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[Hiruma Kai]

So I've run a couple campaigns at this point and wanted to share some thoughts on the colony side of things.  A number of ideas have already been expressed by others here on the forums, but I'm going to try to synthesize an overall game design concept.  With the caveat, I don't know what the plans are for end game, which might render some of this moot.

It appears to me, players like to be rewarded, and dislike being punished or at least the appearance of punishment, for what should be gameplay progressing actions. Going out and exploring should reward the player in some way.  Spending time and credits on colonies should reward the player in some way.

What are the possible exploration and colony playstyles?

For exploration, which can be mixed between the two:
1) Go explore and sell everything for credits and skip colonization.  Do the gameplay, get credits, spend credits on a better fleet, and done.
2) Go explore, find colony system(s), find planet improving items, colonize with said items.  Gain the benefits of a place to store your stuff, as well as credits and building ships to improve your fleet.

The first style is somewhat bland, although more interesting than straight up trading.  I would like to suggest to improve the first option, and perhaps make it more appealing while making all those spare exploration items more useful than just plain credits, is that having an option in addition to just selling, treat them more like cores.  Make it so you can interact with a faction planetary governor or commander, just like with cores, and that the player can get credits, reputation, or perhaps a potential contact if sufficiently valuable (like a Pristine Nanoforge for example) that way, and the item gets sent to a faction world that can actually benefit, if possible.  Although probably only one contact via this method per faction, otherwise you might "give" it to them, raid for it, and "give" it to them again.  If a planet killer device can get you a very high contact, why shouldn't handing a Pristine Nanoforge to the Diktat (for example) not do something similar?

When doing the second style, having a found a colony item and being simply unable to use it or seeing the penalty for using it feels worse than not using it, feels bad from a player perspective, even if it potentially gives more overall benefit than the negative (hostile activity tracker penalties).  You get the positive hit of having found something rare, and then the realization, that what could have been valuable is just some spare credits.  So this gets more deeply into the Hostile Activity tracker and colonization styles.

Colonization styles:
Case 1: Player doesn't interact with the system at all.  They don't create colonies.
Case 2: Player just colonies randomly a single or few planets as way points, and lets them grow naturally without any heavy investment.  Perhaps builds and abandons techmining outposts.
Case 3: Player stays within human administrator limits and keeps each colony off the Pather's hit list (i.e. under the 7 or 8 Pather interest) or at least keeps it under what they can offset with bonuses.
Case 4: Empire builder who finds the right system and just colonies all the planets with alpha core administrators and every single item they've found.  Either they eat the tracker penalties or use the quest options to eliminate them.

I would step back, and ask what should the game reward the player for doing?  Should the player who goes out and grabs all the alpha cores and explores the entire sector have better colonies than the player who just avoids Pather interest and simply doesn't interact much with the system?  If so, then how can we have the system provide a clear reward.

My suggestion would be to make Military Bases and High Command even more expensive to maintain but let them stack for the Hostile Tracker (and potentially new trackers).  Make the decision be either live with access and stability penalties from the hostile tracker(s) or go full on military powerhouse and instead of having penalties reducing monthly revenue have higher monthly credit costs.  Which gives incentive to the empire builder to be fully self-sufficient, cutting potential military base upkeep costs by half.  Also makes low hazard worlds more attractive from a defense perspective.  So instead of having a size 6 High command cost 28,000 per month, make it more like 280,000.  Bump a size 6 Military base up from 20,000 to 200,000.  Or something like that, the exact numbers need playtest.  Make it so you need a full economy behind it, and the opportunity cost not be just a single economic industry being missing, but essentially take the slot and cost the profit of a second economy building to maintain as well.  Increase the net cost to build the High Command to a million or two.  It is easy enough to argue that sustaining a military to rival the Hegemony should be really, really expensive.  On the other hand, if you are sustaining a military to rival the Hegemony in a single system, you shouldn't have any problems with Pirate or Pather fleets.

So instead of have some kind of interaction with Pathers like the Planet Killer quest, you also could let your actions and colony choices speak for you.  Millions for defense, but not one cent in tribute.

So working backwards from how much you'd like to see an end game colony setup making in profit, I'd suggest adjusting industry and military slot costs for building, upgrading, and maintenance, based on the various potential setups.  Pather interest under the radar, so hostile activity tracker stays low, but industries make less.  Perhaps a single high command in such a setup to handle pirates supported from 4 human administer colonies.  Huge investment into cores and colony items, but going all industry and minimal military to just maximize raw credits and just accept the accessibility penalties and attack fleets.  Huge investment into cores and colony items, but also a huge expenditure on the military which reduces overall profits (in the same way accessibility and stability penalties affect profits), but feels more like the player has agency, even if the end profits are essentially the same, or maybe even less than eating the penalties option.

