[Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

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Blockaxe333
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Joined: Sat Jul 01, 2017 4:40 am

[Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

Postby Blockaxe333 » Sat Jul 01, 2017 9:26 am

I want to start by saying i LOVE SIS, and im a major fan of 4X/empirebuilding games as a rule, particularly space ones.

-note i haven't played the game extremely thoroughly , please correct me if i suggest something already being implemented or im wrong about something else :P-

But the simplistic, well not simple but comic-like aesthetic i find just flows really well and allows a combination of gritty detail and fantastical design not afforded well by the ships in distant worlds universe for example ( up for debate ). Not to mention that the user interface is designed to be intuitive as opposed to a steep learning curve, which was a massive relief and suprise! i was like, it surely can't be this easy? Anyway features aside its a great game with stacks of potential, and the passion is evident in your work so... cheers?

Being a massive fan of reading lore and games of the genre i've come up with some ideas, suggestions etc. for the community and dev to discuss/consider as below - feel free to add your own as you see fit or expand upon any of the ideas i've had :P

Diplomatic suggestions -
- Buying out mercenaries - I feel that after some particular research or if your a particular race you should have the option to buy out mercenaries within another empires armies, causing them to fire on their own ships premature to or during conflict with your own, with some element of suprise. Although for balance this'd have to be an expensive option , say two or three times of the actual price per ship.
- Exodus'ing planets - you ever had an ally who's losing planets and has a handful left against a massive enemy of yours, and you've got either a bunch of spare mining moons or a colony ship and a free world? What if you could exodus population's from that allied empire of yours to form an enclave on that world under your protection, away from immediate attack of the enemy but still mostly if not entirely dependent.
-

Technological/conceptual ideas
- Bio-weapon/Bio-weapon bombing - Imagine this, you've been grinding up against this neighbouring empire, you've crushed the fleets around one of his fortress worlds but that shit is DUG IN with enough dakka to level its own moon. Moreover its got lots of precious , useful infrastructure you could utilize, well rather then sending in dozens of battalions of your hover-tanks , or bombing the shight out of it and then sending them in circa rinse/repeat, what if you could release a tailored weapon that either killed off the local populace extremely quickly or mutated a portion into freaks which attacked the main occupants? cool right? Think of it as the ultimate solution to a heavily fortified planet you've gotta crack fast without spending another 30 turns building its economy back up.

- "Drill-Squadrons" - A battalion of battle mechs or possibly hover-tanks equipped with specialist equipment so they operate as individual squadrons in a vacuum, they're equipped similar to a boarding party in terms of effective range, and are tactically useful in attacking ships directing with powerful shielding or point-defense implacements. Probably far more useful against larger vessel then smaller ones.

- Extermination passive/aggressive - conquered planet from a fallen enemy or got a moon with pesky natives? load the water supply up with chemical cocktails designed to sterilize the locals is what the politicians say! Replace those pesky no-good cyborgs with some lovely loyalist miners, or better yet if you ain't feeling passive enough, just directly target specific populations with battalions and clear them out the gung-ho way.

- organised warp gates - particularly on larger galaxies, as an end tier technology warpgates allow 1 turn transit between two distant systems at high cost to build each receptacle. Perhaps they start out 1-1 linked or they're like the eldar webway, all interlinked allow eventual instantaneous transport for all your systems.

