Sparked by this:
This kind of sounds like the Reprisal mechanism. Which, while I don't like it when used for Reprisal (when the accumulation trigger is "Player loses ships"), could actually be a good way to do a retaliation mechanism when the accumulation trigger is "Player does offensive stuff".
This is an interesting point. Keith's explanation of salvage and reprisal (kinda related to one another, but not completely) was:
Basically the literal mechanic is that:
- an AI ship dying on a human planet increment that planet's salvage counter by some portion of the ship's metal cost
- each second, a certain % of the total salvage on the planet is reclaimed by the player; the efficiency (% wasted) of that depends on which command station is present (home gets best; logistical-III next, on down to military-I)
The flip-side mechanic is reprisal, where:
- a human ship dying on an AI planet increments that AI's reprisal counter by some portion of the ship's strength (roughly corresponding to metal cost)
- when that passes a certain threshold (relative to normal wave strength) the AI schedules a reprisal wave a few minutes later; and when that launches it sends all the accumulated strength back at the player in a wave (the Mimic AI type actually sends back the same types of ships that the player lost, which gets !Fun!)
The meta-goal being that if your fleet wipes you won't have to sit around for half an hour (real-time) waiting for it to rebuild; instead you have a few minutes to prepare for a nasty counter attack, which will either kill you or give you lots of extra metal to help rebuild your fleet.
The secondary meta-goal is that tactics based on throwing away entire fleets have a trade-off other than real-time waiting. This doesn't tend to hit neinzul tactics very hard (I still use "dock cannon" tactics with them and the reprisals aren't too bad), but it does make the loss of a core of starships, or the careless handling of any fleetball, hurt more.
In other words: you still set the pace of the tennis match, but the AI will return your last serve
I'm not sure if anyone has objections to salvage or thoughts there, but if so honestly that should be a different thread I think.
The motivations behind reprisal are interesting and make sense to me, but I can also see the objection to it. The AI reacting to you doing "offensive stuff" makes sense, but also the AI reacting to "hey you jerk that just keep throwing walls of dead bodies at me" makes sense from a balance standpoint.
Perhaps more relevant would be honestly a morale system for ships that are in a battlefield where they are just getting routinely trounced. Aka, morale goes down by x amount for every squad death above n on a planet. And then morale improves by y amount per second if morale is dampened on a planet. Effectiveness of the human ships on that planet are dampened in some way by z amount based on morale being lower that x amount.
This would only apply to AI planets, since on player planets that would be maddening. Everyone hates morale systems most of the time, and I am one of those people. But in this case, it would be one way to stall the too-cheesy tactic of "just keep throwing little rocks at the big rock over and over and over with no consequences until it breaks."
With (potentially) the new system of techs, this would also be a non-ship-focused area where you could potentially invest some science, basically to make your pilots have less negative response to morale drops. (Yes in this game I see the ships as potentially being piloted, whereas in AI War Classic they were not).
