Computergeek01 wrote:Hi Everyone,
First I want to say that I'm a huge fan of this game and I love what you guys are doing with it.
Regarding the bombardment\spore idea, I like it just for the spite factor alone. It also makes deep strike raiding a valid if slightly insidious option (otherwise the external engines are a waste of a perfectly good weapon slot).
Yup, and now that troops are heavily dependent on population it can make invasions significantly easier as well, so much so I'm considering building ships with them instead of just using my pet monsters. Porbably need to do some cost/benefit balancing for it sooner rather than later though.
It doesn't actually address the end game grinding issue though, it just shifts it around a bit. What if, after a capitol world is conquered, the remaining planets just flipped over to native species and the remaining ships either disbanded or became monsters? Fluff-wise it makes sense, gameplay wise it speeds up the endgame, maybe a bit too much though? The biggest drawback that I can think of is that I've caught the AI with it's pants down in a couple of games and I haven't read enough of the code to piece together how easy that would be to mitigate or if it was a conscious design decision.
AI decision making is an ongoing project, the AI team have done a lot to improve things of late but it's still, well, a computer algorithm that can't actually think.
I'd like to see more diplomacy options with a surrender/cede worlds system, but that's something that'll need to be worked through as and when the team have time to actually do some real work on the diplomacy system and I've no idea what the timescale is on developing that.