, sometimes, player needs to stop them just so some core worlds can have enough stability to absorb the raids you do to them.  For sure, I will not raid New Maxios or Culann if its stability is 3 or less because I do not want to send their stability to zero and risk decivilization.

I would like a way to make the factions think twice before mindlessly send expeditions at my colonies over and over again.  Maybe allow player to threaten sat bombs if they (core worlds) do not back off, and if they do not get the hint, then they had it coming when player sat bombs them.  Also, after a certain point, if expeditions are not enough, just outright declare a shooting war, and have them stop after I do enough damage.  (Currently, the only way to permanently weaken them is... yep, you guessed it, the sat bomb!)

There ought to be more lasting ways to affect inhabited worlds beyond bombing and decivilization.  And also ways to stamp out zombie criminal factions.

supposedly do some late game stuff in future version of the game = uhhh, wait and see? 2023 release?

I do not care what colonies might do later because we cannot play this mythical future release (that we may not see for another two years) now.  All that matters is what we can play now and give feedback based on it.

[JaronK]

I personally love the colony gameplay, but I think it needs to be more carrot (fun stuff to find) than stick (babysitting).  I think going out and finding items is great, but some of those items (like the coronal hypershunt tap) need a boost because right now they really don't help so much. 

To me, your colonies are the crown on your achievement.  Look, I made an empire!  And we should be able to have more of them.  I really think having more administrators with a lot more variety would help a ton.  In my game, I allowed 10 of them, base, and it worked great.   Lets me do more exploring and makes me care more about the planets I'm finding.

I'd like to see something where there's certain items (like solar arrays) that are so big they require a special transport craft (like a super atlas) to go get them.  Maybe so big that it's normally inefficient to use (low burn rate, high fuel cost), and requires a quest line to even get one (maybe also a fancy battle), but once you have it you can go pick up the super awesome terraforming items and make your empire great.  I thought it was neat how installing a fusion lamp made my colony glow, and I'd love to see more of that.

[Amoebka]

The reasons people (or me at least) call colony combat opportunities "babysitting":

1) You have little to no control when they happen. The raid/expedition/inspection is coming, stop whatever fun stuff you were doing and deal with it!

2) The combat is a trivial chore. Even with a mediocre fleet, you will repell the invasions if you are personally present. At the same time, if you aren't present and haven't wasted literal millions on defenses, the colony will lose without you.

3) There's no carrot. You fight to prevent negative consequences, rather than to obtain positive ones. This is a purely phychological difference, but it matters a lot in gamedev.

The way to make colonies funnel into combat without the aforementioned problems is to lure the player with carrots:

1) Alpha cores improve industries, so having colonies tempts you to go fight remnants. Ruined by the fact that cores attract pathers and hegemony, worsening the unfun, babysitting combat tenfold.

2) Colony boosters improve industries, so you want to go fight motherships and raid core worlds to obtain them. Ruined by the fact that there's only one mothership, the loot is bad, the fight is trivial, and core worlds don't have colony items unless they are 10k+ defenses and inaccessible until post-game.

3) You want good planets to settle, and those are usually guarded by remnants, forcing you to fight. Ruined by the fact that the correlation between planet quality and danger is weak, it's easier to just survey empty space until you find a goldmine.

So the ways to make colonies lead into combat in a fun way are already there, just implemented in suboptimal fashion and watered down with unfun alternatives. Imagine if dorito fleets attacked your colonies (a limited number of times per campaign) instead of pirates. Suddenly it doesn't feel like babysitting, because there's a real reward - unique weapons. More of this stuff please.

[SCC]

I don't have an issue with colonies not making big dosh, I have an issue with them making big dosh only after you you invest big dosh into them in the first place. They would be useful if I had to go on some unprofitable ventures for one reason or another, but I don't. Or if they provided some non-money use, but currently they provide only equipment manufacturing and storage space. Those are nice, but the investment for the former is rather substantial, since you need to luck out during exploration or raid Kazeron or Chicomoztoc to get a guarantee you won't get any d-mods, the pristine nanoforge. Both of those take time to achieve.

I don't think "making use of colony items you find" is something people think about when founding colonies, unless they so happen to have an item that favours one of colony candidates they were already considering. After all, you can always just sell them, if you don't need them, or if you cannot even use them. I would like to see some weaker colony items with fewer restrictions.

I don't mind "babysitting", but that's mainly because I consider defensive capabilities as one of requirements to colonise. Especially after obtaining the Janus Device, as travel time is decreased massively.

Ruined by the fact that there's only one mothership

There are always two motherships per sector.

[Amoebka]

Somehow I never find the second one. Maybe small sectors only have one? At any rate, they could stand to be improved. Right now motherships are easy fights with poor rewards (speaking about colony items here), which is weird for unique limited stuff you need to search for. Increasing the difficulty and the rewards greatly would be nice I think.

[Megas]

1) Alpha cores improve industries, so having colonies tempts you to go fight remnants. Ruined by the fact that cores attract pathers and hegemony, worsening the unfun, babysitting combat tenfold.

