So let me see if I understand the intent:
- You want knowledge raiding to be something only skilled players do if they have the time and resources.
- You're making it unwise for normal players to knowledge raid.
- Pretty much you want to further limit the amount of knowledge available
- You still cannot get knowledge unless you have supply to a planet
So my questions are then:
- Why continue to have research stations at all? Why not simply remove research station and have command stations gather knowledge at the same rate as research stations do today?
- Should a stationary research station that causes reinforcements be a completely different unit, rather than a mkIII? It's not an improved version of mkI or mkII, it's a whole new unit type in that case. It's purpose is almost completely dissimilar from mkI and mkII stations.
If your goal is to all but require someone to take a planet in order to get the knowledge off it, then simply combine the knowledge gathering as an act of taking a planet, its not an action that requires thought or consideration on the part of the player other than remembering to do it. There aren't too many situations where you will not want to build a command station if you are blowing up the enemy command station (and none if you make knowledge gathering a function of command stations). Then research stations become two items, the ARS that you capture for new ships, and the "knowledge factory" which you use for knowledge raiding. It would help cut down on confusion for new players certainly.
Please tell me if I've completely missed the mark on your intent with these changes.
Please see my notes either above in this thread, or over in the knowledge gathering superthread. I've already addressed most of that. To the points I had not addressed:
1. No, it's not meant to be unwise for normal players to knowledge raid. And advanced players should not be knowledge raiding any more than normal players. That's the problem we had
before -- that advanced players knew to knowledge raid, but found it boring, while novice players had no idea to do so. This changes it so that it's unwise for
anyone to knowledge raid except when they have no other option (as a way to just have the game not be over in otherwise dead-end situations). This was always the design intent.
2. I'm not particularly wanting to limit the amount of knowledge available -- actually the next version increases the cap from 2000 to 2500 per planet -- but there was a big disparity between players who knowledge raided and did not. Since knowledge raiding was semi-obscure and also tedious, this was rewarding a tedious behavior and then making the game far too much easier when that tedious behavior was undertaken. Both bad. Now the tedium has been replaced by genuine difficulty, and enough of a time penalty that it is unquestionably not worth it to knowledge raid if you have much else in the way of options. But with the knowledge increase in the next version, people shouldn't exactly feel starved for knowledge despite all the new things to spend knowledge on lately.
3. To the question of why this is a mark III science lab, that's a semantic argument I'm not going to get into.
4. To the question of why command stations don't bring in knowledge, that was also discussed at length in another thread -- I have good reasons for that, but they boil down to "only someone who was knowledge raiding really heavily would even ask that." Labs are still useful and make sense as a game mechanic, they just don't have the same function that some advanced players previously got used to.
