Future changes and thoughts... For 1.0.8

Colony and outpost ships dipping into the origin planets population will really make us protect those ships instead of blindly setting them off into the void. I like jets ship range limit idea, if this were to come to be let's leave the limit off a colony ship and it's protecting fleet. This way we can make a new home in another galaxy without having to settle to close to home. On the topic of ship changes I would like to propose a big change to mine layers and orbital defenses. In the current game mine layers suck, they are over priced, and way under powered. We can only lay mines on our own planets. Well I really don't care under current system if I lose an outpost, it's really easy to retake, and I can build mines at any old colony. I had imagined being able to lay mines in open space quadrants to create a wall around my empire. I would like to see Defense orbitals given this option too.

If we could get some form of rudimentary alliance system soon too that would be great. Would like to be able to just ally with one or two people, see their territory, be able to put orbitals on friendly planets and outposts, and maybe combine fleets. We can work out more elaborate details later, but this would be a great start. Maybe make it distance restricted, so you and your best bud don't ally from one end of the universe to the other and take advantage of trade routes or some odd thing I can't think about right now. Maybe to increase the number of people you can ally with it could be a skill, each rank increases the size of the alliance/guild/faction/corporation. Maybe the forming person get some sort of cut of trades or mining profits, would be very trader oriented. That portion doesn't need to implemented now but an idea for the future.

Would like to add something else that I thought of about the warlord scavenger ability. How often is that really going to come into effect? If they want to make it harder to take outposts and colonies, we are talking a week or two into the game at least before anybody has at least a dread fleet in decent numbers. Then they are gonna maybe start getting some of this extra co/ro. But taking a colony/hw is a pretty major deal now and more so with the changes proposed. So take the two or three day between building a big enough fleet in the current system, make that longer and then attack the planet. Ok so I took the planet now and lost a whole bunch ships. Gonna be a few more days till I can take a planet. Ok so warlords are gonna only getting a payout after a week or more and then only every now and then. I see the researcher getting the best deal with the current system, followed by the trader and still last warlord. Maybe I'm not imagining how fast a warlord is gonna be cruising around but taking planets will be the only thing bringing in money. Even with all these great changes there is still no reason to fight in open space unless I'm missing something. So it's gonna be one or two trading vessels a warlord eats for dinner, and I can't imagine those will net much. Maybe I'm missing something, can anybody enlighten me?

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Originally Posted by Truckingyoda

Would like to add something else that I thought of about the warlord scavenger ability. How often is that really going to come into effect? If they want to make it harder to take outposts and colonies, we are talking a week or two into the game at least before anybody has at least a dread fleet in decent numbers. Then they are gonna maybe start getting some of this extra co/ro. But taking a colony/hw is a pretty major deal now and more so with the changes proposed. So take the two or three day between building a big enough fleet in the current system, make that longer and then attack the planet. Ok so I took the planet now and lost a whole bunch ships. Gonna be a few more days till I can take a planet. Ok so warlords are gonna only getting a payout after a week or more and then only every now and then. I see the researcher getting the best deal with the current system, followed by the trader and still last warlord. Maybe I'm not imagining how fast a warlord is gonna be cruising around but taking planets will be the only thing bringing in money. Even with all these great changes there is still no reason to fight in open space unless I'm missing something. So it's gonna be one or two trading vessels a warlord eats for dinner, and I can't imagine those will net much. Maybe I'm missing something, can anybody enlighten me?

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I agree with this, but want to add one more thing: a bunch of the "hardcore" players have been posting a lot about how easy it is to take colonies ("it only takes 400 battleships!"). Once again, I disclaim this by conceding that I may not "get it," but in none of the games I've played so far have I gotten close to building 400 ships. Given the amount of time I played, I was too occupied with other stuff to manage that. You guys can argue that new players will eventually learn that building huge fleets is the path to victory, but I'm telling you as a guy who has experience with 4x games and played a fair amount in this game, building enormous fleets was not an obvious thing for me to do.