-


General suggestions / feedback
- i've noticed that certain races are predestinate to make alliances with others more easily, and it has a snowball affect - once you've got your foot in the door diplomatically it stacks easily. This imo at least leads to comparatively cheap diplomatic victories so i have the following suggestions to remedy it -
1) under issues with you include a significant penalty if your allied to one of their enemies , or somone they're hostile with.
2) perhaps adding a 'cold war phase' so that even allied empires whom are at each others throats for whatever reason might engage in some sort of covert war with spies and the like. - empires in 'cold war' arent considered 'allied' by victory conditions.
3) Perhaps extending the diplomatic victory with an *endgame scenario* ? Perhaps an extragalactic invasion? A civil war from ideological differences ( we're all thinking the republic i know )? Or to achieve a true diplomatic victory all member empires must agree to merge into a single federated empire?
4) Can i say i just say how much i love ( I know i dedicated a section earlier to my fangirliness but i just feel this is done better then some 4x's attempts at it ) how diverse you've managed to make each races starting bonuses? I feel that having a diversified starting point encourages particular playstyles initially, emphasizing the uniqueness of each race. However i would like to suggest the expansion of the current ground-combat system, regardless of GUI , they're should be infantry , armor , titans or whatever classes are decided upon for the system to diversify the usage of ground troops. For instance armor are great and blitzkrieging fortress worlds by going in head first but are defenseless against longrange artillery units whilst titans ( 40k :D ) are singlehandedly capable of taking on any force thrown at them, and infantry are less durable then more heavily armoured contingents but are capable of infiltrating past certain lines of defense, or gain buffs against slower armor units. Now in saying this and to come full circle i think each race should have buffs to their native infantry, and each race again should have personalised armor, mechs etc not just aesthetic but in buffs and strategic bonuses.
I.E : Human infantry are comprised of hardy survivors whom are also citizen-scavengers from their colony-ships, therefore they have slightly less max damage but gain the ability to sabotage a battalion of enemy armor due to their experience pulling apart wrecks and scrap.
I.E : Phidi troops are far less mobile due to the constraining life-suits they wear, but as a result their infantry are equipped with exo-suits that vastly improve base physical attributes of the user - in lore they would be otherwise used for lifting cargo or performing maintenance on commercial ships. This grants Phidi troops a near-armor like ability to smash other infantry to smithereens, but due to otherwise underdeveloped military infrastructure they fall incredibly short before heavier troop types.

Whether the above is implemented in a "hands-off" system similar to endless space 2 or its more of an active overview of the battle in which you commit specific forces into the battlefield in different ways, like a card game almost is up to the developers. However again IMO i see this system working best if the battlefield is represented by a set number of squares, and the player can choose where to / how to utilize and deploy their troops obviously with penalties if assaulting from orbit to deployment, and once they've set their troops accordingly or set a general battle strategy they press play and the battle unfolds. Strategies might be "Battalions 1,2 etc etc are to strip off excess weapons and flank the enemy by infiltrating those apartments over there." This gives them a far higher critical chance but reduces their health when enemies return fire. Or if defending you can equip a regiment of hover-tanks with distortion fields and send them head-first into the enemy. On that , like weapon attachments in ship design if you've researched the required stuff you should also be able to deploy tactical hardware to your troops, as before distortion fields could be used, or you could release a batch of vat-grown clone troopers as a sort of quickly whipped-up cannon fodder, it could be something more tactical too like deploying point-defense emplacements to shoot down incoming orbital bombardment or artillery strikes , or equipping your infantry with armor-piercing munitions. Its hard to conceptual from a paragraph, and i understand from a 4x standpoint it makes battles far more time-consuming but i feel with the flavor of the lore and the style of the game it works well.
6) Perhaps the inclusion of some kind of racism between certain races? Because space, and aliens and space alien racism.
7) Maybe I've not encountered it yet in-game , but marauders etc attacking trade ships in transit?
ANYWAY
a general note i want to make is that the game is great, the flavor is amazing, and one thing it seems to do above other 4x's is allow the technology you choose to some extent to shape the feel of your empire at that time, and i think extending that mechanic so that the technology available to your empire really defines it would be awesome sauce :D

thats all i can expunge unto you for now, ill edit in and add more ideas later, thanks for listening to my rant ;3

zolobolo
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Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2016 3:49 pm

Re: [Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

Postby zolobolo » Sat Jul 01, 2017 5:05 pm

Blockaxe333 wrote:- organised warp gates - particularly on larger galaxies, as an end tier technology warpgates allow 1 turn transit between two distant systems at high cost to build each receptacle. Perhaps they start out 1-1 linked or they're like the eldar webway, all interlinked allow eventual instantaneous transport for all your systems.


Hold on, this should already be there: do you see the Star-gate tech? It should basically do the same
There is also an Ancient Star-gate variant which looks the same but only the Ashdar Imperials have this at their starting planet and it does not require another gate, it can send the ships anywhere within one turn

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Arioch
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Re: [Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

Postby Arioch » Sat Jul 01, 2017 6:08 pm

Blockaxe333 wrote:Anyway features aside its a great game with stacks of potential, and the passion is evident in your work so... cheers?

Thanks! And thanks for taking the time to write out your feedback.

