Some gripes, complaints, and whining

[Damiac]

I like this game a lot, it's a blast to play, and I lose hours to it like nothing else. However, I have some issues with this game, so I figured I'd get them off my chest.

Why don't fleet postures work for pirates!?! Specifically the defend posture. I spend 90% of my game defending against pirates, not other empires, and if I could have a couple fast ships defending each sector, rather than each individual system, I'd be a lot happier.

Why isn't there an icon at the galaxy zoom level for each colony, showing some quick stats, but most importantly, what structures there are orbiting that planet?!? I recently wanted to make sure I had a defensive base at each colony, and seemingly the only way to do this is to navigate to each individual colony and visually check (usually with a lot of clicking around and searching). At least when I click the system my defensive bases and spaceports should be shown, not to mention all the planets in the system...

Why isn't there another UI element to search for things like specific systems and planets? Sometimes I'll see a pirate fleet originated from some system I apparently know about, but I can't find it for the life of me. I could spend literally hours combing the map for that system, but the game knows where it is! Just tell me!

Why isn't there any way to indicate systems with hostile life forms? Sometimes an explorer or construction ship gets attacked by a space worm, and I don't want to deal with it right this very second, but it'd be nice if I could have that system marked on the map somehow so I can send a fleet to deal with it at my leisure. Even being able to manually mark systems would be really nice...

Why can't I sort the list of attack targets by distance from the currently selected fleet? Isn't that how a sane person would want them sorted?!?

Why is it that I pay for a mining base, the civilians pay the upkeep (to who, I have no idea, but it's not me!), but when retrofitting, I have to have enough money for the retrofit in the bank, yet for some insane reason the civilians pay ME for the retrofit?!? This has to be a bug one way or the other, the UI behavior is at odds with what actually happens. The fact that the civilians seem to have just way too much money is a separate issue...

What on earth is going on with the cash flow display? I mean... it's based on tax revenue vs maintenance expense, this aren't rapidly changing numbers, why is the number such nonsense? I can understand why bonus revenue is so unpredictable, as it's based on the doings of individual civilian ships, but I can have positive cash flow and bonus income, yet watch my cash on hand go down, and I can have negative cash flow, no bonus income, yet my cash on hand is going up?!?

It's too bad the devs couldn't do one last bugfix patch. There are a number of painfully obvious bugs, and while I'm sure some of them would be time consuming to fix, some of them seem like they'd be really quick fixes. It seems the community isn't very big, so I don't expect a community patch to fix these bugs..

Speaking of the community, it's great! No gripe here, you guys seem like a really good community. Please don't take this as me bashing the game, it's more frustration that this gem of a game was so expertly crafted but left unpolished.

[Retreat1970]

That's a lot of questions. I'll answer one. Smarter players can tackle the rest.

You are correct, postured fleets don't normally respond to attacks. This is because there is never a state of war with pirates. Either you have a protection agreement or you don't. Now fleets will respond to pirates once the pirates engage their target. Most of the time it is too late by then. Your best defense is to eliminate the pirate base.

[Bingeling]

Valid gripes...

Colony overview: Visit one colony, zoom to a suitable level where you see structures. Then use the "cycle by colony" button/key and possibly click the selection panel to center on selected item. That way you should rather quickly be able to "see" all your colonies. It breaks down with numbers, though.

Cashflow: I guess it is somewhat like a real budget. It is numbers for a year, and you do not know what it was until the year is over. Expenses are not constant over the year. Add that that that there could be bugs in it, and...

[Damiac]

Heh, thanks for reading my crazy list.

It'd be nice if someone could make a mod to make pirates without protection agreements considered to be at war. I suppose they'd have to also make that not cause war weariness, which might be a little tricky... it's just such a shame defending against pirates using fleets is basically impossible when there's such a perfect tool for it!