I would also suggest letting the Military Base upgrade to different specialization options.  Imagine instead of just a High Command, you could also pick something like Internal Security Headquarters, which gives less help to Pirates, but much more effective against Pather Cells and Pather interest.  Maybe also stronger against Tri-tach.  Or a Merchant Marine Hub which increases the military strength of any trade fleet that either leaves or goes towards your faction's colonies, or perhaps just flatly reduces the penalties for destroyed trade fleets on the colony.  Also being stronger against Pirates, but less effective against Pathers.  High command could be stronger against more traditional faction hostile activity trackers like the Hegemony or Diktat. 

This way if you make a deal with Kanta, you could specialize towards focusing on Pathers.  Or vice versa.  And if you don't want to kneel to either, then be a stander and pay a million credits per month to have the strongest military in the sector.  Install all the Alpha cores and build all the Internal Security bases and have a dystopian society where non-human AI cores are always looking over your shoulder, rooting out Pather dissidents (and perhaps any threats to the AI themselves).  Your very own AI run Diktat.

I think long term, splitting the Hostile Activity Tracker into different independent trackers makes sense, allowing for the possibility of clear reputational interactions.  I'd suggest a tracker for each faction would be the way to go, which is also influenced by the various reputation.  If you're sitting at -25 (suspicious), I think a faction should be more willing to send clandestine raids than if you're sitting at +80 cooperative, which could be a montly plus or minus on such a tracker.  You could also have the tracker take into account cross reputations.  If Tri-tach is at war with Hegemony, and you're at a high reputation with Hegemony, then a Hostile Activity tracker for Tri-tach could be growing faster because of "ally of my enemy", which might be partially offset somewhat by a smaller "my ally" bonus since you might also have high Tri-tach reputation.  Commissions could also play a factor in the trackers.  Same goes with Pirate and Pather reputations.  This would naturally make being allied with the Pirates a negative as essentially all the major factions would have an inherent hostility tracker increase all the time since you'd be an "ally of my enemy".  Maybe a bonus "ally of pirates" increase as well.

If you go this route, a link to related hostile activity tracker from the Faction screen would be nice.

[Megas]

Military Bases are costly enough that I have left Patrol HQs stay as Patrol HQs if I have another world with a base in the system.  Military Base has much higher upkeep than Patrol HQ, and they have high enough commodity demand that Synchrotron and a Nanoforge are almost required to meet demand in-faction.

Until near the very end, when all of my worlds made it to size 6, I did not upgrade my Military Base to High Command because, at first, I could not meet the 8x commodities demand in-faction, then later, I was too cheap to pay upkeep.  (No, I do not want to use items if it means whack-a-mole enemies or I become a kneeler and pay tribute to make whack-a-mole stop.)

If Military Bases become more costly, then Patrol HQs need to scale like they originally did.

Also, if base stacking is required, then core worlds need to stack bases too.  Do not forget about NPCs.  In earlier releases pirates were oppressive because core worlds could not defend against their non-stop raids, and it was up to the player to save those two-faced backstabbing factions from decivilization.  I like that for once, we have a release that does not require base stacking to prevent babysitting.  Even so, I suspect player may still need a base on each world if he colonizes one world per system instead of stacking them all in one or two systems.

[Alex]

Hmm. (Interesting side note: one of the things I've been thinking about for the endgame if drastically increasing the costs of having a Military Base (so that it's more or less impractical to have more than one) in exchange for you letting it do *things*. The more obvious of these being support fleets; one can easily imagine this being a reasonable way to spend virtually any amount of credits.)

Very interesting idea re: giving items more of a purpose outside of colonizing, yeah.

Progress bars for factions, I definitely get the appeal and I think mechanically there could be some neat things there. And in general I'd like to have dynamics where getting in the good with one faction pushes you in the other direction with others. However, that many progress bars is *a lot*, before you even consider adding mods into the mix - I have to wonder if there aren't simpler ways to handle this sort of thing - achieve the similar results with less. And, having both a relationship bar and some other kind of bar for a faction feels a bit redundant. ... hmm, having a bar for *just* pirates might even be interesting...

