Amazing changes on the Enclave.
The first allied minor faction that you have some degree of control over, I freaking love it Keith!
They're experimental: historically we haven't done direct-human-control of minor factions for a lot of reasons and that's not really what we're doing here (it's pretty indirect and general). But we wanted something a bit more meaty with this faction's behavior in the sense of it feeling like an ally that's fighting alongside you rather than directly under your control (we've already done that with most of the Fallen Spire stuff, and to some parts of the nebula faction stuff) or only participating in a very simple fashion (we've already done that with the human resistance and dyson spawns, etc).
That said, it's very hard and perhaps impossible to get these enclaves to do something even moderately complex without it clashing with what some players want them to do. So we're experimenting with these "chat directives" to see if that kind of very high-level influence is sufficient to give these a general appeal to the various kinds of player who want a "computer-controlled sidekick" in the game.
So these commands, and potentially the new behaviors as a whole, may just go away if things are found to just not work out. Or potentially some kind of new interface will be needed for them, in which case it would probably need to be part of an expansion if we do another one of those. For now it's a lot like text-chatting with a human ally in multiplayer.
For the record, I think a discovery and implementation of this sort of mechanic would be an incredibly
lucrative exciting (I swear that was an accident) focus for the next expansion.
I honestly wish the focus of this expansion had been minor (major) faction based.
I think we all crave awesome minor faction changes like the ones you made in this patch. Adding an entire minor faction control panel, and spicing up the ones we have (*Cough* Hybrids take over lost planets *Cough*) would be incredibly fun and exciting.
Great work again Keith.
