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Infrastructure vulnerability in Starmade
Fuel is a generic concept for a system that gives ships upkeep and maintenance relative to their potential agency. Since the best marker of potential agency is power, fuel must be the price of power. How jealously do nations with aspirations of military power in the real world guard their sources of fuel for their power plants?
It is not work (or grind) that is required to make fuel a regulating factor. What is required is vulnerability to attack. The cost of controlling more sources of potential agency then becomes defensive strategy (in all its facets; diplomacy, defense, intelligence gathering & defense – all of which already we can and do perform in game, and are not "new dynamics" that would need to be implemented, although value could be added by further facilitating them). At this point diplomacy and defense in a general sense to preserve infrastructure become as valuable a task as mining or pirate hunting for the basic build resources.
Without fuel, without vulnerable infrastructure (scattered across planets and stations with a variety of functions) to provide that fuel, defense is not a concern within the game, and diplomacy (not a dropdown defining a formal relationship, but actual diplomacy; respecting territory, communicating respectfully, engaging in mutual trade, lending emergency assistance, organizing mutual defense, garnering public image through excellent play) is more of a convenience than a necessity. One need not even plan ahead before provoking a conflict or violating an agreement, as retreat to the invulnerable home base is always an option, and no outlying infrastructure exists.
If not outright removal of homebase invulnerability (solvable, but potentially undesirable for a variety of arguable reasons), perhaps it would be sufficient to force everything supporting ship-building & ship-maintenance infrastructure (at any but the tiniest of scales) be placed on vulnerable, outlying infrastructure. Say, perhaps, allow invulnerability only on stations meeting strict limitations (max mass, max power, no factories somehow, no shipyards perhaps – the specifics are debatable and indeed very flexible). Then the option for any player to have a safe respawn point and safe storage reserve (though limited in capacity to maybe a few hundred thousand or 1-2 million), a minimum of safe docking, and basically not be able to be permakilled back to the stone age is retained. What is gained is that additional infrastructure can be attacked. Actions now have consequences. Attacks can result in actual long-term damage to an opponent but cannot erase them from the game entirely.
Perhaps a simple solution – replace homebase invulnerability with a single new block providing a completely invulnerable kind of shield for stations & planets only. A shield powered by faction points, with a power demand that scales with entity mass and/or energy output (including mass/power of docked entities). If rendering a small station with 1M storage, undeathinator, and docking for 10K mass worth of ships cost as much as 1 claimed systems, factions would face choices regarding size of invulnerable command station(s) versus territory held. It would also feed into more quickly depleting the protection of long-inactive faction and over-reaching 1-2 man factions. A 1-man faction could still easily claim a system and have a very small invulnerable home base at a cost easy to pay even logging on a few minutes every few days. Larger more active factions could render a planet invulnerable, or several small stations, or one larger station, but would have to budget for faction points.
Or perhaps simply limit the total mass of a structure with invulnerability, prohibit factories & shipyards on stations or planets with invulnerability. This is not about nerfing homebases – factions can make any station their home base, this just means that if it has the faction's entire infrastructure wrapped up in it, leaving no part of the faction's manufacture, supply & logistics open to attack it can't be invulnerable. It can be defended by heavy turrets and fleets, but not invulnerable. Perhaps the invulnerable base is just a reserve safehouse with no infrastructure just a large storage, and the actual homebase is vulnarable to attack. As long as the capacity to store a dozen planets worth of goods and churn out fleets of ships within minutes isn't invulnerable, inulnerability can linger on and will no longer prevent real fighting between player empires. Players become motivated to distribute outlying infrastructure rather than centralize them as a single target.
Fuel is a generic concept for a system that gives ships upkeep and maintenance relative to their potential agency. Since the best marker of potential agency is power, fuel must be the price of power. How jealously do nations with aspirations of military power in the real world guard their sources of fuel for their power plants?
It is not work (or grind) that is required to make fuel a regulating factor. What is required is vulnerability to attack. The cost of controlling more sources of potential agency then becomes defensive strategy (in all its facets; diplomacy, defense, intelligence gathering & defense – all of which already we can and do perform in game, and are not "new dynamics" that would need to be implemented, although value could be added by further facilitating them). At this point diplomacy and defense in a general sense to preserve infrastructure become as valuable a task as mining or pirate hunting for the basic build resources.
Without fuel, without vulnerable infrastructure (scattered across planets and stations with a variety of functions) to provide that fuel, defense is not a concern within the game, and diplomacy (not a dropdown defining a formal relationship, but actual diplomacy; respecting territory, communicating respectfully, engaging in mutual trade, lending emergency assistance, organizing mutual defense, garnering public image through excellent play) is more of a convenience than a necessity. One need not even plan ahead before provoking a conflict or violating an agreement, as retreat to the invulnerable home base is always an option, and no outlying infrastructure exists.
If not outright removal of homebase invulnerability (solvable, but potentially undesirable for a variety of arguable reasons), perhaps it would be sufficient to force everything supporting ship-building & ship-maintenance infrastructure (at any but the tiniest of scales) be placed on vulnerable, outlying infrastructure. Say, perhaps, allow invulnerability only on stations meeting strict limitations (max mass, max power, no factories somehow, no shipyards perhaps – the specifics are debatable and indeed very flexible). Then the option for any player to have a safe respawn point and safe storage reserve (though limited in capacity to maybe a few hundred thousand or 1-2 million), a minimum of safe docking, and basically not be able to be permakilled back to the stone age is retained. What is gained is that additional infrastructure can be attacked. Actions now have consequences. Attacks can result in actual long-term damage to an opponent but cannot erase them from the game entirely.
Perhaps a simple solution – replace homebase invulnerability with a single new block providing a completely invulnerable kind of shield for stations & planets only. A shield powered by faction points, with a power demand that scales with entity mass and/or energy output (including mass/power of docked entities). If rendering a small station with 1M storage, undeathinator, and docking for 10K mass worth of ships cost as much as 1 claimed systems, factions would face choices regarding size of invulnerable command station(s) versus territory held. It would also feed into more quickly depleting the protection of long-inactive faction and over-reaching 1-2 man factions. A 1-man faction could still easily claim a system and have a very small invulnerable home base at a cost easy to pay even logging on a few minutes every few days. Larger more active factions could render a planet invulnerable, or several small stations, or one larger station, but would have to budget for faction points.
Or perhaps simply limit the total mass of a structure with invulnerability, prohibit factories & shipyards on stations or planets with invulnerability. This is not about nerfing homebases – factions can make any station their home base, this just means that if it has the faction's entire infrastructure wrapped up in it, leaving no part of the faction's manufacture, supply & logistics open to attack it can't be invulnerable. It can be defended by heavy turrets and fleets, but not invulnerable. Perhaps the invulnerable base is just a reserve safehouse with no infrastructure just a large storage, and the actual homebase is vulnarable to attack. As long as the capacity to store a dozen planets worth of goods and churn out fleets of ships within minutes isn't invulnerable, inulnerability can linger on and will no longer prevent real fighting between player empires. Players become motivated to distribute outlying infrastructure rather than centralize them as a single target.
