Hello, I am new here, apologies if this has been debated already to death. While Colonies were a very welcome update to give motivation for base building, I miss some good old trap-design. And trap-design doesn't make much sense if there is no menace for them to counter. The idea about these invasions is that they would be able to occur once in a while, at your designated home base or planet. You would receive a notification in the GUI and at the SHIP (the S.A.I.L. would have a red message warning or so, to make sure you don't miss it). But it wouldn't happen until you got back to your home place. When you reach that home base, there would be a countdown (3 mins ?) until the invasion would begin : a fixed number of enemies arriving possibly in several waves, that need to be defeated. They would try to kill you, and the tenants. - Several types of invasions possible: space penguin-pirates / cultists / Floran hunters / USMC raiding party / Avian fanatics / etc. - Several kinds of factors: tier level / base size / number of tenants / global pixel value of whole base materials / quest / random / biome or planet type / etc. - Only notification that "Home base has been targeted for invasion by <...>", and only when player teleport or beams down to the base will the invasion get initiated shortly. - Should only start happening in higher tiers, on the home base planet, etc. - All parameters (frequency, factors, etc) moddable in config xml or so, to adjust for anyone's liking or disabling altogether. I know some mechanics are still obscure in this proposal (what if I make a home base kind of empty and put the colonists scattered on smaller bases that never get raided etc ? fair enough that's a way to avoid being bothered by invasions if one doesn't want to...), but bear with me and let me know how this concept sounds. I mean, with the wiring tool and turrets and whatnot, I would like to see base designed by the community to withstand invasions and see them tested, that would be fun. Cheers.
That would be a nice addition, indeed. If clearing certain invasion would yield some kind of items needed to upgrade tiers or any other useful thing, it would be cool as well, as it would give those players who have more fun with adventures, story and fighting (like me) a reason to build a decent colony. After all, I am the kind of person that thinks about starting a colony in a planet and then I think, "Why would I do it? I won't get anything from it". But if it had a porpouse like that, it would be more motivating. At least for me. TL;DR Agreed.
I know it's late to introduce such things in the game before 1.0, but that could be part of a post-launch update, themed around Invasions in general, who knows.
Firstly, welcome to the forum! Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree! I loved the goblin/pirate invasions and the like in terraria and I think SB would benefit from a similar themed event. I would like NPC's to be able to lightly defend themselves or have the ability to hole up somewhere instead of inviting every enemy they can find into their home before letting a frenzy of bloodthirsty floran hunters loose on a colony though.
Yea, invasions would be fun, but probably with limitation of "Player must be present on the planet to trigger invasion/raid", spawning invaders/raiders near the players position and puts them to attack the player. On other thought, randomly everywhere would be possible, if NPCs could be trusted with the defense when player is away and cannot come at the moment
NPC guards are actually pretty good at defense, especially since unlike Terraria you can actually manually dictate the equipment level of the spawned guards via furniture if you're not on a high-tier world. Turrets are garbage now at the moment, but they can wear down enemies too.
That sounds like a very good Idea. Maybe have it as a tickbox like when you're selecting difficulty. Right now, there's no motivation to base building other than pixels, and this would be very appealing to combat centric players. Though there's nothing stopping you from just building a wall so nothing can get in.
But do you mean anywhere the player is ? Because I can't imagine this happening when the player isn't on location very easily. First of all, in a technical term, it means the server needs to simulate the battle happening far away, without any graphical rendering. Also, I had something in mind that would avoid becoming a chore (Anyone played Spore ? Remember the pirate attacks that forced you to backtrack, and were tedious as hell ? That's why I was thinking that it triggers only when a player is there). And if the player wants to reap the benefits from his tenants he/she will have to go visit at some point... But well if it is technically possible, why not. But with the interstellar travel, the idea of a general countdown across the stars is a bit finicky, so overall that's why I thought that it could be a vague indication of incoming invasion, given by our ship's SAIL, and then when on-site, the countdown begins. Then technically, what happens if a player teleports home, triggers the invasion, and then teleports out ? I guess there would be several ways to handle this, but yeah that's surely a tricky one. Also, beyond guards and turrets, I would like to allow wiring and creativity for some nice traps ! And traps that are efficient for some invasions would be less for some others, for example. Good stuff, and good fun in coop too possibly. I can already imagine nice defense designs shared by the community, if that would happen.
