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DeadlyShoe -> Pirate Feedback (6/2/2013 1:47:15 AM)
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Hi all,
Let me first say I'm very impressed by Shadows so far, and think it has done great things for the game. But after playing pirate factions several times now I have some (hopefully constructive!) criticisms. These are roughly presented in the order of how aggravating or important I find them.
* Blowing up your own pirate base
This is incredibly aggravating. 50% or more of the time when building a pirate base, MY OWN ships will raid the colony and start a battle where MY raiders + the colonial militia destroy MY under-construction pirate base. BLUGH. Please, please add a sanity check for this. I have no doubt the AI pirates suffer from the same problem.
* Excessive micro for raiding
It's too difficult to actually conduct raids manually, except against planets. You don't have any interface for selecting targets that are currently in the fog of war, even if you know there are stations there. You also need to assign raid targets individually and manually (since its a waste to attack 1 station with 4 ships, for example.) So typically I have to order a group of ships to fly to a system, ride herd on them until they get there, and then individually/slowly parcel out raid orders for stations.
I suggest either a raiding targets list/interface, OR a new order called Raid System where a fleet auto-selects targets in the system for raiding, OR an expansion of the Boarding/Capture Policy interface to add Raiding options.
Two other minor grievances for raiding: I have to go into the message archive to see what I received (if i miss the popup) because the message is solong, and it's not clear where stolen resources go. My spaceport? Not sure.
* Protection agreements
Theoretically this should be a core mechanic of piracy, but it is not in practice because empires rescind the agreement quickly and almost never reaccept it. I've tried leaving empires alone, I've tried minor periphery raids, and I've tried blowing them back to the stone age: Nothing will make empires re-accept protection agreements. Furthermore, the amount demanded seems arbitrary and sometimes seems very little.
* Mercenary missions
Defence missions don't seem to work very well, particularly for planets. The rewards offered are often meaningless (1000-2000 credits, for a 2 year commitment of ships?) and they are impossible to complete in practice unless enemies leave you entirely alone. A single ship landing raid shuttles causes the mission to fail even if you have say a pirate base on the planet and easily quash the raiding party.
There's also a weird thing where an empire issued 10 defence missions in the same system at the same time, which was great but suggest that a single Defend System mission would be better suited than numerous Defend Stations.
Suggestion: Rework defence missions. Perhaps you get X money per Y ships you are defending the target with per month, up to a max per ship, with a penalty for landed raiding shuttles and a bonus for destroyed attackers. Or you just suffer a penalty of whatever raiding losses the planet suffers.
Attack missions seem to work alright, except I *think* I failed one when my ship auto-captured a target base - even though I scrapped it after.
Additional suggestion: Add a Bounty mission, where an empire pays 1 credit per credit of ship value destroyed up to the max in the mission order.
* Smuggling issues: Not enough freighters
I find that if I build even a small number of mining stations any reasonable number of transports are wholly occupied with transporting their goods around. This makes smuggling sort of... luck based? Or requires you to not build stations, not even refueling points. Which is weird when you are playing a market monopoly faction. :)
I think it might be a good idea to explicitly seperate Smugglers from normal freighters. Smugglers only fulfill smuggling missions and idle otherwise.
* Resorts don't work?
I can't get pirate Resort Bases or Passenger Ships to work at all. :)
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