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[XyttheElite117]

I was just wondering because I usually have really good colonies and if I'm feeling like it, I just colonize the entire Penelope's Star and put Alpha AIs and special items on my colonies and industries for fun. But since I saw the news, I feel like it's going to hurt colony management real hard and I have to deal with tons of faction fleets on my colonies I don't want to deal with unless they're pirates or pathers. What do you guys think?

[Worldtraveller]

I haven't found it to be unduly painful. I've colonized Penelope's Star as well. I have the planetkiller in my inventory, but I don't feel like I should actually give it to the Pathers.... I've paid off Kanta, so that slows the aggression track quite a bit.

I have to kill the occasional Pather base, but it's so easy to maintain the minimum good relations with the other factions that I just 'use my connections' when they threaten to raid my system. Unless of course, I'm in the mood for a good fight. I have so many gamma cores that I saved from day one of this game (~80) that as long as the faction is high enough that I can visit their base, I just go give them 4-5 cores, then do an explore mission and I'm right back with that 20 points of goodwill.

I realize I would eventually run out of both explorations and cores, but I usually start a new game long before then.

[Princess_of_Evil]

Dealing with a colony crisis, from Alex's answers, seems to be permanent. It's basically the same system as the old one, except raids don't give you penalties and they straight up run out if you defeat them enough.

[Bungee_man]

I think it's the opposite. The present system goes a bit heavy on scaling up pathers nearly linearly indefinitely, whereas this follows a much more realistic (and more fun, IMO) system of "success makes people jealous and/or suspicious, and you may have to fight them, but fighting them off successfully both deters further direct attacks and makes you appear more credible to potential partners".

[Excretusmaximus]

I don't understand why we're even allowed to colonize, since Alex and the rest of the team seem to hate the idea of players being successful in colonization.

[Nettle]

I don't understand why we're even allowed to colonize, since Alex and the rest of the team seem to hate the idea of players being successful in colonization.

What makes you think so?

[nathan67003]

Yeah, I really don't get how anyone really sees the devs as being hostile to colonies. Sure, they've been nerfed a bit when AI because the only way to have them perform at their best, but that's about it.

[Histidine]

Considering the new system makes threats go away after you deal with them once and does not have long-term accessibility/stability penalties, I'd expect it to be a huge upside for the player.

[Daynen]

You have to remember that once the game stops trying to beat us, it gets boring fast.  Successful colonies can easily negate a vast majority of the challenges the game throws at us, so colony-specific problems keep things from getting stale.

[Vaelophisnyx]

I'd prefer stale to actively annoying though. I'd assume most folk would as well?

[Aeson]

Successful colonies can easily negate a vast majority of the challenges the game throws at us

So what? The thing that I, personally, want out of colonies is a stable source of income that will let me go off and do whatever without needing to worry about whether or not I'll be able to pay for fuel and supplies next time I come back to the Core or crew/officer wages while I'm out and about, not a chain tying me to a system or two that needs babysitting, because as things currently stand the thing I'm most likely to be doing if I'm worried about money is smuggling - bounty hunting doesn't offer a good enough risk-reward proposition to be worth it, bar/contact missions are very hit-or-miss (especially if you don't want to tick off major factions or often fail to find interesting missions due to character/fleet composition/economic reasons), exploration/surveying usually doesn't have a very good return-on-investment unless someone's paying you to do it, and legal commodities trading is almost always a losing proposition.

Colonies - especially well-established colonies - are a relatively late-game thing. It isn't a bad thing if having them frees the player from the sort of troubles that might trip them up in the early stages of the game and allows them to more easily recover from the kinds of disasters that may as well have you start over earlier in the game.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

I'd prefer stale to actively annoying though. I'd assume most folk would as well?

I know (probably Megas) and I are on the same page, I'm not sure how to @ someone on here or I would @ him.
The old system before HA was better. The current HA system is very easy to abuse and ignore, and if you don't it is incredibly annoying. To give a few examples.
If you set up your colony in the Penelope star system, you will never have to worry about destroying pirate stations as they will spawn too far away to be counted towards HA.
The LP will never target level three worlds, meaning you can spam small Alpha core colonies all over the sector as a very large profit generator.
If you haven't attracted LP attention, and have a level six world with a high command, you can pretty much ignore pirate stations. Eventually they will generate enough HA to be a problem, as pirate station HA increases with station size which increases overtime, but it takes decades. All the while they are increasing your profits by raiding the core worlds.
The entire HA system can be ignored if the player bargains with Kanta, and gives the LP a planet killer.

While some of these will be fixed next update, some won't and can't due to how the system works.
Having pirate stations randomly target you, and being able to destroy those stations was a better, and more consistent design. The fact that the core worlds and factions don't suffer under the HA system is weird, especially with Alex's previous "everyone is on equal footing" design philosophy.

As I already warned him, all the new system is going to achieve is forcing players to mod their game so they don't have to, or can deal with the "it's just one time" death fleets.
No one is going to want to worry about a random sat bomb attempt every playthrough.
If a player plays 10 playthroughs in their life, that's 9 times too many sat-bomb attempts.

You have to remember that once the game stops trying to beat us, it gets boring fast.  Successful colonies can easily negate a vast majority of the challenges the game throws at us, so colony-specific problems keep things from getting stale.

The game stops trying to beat the player after they defeat the "it's just a one time invasion / sat-bomb" fleet. Nothing has been resolved, it has just been made more annoying.

Really the issue is Alex seems to be caught between wanting the game to be static sandbox that only the player can change, and wanting the factions to have dynamic changing behavior that impacts the player.
You can't have both.
If he goes with the former, he has to accept the player will have a money printer colony, and the late game will be stale. But the story will always be consistent.
If he goes with the latter, he has a gold standard mod to take inspiration from I.E. Nexerelin. But has to accept he will never have control over the sector's story.

[nathan67003]

You raise some legitimate concerns but I for one can tell you that having to constantly keep an eye on Pather activity and pirate activity in 0.95a was a massive pain. I'd be out somewhere culling Remnants and suddenly I'd have to stop everything I'm doing to go nuke a station before active cells could disrupt my colonies. Same for pirates. And it never stopped, either; they always came back like bloody roaches and you couldn't stop it because some systems don't have planets to colonize.

And that's not mentioning the regular occurence of 2-3 factions at very close intervals sending two-three massive fleets each to some of my colonies - even with star fortresses across the system, at least one Command HQ per system and as many patrol HQs as could fit, I often had to high-tail it the hell back to participate in the space defense. Yes, I still had ground forces as a last-resort basically guaranteed measure, but they were precisely that: a last resort.

[Aeson]

If you set up your colony in the Penelope star system, you will never have to worry about destroying pirate stations as they will spawn too far away to be counted towards HA.

This isn't actually true; sector generation can spawn stars close enough to Penelope's Star to host problematic pirate bases.

Also, I don't recall if it was in the current version or not, but I'm pretty sure I've seen pirate bases spawn in Duzahk once or twice.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

If you set up your colony in the Penelope star system, you will never have to worry about destroying pirate stations as they will spawn too far away to be counted towards HA.

This isn't actually true; sector generation can spawn stars close enough to Penelope's Star to host problematic pirate bases.

Also, I don't recall if it was in the current version or not, but I'm pretty sure I've seen pirate bases spawn in Duzahk once or twice.

Fair enough, although I've had several runs now where no stars spawned close enough. It's rare I actually colonize Penelope, as it is usually a terrible system.
As for Duzahk, I know I've seen LP bases there before, but I can't recall seeing pirate bases.