Arpharnator
commented
2 years ago Perhaps it would be possible to lean in to the "Ship Habitat" lore of the Automatons?
Instead of automatically giving Maximum Production Capacity, instead having ships being the ones that give that could be a way to propose something vastly different. There could also be other orbital bonuses such as FIDSI and whatnot.
The problem with that is that if these ships are destroyed, then the Automatons would lose a great portion of their economy.
That leads us to the following question, should the ships be the Automatons economy or simply an assist tool?
Of course, with the way the game works, unless I blow up every single tech in the game then it won't be possible to replace every improvement with ship equivalent and stuff.
I'd argue that the best answer to the question is the one that fits with the lore of the Automatons, which it looks like I have to investigate further. Perhpaps it's possible to use the sort of magic tricks that vodyani arks use to not be attacked. An idea that springs to my mind would be to create an "Orbit" action that would make the ships around the system confer their bonus to the system, while if they were in a normal state they would not give their bonus to the system.
What would prevent the ships from moving around and establishing many colonies with a lot of improvements quickly ? The colonisation reduced cap would provide an ideal environment where the ship would typically stay stationed around the system. Considering the way the faction works it could also be a good way to help new "legitimate systems" ie systems within the col cap to help get up quicker. Afterall there's no point in investing resources into a new system if you know it's not gonna be useful at the tie you need it (similar to the Vaulter's way of instantly shipping pop to their newly aquired territory far away to boost yields greatly).
I think this could be a fun way to reinvent the faction and deal with the current fairly severe problems that the faction is facing. Furthermore on the topic of ships giving FIDSI, these would be kinda the core of the faction but they would also be limited by either your need to stockpile industry for a thing more useful than a somewhat costly ship or simply strategic (even though the latter might come with some special problems)
More tomorrow, I need to sleep.
I've played the faction a bit and it feels quite clunky. The pace is really different so using the affinity can prove hard considering you want to build a lot of the turns you can build something (I mean like oneshot it). This holds true both early and later on, with the difference being that later on you have a lot of spare industry laying around so your affinity will typically fill up.
Early on it's useful for adding flexibility I suppose but it doesn't really do anything as you almost always want to be building something the moment you have enough ind. So you can get some extra ind but that's really about it.
Midgame it's useful for more or less the same reason, even though you have a bit more of a chance to stack industry as the buildings cost more or/and the science can be a bit low compared to your building rate at this point.
Later on, it's absolutely bonkers when you obtain the +15% industry interest rate on the building. There's both the fact that there's less to build but that the buildings are also more important, but it mostly boils down to the 20% interest rate allowing to generate massive amounts of industry after a few turns of stockpiling (+100%-175% of total ind).
I'm not sure if that's really healthy, I feel like the curve should be flatter on the industry interest rate in order to be useful. I also feel like limiting to 15% intereset but perhaps starting higher and sprinkling goodies around to help.
Onto other things, I believe that the Automatons bonus should be 2 parts, with one being bonuses on fertile, and then bonuses on terran. The current bonus is useful when on T4 tech because of terraformation and otherwise doesn't do much. Giving a bit of love on fertiles would help the early game and mid game a little bit. Then it's still useful on Terrans.
Then the pop collection bonus could be a bit better, it's not very good for a major faction pop.
Another thing is the trading focus that Automatons want to have. I believe they should have a thing for trading, afterall they were good at it in ES1, but it's also an issue of the numbers being low in general in ESG and currently not having a good place. However there's the issue of the fact that you want to hold little systems as Automatons but trading requires you to have a really good amount of systems to start profiting decently. I believe that the Automatons are meant to play talla and that as such it's not really suited for them. As such some traits to help guide the trading to be more profitable on a tall playstyle would be useful. My current thought were to give them -1 max trading company but have them compensate this with trading bonuses.
I also think I need to do something about the limited teleportation bonus, we already have limitation in form of colonisation cap even though it doesn't direactly affect FIDSI, and the current vesion of the empire improvement doesn't lose much of it's power if colonising in your col cap because 1/3rd of the galaxy is a lot. I tried not colonising a lot for the sake of this bonus and it was the most stupid thing I've ever done in the last 1500 hours of me playing ES2. The losses are insignificant comapred to getting access to strategics, especially with the way they work compared to ES1.
There are 2 steps to solve this problem. The first is to lower the colonisation cap of the Automatons baseline. 4 seems a good number for now. According the bonus under the colonisation threshold then seems like the thing to do. It'll make them quite similar to Vaulters in a way but I don't think there's much I can do about it if I go this way.
However the solution of lowering colonisation cap raises the question of strategics. But like I said in another issue, there are many solutions to this problem if we're creative enough, for example a constructible giving strategics based on industry. There are also many other solutions that would require me think a bit to not make it busted and limited to the Automatons factions. Also if you're wondering why Vaulters wouldn't get this treatment is because of the fact that they can choose their systems, and thus obtaining the systems with the strategics is possible for them, even if it is far, while the Automatons could be quite constrained in their system choice and thus strategics access.
I think however that the most important question currently is as to how to make the affinity attractive to use, and to make it useful throughout the game and not busted later on.