New native species trait : Disloyal

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afwbkbc
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New native species trait : Disloyal

#1 Post by afwbkbc »

This trait should be added to powerful natives that may be unbalanced otherwise.
For example, Mu Ursh and Kobuntura.
This trait will balance powerful natives by making it harder to contain them in empire. Will also add interesting strategy decision - building reliable empire by sticking with loyal species, or building oppressive empire by making use of powerful disloyal species with additional efforts to secure them.

Disloyal is defined in percentage (i.e. Disloyal 2%). May be absent. May have float value like 0.6%.

Effects:
Species with any Disloyal percentage present will not attack their own kind (i.e. Mu Ursh troops won't invade Mu Ursh planet, Mu Ursh ships won't attack Mu Ursh ships of other empire)
Every turn there is a chance (defined by Disloyal percentage) for planet to rebel. Planet will become neutral and will require to be invaded and conquered again.
- planet can't rebel until its troops reached 25% of maximum troops cap.
- if yoir fleet in star system is strong enough (weapons > planet defence and structure+shield > planetary shield) - chance of rebel is halved.
- if there is no fleet in system - chance of rebel is doubled
- if you have more troops in troopships in system than defensive troops on planet - rebel chance is halved
- if empire has planet with species that also live on neutral planet in same system - chance of rebel of this planet is doubled. If there are two planets with same species in same system (that either rebelled or were neutral initially) - chance is tripled, and so on. So if you have 4 Kobuntura planets in same system and three of them already rebeled (and you didnt reconquer them yet) - there is high chance of last one rebelling aswell soon
- after rebelling, planet loses tech-based defense, shield and troops bonuses gradually, reducing by 33% every turn (but not less than 1) until reaches base values (depends on natives)
- after rebelling and becoming neutral, planet won't fight with player's fleet immediately but will have one turn delay so player can remove fleet if needed.
- Concentration Camps increase chance of rebel 10 times, i.e. you don't want to concentrate species with Disloyal 10% - they will rebel immediately because chance will become 100% (unless you reduce it by other means, but it will still be really high). Upon rebelling, Concentration Camps are destroyed
- rebel chance is modified by percentage of population cap reached. If cap is 10 and population is 10 - rebel chance is normal, if population is only 5 (with cap of 10) - rebel chance will be halved.
- if system belongs to player's empire for 50 years without rebelling - every next turn rebel chance will decrease by 4% (so after 60 years it will be reduced by 40% and after 75 turns by 100% so planet will become completely loyal). Rebelling or being conquered by another empire will reset this counter and remove rebel reduction bonus accumulated
- "Galactic Loyalty" tech branch will exist and provide global bonuses (i.e. "Reduces global Disloyalty by 10%) and specialized buildings that reduce Disloyalty locally.
During combat, there is chance (determined by Disloyal value) for ship to change sides if enemy fleet have more ships with same species than player's. "More" means some comparison of total attack, defence and shields. Chance is modigied by how much more ships of same species enemy has. I.e. if you have 2 Mu Ursh ships and 20 other and enemy has 6 same Mu Ursh ships and 5 other - every turn every your Mu Ursh ship will have Disloyal*3 chance to change sides and move to enemy's fleet.
When outside friendly supply - fleet that consists mostly of disloyal troops will have chance to rebel. Chance is equal to Disloyal percentage and is modified by how many lanes ship is away from friendly supply. Upon rebelling, fleet become neutral space monsters and roams around galaxy.
- fleet can only rebel if ships with Disloyal species make at least 66% of fleet's strength.
- if fleet contained other species - a combat begins upon rebeling. Rebel only occur if Disloyal species represent majority of strength, so other ships are always destroyed but may damage traitors (or destroy some) before death, making it easier to deal with them later.
- "Galactic Loyalty" tech tree will have combat-specific branches to mitigate this.

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Voker57
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#2 Post by Voker57 »

There's already Happiness counter which should be used instead.
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Vezzra
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#3 Post by Vezzra »

Species-Empire relations is a mechanic that is on the roadmap, and IIRC some basic framework has already been implemented. Having species that are harder to integrate into your empire is definitely something that will be part of that mechanic. And using that (among other things) to balance powerful native species is certainly a good idea, and probably going to happen.

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afwbkbc
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#4 Post by afwbkbc »

Voker57: happiness is completely different thing. You can be happy but disloyal (anarchist) or unhappy but loyal (scared of cops).

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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#5 Post by afwbkbc »

Vezzra: so, no harm will come if I implement 'Disloyal' change but not add it to any existing species, right?
AI changes needed would be minimal, maybe just keeping some fleet and troops over disloyal planets and prefer loyal species over disloyal if their gains are similar.
I'm currently working on Necri species that will definetely need to be disloyal / rebellious, I thing making this trait reusable is better than hardcode to Necri scripts.