For Hostile Activity, I've been thinking about it quite a bit and I have some ideas for how to adjust it. Not quite ready to talk about it, but, ah! With the understanding that this isn't final and there's still some mulling over going on. Basically, what I want to do is reframe it as a "colony crisis" bar and get rid of the penalties entirely. The idea being that those are not interesting at all, they just kind of "make sense" but their mechanical effect is just encouraging the player to avoid some of the things that are actually interesting about the mechanic - or at least, that can be when more content is added onto it.

So, very briefly, the thought is to ... basically have this be a deck of various Events, ideally drawing from most/all factions, with each event coming with an exciting opportunity as well as a (generally combat) challenge. And you can re-roll the event by fighting hostile fleets/otherwise reducing bar progress, but every time you do this, the bar fills up faster, until an Event finally happens. So basically, no penalties along the way, just a driver for thematic colony-related things happening, giving the player some means of control over when they happen, and ensuring they don't all happen at the same time.

It would still spawn hostile fleets in your systems; the Commerce bounty I think is sufficient incentive for fighting them if that's what the player wants to do. The number/size/etc of those would not longer be based on progress (since higher progress no longer represents "things are worse"), just on the magnitude on the factors.

An Event/Opportunity example might be: Tri-Tachyon doing commerce raiding and then sending punitive expeditions, due to your having a high market share in drugs or volatiles or some such. If they're defeated, in whatever way: this approach has proven unprofitable, and they're willing to cut lucrative deals with you!

Something like that, at any rate; this is all entirely uncertain. I might end up writing a more detailed blog post about it when it's more settled and a good way along implementation-wise, and very much open to thoughts and feedback in the meantime!

[Hiruma Kai]

Hmm. (Interesting side note: one of the things I've been thinking about for the endgame if drastically increasing the costs of having a Military Base (so that it's more or less impractical to have more than one) in exchange for you letting it do *things*. The more obvious of these being support fleets; one can easily imagine this being a reasonable way to spend virtually any amount of credits.)

That seems like a perfectly reasonable way to go.  Faction level militaries probably should be expensive, but also doing something end game like with them would certainly be cool.  As I said, plans might render the suggestion moot.

Progress bars for factions, I definitely get the appeal and I think mechanically there could be some neat things there. And in general I'd like to have dynamics where getting in the good with one faction pushes you in the other direction with others. However, that many progress bars is *a lot*, before you even consider adding mods into the mix - I have to wonder if there aren't simpler ways to handle this sort of thing - achieve the similar results with less. And, having both a relationship bar and some other kind of bar for a faction feels a bit redundant. ... hmm, having a bar for *just* pirates might even be interesting...

Fair point.  We do have reputation bars for everyone, but I suppose that is a completely different level of interaction compared to a progress bar for something happening.  And then as you say mods can expand the factions quite a lot, and yeah, now that you say it, something like 12 faction trackers does seem overwhelming.

It just feels like if you go to war (i.e. -100 hostile) with a faction, say the Diktat for example, then something should happen to your colonies from them specifically.  Although that can perhaps just be taken into account when the event from your new proposed Colony Crisis tracker is picked.  Certain types of events are only possible at certain relationship levels.  Perhaps the more negative the relationship, the more likely that faction is picked for an event.  Maybe if you're hostile with a faction, one of the possible events is an invasion fleet, and if you beat it, it results in a possible peace deal (which the player could refuse if they want) but allow for a large bump to relations from -100 to -45 or the like.  If you're +50 with a faction, they simply won't send an invasion fleet, but I guess something along the lines of what we get now in terms clandestine industry raids.

As for the Pathers and Pirates, these are more philosophies than factions in certain respects way.  Certainly the new quests flesh out that the Pathers are in no way monolithic.  A crazy, and not necessarily good, idea might be to remove reputation tracking for those two factions and just replace them with Activity Trackers.  Performing a Pirate or Pather quest affects the tracker instead of the reputation.  I suppose that might do weird things with Pirate and Pather military market access, but it could emphasize the decentralized nature of these groups.

So we've got Exploration Tracker.  A Proposed Colony Crisis Tracker , or at the very least the current Hostile Activity colony related tracker.  I do like the idea of a third separate tracker for some kind of combat that is not colony related?  So a pirate tracker perhaps, or maybe something more generic that includes everyone who dislikes the player?  Unless colonies are going to be required for the progression of the main questline?  A pirate tracker separate from colony crisis could lead to hired mercenaries or pirate kill fleets coming after the player for farming pirate fleets for credits, not unlike some mod vengeance fleets.  Or other opportunities one might expect from factions disliking each other significantly and the player offered jobs. At which point you have a combat path in addition to the colony path.

