Are people finding the hacking mechanic useful? As I understand it, you only get to do so many raids.
Basically correct, it's not meant to be a useful mechanic though, however it's made K-Raiding more interesting. It's a governor on the engine. You only get to do so much before the AI whacks you upside the head. It's similar to the tazer lock. It was too powerful for the intent, so it got restricted.
I'm actually trying to make k-raiding more useful, too, in the sense that it should actually be easier and quicker to do now. Previously our approach was to marginalize the tactic by making it really long and annoying. This was better than the previous shattering-of-balance, but as we've seen recently it didn't really even prevent that. So now it's easier, and I actually hope to see
more players using k-raiding (and the other stuff) when it's strategically advantageous. I may even make it easier, just to encourage broadening into those kinds of tactics.
But the key that allows that is that now you can't go on doing it a basically-unlimited amount of times without something hitting the fan. At the same time, it's not just saying "nope, can't hack anymore, bye", it's just getting nastier and more unpredictable in how you respond. So you don't know exactly where "the line" is in terms of how much backlash you can handle, and even after you cross it you can probably pull out a desperate defense and survive. Hopefully this will create some suspense, but that could be wishful thinking on my part
If you use up one of these raids doing hacking, that's one less you can knowledge raid.
Precisely.
Accurate, but not precise
The first ship-design-hack causes significantly less future suspicion than 3000 points of k-raid. But yes, it's a tradeoff. And who knows where the numbers will end up.
Thoughts? Also, is this encouraging folks to save scum to get the ship that they want?
I'm not save scumming 'real' games, though I am the same one to test out the different levels of challenge each one incurs, including combinations. However, yes, I could see save scumming ARS captures, doing a hack if you got a 'lousy' ship. I won't but it's a significant possibility.
It does somewhat encourage "capture the planet normally, and if I don't like what I get savescum and hack it and see if I like those choices, and if I don't like those just savescum and take the normal one again". It doesn't reward "hack, don't like choices, savescum, hack the same planet, see if I like these choices better", though: the 3 types available on a planet are now set at the beginning of the game (or when you load an older game). Which, incidentally, makes the normal ARS unlocks vary between planets instead of always giving you the "next" one from the map random seed.
Anyway, we'll see how things go. There are some bugs people have found that I need to iron out, though I get the impression that the mechanic is working in
most cases.
If this winds up being too restrictive, the rate of growth of the AI's response to hacking can be changed to allow more of it. I don't mind doing that if it results in more choice and more fun, because now there's actually some way to balance it so that it doesn't render a large swath of the other choices in the game sub-optimal (and thus "not there" in the sense that not managing energy is not really an option for really serious play, etc).
