Improving combat diversity - taking the offensive

[stigma]

Hey all,

I could write up a whole article on this suggestion (maybe later) but for the initial post I just want to get the basic idea across as it is fairly simple.

Currently the combat of the game revolves around defending your base - and you defend it against pretty much the same threat each time - raiders. Amount of raiders and how good guns they have vary some, but that's about it. Hopefully variety in attacks will improve as the game development goes on, but here is a idea to add something different to the whole equation.

Rather than being all about defense (and often lots of turrets), add opportunities and incentives for going on the offensive. These would be combat objectives that require you to leave the safety of home (most likely involving elaborate chokepoints, lines of turrets and mines) to rely on just your colonists, weapons and your tactics. The idea is to add some pretty drastic variety to the combat this way by taking you out of your safety-zone. Here are some concrete scenarios that could happen:

- A small raider scout party appears and moves though the map (the AI makes sure that it does not wander into your defences for an easy kill). The objective is to eliminate the scout party before they can report back. Failure means a good chance of an especially large attack you have to deal with later, rather than this comparably smaller threat. Do you leave the safety of home to preemptively ward of the future attack?

- Local slave trader caravan appears and moves through the map (again, AI avoiding defenses as should be the case with pretty much all of these scenarios).  You can either let them pass, or attack them to potentially free slaves. (possibly add the option to trade with them also)

- non-hostile trade caravan passing through. Leave them alone, trade with them, or take on the role of the bad guys" to attack and steal whatever they are transporting - which could be anything from resources to guns.

There are dozens of variations here to work with just off the top of my head, and this opens up a lot of potential for both a of variation on combat scenarios, and also the opportunity to actually use the tactical elements of the game in a more meaningful fashion and get the feel of some squad-based combat to change the pace instead of it all feeling like "swarm wave defense". Also adds some meaningful choices both in terms of strategy but potentially also some moral choices to roleplay. if your colonists are close to starving, can you justify a "better you than me" attack on an otherwise friendly caravan?

Just something to consider for later additions to the "meat" of the gameplay
We certainly need some more different types of events than only raiders and crazy boomrats

-Stigma

[Mucephorous]

I like this, it would add a nice variety of combat scenarios and more importantly player choice. Currently you can't really avoid raider attacks altogether, and neither should you, but they appear to play out very similarly every time with just numbers and equipment varying. This would definitely spice things up.

[Gazz]

A defensive war can not be won.

You can delay the inevitable but if you're under siege and stay that way, you eventually lose.

The great chinese wall failed. The Marginot line failed. The defense of Masada failed.
Not necessarily because they didn't work as designed. The Marginot line was never broken... it just wasn't attacked as designed.
Mind you, they all failed spectacularly so if that's the goal of the game, it may be the right thing to do. =)


So there are 30 raiders attacking.
What if they fall back when they are wounded? Heal up and try again? Every casualty you suffer will be far more noticeable. And eventually you lose.

If you want to win this "war", you have to take the offensive. Even if it sounds wrong...

Harrass the raiders. Flank them. Snipe their officers. Cut them off from their ship and supplies. Flood their cover by blowing up a dam. Destroy their ability to wage war.

Right now, with no FOW and everything being a straight shoot-out, there is very little in the way of tactics that you can do against a superior force.
In the current state of the game, sitting in your fortress is the right tactic. Sorry.
That's the thing that needs to change.

Even if there is no tri-state FOW, what about stealth/camouflage? Suppression, morale, routing?

Mine the enemy's rear with IED, suppress them from your fixed defense, flank and rout them, keep on the pressure so they won't stop running for 3 solar systems.

But it won't just happen for free. That requires the game mechanics for doing some of this interesting military stuff. =)
Right now the game is a glorified Tower Defense. There is no advantage to be gained by taking the offensive.

[Hxns]

I like this idea of taking the offensive. I remember Tynan said something about making a mothership to get off the planet. But what if you don't have all the parts to create the ship and have to collect the parts from the raiders who stole it from your ship or from other ships.

So eventually you create your army and build a teleporter or transporter ship to attack the raider colonies and you have to defeat all of them to finally get all the parts you need to build the mothership.

[stigma]

I think the basic idea is very simple and can use pretty much existing mechanics. You just have to write up some new encounter scripts that use a little different AIs and such.

The idea could be expanded on though if need be. Though it would require a lot more work, I don't see why you could not make "away missions" that dealt with that sort of thing. let's say an event tells you that raiders ahve set up a forward camp nearby, or perhaps even a neutral colony. By going to an assigned spot on the outskirts of your own map you could choose to leave the map temporarily to go to another map where you can engage in an attack for various objectives - elimination of all foes, raiding supplies ect. Plenty of opportunity there for both good and bad roleplay. You may want to raid that neutral colony for supplies, or just send someone to set up a trading relationship.

Actually there is a lot of fun possibilities there... you could for example use actual player maps and let the AI take over from there. To raid that colony you might have to overcome the defences that some other player actually set up, which could be fun - and it saves the developer from having to code procedurally generated bases that make sense. Just an idea. The game could simply harvest some anonymized data from the clients and upload them to some central server for use in other games as attack scenarios.

This is much more involved than the simple scenarios I mentioned before obviously, but perhaps worth considering

-Stigma

[Gazz]

Though it would require a lot more work, I don't see why you could not make "away missions" that dealt with that sort of thing. let's say an event tells you that raiders ahve set up a forward camp nearby, or perhaps even a neutral colony.
By going to an assigned spot on the outskirts of your own map you could choose to leave the map temporarily to go to another map where you can engage in an attack for various objectives

That's a good start but it could be even simpler.
Raiders arrive with a ship / shuttle.
If you can capture the shuttle, they have to surrender their weapons and leave or be stuck on this bloody rock, too. They wouldn't want that...

That would at least add any reason to leave the safety of your fortress.