In this post I'm going to address a couple areas that feel under-powered and over-nerfed from the very early days of the pre-alpha and make an argument for some much needed buffing. Note that there are definitely some over-powered areas in the game as well, but I'll cover those in separate posts. Colony Leader Primary Stats Colony Leader primary stats feel really under-powered to me compared to other modifiers in the game. They are still useful due to secondary abilities, but I feel like their primary stats are really lacking. Right now when they level up you get excited about the secondary ability because it makes a noticeable impact, but the primary abilities have almost none. Administration, Labor, and Research primary skill benefits should be increased. These used to be 1.0 per point in the earliest versions of the game and now provide 0.1 per point. This increment is so small is makes any benefit from leveling up a primary stat completely unnoticeable. For instance I have systems producing 10 production per pop. A leader levels up (which takes awhile) several times and I take their labor up to 5 and get.... 0.5 extra taking me to 10.5. All those points spent and time taken to add 5% to my production total for that planet. I think it's time to revisit these stats as I feel they over-nerfed early on. I feel they would be more useful and balanced between 0.3 and 0.5 points each. Corporate skill is probably fine but mining is not. See the mining section below. Asteroid Mining Asteroid mines used to give +3 Production per pop for large, +2 production per pop for medium, and +1 production per pop for small asteroids. When multiple large and/or medium mines were sent to the same place, especially one with a leader adding 30,40,50% or more to the total due to their corporate primary stat, production values would skyrocket. Mines were later nerfed in a similar manner to leader primary stats. They were changed from +3, +2, and +1 for large, medium, and small to 0.3, 0.2, and 0.1. Just like leaders, this has made asteroid mining very under-powered. For instance, I focused on mining in one of my recent games. I got a leader with Corporate 4 and took the "Astro-Mining Guild" perk for +50% asteroid mining production. That's +90% production to any mines sent to my colony. I established 4 mines = 2 large, 1 medium, and 1 small. This cost me time because it required 4 outpost ships, 4 freighters, and the asteroid mining tech. I sent all the mines to my best planet. With all the ships involved to set the mines up, the tech required, the defense required to hold them, my focus on a corporate leader and mining focused space culture, you'd expect to see big gains from this right? The planet has 19.01 production per pop and exactly... 1.71 comes from those asteroid including all beneficial modifiers. That's less than 9% of that planet's production. 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.2 + 0.1 = 0.9 + (0.9* 90% bonus) = 1.71 production per pop. I'd like to see these mining bonuses increased significantly. Conservatively, I'd say 1.0 for large, 0.7 for medium, and 0.5 for small. That would look more like this: 1.0 + 1.0 + 0.7 + 0.5 = 3.2 + (3.2 * 90% bonus) = 6.08 production per pop It's still less than a focus on strategic resource driven production engines using antimatter, helium-3, or neutronium (based on morale in this case). It requires a lot of setup and impacts only the 1 planet it connects to. To be honest, they may still be under-powered currently but it would be a start while other things are nerfed.
I should mention this is a sister thread to my thread on morale being too strong: https://www.interstellarspacegame.c...b-people-are-too-happy-morale-discussion.450/ Morale needs to be toned down at the same time as any buffs are given to leaders and mining to prevent production total from soaring out of control. Since mining and leaders only effect a single planet/system and are part of the production total instead of a multiplier to the production total, there is much less risk involved in increasing these.
I've taken a very keen interest in that thread and I agree with you. This needs a very good balancing act but you are already on the correct track. Lower morale and empire buffs by a substantial margin while increasing the efficiency of mining and leader attributes by an unknown margin. Yay! let's play with some numbers, have you considered specific reductions and enhancements to do this? do you have any numbers that you think would make for a good solution? Edit Specifically You gave detailed examples in your first post, These are a starting base and not just examples, I want to make sure about that. If so, have you considered how the numbers would affect leaders that are posted on very productive worlds to begin with?
Totally agree with all above. For all the effort your go through to make outpost ships, claim asteroids, build freighter fleets, etc the reward isn't all that exciting. Still worth doing certainly - but not that exciting. Ditto for leader primary skills. And I agree that the high morale benefits are a bit too strong right now.