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Krikkitone
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#6 Post by Krikkitone »

afwbkbc wrote:Voker57: happiness is completely different thing. You can be happy but disloyal (anarchist) or unhappy but loyal (scared of cops).
Those don't really matter for game mechanics

Poor "Happiness"=rebels... anarchistic species=low happiness

If you are "scared of cops" then
Base Happiness=Low, but there is a positive "happiness" effect as long as there is a garrison/fleet overheat (as soon as the garrison/fleet is eliminated you are ready to rebel)

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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#7 Post by afwbkbc »

Lol, NO.Happyness no direct relation to rebels. Happyness may INCREASE chance of rebels but only for species that CAN rebel. For others low happyness is more like depression.
Some peaceful monkeys are just not brave enough to rebel against the large empire, and low happyness won't add them bravery out of nowhere.
Also high happyness do not prevent anarchic views of species if they have them.

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Krikkitone
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#8 Post by Krikkitone »

afwbkbc wrote:Lol, NO.Happyness no direct relation to rebels. Happyness may INCREASE chance of rebels but only for species that CAN rebel. For others low happyness is more like depression.
Some peaceful monkeys are just not brave enough to rebel against the large empire, and low happyness won't add them bravery out of nowhere.
Also high happyness do not prevent anarchic views of species if they have them.
Happiness as a game mechanic is the "rebel" measure. so a "cowardly" species would have high happiness(or low combat strength)

There's no other gameplay reason to have "happiness" (there might be a 'fluff' reason if you want to imagine you are keeping your population happy in a utilitarian utopia)

(a different term might be useful, depending on how the mechanic works.)
Last edited by Krikkitone on Thu Mar 23, 2017 3:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#9 Post by afwbkbc »

Actually happyness influences a lot of other things, i.e. ability to colinize planets.
It's still not directly opposite of likelyhood of rebellyness. Most natives will never rebel. It takes some balls for a single planet to rebel against the Empire. So it's mostly possible for militarized or fearless natives, i.e. Mu Ursh.
Others are just, um, 'терпилы' (idk how its in english) - they just accept their fate silently and won't uprise against their masters, regardless of how unhappy they are.

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Vezzra
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#10 Post by Vezzra »

afwbkbc wrote:Vezzra: so, no harm will come if I implement 'Disloyal' change but not add it to any existing species, right?
That depends on what you expect. This is an open source project, so you fork your own copy of the codebase and implement tweaks, features etc. to your hearts desire, and shape the game to your taste. Your free time and coding skills being the only limit here.

However, if you want to contribute something that gets accepted into the main repository, things get a bit more complicated, depending very much on what it is you want to contribute. Simple bugfixes or implementation of features/tweaks that have been already agreed upon will most likely be accepted, provided the your code meets our code standards, and after you address any issues that might be raised by those reviewing your contributions.

If, as it's the case with your idea here, you propose a new feature, element, mechanic, whatever, this has to be subjected to the usual design process: presenting the idea (as you've done here in this thread), followed by a design discussion. Adjusting the propsal to suggested changes, further discussion, etc., until we reach a general consensus or the idea gets rejected (for whatever reason). If finally accepted, it can be implemented.

However, because all of us do this in our free time as a hobby, there is only so much time we can spare for new suggestions, so please don't be offended if we don't pick up everything. Especially when someone churns out a lot of ideas like you did recently. We just don't have the capacity to deal with all of this, you'll have to adjust to a much slower pace here. ;)

Now, getting back to your suggestion of a "disloyal" species trait: we have already plans for mechanics that will achieve something like you propose here, although not in that form and not in that way. But the basic idea, to have a "loyalty" factor (we have been calling it "allegiance") for species, so you e.g. can't just crew your ships with a recently conquered species, or only do so risking severe repercussions, is something we are aiming for. Or have species whos loyalty/allegiance is more difficult to gain than that of others.

E.g. the "xenophobia" factor should come into play here. So you managed to conquer those nasty Eaxaw neighbors, who make for good pilots. But having been conquered and being xenophobes to begin with will make it very hard to make them loyal to your empire. And unless you gained their loyalty, it might be a really bad idea to crew all your new warships with them.

Just to give you a rough idea what might come. All of this is still in the early "tossing ideas around" phase. But whatever it will turn out to be in the end, it will most certainly be quite different from what you suggested. Which makes it unlikely that your idea as outlined here will make it into master, when it's already clear it will be superseded by a more thorough/general mechanic anyway in the not too distant future.

What I encourage you to do, however, is to join the discussions once we get to the whole species-empire, species-species relation, happiness and allegiance stuff for real. Then we can consider which of your ideas here can be incorporated into those concepts/mechanics. Given the pace of our advancement you'll have to be patient though. I don't expect us to get there before next year.

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Vezzra
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Re: New native species trait : Disloyal

#11 Post by Vezzra »

afwbkbc wrote:Actually happyness influences a lot of other things, i.e. ability to colinize planets.
It's still not directly opposite of likelyhood of rebellyness. Most natives will never rebel.
I wouldn't say that. How exactly happiness is going to work, how it will interact with "allegiance" and a rebel mechanic hasn't been decided yet - far from it. There have already been a lot of ideas and thoughts tossed around, but we haven't come to a general consensus yet, not even close. The first discussions actually happened a long time ago, before I joined the project, and from what I've read in those ancient threads (and also the more recent ones), it's a difficult beast.

The challenge is to come up with a mechanic that makes sense, isn't too complicated, allows us to achieve a quite broad variety of effects/dynamics. On top of that it turned out that different people have very different ideas and preferences how to do it. There are many potential approaches...

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