Originally Posted by Malorn
One of the Reddit questions I had asked was:
How do you plan on addressing the "rich get richer" problem where as an empire gains more territory and resources, they gain more power over the other empires?
Higby's response
...
Perhaps we, the illustrious PSU community, can assist with some ideas to help address this hard problem.
Part of the reason this is a tough problem is because solving it could render motivation to take territory useless. For example, if we had a welfare system it might not motivate people to take territory, or if we penalized large territory ownership it might motivate an empire to not take too much territory in order to optimize resource gain.
So how can we both reward players for conquest while simultaneously handicapping them so it is still possible for the conquered empires to strike back and regain territory?
What do you think could be done to help solve this problem?
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No welfare, no math, no reduction in desire to take territory...
My idea is just the history of war... What do underdogs do when they are out of stuff?
Steal...
destroy...
sacrifice... I think the mission system would be
perfect for this... I'll illustrate some basic missions that would be used as a
proactive way to "adjust the economy"
without sacrificing the will to conquer territory...
1. Partisans...
Back hacking in the enemies rear areas allows for a resource gain for each minute the hack is in progress,
regardless of success or failure. So, the needy empire always gets something for the effort. It puts a similar drain on the owning empire for each minute also, which simulates
supply line interuption abstractly. Resource gain should probably tie into the hack timers to simulate the value of "fresh / untouched" areas which should be considered more productive for having seen less war ravages for longer, as an abstraction... If the hack succeeds, then this territory would produce very little if it is recaptured, due to an implied scorched earth policy of the back hackers efforts. IE... typical partisans...
2. Sabotage...
Missions in the rear of empires that attempt to destroy infrastructure. These could be hacks that are quicker, but do not allow control, just a destruction of resources. Sometimes you just want to jack them up, you may not need the territory... so the timer for the missions hack is far less to complete.
3. Raid...
These missions are similar to sabatoge missions, but if an empire needs resources more than they need to deny resources, then this is a marauder mission on "depots", abstracted... Think in terms of attacking baggage trains, depots, convoys, etc. Similar to sabotage, but there may be an element of extraction involved, much like PS1s LLUs.
4. Scorched earth...
If you
presently own a territory that is in danger of being taken, there could be a mission(s) of scorched earth, where you
destroy a territorys usefulness for a period of time, and this means if you keep ahold of it, you screwed yourself too... It could be as simple as multiple hacks on your own structures, each one reducing, or lengthening the resource degredation of a given territory. This one is cool, because you never know who gets hurt, or helped by this, so feints and diversions could cause the enemy to damage themselves.
All this could be done with no damage to the resource system for territory aquisition, and fleshes out the mission system even more, since it would interact with the meta economics, for more strategy. If tuned well, this could even things out meta-wise, and really
FORCE empires to maintain villigance on the rest of the map or really
SUFFER from complacency.
Edit: Spelling stuff