On a related note - there is nothing to limit outpost spam in this game is there? The answer to where to place an outpost is really "everywhere you can" because aside from the cost of the outpost there is no reason not to. Science outposts - should these provide a bigger science boost but have a high credit upkeep costs? But trade outpost are free money. How to limit those? What if outposts actually consumed a planet slot and always had to be linked to a planet via a freighter fleet for all outpost types? I do know how many more buildings are planned in the full tech tree, but I seem to often have a surplus of building slots on most worlds. Coupling these to outposts makes some logical sense to be as well.
We can certainly try buffing asteroid mining a bit. It was too much at the beginning (+1 to +3 from small to large) but +0.1 to +0.3 was perhaps too drastic now, I agree. Since you're not sure your proposal could still be underpowered, and the fact I prefer round numbers, how about going with +0.5 for small, +1.0 for medium and +1.5 for large? This would be half the initial proposal and slightly higher than what you propose (+0.5, +0.7, +1). Perhaps this will do it? As for leaders, the same thing. I took think going from +1 to +0.1 was a bit too much of a nerf. How about we go with multiples of 0.5, your higher number (and again the round numbers thing)? This would also be half the initial proposal. What do you say we try it like this?
Yes, only the cost of building more outposts limits you to establishing more outposts, at the moment. On the early game you're somewhat limited but on the medium/late game you could build many more. The thing is, outposts are vulnerable, so you'll have to see if you can defend them all. You also can't establish outposts in enemy territory, if you haven't a mining treaty going with the race that controls it. I'd say that we need to keep assessing this to see if it is a real problem or not.
I don't know if it's an issue yet either - but something to keep in mind moving forward. Stuff like this could turn into an exploitable situation (building titans in 1 turn or whatever) down the road or late game. I was also thinking about more from a choice standpoing. I'm not giving up anything by spamming outposts everywhere. It's just like with your gripe about other 4X games where the best thing is just build every building on every planet all of the time. There are no trade-offs, and hence no decision. You fixed that with limited building slots and other factors - but the same issue now applies to outposts. GalCiv3 is/was criticized a lot for outpost spam for this same reason. Even if it isn't a balance problem as it, making the decisions come with a trade-off will nevertheless make the gameplay choices more interesting (by making it an actual choice).
I see what you mean. There may not be tradeoffs to building outposts at the moment in that choice (if we exclude the small temporary 1 SSP penalty). It is still a choice, of course, as you could be building a titan in 1 turn instead. Of course, if you're building titans in 1 turn, or outposts for that matter, then something else needs fixing somewhere else However, and as you suggest, it could be more. As it is now it is only a choice rather than an actual choice, as you say. So, if there is more to it (namely a trade off) to building outposts (apart the temporaty 1 SSP) then I'm certainly on board to discuss it and incorporate it in the design if it is perceived as a good call. My feeling regarding this is that whatever change we may end up doing to the outposts building process, I guess it is more to help mitigate an unwanted or grindy behavior (ala ICS - infinite city sleaze in Civ), where spamming outposts could be seen as a dominant why-not unwanted play strategy. The fact they're vulnerable, and that you should not have too many ships to spare to defend them all, may mitigate this to some extent but it's certainly something we need to keep in mind. So, I suggest that we keep assessing if we feel something should be done about this or not. Again, if we're seeing ourselves building too many outposts and taking advantage of that to gain superiority in what may end up in a grindy/degenerate playstyle, like was the case with outposts in GalCiv2, then no doubt we should do something about it.
Regarding the mining production and leader changes, yes, I say let's give those a shot. Less than original but much better than they are now. As long as some numbers are nerfed to morale and/strategic resources benefits otherwise we'll have a major overabundance of production.
Regarding this, right now it is very easy to flip/flop both colonies and outposts back and forth with almost no penalty. In the case of outpost with mines you do lose the freighter and have to build/assign a new one, but beyond that nothing else happens. More specifically, the outpost always survived entirely intact, your citizens are always just as happy as they were, and for colonies no buildings are damaged either. They are apparently fine with constantly losing fights and potential regime changes. Most of my end game sessions involve me and the AI flying past each other waving hi while we reconquer the same couple systems until reinforcements arrive. We are, however, talking about a pre-alpha. If morale penalties are applied to your colonies, say due to news of an outpost or colony being lost to those putrid flesh monkey humans (sorry, alien fan here!), well now we are beginning to have an entirely different conversation. Add in potential colony and or outpost damage due to leaving your assets exposed or under-defended and now we are talking about some real considerations to be made regarding spreading colonies and outposts everywhere. Although I don't know the eventual plans in this regard, it seems worth bringing this up as it could potentially "fix" the issue of outpost spam organically.