For Hostile Activity, I've been thinking about it quite a bit and I have some ideas for how to adjust it. Not quite ready to talk about it, but, ah! With the understanding that this isn't final and there's still some mulling over going on. Basically, what I want to do is reframe it as a "colony crisis" bar and get rid of the penalties entirely. The idea being that those are not interesting at all, they just kind of "make sense" but their mechanical effect is just encouraging the player to avoid some of the things that are actually interesting about the mechanic - or at least, that can be when more content is added onto it.

This seems like a good direction to explore.  It alleviates dealing with passive penalties all the time and you have specific once in a while fleet interaction thing that require direct action rather than just affecting a spreadsheet at the end of each month.  From a game design perspective, it seems more solid.

[Alex]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

(Hmm. For non-colony-related combat - thinking about it, does that need a tracker, or can that get away with just... doing stuff? It feels like the transparency/predictability/manipulate-ability/not having too many happen at the same time that are some of the benefits of having a tracker are probably more downsides here than upsides, or at least neutral...)

[Gothars]

Interesting! I would not miss the flat statistical penalties. But yeah, I also think that opens up a way to split the hostile activity into multiple event bars.

And in general I'd like to have dynamics where getting in the good with one faction pushes you in the other direction with others. However, that many progress bars is *a lot*, before you even consider adding mods into the mix - I have to wonder if there aren't simpler ways to handle this sort of thing - achieve the similar results with less. And, having both a relationship bar and some other kind of bar for a faction feels a bit redundant. ... hmm, having a bar for *just* pirates might even be interesting...

Could there maybe be some more general "issue alignment bars" that factions reference when dealing with you/spawning events for you?

For example, a "criminal reputation" bar, a "Believer in technology" bar, a "Domain resurrectionist" bar, a "respect for life" bar. Basically, list the main issues that divide the Sector, and allow the player to take a stance on them with their actions.
 
Then the factions (and mod factions) will react to you accordingly, e.g. Hegs will send inspections flotillas (later fleets) if you are high on the  "Believer in technology"" bar - defying those might increase event progress of that bar and open some doors with the TTs. 

Other example: If you are a somewhat known Domain resurrectionist (but not, like, fanatical about it) the Perseans might try to get you to spy on the Hegs for them. If you do what they say, your event progress decreases, if you double cross them it increases and the hegs might send you to recover a fleet of historic XIV derelicts.


The nice thing is that the alignments could interact. A high "criminal reputation" and "Believer in technology" will generate other events than having just one of them high, like stealth jobs for TT.

The alignments should probably not be dependent on you having a colony, but colonies might influence each of them separately and continuously. Settling a terran world helps your "respect for life" reputations, polluting it reverses that effect. Using colony items makes you a "Believer in technology", running a free port increases criminal reputation.

Faction commissions (or at least cooperative standing with them) could be locked behind the right set of alignments/blocked by a wrong one.

An Event/Opportunity example might be: Tri-Tachyon doing commerce raiding and then sending punitive expeditions, due to your having a high market share in drugs or volatiles or some such. If they're defeated, in whatever way: this approach has proven unprofitable, and they're willing to cut lucrative deals with you!

A alignment bar would allow to have event/opportunity separated between factions, like in the example above.

[Hiruma Kai]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

(Hmm. For non-colony-related combat - thinking about it, does that need a tracker, or can that get away with just... doing stuff? It feels like the transparency/predictability/manipulate-ability/not having too many happen at the same time that are some of the benefits of having a tracker are probably more downsides here than upsides, or at least neutral...)

That... makes sense.  You've got intel and contacts which seem to be on a monthly cadence already.  Questlines are already at your own pace.  So yeah, point taken, no need to hide any of that behind an additional timer (which is what it would amount to).  If there's new general content (as opposed to colony content) then it just gets put into one of those existing methods and no need for a tracker.

[Alex]

@Gothars: hmm. An alignment type of system sounds interesting, but it feels like... kind of its own thing, maybe? E.G. the HA/"Colony Crises" mechanic would serve to make colonies a source of interesting trouble; it ties in with colonies and furthers a specific design goal for them.

At first glance, I'm not sure how an alignment system fits into the game - it feels like something that needs a *ton* of content to work well, and it might work well, at that! But there are also other systems in need of more content - HA, contacts, endgame things, other colony things. So this is super neat to think about, but I'm not sure how practical that is - it feels like spreading the effort a bit thin, if that makes sense.

