From the power of the volunteer developers comes a document that hopefully will help make the mechanic behind Subspace and Colony suitability a lot better for everyone! I encourage everyone to give me feedback on this document as soon as possible, as it will be used in a developer meeting later today.

Prologue:

Currently the Subspace invasion is a feature which will have direct impact on planet suitability in Earthforce Space and Wild Space. This is tied together with alien galaxy ownership in Subspace. A lot of player feedback has been given on this feature.

Current mechanic:

Aliens select a random galaxy for invasion → The timer announcement is set in the client → Alien scouts spawners appear in the targeted galaxy → Invasion spawners are added when the timer is up → Invasion ends. If the aliens win, an outpost (Uparaksana) is added, and the aliens own the galaxy.

Invasion frequency is scaled with the age of the universe. They are more frequent the older the universe is, and the spawners are stronger scaled with age as well.

What works?

The scaled strength between the 6 arms is somewhat balanced (Ekam, Dve, Tra, Catur, Pajca and Sas). The hardest arm, Sas, is now a desired area for levelling and obtaining gear by killing the outposts, which is great. I consider this part successful in its current state.

The revamped outpost mechanic that removed the invulnerability aura (I did this some time ago). This also fixed a few bugs, and it seems to work well now.

Perilous Space invasion impact works as intended. This also needed some bug fixes, and are almost complete, but could use a minor tweaks here and there.

What needs improvement?

We need to improve the way the ownership works. Ownership should be determined by the outpost only, and the death of an outpost should remove ownership of the galaxy, and wipe all the spawners related to that galaxy invasion. Basically the same mechanic as with termite mounds. Killing the mound also kills all its termites. This also means that outposts (Uparaksana) should only spawn once.

We need to improve the visual map indicators on which galaxies that are:

Targeted for invasion
Under invasion
Owned

Another key aspect is the frequency of invasions. They scale with the age of the universe, meaning it is a lot more work to build a colony in the second universe month, than the first month. Later in the universe the invasions become very, very frequent, and it requires daily clearing of alien ownership in order to keep the suitability high. We should scale this down. However, this will also be easier to determine if we improve the visual indicators, and fix the bugs that are mentioned below.

We need to improve the gear and rewards from killing the arms in Ekam through Pajca, which should be incentive for low-mid level players to kill these zones. Right now that incentive is currently in dungeons and other zones outside Subspace, and from prospecting.

What bugs are there?

The galaxy map indication for which galaxies are selected for invasion and that are under invasion, does not show.

Eggs spawn into the owned galaxies (and invaded galaxies) too far out in the galaxy. Some reports show that they spawn 30,000 distance out in the galaxy. The spawn locations should always be close to the galaxy centre, or at least close to a sun or a wormhole.

Spawned AI in a galaxy that seems to be connected to (and determine) ownership of a galaxy, can warp out of the galaxy, and relocate to other galaxies. The galaxy will not go unowned as long as this spawned AI is alive. This needs to be looked into, as it isn’t properly tested, but it would make sense with the player reports.

Outposts (Uparaksana) will respawn a few times before they actually are defeated. This means more loot for the player, but also more work for the colony builders in order to wipe the ownership of the galaxy. This is a feature as far as I know, but I’m going to consider it a bug in this design document.

General list of feedback and notes:

The major colonists that reach their full population within the first 1 month of the universe, does not see such a major decrease in their profit from a heavily reduced suitability from the second month through the fourth month. They already have the population they need, and keeping it alive is way easier than actually increasing it, especially during critical alien ownership.

The amount of players in the game is not large enough to support a model like this. If we split up the colony building players in four groups, we get: 1. New players 2. Low-developed players 3. Mid-developed players 4. High-developed players. Right now we’re hurting the groups 1-3 more than anything. They don’t sit on the time or the assets in order to actually fight a mechanic like this. And as we’ve established in the paragraph above, the players least affected by this are the ones in group 4. They have infrastructure to either avoid a major impact of the mechanic, or they have assets that allow them to fight the mechanic. The majority of the players in group 4 don’t really have the time or incentive to do the majority of the work by keeping the ownership constantly low.