2) Colony boosters improve industries, so you want to go fight motherships and raid core worlds to obtain them. Ruined by the fact that there's only one mothership, the loot is bad, the fight is trivial, and core worlds don't have colony items unless they are 10k+ defenses and inaccessible until post-game.

3) You want good planets to settle, and those are usually guarded by remnants, forcing you to fight. Ruined by the fact that the correlation between planet quality and danger is weak, it's easier to just survey empty space until you find a goldmine.

#1 is why I want to sat bomb H off the map, and if I plan sector conquest, then never allow the new colonies governed by alpha core to grow beyond size 3, which blocks Pather cells.  Peace of mind (no babysitting) is worth the income loss.

#2 is ruined by Pather interest.  Most items add +4, and player can use one safely.  For the few that add +8 (hypershunt tap), it is an automatic "NOPE!"  Furthermore, player needs pristine nanoforge and synchrotron to properly support and meet demand for his Military Bases, so that is two planets out of four (soon to be five) dedicated for the necessities.

#3 Remnants tend to have good planets, but I find better elsewhere.  Also, I do not want to purge Remnants from the system if it means I lose my AI core farm and battle simulator.  Having unlimited source of AI cores and Remnant-only tech (fighters) is more valuable than anything my colonies can produce.  Also, thanks to picky item requirements, habitables are not necessarily the best planets anymore, since player needs two barren rocks to host the mandatory nanoforge and synchrotron.  A simple barren world with 150% hazard, regardless of resources, is the ideal world for fuel production.

P.S.  Some items are better than others.  Some items merely make a bad world good enough to colonize (like fusion lamp for dark worlds) or improve a less important stat.  Others make good worlds even better (like Dealmaker for Commerce).  Beyond the two necessities, the only items I want for the rest of my colonies are Dealmakers, and maybe the biofactory for the drug lab too.  In any case, adding all of these frivolous items makes finding the necessities like pristine nanoforge a luck-based mission.  (Never found one, so I raided the core worlds for it.  Could have bought it from historian, but I do not want to spend 2^n SP on historian except for the Legion XIV blueprint and more Dealmakers.)

P.P.S.  Free Port is another babysitting maker by making the invasions more frequent.  For me, the main use of Free Port is population growth, and maybe feed my miners.  The added income was a nice side effect.  At least last release, Free Port made expeditions frequent enough that I wanted to wipe the core worlds off the map to make them stop.  (Paying them a million credits per event to back off felt too much like extortion, and I would rather destroy them with a good sat bomb - never negotiate with terrorists!)

Another thing, part of babysitting experience is not defending my colony... or theirs from pirates, but also seeking bounties or farming cores to fix the rep drain from all of the factions' meddling.  If my colonies are strong enough to repel all expeditions, I still need to take time off to find a system bounty and grind up rep after prior rep drain instead of doing what I want.

[SafariJohn]

Histidine et al. will forever be heroes for what they brought, well before colonies were introduced in vanilla. The conquest warfare tied to dynamic reputation/standing/alliance meant a fair amount of additional opportunities while improving the "living Sector" feeling. It could become repetitive, but looking back it felt quite nice. Speaking about this in the past tense because I haven't played with Nexerelin for a while. I am not saying going the 4x route is what Starsector needs. My point is, adding more varied and compeling opportunities would really help vanilla.

I think Starsector should have strategic warfare like Nex does, but I think the player should not be able to steamroll their desired outcome because it undermines suspension of disbelief for the gameworld. If some random mook can slap together an empire and overthrow the Hegemony, then it makes the lore a joke.

[SCC]

I think Starsector should have strategic warfare like Nex does, but I think the player should not be able to steamroll their desired outcome because it undermines suspension of disbelief for the gameworld. If some random mook can slap together an empire and overthrow the Hegemony, then it makes the lore a joke.

That's already the case with what we have currently. The hardest part of raiding Chicomoztoc is buying enough marines.

[Amoebka]

No-name upstarts shaking up the entire sector doesn't even break the lore that much. Kanta, Cotton, and, to lesser extent, Andrada went from nobodies to faction leaders.

[SonnaBanana]

Histidine et al. will forever be heroes for what they brought, well before colonies were introduced in vanilla. The conquest warfare tied to dynamic reputation/standing/alliance meant a fair amount of additional opportunities while improving the "living Sector" feeling. It could become repetitive, but looking back it felt quite nice. Speaking about this in the past tense because I haven't played with Nexerelin for a while. I am not saying going the 4x route is what Starsector needs. My point is, adding more varied and compeling opportunities would really help vanilla.

I think Starsector should have strategic warfare like Nex does, but I think the player should not be able to steamroll their desired outcome because it undermines suspension of disbelief for the gameworld. If some random mook can slap together an empire and overthrow the Hegemony, then it makes the lore a joke.

I think the player should be able to steamroll the Hegemony, if the player is willing to and can spend 50-100 million credits.

[SafariJohn]

No-name upstarts shaking up the entire sector doesn't even break the lore that much. Kanta, Cotton, and, to lesser extent, Andrada went from nobodies to faction leaders.

