Currently working through significant changes to Hostile Activity, and adding more content there, so it's not just pirates and Pathers. It's supposed to be a way for you to fight more things just those two, and I really want to flesh that out. And David has been adding some fun exploration content, too!
The HA stuff ("Colony Crises", now) I'll probably want to dive into with a blog post once it's closer to done!
That's great to hear! Say, will there be changes to how Pather interest and mitigation work?
Right now, under the current system, it feels very punitive to pursue colony building as an activity ingame. Once you've achieved a certain point in your progression two of the more common, maybe even expected, activities for players to engage in is the hunting of Ordo fleets and wide range exploration. These activities reward players with AI-cores and the rare colony item. These rewards, in turn, feed into the colony system: giving you the tools and incentives to create industries and install AI-cores in your planets for you to generate bigger profits if you so desire.
However, that's where the Pathers come in. The pathers, as a threat, scale linearly with every colony item and every AI-core you install in your planets. The potential for scaling is infinite, there's no hard cap and no diminishing returns. The more you improve your colonies with the rewards you get from organically playing the game, the worse it gets. On the other hand, there's no way to properly mitigate this problem within the system. The only measure you can actively take gives you a global one-off flat reduction of (-18 at best) that will quickly amount to nothing if you do choose to engage with colony play at scale.
I know Starsector as game in vanilla isn't meant to be a 4x game, but you have a system where there are gameplay rewards that feed into this system, but you're actively punished for using, without any proper way to play the system at scale without feeling handicapped. It is, in my humble opinion, a bad experience. You find planets, you obtain ai-cores and industry items, and get smacked worse and worse for trying to use this cool stuff you find and fight for.
I'm not saying to completely do away with the pathers or to stop their gathering interest completely, but I feel the player experience would benefit for your defenses to be able to keep up with the pather interest growth in some fashion. There are systems in the game that already do this: Player skills that reduce percentual resource usage up to a point, and then with diminishing returns; and ship systems/hulls mods that vary in effectiveness depending on hull-size and stack with diminishing returns. I would like to propose for the Patrol HQ tree (or another defensive measure you implement) to work in a similar manner, to give a percentual reduction to pather interest overall plus a small flat subtraction to the total value, with diminishing returns the more of these you stack. Similar to the Salvage Gantry. This way, pather interest would still grow organically and culminate, but a player's defensive measures would feel more impactful over the long term.
Apologies for the rant, I'm not the most eloquent person around, but I really like the colony system and the colony threats, and it feels that we're just a fine-tuning away from it being perfect.
