Regarding the hacking "minigame," that is perhaps a bad way for me to explain it. I view it as a "minigame" in the same sense that the waves are a "minigame," or the logistical challenges of AI War Classic were a "minigame." They're a self-contained part of a larger whole.
I wrote this up for an internal email, and we've not discussed it yet internally, but I may as well post it here as well for feedback:
Why do we need hacking to be more of a thing?
In the first game we had a lot of things that were relating to logistics, and that was basically the third leg between offense and defense. Logistics kept people busy, and gave them ways to feel clever. Where do you allocate your engineers? Which command stations do you make logistical ones, and by how much? How do you route ships from the construction yards to the front lines? Etc. We have, happily, streamlined pretty much all of that out. It was often leading to annoying micro, and it was getting increasingly streamlined-out during the progression of the first game from 2.0 to 8.0, anyway. Things that were meant to be logistical challenges early on in, like having advanced factories be capturable and location-locked, eventually got stale and had to be changed to letting you build those mark iv variants wherever, or using those warp-gate pads that let us send things to far locations directly from the advanced factories.
The removal of this stuff was a really good thing, but it left a hole. The game is now lopsided, and feels too simplistic because of it.
I don't think any of our existing designs cover this hole, and I feel like people will feel like this game is ultimately a dumbed-down version of the first one because of this hole. My sense is that no amount of improvement of archers and soldiers is ultimately going to solve this issue. People will get happier and happier... but you know what? They're ultimately going to prefer the original game anyway. This just has a Valley 2 versus Valley 1 vibe to me, it's too familiar.
We're very limited on time, though, so that means our options are limited. And that's pretty good, in some respects, because we want to introduce something that is interesting to add to the game, but not so complex that now it's a mage-fest and soldiers and archers are falling by the wayside. It needs to be just complicated enough to break up the tempo of the other two things, and all three components need to have lots of room for expansion in the future, but without adding something that feels too unconnected (like the nebula missions in the first game did, in my opinion, with the champions in the first game). It also shouldn't just be yet more logistical MacGuffins like the spire quests in the main offensive terrain. That can come later, but that's basically a variant on offense, not a third leg for the game to stand on (the original game had offense, defense, and logistics; this game has offense, kinda defense, and...?)
Hacking Alternative Idea
To me, the only idea I have that seems remotely feasible, is an addition to the metagame based on the concept of hacking. We have the galaxy view already. Taking a galcon-like approach with hackers and antihackers on there, in a specialized view, makes sense to me. It's something that can replace the existing hacking mechanics, but accomplish all those same things in hopefully a more interesting way. And it can accomplish a bunch of other things, too, such as allowing for debuffs or other things on enemy worlds, or buffs on our own worlds. Bring in a bunch of hackers to aid in the defense of a planet by hacking the gravity in your favor for a while.
Then the hackers are basically augmenting either the offensive or the defensive power-based structures very directly, OR they are progressing the meta via means other than planet-hopping with your offensive fleet. It also requires skill and planning: putting the right amount of hackers in the right place at the right time for the right length of time. Blocking enemy anti-hackers, or tricking them out of position, or similar. Just basically making the whole thing feel more like... a second battle front.
To me, it's always been the intersection of interesting and fairly simple systems that provides the greatest opportunities for player creativity as well as procedural magic to happen. It's part of why I've been so happy with the way that the warden fleets and hunter fleets have evolved, and with the way the minor factions have been added. Those allow for a bit of player creativity in dealing with them, and definitely contribute to the procedural magic effect.
But they don't do enough for allowing for player creativity. I don't think that we can solve the fleet-ball problem, at least not with everybody. But if an attack is inherently two-pronged because you're doing things with hackers at the same time you're doing things with physical ships... magic happens. Suddenly the offensive game isn't just "put fleetball in place and win or lose." You may have players going "dang I lost because my fleetball was there, but my hackers didn't finish doing xyz because my blocking hackers at planet A got overrun by antihackers from planet B, who came on over to the planet with my fleetball and interrupted me, so my fleetball was hung out to dry."
I haven't been to specific with designs on the hacking side of things yet, because I don't know what sort of buffs and penalties are possible to apply at a per-planet level. Keith will have to answer that. But, assuming that there are a fair number of things that we can do there, I can start providing some designs for the hacking game for people to tear apart and rebuild.
Techs And Hackers
The other area of meta is the tech tree, and that's something that is... tricky. It may be that we need a lot more science, but then having a lot of that able to go to hackers, and really required to go to hackers, if you want to win. The nice flexibility about hackers in my general design is that they can fast-travel very well, they don't exist on planets but only on the galaxy map, and they could have a bunch of techs associated with them if need be, which make them able to augment both soldiers and archers flexibly.
Hackers, TLDR
My thought is that basically these are logistical keys for doing all manner of cool things. Yes, you absolutely wouldn't be able to play the game without them, same as you can't play without turrets. But, as with turrets, this isn't exactly a whole new thing. The general idea of the hackers here has a lot in common with the rest of the game:
1. A lot of it is just positioning numbers on a planet-by-planet basis, so it's strategic thought about terrain. It's just adding more variance there.
2. This isn't some abstract minigame or door-cracking situation, so it's not disconnected from the rest of the game. It happens right on the galaxy map, albeit in a specialized view of it.
3. There's a strong and immediate interplay between the battles and the hacking, because you can hack enemies to make them slower (I hope), or hack a planet to give yourself a range boost, or speed up starship construction at that planet, or whatever else. A lot of these were things that fell under logistics in the first game.
4. There's a strong and immediate interplay between your long-term meta progression on the strategic front, and hacking. You can hack to soften up targets, find targets, scout without traveling, create diversions, cancel or redirect waves, and all sorts of other things. I expect. So basically it's another resource that you're expending in order to make your main battles easier.
5. The idea being that, on any serious difficulty, if you just leave this sitting around and never make any choices with it, of course you lose. But it's not a grand new skillset to learn, not some disconnected "now we have go-kart racing mode" that you have to play, but instead it's a whole new toolbag that is very micro-averse that lets you do a lot of things that you could do in the first game, plus even more, but minus the micro the first game had.
edit: In general, obviously the hacking stuff I'm talking about here is pretty huge in terms of additions at this stage... but if people are on board with the general idea, I can write up a document that lays this out as just a few days of work, in the main, I think.