More generally, I think it's a symptom of poor design that someone like me could go so far off the rails in terms of playing successfully, so I encourage the designers not to make decisions based on this hardcore play style. I really think the vast majority of potential players are not ever going to reach the point of colony killing fleets. More likely, they will play the game like me, realize at some point that they are completely outclassed by some of the other players, and then quit the game thinking "no way am I putting in the effort that guy has."

Anyways, regardless, the idea of getting resources from killing ships is interesting in theory, but in practice most ships are parked in orbit of colonies, and with colonies being so badass, it seems that a young warlord who hasn't built a colony killing fleet will stand little chance of actually killing any ships.

On a side note, given how colonies work, it would be interesting if there could be some way to attack things in orbit of a colony without invoking its murderous wrath. There is a HUGE jump between fleets that can have skirmishes in uncontested space, and fleets sitting in orbit of a 400mu planet.

Also, on the topic of defending colonies/homeworlds, I don't think I've found a single homeworld yet that had more than a couple orbitals defending them. I think the best I've seen was a couple colonies and a homeworld (from the same player) with 1 energy array, 1 missile array, and a few ships (I think it was 1 fighter, 1 destroyer, one cruiser, 1 battleship). I think I lost a total of 60 or 70 ships to that one. I found another player 1 energy array, 1 missile array, and a few fighters. Not sure if people think that's enough defense to protect them, or if they don't realize they can build more than one of each type of orbital defense or what. Personally, I have at least 15 energy arrays on each of my homeworlds...

Oh, and I've seen some with 1 or 2 minefields, which might be good early game or against a fleet that's just barely big enough to capture the homeworld. Later on against larger fleets, doesn't help much. Not sure if it makes a difference if the mines are on the defense and not at war with the attacker or not, can they be killed off in the first round before they attack?

I also just found a colony (I'm assuming homeworld, looks like a homeworld system) with 850Mu population. That one's gonna hurt too methinks...

Ok so some more outloud thinking about combat. So we know that they are slowing combat down to 30 min fights roughly this is a nice thought in theory but in practice who it going to help? The defender. When I've been attacking somebody under the current system yes I swarm somebody with a huge amount of ships in one giant fleet. I know they don't want giant fleets of "small" ships and I agree with the idea, but with new system we will still see giant fleets of "big" ships. I'm not going to send in two partial fleets no matter what. It takes more than 30 min to get across a galaxy sector with most traditional fights. And it takes more than an hour or two to build one "big" ship so for the attacker it's best to build big fleet of big ships and attack. The defender will get a bonus to their formidable defense if they can fly in ships you may have had defending a different system or you were massing for your own defense. Not sure how to fix this cycle but just thought I would bring it up how I see it playing out.

We need a reason to want to have space battles I think, not just near orbit battles. Something that invokes that armada vs armada feeling, not the armada vs the planet defenders.

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Originally Posted by JetJaguar2000

I agree with this, but want to add one more thing: a bunch of the "hardcore" players have been posting a lot about how easy it is to take colonies ("it only takes 400 battleships!"). Once again, I disclaim this by conceding that I may not "get it[]
More generally, I think it's a symptom of poor design[]

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Jet, with all due respect. Yes, you did not get it this game. It is very, VERY EASY and CHEAP to protect your colony from 400 Battleships. When I did a math I said to myself at the beginning of the game - there is no point to build 400 battleships since it will be useless against reasonably defended colony. I build my army only to fight aliens. Then later on I noticed that almost all players put a sign on his/her home worlds: "Please conquer me. I am totally undefended. I do not know what I am doing".
I repeat as a winner on Aruru of 18 home worlds: It is almost impossible to take down reasonably protected home world! My own home world could not be taken by 1000+ battleships. The attacker is in serious disadvantage against properly protected colony.
I think a simple knowledge about this fact will render idea of attacking home worlds obsolete in the future games.

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Originally Posted by Supamand

Not sure if someone said this, but there needs to be a way to abandon a planet! If I start a game and two of the planets in my sector are ice, I would like to have a function to abandon a colony on those planets. That way it does not count against my total planet count.

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To be honest the conversations internally are leaning towards making the PCC a radius rather than a specific planet count. We have been discussing adding a range to ships. The grid as it sits for the sector maps will probably be going away in favor of jumping to systems. Once we get a little further on this we'll publish our thoughts.