Since terraforming won’t counter the suitability decrease, there isn’t any other way of increasing the suitability during the critical phases other than spending a lot of time in Subspace clearing the alien ownership. This can be very tedious in the most frequent stages of the game. Primarily this is around the second and third month of the universe.

The outposts spawn a combination of mini bosses that are both weakened, and in equal strength to the mini bosses that appear in the Dvaratas (T22 skill dungeons). The outposts seem to build up the amount of mini bosses over time, and it can be hard to differentiate between the two types. There might be some bugs related to this.

The main reason for the complaints is because the actual mechanic itself is hard too complicated and not well documented. There is nothing more annoying than having to run around in Subspace trying to chase down a light fighter that is preventing its originated spawn galaxy 10 jumps away from going unowned. If we want to keep this mechanic, we need to make it more obvious, and make it simpler. The core issue is the key element of not knowing what to do, and having this information undocumented. Combined with the issue with roaming spawners, this becomes very painful.

The incentive for lower level players, suited for the balance in Ekam through Pajca, seems to be low in terms of actual rewards from killing alien ownership. Prospecting is profitable, but compared to Sas, the actual rewards are close to pointless, due to a lack of balanced and desirable drops from the AI and the outposts in these arms.

Developer to-do list:

Remove the instant respawn of outposts in a galaxy.
Make alien ownership tied to outposts only.
Fix (and add) the visual map indicators.
Tweak the Ekam through Pajca arms to give further incentive for low-mid level players to fight that content.
Improve information and documentation on ownership and suitability through a mission chain in Subspace.

The outposts respawning isn't that bad, but it would be if there are too many. I would prefer if only one outpost is added each invasion to the galaxies being invaded, and if one already exist, another outpost would be put into limbo to spawn after the first is killed. Other than that seems fair.

You hit the nail on the head here. The only comment I'd make is that I personally like how outposts respawn a few times before they're gone because it means the clearing party gets a little more reward for their efforts. I also liked the idea of having a mini-boss spawn after a certain amount of clears (3 clear sounds good to me) and after that boss dies the gal goes unowned. Currently, I believe it's random howmany times the outposts respawns (Masterful said 24 times once (lol)) and I think it should have a limit on it.

Great summary well wrote.

Could you possibly clarify something for me is it only alien ownership in sas that generates the nerf?

What's the actual relationship between nerf and ownership? E.g 1% suit reduction per alien owned gal?

Is clearing one sas gal for example 10x the value of clearing An Ekam gal?

If Ekam was entirely owned what % suit would you recover for clearing the whole of Ekam.

Thanks those are the things that are murky to me.

I'll get you that information a bit later today I don't think I have access to the code, but I might remember it being documented somewhere!

Very well written, I think that this is a very good idea and you have my vote.



This ^

I also think that 3 spawns is the perfect amount for getting some decent loot while at the same time requiring effort for clearing an owned galaxy.

- Chrono

so what now?

Here is the blog post Calypso made which include information on galaxy ownership scaling

As for the rest of the questions, I was unable to look that up as it needs administrator access to the code.

For those of you commenting on the respawn on Uparaksana: I myself feel that such a respawn is highly unnatural. It doesn't really make sense that an outpost that marks the end of an invasion (which takes quite some time!) should just pop out of nowhere repeatedly But we'll see what we end up doing with that!

But not everything has to make 100% sense in this game Give the people that actually take the time to do these nightmare outposts some more credit

I'll see what I can do. The Uparaksana already give a rather absurd amount of loot for not having a lockout, and becoming rather frequent in the later stages of a universe. If we tune down the frequency of them a bit, I'm sure I could move more loot to each outpost, instead of spreading it across several respawning ones

That works too

did you guys decide who/how its going to be fixed? and maybe when?

Where did it state that this is the ideal, and that we're aiming to achieve this?