*Nomination: keith.lamothe
I'm sure if my daughters had a nerfbat they'd have already accomplished that
On the wormhole guard posts thing, I was actually thinking about that a couple nights ago: would it hurt to just get rid of them? It's not like the AI really needs the extra reinforcements it gets from them nowadays.
Then I recalled something important: without them the AI will probably have
zero military presence around most wormholes, which would probably lead to a "house without walls" feel.
They used to just be invisible and invincible, to fulfill that role. Then they were made visible but it was too easy to kill them so people were completely-neutering systems very quickly and AI reinforcements were tanking pretty hard. So they were made tough-as-nails and given a little popgun to make sure their guards wake up at the proper time (which is also responsible for its range).
But I wonder if just making them reasonably killable, substantial combatants, and merging them and the tachyon guardian (though that might make tachyon drilling too hard) wouldn't be a bad thing. It might give the cheesemasters some new angles to work, but I'd like to deal with that in some way other than "player is constantly tripping over nigh-invulnerable annoyances". Albeit easy enough to ignore most of the time, hence this not coming up much over the past two years.
But it might be better to leave well-enough alone for now, too