Pushback against certain types of runaway success?
Just a thought that has occurred to me, though we may be too invested into the Bandits at this point to change that, but one of the posters recently said that all their games were red and blue against bandits... with the meaning i am assuming meant that it wasn't quite the red vs. blue purity that we thought it would be originally. (whether true or not)
Regarding that... i once played a game, sins of a solar empire to be exact, where the bandits were 'purchaseable' by the factions.
If we were to try to apply this to SC, it might mean, that for XX resources one side or the other might be 'scheduled' by the AI to choose a side and then launch against the other.
As an example, red 'buys' the bandits and launches them against the blues, the bandits attack the blues flying the colors of the red and are counted as red losses when they lose men.
In this way, a certain amount of resources are used by the factions against the other, but not chosen by the player who may have preferred to hoard the resources for other uses.
In those circumstances, what that may mean is taking resources and applying them to other uses 'between' the timer that launches the bandits against one side or the other... in essence a mercenary army for one side or the other that has to be countered by the player.
This might make building large reserves of resources very difficult if not impossible and also put the emphasis back on red vs. blue in the battles.
p.s. Also in this way, the battles can't rage against a party (bandits) and not throw the game balance between red and blue out of balance. Any faction using the bandits against the other throws the balance out that has to be addressed by the other side, instead of comfortably avoiding the other faction to raise score and keep a certain amount of equilibrium. Which would certainly not be the case if we have the bandits acting on one factions behalf and throwing balance out immediately when doing so.
-Teal
Hmm.... I dunno. This one seems a bit arbitrary.
My problems with the idea:
1. Having the player just really abruptly lose a huge blob of resources is likely never a good idea. It can work with the woes, because you know way in advance when they're going to do something, and WHAT they're going to do, and they're super-varied. So it's not like you are having your resources drained every 7 turns by them, over and over and over.
2. The cost on this would be difficult to balance. Too low, and it simply wouldnt matter. Too high, and the game becomes unplayable. It seems like it'd be a very fine line... and then you throw the RNG on top of it, randomly choosing when to spend.
3. The only way this would have a real effect is if it bought *alot* of bandits at once. Like, a whole ton of them. If there's 10 bandit forts on the map, and the red guys buy 2 of them.... this wont have much meaning. Red and Blue, including the "new" red guys just grabbed, will STILL be constantly both clashing against the bandit faction. But, if one side buys too many at once, it might tilt the balance TOO much, suddenly creating a situation that the player cannot deal with, as it takes time to set up new cities for more military production. Again, woes can do this sort of thing already, but you get lots of preparation time, and the woe is explained to you during that time, and it's not like EVERY woe just spawns like 40 blue guys or something like that. Furthermore, if it's only a small number of bandits at once, well, any given bandit fort is pretty easily shut down by just dropping a couple of myth units to either destroy it, or just hold the enemy units in place for a couple of turns so you can get siege units over there. And if your myth guys die there.... you can just drop more. Bandits mostly become a threat in large numbers.
4. A player with enough resource-producing cities on each side still wont be affected all that much by this. I've seen that happen with the "resources all gone!" woe; if you have enough production buildings when that one hits, well, you're back up and going in just a couple of turns, really, unless you have like a gazillion military buildings.
5. It's really not much different than the new "ally camps", except it sucks resources out and basically turns bandit camps into more ally camps (albeit with different units). Seems redundant.
That's my thoughts on that, anyway.
Wish I had some suggestions here, but I havent thought of anything yet.