Blockaxe333 wrote:- Bio-weapon/Bio-weapon bombing - Imagine this, you've been grinding up against this neighbouring empire, you've crushed the fleets around one of his fortress worlds but that shit is DUG IN with enough dakka to level its own moon. Moreover its got lots of precious , useful infrastructure you could utilize, well rather then sending in dozens of battalions of your hover-tanks , or bombing the shight out of it and then sending them in circa rinse/repeat, what if you could release a tailored weapon that either killed off the local populace extremely quickly or mutated a portion into freaks which attacked the main occupants? cool right? Think of it as the ultimate solution to a heavily fortified planet you've gotta crack fast without spending another 30 turns building its economy back up.

Bioweapons are difficult to control, as life has an annoying tendency to mutate into strains that the creators did not intend. Perhaps this could be a very late-game tech, but I think using it should still incur some risk; there might be a chance every time you use it that the pathogen mutates and the target world becomes a plague world.

Blockaxe333 wrote:- "Drill-Squadrons" - A battalion of battle mechs or possibly hover-tanks equipped with specialist equipment so they operate as individual squadrons in a vacuum, they're equipped similar to a boarding party in terms of effective range, and are tactically useful in attacking ships directing with powerful shielding or point-defense implacements. Probably far more useful against larger vessel then smaller ones.

This is essentially what Humanity's Assault Marines do.

Blockaxe333 wrote:- i've noticed that certain races are predestinate to make alliances with others more easily, and it has a snowball affect - once you've got your foot in the door diplomatically it stacks easily. This imo at least leads to comparatively cheap diplomatic victories so i have the following suggestions to remedy it -

I agree that there's a lot more that could be added to the diplomatic interactions, and that's definitely on our list of things to do.

Blockaxe333 wrote:3) Perhaps extending the diplomatic victory with an *endgame scenario* ?

Yep, we have a plan for this, and you'll see the first stages of it in the first DLC.

Blockaxe333 wrote:4) Can i say i just say how much i love ( I know i dedicated a section earlier to my fangirliness but i just feel this is done better then some 4x's attempts at it ) how diverse you've managed to make each races starting bonuses? I feel that having a diversified starting point encourages particular playstyles initially, emphasizing the uniqueness of each race. However i would like to suggest the expansion of the current ground-combat system, regardless of GUI , they're should be infantry , armor , titans or whatever classes are decided upon for the system to diversify the usage of ground troops. For instance armor are great and blitzkrieging fortress worlds by going in head first but are defenseless against longrange artillery units whilst titans ( 40k :D ) are singlehandedly capable of taking on any force thrown at them, and infantry are less durable then more heavily armoured contingents but are capable of infiltrating past certain lines of defense, or gain buffs against slower armor units. Now in saying this and to come full circle i think each race should have buffs to their native infantry, and each race again should have personalised armor, mechs etc not just aesthetic but in buffs and strategic bonuses.

Thanks again, and I do agree that it would be nice to make the various troop types contemporary (instead of replacing one another), as would adding more race-specific troop types.

Blockaxe333 wrote:6) Perhaps the inclusion of some kind of racism between certain races? Because space, and aliens and space alien racism.

This already exists to some extent (i.e. Ashdar and Gremak empires have negative modifiers towards each other), but I agree that it could extend to the population morale modifiers.

nweismuller
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Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2015 2:33 am

Re: [Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

Postby nweismuller » Sun Jul 02, 2017 12:02 am

Arioch wrote:Thanks again, and I do agree that it would be nice to make the various troop types contemporary (instead of replacing one another), as would adding more race-specific troop types.


My impression, based on the text for the current troop types, was that it specifically said that Tanks and Hovertanks actually represented combined-arms armies with heavy vehicular support under the current model, so presumably they actually have infantry and artillery of their own. (Presumably Militia are not combined-arms armies, of course.)

That said, making it so there's more choices involved in building up ground forces wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, and may change the current model.

zolobolo
Posts: 1544
Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2016 3:49 pm

Re: [Suggestion thread] + my love note to the Devs

Postby zolobolo » Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:48 am

nweismuller wrote:My impression, based on the text for the current troop types, was that it specifically said that Tanks and Hovertanks actually represented combined-arms armies with heavy vehicular support under the current model

That was also my understanding so far, and while it would be awesome to see race-specific troops represented next to the tank , I understand that that would involve a lot of work

What I do ave hopes for is that more race-specific "special forces" will be added along the lines of Marauders and Assault Marines - my only concern (as with everything :)) is if the AI will be able to utilize these


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