Indeed, but I would suppose some invasions use airborne vehicles too (space penguins, avian airship, etc). But I see you point. In terraria for example, you can't espace the invasions. A way to deal with that would be to block beam/teleport (ENEMY IS JAMMING OUR COMMUNICATIONS) while the invasion is occuring, until you killed all the enemies/waves. Only way out before that is if you die, but then you'd respawn on your ship. From there, it could either cancel the invasion altogether (meaning there must be a penalty, maybe losing the chance for some loot on an invasions' final tough enemies or so), or, you could beam down and resume the fight somehow.
I have nightmares about the alarm/warning noise that happens near constantly once you hit 25-30 colonized systems. Anything but that again! Nooooooooooooo! /bang
This could be fun. I'd like this. Main problem I see is that it's fairly simple to build settlements that are impervious to assault by simple virtue of having no entrances. To be a credible threat, the hostile NPCs would have to have a way through walls, most obviously by destroying them and you know people aren't going to like NPCs being able to destroy their buildings, with good reason. I suppose one alternative would to equip hostile NPCs with short-range teleporters, so if you ignore them too long they can plop down a teleporter and zap past your defenses. As an alternative, give hostile NPCs the ability to destroy blocks, but have the game take a snapshot of the area before the battle begins and have the tenants automatically rebuild afterward. And how's this sound: scrap the mechanic of higher tier planets granting higher rent and instead tie rent to colony safety. The better a colony is at resisting attack, the more rent you get. Further, perhaps tenants could buff each other (and you) during combat, so having a variety of different tenants would grant different bonuses.
I have thought of this so many times, I'm glad someone posted it, and the fact that a lot of people is commenting makes me really happy, hope this thread becomes pop
Thanks for the feedback. This is indeed a capital point about the whole concept. Nice pointing these things out. Here are my thoughts on this: Concerning the defense conundrum, I find both of your solutions quite nice: - The "teleport inside" is the easier solution I suppose, and the enemies would need their pathfinding routine to not be able to find a way in for a certain amount of time / seconds (+ a little random 1-3 secs to avoid massive onetime teleport of a whole wave inside your enclosed base?). The delay is also useful if you setup traps that alternate a viable route and a closed one as a part of their set-up I guess. The trick here is that the "target" of the raiders would be the tenants I suppose, and so tuning the teleporting properly to avoid "jumping" all the way there is important, while passing through the impenetrable layer still. Probably tricky to implement in any case, but worth a thought undoubtedly. - The "snapshot the base and restore after invasion is deflected" is very nice too, but means more work on balancing the invasion units that can damage walls. It would leverage the different resistances of materials and therefore could or could not dictate the base design in a way that could hamper creativity. But then again, these are for colonies, and nothing prevents a player to have a home(without colony) somewhere else, never invaded, where his/her creativity can go wild. In addition to the reverting back to original state, that could incur a pixel penalty at the end of the invasion. It could be either an amount to pay to set the base back to its original state, or a penalty on the overall "safety index" of your base if tenants residences are affected ? Representing their feeling of being unsafe and impacting their rewards accordingly. One last thing here : the wall-damaging could be either a product of normal attacks of some mobs (expect decent destruction as a result, on weaker materials), or a special attack that triggers very much like the teleporting of solution 1 : if the pathfinding cant access the tenants aftera while, some special attacks that can damage blocks will start to occur. NOTE: since this could also happen during a multiplayer session, the means of how a person could "join in" during an invasion, or be locked out (for the same reasons as a player could not beam out during an invasion for instance), need to be discussed and set-up as well for sure. Now since I would more see this as a big after-launch update, I think this definitely needs to be a robust, bigger concept, and therefore I can only applaud your suggestion to tie tenants rewards to colony safety. Then again, colony safety could be a product of both the planet tier and the invasions success/failure rate. Invasions could be definitely tied to planet tiers too, killing two birds with one stone : - If you want a colony easy to protect, build on early tiers planets (possibly the lowest tier have no invasions but yield the minimum, and possibly cuts out the best reward gear, but can count as a first "step" to secure some income for early play) - If you want a colony harder to protect, build on later tiers planets (harder invasions with more waves/enemies and more powerful ones etc, but better tenant revenue and higher/precious gear or materials rewards are possible, depending on safety etc). This way players can tune out the challenge for themselves. Higher reward from colonies/tenants mean you have to go on harder planets and face harder invasions. This is effectively another tiered progression, in parallel to the tiered progression we have now regarding exploration, more or less. And I like this idea very much.
Giving the players a way to have peaceful settlements if they want it is a good idea. The reason suggested dissociating rent/danger with tier is really because I want to disassociate them with planet type. I think players should be able to have a safe city on a lava planet, or a frequent attacks on a meadowy planet.
