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[u3r]

When - and only when- you've got Persean League contributing to your crisis meter and you choose to sat-bomb one of their planets:

Instead of having the normal "everyone turns hostile" reaction, offer a (1-4) SP option
"Send a message that will be heard" that reduces the impact to -20 rep (still for all the factions that would have turned hostile).

Or tie it a this reaction-mending to a conversation with Reynard Hannan before/after the sat-bomb.
That way it would feel like more the "negotiations" you are doing with tri tachion crisis.

[Megas]

This would probably be more appropriate for the Diktat crisis since they are the one threatening to nuke your colony.

[Zumberge]

In either case, I like the idea of having the option of being assertive without being belligerent.  For the League it would demonstrate that yes, you appreciate their concern for the well-being of independent planets, but you're capable of defending yourself if need be.  Whereas for the Diktat it would let you resolve the incident while still letting the Diktat save face and, perhaps, not have to deal with another Opis.

Gunboat diplomacy, but diplomacy just the same.

[Bungee_man]

Gunboat diplomacy is tac-bombing Kazeron, which has a reasonable effect. Saturation bombing is a declaration of war by means of a direct, indiscriminate attack on a civilian population center, which (rightly) makes everyone treat you as a terrorist.

[Siffrin]

I don't think Alex wants to give the player any reasonable excuse to justify a saturation bombardment.

[Zumberge]

Wait, we're talking about doing a sat bombing?  I thought "send a message" was just the equivalent of dropping a brick with a note tied to it reading "leave us alone, please" instead of hundreds of units of destabilized antimatter fuel.

[SCC]

I wonder if sometimes Alex doesn't feel regret about making saturation bombing a thing.

[Megas]

Diktat crisis will have Diktat come to sat bomb your fuel planet.  If they are so eager to come and sat bomb your colony, they should be prepared to take a sat bomb back from you.  Now if only the Indies kept their nose out of the conflict.

[u3r]

I am not too keen on really sat-bombing anything - but I would wish for some more active measures you could take, instead of actively not building military buildings so the bar gets filled faster.
Let's do a tactical bombardment and then leave 1,5k fuel in orbit with a yellow sticky note "next time you touch my colony I'm going to de-orbit this!"

Why do I have to wait for a blockade or why don't the hegemony inspection fleets contribute to some "inspection disruption".
Please Alex - let us inspect right back at you dear hegemony 


Honestly - I get why it is the way it is currently: to instigate some more challenging fighting you need to reach critical mass. Still it feels very passive waiting for the meter to fill.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

I don't think Alex wants to give the player any reasonable excuse to justify a saturation bombardment.

A bit too late for that, as it's justified in the interstellar community if you set up shop in another faction's claimed territory, even if they are cooperative and the territory is unihabited. Likewise, with a little bit of propaganda apparently even fuel market competition is a justifiable reason.

Unsurprisingly it's a bit like real life. The big players have control over the flow of information, smaller players and the public at large are kept too busy to even notice if a civilization gets wiped out. With the exception of course if a genocide or "genocide" is spammed in the public's face via controlled information sources. Propaganda can further be used to prevent the public from recognizing uncontrolled information sources as legitimate obviously.

You have no reasonable recourse for what is an act of war. Nobody will ever listen to you, if they even can. So only unreasonable options are left, which by virtue of circumstance are now reasonable.

You can weather the storm and get some trinkets from it, in return for pretending it never happened. Lore wise, it will undoubtably happen again.
You can capitulate to unreasonable demands made by suicidal power mad fools. Who lore wise will make more unreasonable demands.
Or you can paint the sector red.

All options are reasonable, all have their own benefits and drawbacks.

Still a reputation malus rather than forced hostility is better for the third option. In the end the player can only make the other factions so angry, and can get back to 100 rep by giving away AI cores, so all it really would do is reduce grinding.

[Bungee_man]

The existing factions are all established players that have spent decades and generations proving they can coexist. You aren't, so you don't get the same privileges. "Right" and "wrong" don't matter in this context, and "fair" definitely doesn't. Accordingly, you are expected to be more restrained than the established powers. Maybe you don't want to play by those rules, but they are the rules that they are willing to play by.

Something that kind of obfuscates this is that the faction homeworlds' in-game defenses are a lot smaller than the story would imply, either as a gameplay abstraction to make smuggling viable or simply because they haven't been updated in a while, and power creep has occurred in the meantime. This makes the power gap between the player's colonies and the major factions look a lot smaller than the story treats it as. The final AI inspection, the League blockade, and the TactiStar mercenaries are what a small, cost-limited intervention against an upstart looks like, but only Sindria has anything resembling a proportionate level of security around its capital.

[Beep Boop]

Something that kind of obfuscates this is that the faction homeworlds' in-game defenses are a lot smaller than the story would imply, either as a gameplay abstraction to make smuggling viable or simply because they haven't been updated in a while, and power creep has occurred in the meantime. This makes the power gap between the player's colonies and the major factions look a lot smaller than the story treats it as. The final AI inspection, the League blockade, and the TactiStar mercenaries are what a small, cost-limited intervention against an upstart looks like, but only Sindria has anything resembling a proportionate level of security around its capital.

Well, Sindria is a busy place, but we can still manage to smuggle our way in. But I guess most of the fleets are probably landed, as we can see patrols landing on the planet and disappearing from apparent existence as a result. Since ships that have landed don't chew up supplies, this makes sense. They could, perhaps, scramble if a hostile force is detected.