Their positions are precarious: if they tried to extend their dominion aggressively, such as by conquering the Hegemony, they would lose what they have AND what they gained.

Slightly above that would be a good balance point for the player's strategic power IMO. Able to shake up the sector permanently, but not to overthrow all which came before.

[Megas]

Their positions are precarious: if they tried to extend their dominion aggressively, such as by conquering the Hegemony, they would lose what they have AND what they gained.

That would happen if not for alpha core admins.

Without income from trade, the player's only option is to get as many instances of Pop & Inf. as he can, and alpha cores enable that.  Thanks to alpha cores, player can make his fantasy of full sector conquest a reality if he grinds long enough.

Alpha admins should either have a downside that is completely independent of human interference or have a limit similar but separate to human admins.  After all, player with Automated Ships cannot fill his fleet slots with nothing but Radiants.  Currently, alpha admins feel like the clingy jealous harem members of a stock harem anime or manga that will fight over and do anything for the protagonist.

[FooF]

Good thread and OP.

Megas is a better SS historian than I but let's take a look at what life was like before colonies (and what problems colonies were trying to solve when they were introduced):

1.) Lack of "permanence" in any way, shape, or form. The goal of the game prior to 0.8 was to have a perfect fleet. Anything that jeopardized the fleet was clearly not "worth it."

2.) Completely at the mercy of salvage/markets to get the ships/weapons you wanted.

3.) Credits became meaningless as you had nothing to spend it on

4.) Desire to have a faction of your own to compete with existing factions and/or take an active role in the economy of the sector in a way that the player can capitalize on

5.) Potential endgame shenanigans

I think Colonies have achieved #1-4 pretty well, honestly. The fact they're also supposed to "get the player into trouble" is where we have differing opinions.

I have always had the understanding that a Colony (at minimum) needs an Industry and Orbital Station to be self-sufficient. Waystations, Patrol HQs and Ground Defenses are "nice to have" but not completely necessary starting out. That translates to about 500,000 credits to get one off the ground and in a state that doesn't require my fleet to be within a few lightyears of it to defend it. What do I get for that 500,000 investment? Free storage and, depending on Industry, Location, etc., somewhere between 5-10k colony income/month. That's a 1-2% ROI. That seems like a bad investment.

However, just boosting colony income seems like a poor way of going about fixing this. As Amoebka pointed out, I think Colonies do need more carrots. Your initial colony could have its own mission arcs that push the player into combat/exploration, build up the colony in a more hands-on way, and generate credits. I also proposed an initial system bounty when colonies first start with the caveat that the first few months should be kind of dangerous for the fledgling outpost. If there were constant, but manageable, pirate activity once a colony starts, you could generate a profit from beating them back personally. After the initial wave, it slows down to normal raid rates and you can go about your regularly-scheduled playthrough.

As noted in the OP, if there was a more direct path toward colony growth (i.e. completing missions), I wouldn't mind toning down the random finding of colony items and hazard pay. If, for example, you had a colony with meager Farmland, I think it only natural that you'd might receive a mission that sends you on a quest to find the colony item that boosts farming production. These missions could either supplement your colonies lack of something or complement its own overabundance. Colony quests could also point you in the direction of Cryosleepers and Hypershunts. Heck, you could even have missions that send you into the Core Worlds to "recruit" colonists and bring back sizeable populations of them to boost the growth rate. I think there's a very fertile trove of possibilities with colony quests that could be creative/fun to partake in that furthers both your fleet and your colony.

If none of that happens, which honestly would be a lot of hand-scripted missions/work, I could at least get behind getting paid to fend off raids. Right now, raiding is a net loss in reputation, if nothing else. Without getting into 4x territory, I don't think it would be too difficult to imagine the other factions would love to see materiel loss from an enemy faction. Perhaps there could be some underhanded incentive given to defeat enemy raids in hyperspace en route (with your fleet, not defense forces) and if you can manage it,  off the books and away from the eyes of interested parties, no small amount of credits might end up in your account. The Contact system could be really helpful with this: lets say you're friends with a Tri-Tach Contact and he/she informs you of a soon-to-be-planned raid from the Hegemony. You could accept the mission to defeat the raid in hyperspace for a sizeable sum.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think Starsector should have strategic warfare like Nex does, but I think the player should not be able to steamroll their desired outcome because it undermines suspension of disbelief for the gameworld. If some random mook can slap together an empire and overthrow the Hegemony, then it makes the lore a joke.

But you can just steamroll everything in Nex too. I don't really see how Nex fixes that at all.

To me, the obvious direction is to utilize story content to provide motivation for colonies. Stuff like needing to build a special structure and supply it with a bunch of resources in order to complete a story mission. Or even just having to supply a hegemony world with x amount of food or something. Then you don't have to worry about balancing things to be worthwhile investments for the player.

I also remember in one of the x-com games, there was a mission that would happen once in a campaign where the aliens would all show up in your base suddenly and you had to fend them off. Stuff that like would be much more interesting than the perpetual raids and expeditions we have now IMO. In general, I prefer scripted one-time fights that are very difficult to repetitive proc get fights.