[Aeson]

I'm against increasing the upkeep for at least the Patrol HQ and Military Base; current Hostile Activity mechanics pretty strongly incentivize building a Patrol HQ and upgrading it to a Military Base fairly early on in your first colonized system, both of these are fairly expensive pieces of infrastructure to build, the Military Base has an ongoing hidden cost beyond its upkeep inasmuch as you built it instead of an income-earning industry, and my experience is that if you're actually trying to develop them it takes a fairly long time for a colony to go from being a money-sink to being an income generator, especially since anything above 125% hazard seems to almost require hazard pay if you want it to grow and waiting to start colonizing until you find a 125% or lower hazard world can mean waiting a long time. I don't know how typical it is, but if I've counted right I've surveyed 440 worlds in my current game (mixed-normal sector) and ~0.5% of them - 23 worlds total - are 125% or lower on the hazard scale; of these, one is a 75% hazard world, five are 100% hazard worlds, and the remaining seventeen are 125%; the mode hazard, meanwhile, is 200%, with 100 worlds, and the two next-most-common hazard ratings are 175% (86 worlds) and 250% (73 worlds). (Aside - I'm pretty sure I've miscounted something because I've got 440 survey data cards in storage whereas my world count by hazard rating totals 438 planets, though the mismatch might have to do with Sentinel since I filtered the planet list by unclaimed.)

Also, if you're looking for a way to make Patrol HQ / Military Base / High Command hostile activity reduction stack, my inclination would be to leave the flat bonus alone and instead give one-time Hostile Activity reductions each time a patrol fleet takes down a pirate fleet, as is already the case with the player fleet. This would have an added bonus in that it'd allow Cryoarthmetic Engines, Heavy Industry, Corrupted / Pristine Nanoforges, and Alpha Cores in Patrol HQs, Military Bases, and High Commands to contribute to Hostile Activity reduction indirectly by improving your faction patrol fleets.

One further comment - I might also be concerned that stacking bonuses from military infrastructure would further disincentivize single-colony systems, especially if Hostile Activity were eventually balanced around the idea that you will have two or three Patrol HQs / Military Bases / High Commands in at least your main system

[Megas]

Habitables have a bonus to growth too.

One further comment - I might also be concerned that stacking bonuses from military infrastructure would further disincentivize single-colony systems, especially if Hostile Activity were eventually balanced around the idea that you will have two or three Patrol HQs / Military Bases / High Commands in at least your main system

This would certainly harm the Core Worlds if they play by the same rules as you do, which means the player would need to babysit those two-faced backstabbers from raiders because they did not stack bases like the player did.

This release seems like the first where single-colony systems are not punished (by insufficient defenses to repel expeditions).  I like it to stay that way.

[BaBosa]

For the colony crisis bar, you could have the bar made of different colors for each faction and then when it hits the milestones, it randomly picks a faction to cause issues, weighted by how much of the bar each faction makes up. Maybe also have a fear mechanic where the stronger you are or the more attacks you defeat, the longer it takes for the next event but the bigger it is. And that factions have a threshold where they won't add more to the progress bar to reflect that they don't care enough to make fighting you worth the danger.

Making High Command an end game industry to become a proper faction sounds like the best way to go. Don't really need to have two different defensive industries. If being able to vary the amount spent on defense is important then Military bases could have an adjustable power/cost bar.
Though what sort of things would you let High Command do? It seems like something that would be too easy to make the game worse by making you do less.

Treating colony items like cores sounds right. Though there are a lot more types and unlike cores, they're not basically all the same except for how powerful they are. Different factions will have different preferences for colony items so some way to find out who wants what you have would be needed. Maybe a character like the historian makes themselves known if you have a colony item and they'll provide information for a reasonable cost and offer to handle the sale themselves if you just want cash.

Pirates, Pathers, and independents all feel really different from the other factions that your relationship with them shouldn't be treated the same as with the other factions. It doesn't make sense that doing work for one person in those factions has an impact on the others in that faction. But they could kinda act like an alignment, pirates respect you the more underhand stuff you do, pather's accept you if you follow the faith, and independents like you more if you become a respectable citizen that pays taxes, helps distress calls, and keeps their agreements. Though this would probably also require a separate reputation for each colony for those 3 factions.
The other alignment axis Gothers mentioned could be included in the other factions' reputation bars like Perseans trying to recruit you if you have a Heg commission and high rep.

On a side note, it would be nice if there was more acknowledgment of your personal power when you get to late game even if it is just that you sometimes get personally contacted when entering a port to be offered a mission rather than having to go to a bar. It feels weird meeting with major powers in bars to take important missions. Or sometimes contacts inviting you to meet other contacts or offering you a job on behalf of another. A guaranteed contact with a commissioned faction would also be nice.