I feel similarly about the pain in the neck that is attacking a colony with a few cruisers, then just planting an orbital defense array there. The investment required to remove it is way higher than it is to put it in. It's a less egregious problem than the colony problem though.
Yeah, I'm fine with homeworlds being well defended. I'm also fine with 400 Mu colonies being well defended. It's just that it's too easy to get to 400mu and on the way up they're orders of magnitude too difficult to deal with. Maybe colonies should require terraforming to get up to their current strength, but homeworlds can start off at that level? I don't know. A new colony should be barely hanging on though, not immediately become an impenetrable fortress until you're two weeks into the game :-)Originally Posted by Leedot
I would propose that homeworlds be given special "strong" status, but that new colonies be much weaker and take much longer to reach "full strength." As the previous poster points out, it takes only a few hours for a colony to hit 400mu, at which point it is effectively indestructible until much later in the game. This allows for lots of annoying plays by land grabbers (I still don't understand why land grabbing isn't kept in check the way attacking homeworlds is, but ok) who can take ownership of huge swathes of the game very quickly.
Building a colony should be a very risky proposition, especially if you're considering doing it in an area where it is likely to be attacked. Right now, you can swoop in to an opponent's space, knock out an outpost with a very small fleet of ships, and drop a colony ship in its place in a matter of minutes. If you can avoid a counter attack within, literally, 2 hours, you're golden. You now have an effectively permanent foothold in their space, and there is nothing they can do about it.
EDIT: Btw, I think you guys should really reconsider how you frame the strength of colonies. I don't know if this bothers anyone else, but the idea that an "undefended" colony is actually capable of handily obliterating everything up to huge fleets of capital ships just feels bizarre to me. It makes you wonder what role the explicit orbital defenses are supposed to have. A laser defense array, as strong as it is, adds literally nothing to the strength of a colony. It's peanuts in comparison. I think colonies should automatically build some kind of defense units that are observable as orbitals, if for no other reason than to give some visual parity with the actual defensive units.
Last edited by JetJaguar2000; 06-01-2012 at 05:56 PM.
Also! do populations grow linearly? Maybe they shouldn't. They definitely don't grow linearly in real llife. Maybe there should be some kind of generation thing. Like, 16 hours, the population doubles. So it would take 5.8 days to grow it completely, but the strength of the colony would stay relatively low for a few days. The numbers would need to be balanced, obviously, but I would welcome a change where a new colony is something precious that would need to be protected for a little while. And maybe if you take over a struggling colony, it just kills the whole population and turns into an outpost, to prevent people from just being total vultures about it?
No, I think they grow faster in the beginning and taper off somewhat as they get larger. I believe part of that was to get them to the 100Mu at least, relatively quickly so that their defense would go up.
It was done like that because a huge complaint in beta was that colonies were so easy to take over, because you couldn't build anything until the population got up there.
But there are a number of colony defense options that don't require the colony to be productive: mine deployment ships, cruiser and battlecruiser transforms, or just leaving a fleet in orbit.
I'm curious about that feedback, then. People thought those options weren't good enough, or people didn't want to actually spend resources defending their new colonies?
Sounds like maybe people just didn't want to use those forms of defense, they wanted to be able to build the planetary defenses from the planet itself. I know in one of my games the only defenses I have are the orbital arrays. It all depends on what you decide to research, mine deployment and orbital defenses are easy to research to throw up, but the cruiser/battlecruiser transforms take a coupla research items each, since first you have to research the ship itself, then the tech to transform it (don't remember what tier those techs are, but if it's not tier 1 for the ships and the transforms, thats even longer before you can get em, whereas mine deployment and orbital defense i believe are both tier 1). As for minefields, I have no idea what kind of attack they have for how effective they are.
Well, if you ask me, you should have to invest in defenses if you want to build colonies in places that you think need to be defended. Isn't that a no brainer?
Otherwise you are just empowering the landgrab approach, enabling folks to just crap out outposts and colonies as fast as they can click on them. Colonies should be an investment, and you should have to treat them as such, or risk having them taken from you.
Landgrabbing will kill this game, I really hope they do more to slow it down.
Two things I can think of:
1) Repeatable queues. This would be good for defences and replicate NP.
2) Automatically build something when the resources (or research) are available. A simple implementation might be that you could add stuff to the queue even when you have insufficient resources and it'd just sit at 0% until they are available (or build up to whatever % you can currently afford). This would increase the amount you can do per login and eliminate those situations where you don't quite have enough resources but can't login again for eight hours.
Mine deployers, and the ship conversions didn't exist then. All of those things were added later to try and address the problem of protecting newly placed colonies.
You would drop a colony and somebody would come by with a pair of cruisers and that was it, colony gone.
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