by Soelien-Twa » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:18 pm
Should there be aggressive NPCs. Yes. Was it working before? Not really. There are things that need to be fixed before that should be implemented with the strength it had been. In order to take a planet you pretty much had to do it on one turn to avoid the retaliation fleets. However... sometimes fleets would just refuse to submit to orders. The enemy planet is swept of fighters, FORTs are destroyed by small missile fleets of 5 ships, and then when the big Missile fleet is called in to rain down on the HMUs their attack is thwarted by the activation of the planets defenses (of which there are none left). Fair enough. Murphy's law. You lose the roll of the dice on luck. However... two more attacks have been scheduled with this fleet on the same turn. Those two are aborted due to the activation of the planet's defenses of which there are none. A "turn" is meant to represent days, weeks, months or even years. An action maybe as little as a few hours within that time. It seems that when an action fails it fails for the whole turn rather than just the action. I've noticed this for several things including launching sector probes. One fails so the seven behind it fail. The random fail factor should be re-calculated after each action. Also missile fleets encountering no resistance should still follow orders unless the random "dice roll" says otherwise.
There are all sorts of different players. Cogs in an alliance, loners, warriors, builders, explorers and diplomats to name a few. I don't think I will ever send out a diplomat to an NPC world. It doesn't appeal to me. I don't have enough actions to do the things I want to do now so why would I waste them dealing with NPCs. Their throats look far better under my boots than spouting demands. There are some people sure to say its not about the money but this game is all about non-action income. Non-action income allows you to bankroll RUs to do what you really want to do. The best way to earn non-action income is a string of Terraformed worlds. Unless you are trying to be totally peaceful, many of these Terraformed worlds will be former NPC worlds unless you are an ICB or Nomad (or have close ties to several ICBs and Nomads)... and maybe even then.
Overly aggressive NPCs penalize the loner players (or small alliances) trying to make a go without being tied into relying on ICBs and Nomads. I can understand why the Cybers want the NPC fleets. All of their RUs go into invasion/battle fleets and they get their action income from those fleets. The rest of us are stuck with merchants or tramp mining fleets and really don't have the resources... especially early on... to develop battle fleets. Strong aggressive NPC fleets keep non-cyber players week. I just want to carve out my own little empire in peace (or at least peace with other player characters).
"A new player that finds an NPC world in his home sector almost always tunnel visions himself on it and attacks it. Honestly I don't get that as NPC planets defend my systems just as well as my own installations and I don't have to pay for it but that's just me. For most players they immediately try and take that world come h**l or high water." - Yes this used to be the case. However now those NPC worlds are not in the same sector, nor even the same subsector, but the same system and maybe even multiple NPC Terraformed worlds in the same system as your Homeworld. It used to be etiquette that if you started mapping a sector and you saw all the worlds were owned by one player except a couple of NPC worlds that the sector was considered that player's. However now I'm finding players considering any NPC world free game even though I own the other 99% of planets in the sector and just haven't got to that NPC world yet. Foreign players coming in and taking multiple planets in my own homeworld's system is not a viable "safe" scenario to galactic conquest.
An MP 16 terraformed world as a miner with a trade center on makes 20MCs *20 + 100PCs *20 + 2*100 = 2600 RUs per turn. More if the trade center is nationalized. Alternatively I would have to install and build 130MCs on foreign planets or install and build 260CBs for the same level of income. So what is the best way to make non-action income... Putting the boots to the NPCs. Attacks on NPC worlds are almost inevitable if you want to be successful.