Mercs in Classic fulfilled two main purposes:
- Provide a high-cost way for the player to get some high-power ships without counting against the normal ship caps. These were generally used for key battles like emergency homeworld defense, since losing them in routine actions would have been very expensive.
- Provide something useful to dump excess metal into, rather than losing it to the storage cap
And they did this by having a separate space dock that pumped out ships just like the normal dock (just mk4, and for high cost).
Ultimately, that's fine. We don't need to change it. But I'd like something that feels more thematically appropriate, and is more interesting.
After batting around a few ideas, I'm thinking:
- have a "Mercenaries" node on the Ark's menu (the menu you see when the Ark is selected; also includes nodes for Ship Production, Building Construction, and Hacking)
- when you expand that, you see a list of 2 available mercenary groups; each of those has:
-- the name of the group
-- a short description of the units in the group (for example, "Siege Destroyer and 2 Siege Frigates"), probably with icons that have mouseover tooltips for the ship types
-- that group's price in Metal
-- that group's fuel consumption
-- the time left until this group's entry is replaced by another random merc group offer
- clicking one:
-- spends the Metal
-- causes the group to warp in on the edge of the Ark's current system (with an initial order to move to the Ark); they're totally under your control as in Classic
-- removes that group from the list; another one will be randomly picked to fill its place, probably after a short delay
- there are various Mercenary Hideout structures (or whatever we call them) throughout the galaxy, and for each one on a planet you control:
-- you get a discount on future Merc purchases
-- more powerful Merc groups become eligible for showing up in the offers list
-- the offers list grows by one slot (so if you control 3 hideouts, the list has 5 slots)
- the Hideouts are never actually owned by you, and they never do anything directly, so the AI doesn't bother them
As in Classic, these would be absurdly expensive on a strength-per-metal basis, and they wouldn't count against your normal ship caps. There might need to be an overall strength cap (proportional to hideouts controlled) on how many mercs you can have employed at once, similar to how the merc types in classic had their own caps (just very high ones).
To continue fulfilling the overflow-usage purpose there would need to be some kind of ui element to let you automatically invest metal over a certain % full into mercs, though maybe that's not needed at first. Let's see if overflow is even still an issue, for example.
The merc offer possibilities themselves would be defined in xml and would be a good place for creative modding.
I like how each group could have its own place in the player's mental story of what's going on, and how they can add to making each game different.
Thoughts?
