Apparently the AI will try to retake territory now, which it didn't really do before. You'd think that would lead to them wanting to get these facilities back rather than blowing them up.
I never found the explanation that the AI didn't need them very satisfying. If that's the case, why not disassemble them so the humans can't steal them in the first place?
I agree with all of this, and in general with the original post.
The reason that things were that way in AI War Classic mostly had to do with the way that AI War 1.0 (and by extension 2.0) were conceived: there was mostly fleet ships, and the focus was there. Guard posts were nothing special, there were very few special capturables (though these core ones were there), etc. Going into AI War 3.0 we started having tons of capturablees and a bunch of other things, and the focus shifted. However, the underlying framework never did shift.
This is a really good example of why I'm approaching the sequel the way I am, and starting completely from the bottom-up and ignoring a lot of certain kinds of discussions until the underlying decisions are made (with those sorts of things in the back of my mind, though). Hacking was actually Keith's solution, and it was a really good one, I think.
But I also do think that having two ways to go about something, and one of them being more obvious as well as less fun, is not a way to have the design in the sequel. I'd rather have only one more difficult way to handle it, but that at least is fun. Or ideally something in the middle difficulty-wise.
---
One of the other core design tenets of AI War Classic from early on in was permanent consequences. That's still something I really like, and there are times where that's appropriate. But even AI Progress itself evolved during the course of AI War Classic such that you could reduce it; originally that was absolutely-irreversible, but that went over like a lead balloon. I don't recall if that had already been changed by 1.0, so perhaps none of you actually saw that, but that was the original design idea.
Anyway, something I've been thinking about is that there needs to be a bit more push and pull, a bit more King of the Hill and a bit less One-Hit Permadeath, so to speak. The most epic and interesting battles have always been fought in the parts of the game where there's back and forth like that, and in the sequel I'm really upping the AI's ability to engage in that (recapturing territory).
Having one-way-doors of consequences are still also something I really like, but making them some sort of instant penalty I am less fond of. You being able to pull a "the enemy's gate is down" against the AI feels pretty epic, although can be cheap if done too much. The AI doing it against you feels kind of head-desk instead, and honestly I don't see it as something that does more than make the player play too conservatively.
That gets into kind of a vicious cycle:
1. Players become very conservative in how they take territory and what they hold because of the fear of irreversible reprisals.
2. The game proceeds very slow, and the player is pretty much perfectly protected in some senses.
3. The AI is then ONLY able to actually cause an irreversible reprisal in ways that are either overwhelming force (that's fine) or sneaking-through-the-backdoor (tends to be maddening).
4. Because of the threat of overwhelming force and the backdoor risk, players tend to both build heavy bottlenecks AND then certain forms of defense-in-depth, and this makes them even more conservative. And the cycle repeats.
To me, this is negative because it trends a lot of players toward one style (turtling with a bottleneck). Playing that way is fine (it's my preferred way personally, too), but having the incentive to take some risks after you have a secure core is something I definitely want to do. Having more things that you can try, fail, and try again without irreversibly screwing up your campaign is a part of that, I think.
Having both the need AND the ability to defend more territory without relying on a single choke point also ups the tension quite a bit. You get into more 'Indiana Jones holy grail' situations, too: "I can allllllmost reach that!" (and then you fall down the hole and die). In AI War Classic, players almost never die because they got cocky, except right at the endgame itself. I don't want to wreck the mood of the game, but having a bit of a sense of "I can take just a little more ground, and it will be okay" as a general sense would be good. But having you constantly questioning yourself on that, and sometimes it horribly backfiring, too.
Anyway, long rambling post.
But my core point is that more things that are Bad Things That Happen, But That You Can Undo is a good thing, and actually would increase tension and difficulty rather than decreasing it. Paradoxically as that might sound. I've seen it happen with various mechanics in AI War Classic and other games, where that sort of "hey, I can always fix that later" mindset leads to all sorts of fun lapses.
