You know, if I got my hands on this system, I'd be sorely tempted to map out a faction from it. You know, use the system to keep track of relationships with various NPCs until certain event thresholds are reached. It sounds like you could even add penalties for not doing certain things, like assisting in the defense of a planet. I might even be able to limit the effects to certain systems where the player has been industrious.
I would even have a set of final events that would start whenever the player reached the end of the progression, chosen procedurally. Some kind of narrative-defining event such as an AI Inspection of Culann or a titanic battle as Sindria raises some kind of slap-dash mega project that will turn Askonia into a mildly habital world after a couple hundred years of terraforming.
It's just a good concept. Can't wait to get a better look at it.
Hmm, yeah - thinking about this a bit more, it could also make for an interesting commission mechanic, sort of progress that's parallel to your reputation with the faction, too. Lots of possibilities! Which also probably means lots of ways to overuse it; this'll be interesting to figure out
Does this mean the regular Pirate Activity condition with its -stab and -access is gone now, or at least no longer has that effects? What about the Pather cell's -1 stability passive?
Sort of - right now, Pirate Activity still used for non-player colonies (NPCs, heh?); this may or may not be a temporary state of affairs. Pather cell -1 stability is still there for the player.
Can a mod readily implement [a derivative of] the Hostile Activity intel item for NPC factions?
I don't see why not. I think it'd have to be fairly different, though, since "giving the player sort-of-missions to do around resolving hostile activity causes" is one of the primary points, it's just a very player-centric thing. I think one for NPC factions could get away being a highly simplified version. (Which, I might also look at at some point for vanilla. Just, for the moment, retaining Pirate Activity was simplest.)
Also having one of these per faction might get to be a bit much?
Now that I think about it, do NPC factions now suffer any consequences from pirate/Pather activity?
(Thinking of Megas's complaints about major factions doing nothing while -3/-50% pirates bleed them dry, and the feature I specifically implemented in Nex in response)
Well, reduction in ship quality/fleet size/etc. And whatever consequence from Pather sabotage (which no longer happens on NPC faction worlds, at least as of right now).
Interesting items along the progress bar. Number 1, 2 and 4 look like growing levels of harassment fleets in system; 5 is the faction-specific "special", and from the Kites leaving a planet, I'm guessing 3 is a raid.
#3 is "increased defenses", responsible for the green -10 progress lower down.
Mods can stick whatever item thresholds they want on the bar, I assume? (Though it could get visually crowded pretty fast!)
Yeah. Mods have fine grained control over the icon size and how far the icons are from the bar, too (down to the pixel, not picking from a bunch of presets).
Doesn't commerce also add the open market to the planet? That's a very useful tool when you're far away from the core and want to do trading. Admittedly this is significantly less important with gates, especially considering you don't gain access to the superior black market.
It does, yeah. It's just nice to add more special things to industries. I feel like ideally every industry would give you something that's exciting and fun and makes you really want to build it so you can engage with the mechanics it adds/promotes. Not sure how feasible that is in all cases, but, ideally!