An example of gameplay styles is that the game seems focused much more on keeping a big fleetball together around your Ark/flagships, and much less about controlling territory and taking critical planets. The primary reason to capture planets right now seems to be for Fuel to build a larger fleetball, which is frankly kinda boring.
Yea, the mobility of your "king unit" is a huge change from AIWC, and it's one I'm very excited about. That said, it's perhaps too mobile now.
As you alluded to, I don't really want to start making balance/design changes before the non-stretch-goal content is in place to be tuned as a whole (or at least in big parts), but here's an idea we might try shortly after hitting that point:
When you move the Ark to a different planet, the AI notices.
Perhaps it's a temporary increase in AIP. If we're really mean, perhaps it's a (small) permanent increase in AIP. In either case, perhaps it sends an immediate additional wave.
So the idea is: yes, you can re-base, but it's not without a cost.
On the other hand, one of the goals is for you to be able to fall back in the face of an overwhelming assault and have a chance at wearing out the attack. If falling back increases the attack on you, that's less likely to be a real thing. So, tradeoffs.
One thing I miss from AIWC is that it doesn't feel like the AI can ever sneak up on you. In the basegame there was a definite element of fighting for vision, making sure to have scouts, tracking the Threat Fleet and so on. It was something I had to prioritize and work for, and feels like that element of the game is basically gone.
Yea, one of the things I picked up over years of AIWC feedback is "scouting isn't fun". So it's basically gone, replaced with a mechanism whereby you "unlock" the galaxy one chunk at a time. That's not ideal, but at least it gets in your way a lot less. But one of the problems we have right now is that the game spends so much time "not getting in your way" that you wonder what you're even there for.
Still, having to keep sending out these little units all the time to scout and picket is a big pain when you get past early experiences with the game.
One possibility is to have each of your sensor arrays exert a certain amount of "reveal pressure" on planets within X hops (further out, less pressure), and to have each of the AI's planets exert a certain amount of "conceal pressure" on itself and planets within Y hops.
Then you simply have current vision on all planets where you have a unit, and on all planets where reveal > conceal (possibly you have to keep it that way for a minute before getting vision, to avoid rapid switch-back-and-forth exploits).
The AI's sensor scramblers would remain but not impact this in any way, they simply control which planets you know about at all.
So the difference from the current model is that if you lose or scrap a sensor array you can lose part of your current vision. Sensor arrays are most efficient on the "front", but cost power to run, and so decrease the defenses you can hold that front with. You can put them one step behind the front, but power is also used for resource-augmenting buildings, and other stuff, and even a not-on-the-front planet may be called on to defend itself or at least have enough tachyon coverage to keep the cloaked raiders honest.
Would that be enough to recapture the sense of having to fight for vision? Dunno. If it turns out to not be enough, we could add more ongoing player agency back into it by having you pick "target" planets for your sensor arrays (or at least prioritize planets), since one change from AIWC is that you can select planets on the galaxy map and give commands concerning them.
So yea, lots of iteration of this sort will be necessary, I'm sure. I look forward to it
