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.
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.Originally Posted by JetJaguar2000
You would drop a colony and somebody would come by with a pair of cruisers and that was it, colony gone.
Maybe that means you can dial back the awesomeness of colonies, then. As I wrote before, I think allowing colonies to be so indestructible feeds in to the "land grab" strategy that I think is really problematic for the game. I think there needs to be more checks against that, so that people who don't play constantly can stand a chance in the long game.
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.
We'll most likely be making some adjustments to colonies so they're more of an investment that you'll need to protect and nurture early on. We'll want to sit down and run some numbers first though.
On the issue of players picking of outposts with cruisers and then converting them to energy arrays I don't really have an issue with that considering that it takes one T2 tech and one T1 tech from a separate tree. Also, if the outpost was actually defended this would be much easier to fend off. It's possible that the ATK / Cost balance of energy arrays / cruisers, etc. need to be looked at but on the whole I think it's a good strategy. If you're not defending your outposts then you should expect them to get ganked.
I agree completely on outposts. Seems like already people feel that they should be able to stake claims across the sector and not have to worry about defending them. Defend your outposts, people!
I'm glad you guys are open to making adjustments, I really think it will improve the balance of the game.
I had someone get upset at me when I used my colony ship to kill their outpost then colonize the planet. They said I should respect their outpost. It entertained me.
In reviewing the planet regen code, the population refreshing like it does is consequence of a change I made in beta. This is a mistake and it will be undone in a patch tomorrow.
In rough numbers, with no skills, a Terran planet will go from the initial colony pop drop to 400Mu in ~7.5 days.
On the other end of the spectrum Rock planets will take roughly 15 days to reach 400mu without any tech upgrades. (although with their lower terraform level you'd need to do some work on them to even get to 400mu.)
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