Spoon - We were actually talking about this just last night. I'm a big advocate of homeworlds being strong as someone being wiped from the game should be a big deal imo but regular colonies are very easy to establish considering their strength. (and that's without getting into the fact that colonies can have populations over 400mu)
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.
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.
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