Pirates, Marauders, Smugglers (A possible SEV Suggestion).

[Starhawk]

Because many people may or may not read my post on "Fleet Composition" and to keep that from getting locked for OT.

Now here is my question, how many people would like to see pirates, maruaders and smugglers added to a space strategy game?

I would have absolutely loved this kind of thing for space empires as a sort of random event thing Because it would add so much depth to the game in the ways of strategy, thought and overall roleplay taking place.

Here are the ideas I had for the seperate catagories:

Pirates: The basic pirate type individuals usually in small lightly armed vessels designed to board and capture enemy ships for the booty, some of these guys may have battleships or dreads but for the most part they should have frigates up to cruiser. But anyway they have no planets under their control and only invade planets long enough to rob them of valuable material "say having a strip mining ability that reduces the planetary value and of course population." However they would usually not prefer to engage an armed warship and if they saw one would likely do that AI run away thing.

Marauders: These guys are pirates on steroids, they control a squadron of warships that can vary greatly in size and technological ability, they raid planets and will occupy them amd use the population as slave labor, a Marauder fleet that does not have the ability to capture a planet (say they lost their troop ships to Planetary platforms) will just rob it of materials and may either move on or glass the colony it all depends. But unlike most pirates when a marauder fleet attacks it should require the use of a squadron of Capital ships to neutralize them and maybe even a troop ship or two to retake any Marauder enslaved worlds.

Smugglers: These guys usually control lightly armed ships and just land on your worlds and steal resources from your treasury, You'd have to use intelligence to spot smuggler rings and dispatch a ship or two accordingly to the planet or system with the smugglers and use "whatever force necessary" to eliminate the smuggling problem or it may even become a system wide problem where you would need to bring in battleships and the like to neutralize the smugglers.

Either way my question is would this be possible to program into a game like the SE games and if so would it be popular to others or is it just to people like me who would love to actually have that kind of thing going on so that it's not always a good idea to leave a system defensless when you are crunching that Last enemy colony under your jackboots .

And this is also a Q&A sort of thread so please give me your opinions on how these things could better work and how you'd like to see them or hey if you really want you can just tell me to bugger off lol (please don't ).

[ June 30, 2004, 05:17: Message edited by: Starhawk ]

[Renegade 13]

I think those are great ideas. As it is now, if you control the warp points you don't have to worry about other system defenses. Also, your core systems are usually left totally without support from your main fleets, as they are guarding your border systems. With pirates/marauders, etc, that would have to change, at least a little bit, and would add a lot of flavor to the game.

[Starhawk]

See that was my idea exactly I mean for the most part by late game you wont really have any ships anywhere NEAR your core systems unless you are building them!!! or unless your empire is losing the war (which of course happens once and a while).

I mean for example in the unmodded game I'm playing right now I have zero (0) ships defending my most heavily populated worlds but I have over 600 ships out there pillaging and rampaging across the 400+ worlds of the Earth alliance!

I would love to have to worry about pirates and marauders and smugglers as that would add some spice to my game as right now it's just a matter of my invincible fleets conquering across the galaxy one system at a time (or nova bombing a system that is too heavily fortified hehe) until eventually I reach the end of the game, as it is the EA is no real threat to me anymore and I miss the days of the early part of the game where my empire was beseiged on all sides and from one turn to the next I didn't know if my blockades would hold or if the enemy would manage to slip into my space and depopulate one of my precious few worlds, now I have 18 Sphere worlds, 400+ planets a population of 1.8 trillion a fleet of over 600 ships and have only conquered have the galaxy as the EA has the other half.

Pirates would add flare to the game yes but more then that i think they would also prevent the true feeling of an uber empire because you would always have that "what if this turn a pirate attacks and one of my core worlds is enslaved?" or "What if this fringe world turns into marauders and tries to conquer their system?" you would always have something to keep you on your toes.

Now although I beleive pirates should be a rather common thing I think things on the scale of worlds rebelling and Marauders coming in should be a limited thing this way you don't have SOOOO many raids on your space that it ruins the game between you and other players or the computer races. But in vanilla a world would never rebel without years of riots and even then it was iffy I think fullout rebellions on rioting worlds SHOULD take place and maybe they could bring a few of your warships over to their point of view and try and carve out their own little empire.....as it is any rebel worlds I've ever seen surrender in 1 turn and never build any form of military or defenses of their own.


But if you think about it Marauders and pirates could ALSO act as a new sort of diplomatic thing say if you see pirate ships you can hail their captains and ask them to support you against another player or something and see if you can bribe em . But more then that say if Player (A) and player (B) are allies and player A is plagued by pirates (A) can ask (B) for aid agaisnt them and say give a "gift" in the form of resources to encourage such an action.


AND THAT'S Another thing I'd like to see Cold hard bribes! Like in Civ where you can demand X ammount of money from them to do as they ask or they can demand X ammoun of you to do as you ask this would much improve the game instead of just those stupid "Aid us against empire blah blah" which the AI NEVER DOES because it has NOTHING TO GAIN......but anyway that's another story hehe.

[Paul1980au]

How abuot a borg type race that pops up from a unidentified system or from another galaxy - they begin taking over fringe systems and their growth can be exponential but you would have to conqueor them - they would beomce "one" as they took over planets

Space monsters have also be considered for this game - a great idea in my view. I would like to see the "spatial anomoloy event" able to be beefed up though i have maxed it as much as possible in my events file on SE4 as it allows other empires ships to come into youre backyard but there is only so much i can do with it.

Perhaps a ability to set certain events to a much higher probability as a game setup option (ie high plague but low chance of planet destruction) to make specialised games possible.

But yes pirates marauders and smugglers are a great idea.

[dogscoff]

I'd like to see the game's definition of an "empire" and the diplomatic model made more flexible to allow ideas like these to be included.

Each pirate fleet would be an "empire", even though it had no planets. That way you could try to buy them off using the diplomatic options, you could ally yourselves with them (and sic 'em on the enemy=-) and even conquer them. Tying it into the existing diplomatic optins like this would also simplify the interface for dealing with them.

Extra-galactic visitors could be handled in a similar way, the only change necessary in the code would be to allow spontaneous creation of new empires mid-game (this can already happen with planet rebellions, but that seems to be handled as a bit of an afterthought in se4.)
All you'd need to do is spontaneously create a new empire, hand them a few high-tech warships/ colonisers/ troop transports and then just let the game do what it already does.

[psimancer]

try this on for size

marauders and other such appear form unknown space

say you make the galactic map capable of hiding systems

then add a new science "astronomy"
and a new component "stellar cartographer"
it would have a range like wrp point openers do
then it becomes a truely interesting game as everything is actually hidden and some systems like those darn nebula systems can actually have planets and such but cant be mapped until you find a warp point into them or you get high enough sensors with your cartographers/astronomers thus you can have hidden systems and wormholes and your marauders / pirtates can actually have bases or base ships or planets to operate from

and an even more fun item is to create the ability to interface one game to another with a galaxy gate that allows the movement from one game map to another that would trulyy make an interesting situation as you have your galaxy penetrated by another super empire (somebody elses save game ) at a random location

[Starhawk]

Well see I would prefer these guys not having planets under their control (the marauders can capture them and pirates wouldn't want too) because it would make them to easy to hunt down and destroy and they wouldn't be any better then having a neutral race in existance now would it?

But I like the whole hidden systems idea because that would add a true bit of exploration to the overall game.

Any more ideas suggestions?