I do kill pirate bases as fast as possible, but of course there's a lot of them out there, so no matter what I need to protect my colonies from raids. Currently the only way to do this seems to be to park a defensive base there, or a small fleet of 2 or 3 ships. Of course that fleet of 2 or 3 would be fine to defend a whole sector, if only they could be automated to go after pirates in my territory.

[Bingeling]

I have a feeling that it could be design against postures not working. The AI uses postures, and it could make the pirates extinct or something like that. And how peace and war works is not moddable.

When it comes to pirate busting, I do not find it that bad. Especially if you turn of the respawning pirates, which also should help on late game performance. I find that there is little time between pirates being an overwhelming annoyance (and proper enemy), and them being a non-factor.

With respawning pirates, though, you kill a base, some small pirate crew surrender, a new one arrives to bust your mine with an escort that can't budge its shield.

I think the following habits can help me not being annoyed by them:

- I hunt pirate bases mercilessly, unless no pirates bother me.
- I do not deal with pirates, I fight them.
- I enjoy "clean borders", which gives relatively less "external area".
- I build gas mines on every fuel source nearby, meaning pirates don't set up shop there, or at least, I get a warning when they try to as they attack the mine.
- I spend quite a lot time at peace, which gives time to observe the map and spot ships of the wrong color passing long range scanners.
- When things quiet down a bit, I pay extra attention to every annoying pirate, and make an effort to find their base.

[Damiac]

Yeah, I do pretty much all that same stuff. It's usually that period of fast expansion at the beginning of the game where they're at their most annoying, where my empire is still compact enough that an automated fleet would probably be able to protect a few systems at once.

And I really like the existence of pirates in the game. They are a good discouragement from overextending your empire, and I like that you suffer realistic penalties for being overextended. Instead of some arbitrary number being adjusted, you have logistical problems and more surface area to protect. So while I find them annoying, it's the kind of annoyance that feels so good to overcome.

[Bingeling]

When you have lots of aggressive pirates, finally beating them feels so good

[Damiac]

The game I'm currently playing is like that. The pirates are insane! I've busted up two criminal networks now, but there are large pirate fleets all over the place. They're not really a threat, although they occasionally demand I take a fleet off offense by sending a huge fleet to one of my colonies. I'm also regularly knocking down pirate bases at my colonies, I wish I could make that automatic...

[Aeson]

I'm also regularly knocking down pirate bases at my colonies, I wish I could make that automatic

On the bright side, once a colony's population gets above about 2 or 3 billion, pirate facilities start to become a nonissue as the population begins to be capable of removing pirate influence too rapidly for any pirate faction to be able to accumulate enough to build a pirate facility even with extremely heavy raiding; the pirates may still be able to build a facility for a short time after an existing facility was destroyed, however.

Stopping pirates from keeping ships around your colonies and preventing pirate raids reduce the ability of pirate factions to render a world capable of supporting a pirate facility, and you can manage that with a local defense squadron or some orbital defenses (e.g. a spaceport), though how strong the defenses need to be will have some impact on whether or not this is worthwhile. Even if you cannot secure local space, you can prevent pirate raids on the colony by the simple expedient of constructing a planetary shield generator (which you'll probably want eventually anyways, though given that this is just about the hardest counter imaginable to raiding you might consider it something of an exploit, especially since it'll probably cost you less maintenance than the troops you'd need to repel raids), which forces the pirates to keep ships around the planet if they want to generate influence there, and this kind of influence generation is really only practical with small colonies, say those with populations under a billion or so and probably less.

[Damiac]

I generally have a defense base or a small fleet of ships for each colony of mine, in this game the pirate activity is so heavy that even though I blow them up on arrival generally, they send enough attacks to apparently get enough influence to build bases.

If I notice immediately, I can destroy them with 1 troop unit, but if I let it get all the way built I generally have to recruit a few troops to deal with it. Not the biggest problem in the world, since I'll use those troops for invasion sooner or later, but if I could automate smacking them down it would be nice.