Station-Ship Combat Suggestions

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ZikChil
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:41 pm

Station-Ship Combat Suggestions

Post by ZikChil »

Having reached year 2051 playing the Resistance, I've got some thoughts about this game I love to hate.

1. Allow placement of ships on a grid that includes behind a station (so station is between player & enemy ships).
2. Station defenses may be controlled, aimed jointly or individually.
3. Shields! If "defended". Might be cool as opposed to "always on".
4. Armor! I don't know if this is actually implemented, accounted for, or assumed - but having the same armor options as ships. Including exotics.
- ...could be coded into Layered Defense Array and applicable to habs on planet surfaces.

5. Padlock "all" on-off for ships.
6. Fighters (i.e. - deploy / recover station drones).
7. Ships have a "Station-keeping" function to remove the need to "stop" which results in a flip & burn maneuver exposing the ship aft section.
- If a ship/fleet is docked when an enemy force attacks, those assets should not be "flying away" from said station when the battle is joined.

8. Ships have an "orbit" function that may be executed during combat/defense of a station.
9. Station Marines - Boarding Parties.
- If an enemy ship is sufficiently damaged, ELite Marines can launch boarding pods from a station to attempt a capture.
- Players may use the color coding damage mechanic allowing them to surmise when an enemy ships' PD are disabled (so they aren't simply fodder).

10. Ship/Fleet "Patterns" - some canned "Picard Maneuver" type stuff similar to the micro-maneuver options available at the per ship level.
- Some options:
-- Fleet "Burn like hell Canterbury" option. This would be useful to avoid kamikaze aliens and other fast movers.
-- Fleet/Ship "Flip and Burn" - replace current "Stop", attempts to reverse current heading by 180.
-- Ship/Fleet "All Stop", as is with "stop" but assumes station keeping once stopped.

11. Ship/Fleet "rescue".
- A mechanic to reacquire ships that have expended all fuel or are damaged to the point of zero thrust.
- Possibly a tanker-drone automation provided by the station (so we don't have to scuttle a ship & toast the entire crew in the process).

12. Station & Ship "Self destruct" - so we can take those bastards with us. :twisted:

-- Related (but not combat dependent) --

13. Improve the alien "hate meter".
- I'm encountering aliens every turn and that thing is sitting there showing me a status from 6 years ago.
- Supposedly MC affects this but you'd never know it. I'm at 26/248 and their rage hate is still reporting as 50+ (red).
- Use a number value, a tooltip mouseover for the current 5-diamond color coded iterative widget.

14. Fleet view Auto Refresh
- Whenever repairs or refueling is complete, this view updates to show the current fleet status without the user having to force refresh it.

15. Hab view includes an icon indicating an incoming enemy fleet (once detected).
16. Hab view tooltip for the icons appearing to the right of the hab/station label (not the resource icons - we know what those are).
- Document this on the wiki in the "Habs" section.
ZikChil
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:41 pm

Re: Station-Ship Combat Suggestions

Post by ZikChil »

Just going to thread some additional relevant opinions:

- If the number of ship setting is lowered such that reinforcements spawn into battle as enemy ships are destroyed, the spawn point is random (?). Enemy ships can pop in behind the station. Unless reinforcements are provided by a different fleet than the one at the start of the engagement, they should all spawn from the same forward location. The argument to not do this is to allow players to place their ships around a given station (as is now).

- Provide a project that lets the "Defend Interests" last longer. It is excessively tedious that 0.40 of the game burns player cycles on this alone.

- Add an "Acknowledge All" button on msgboxes that inform the player "Nation A" has quit relation with "Nations B-Z". This type of notification is currently a click-fest from hell.

- Only need to pop one shield icon for each CP whose defense has expired. For example, the US has 6CPs and when they expire (assuming the playing defended all CP's at the same turn), all 6 icons pop. This drops any remaining expired CP icons on the floor, which forces the player to open the Nations tab to do additional housekeeping. If xNum of these icons pop for a given nation, we only need to see one in the alert row.

- Stations appear to magically take damage during a battle. This may be from an IR type weapon that isn't rendered (?) but it typically occurs at the onset of battle (which has enemy ships at the far spawn point).

- If a station having 5 powered Layered Defense Platforms only uses 3 during a battle I assume this is due to the station being low on resources (like water?) - it would be nice if there was a mouseover event on the low power defense platform(s) informing the player of this.

- Enemy fleets love to blow their missile wad and then set the "please let me disengage" flag = true. This is annoying AF, especially when they attack a station defended only by platforms. They smartly stay out of range and any ship with the long range invinso-ray can needle the station to death if they are capable (again, I'm assuming this is a thing with a specific Alien weapon). If they cannot engage, they should disengage instead of relying on the player to grow weary or grant mercy.

- Hate meter follow-up: After multiple alien attacks on a station that were successfully defended (with no ships), the hate meter went from 1 red to all 5 red. Petty, and I still have no idea what value this is but it looks like "100".

- We need a "stealth build" project that lets the player build a station with the chance it remains undetected. This would give players a chance to survive the current build-complete-get immediately blown up-rebuild issue that occurs when they game has been managed except the aliens are flying around with 100+ ship fleets. Proximity to other factions/aliens would adjust this chance accordingly.

- We need a "commando" trait/org that would allow counselors a chance to weaken alien armor on the ground to soften up the ridiculous & nearly unstoppable crawler numbers.

- We need a "commando" project to supplement the char trait/org to allow access to the various armor tiers. I.E., commando project "1" is good only for information age armor, commando project "2" is good for information & robotic age armor, etc.
ZikChil
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:41 pm

Re: Station-Ship Combat Suggestions

Post by ZikChil »

Some of the "wants" listed in the prev posts do eventually manifest.

For example I'm now in year 2067 and am now able to access certain skills that afford me more of a buffer regarding the MC points to alien hate ratio. I may not be able to place docked ships behind a station to take advantage of the Layer Defense / Battlestation pods, but my ship tech no longer sucks so badly I cannot build a ship capable of doing a "flip & burn" and getting into position for when the alien fleet blows their missile wad all at once my PD takes out all fast movers. Also, I was able to dump a crap ton of money into military to match the aliens armor rating for planetside combat. Etc.

Seems a significant part of this strategy is to fly under the radar as much as possible, then strike like a cobra once the opposition suffers a set back.

I suppose the moral is to "suck it up and stick it out". I've had my hat handed to me twice and the game seems to have this self correcting mechanic that once I crossed the alien hate threshold, they promptly bomb me into the stone age but then left me alone. This isn't readily apparent to the player but once you get past the WTF moment after you've spent untold hours building stuff only to have it pulverized in seconds.... right. I may have lost a lot of useful hardware during the alien retribution sorties, but all the researched knowledge remains. And when the humans actually grow a pair and revolt, they take back their nation(s) and that's when you can go hunt aliens AND bitch slap that Fox News loving servant wench right off Terra.

Side notes
- don't nuke aliens when your councilor(s) are in the vicinity; unless you want them vaporized too :oops:
- work toward getting "exotics" as well as all skills that reduce the aliens percentile roll.
- When you have little resources and cannot build / maintain fleets (or habs), set the number of ships in combat to 10. This is a cheat allowed by the game that will give you a fighting chance - especially when the aliens start bringing titans to the fight.
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