...What I'd guess, though, is that I wouldn't have even founded a federation my first few playthroughs with it like this, and that (along with the pure waiting game it introduces) would have been frustrating, especially because there seem so few ways of impacting it at present.
my thoughts exactly....
as far as i know the whole idea of FP was to try to force a more complicated game onto players who were figuring out optimal quicker ways of putting a federation together and thereby (to an extent) trivializing the rest of the strategic game. The point being that they were missing out on the late game content, the highest level tech, the huge armadas and wars - all of which they were never seeing due to breezing through the strategic game too easily. [if thats not right i'm sure someone can correct me?
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I for one was finding that the strategic side of the game was lacking in challenge at this moment, even on so called 'hard' strategic difficulty, and i have found that the FP add a welcome complexity to that side of the game.
I think of it 'lore wise' as some kind of measure of how long it would take one lonely hydral, an individual of a race of oppressive dictators, to convince the newly freed races that some kind of larger system wide political structure is really a good idea..... not an easy task given their total mistrust of the other races present in the system and the crazy idea of forming a federation based on faith in the goodwill of those species.
What i found was that the game i played this afternoon would have been beaten fairly simply with 6 races remaining if i had been able to form federations based on relation alone (as in pre 1.05)... but instead i had to fight to maintain the situation i wanted while the FP ticked up slowly and be careful my actions did not set back the counter even more. Inevitably things got out of hand as the counter slowly crept up. Trying to hold back the Acutians from their expansionist tendencies was in the end impossible. i was close to keeping everyone alive but as the relations started to spiral the costs of 'stop attacking' etc. got too high and i had an acutian fear empire on my hands. Then, realising how long the FP was going to take to tick up, I had to choose sides and work hard to keep alive my chosen thorax and skylax to one day form my federation... the acutians took out the andors and the evuks as well and things looked bad, but concentrated effort got me to the breaking point and it was very satisfying to finally broker the federation - even if they were going to be facing off against a 6 planet fear empire.
it was a new challenge to have to play like this...
and now the game is poised to show me all new content in the late late game, which i have previously never seen due to usually beating the game with a unified federation much earlier.i do agree whole heartedly with what chemical_art said above... another counter/number is not really what the game needs to achieve this goal. structured content would be much better, not a simple gating clock mechanic. it would be all together better to have interim partnerships, necessary technological steps to be achieved and other minor interim goals before a federation could be formed - thereby achieving the same thing in a much more 'organic' way (nice choice of words by chemical_Art) that is more fitting for the game as a whole and would add so much more story to the experience of TLF.
However, while this is surely the way to go, such things are going to take a little more time and effort from the Arcen folks.
I'm really confident that all of this will come in time but i can see a place for this FP mechanic in the mean time as
an unlockable game start option for those that want it - just to fill the hole until other content makes it obsolete. It could definately be tweaked a little as we have talked about above, but for right now its doing a job for me and has got me excited about returning to my game this evening and seeing if i can get my poor little federation to face down this huge fear empire - and i reckon thats a good thing.
EDIT:
hmmm, or alternatively you could just take this mechanic out completely and put a few achievements in the game about not forming a federation until year X, Y and Z and then i could just choose to play that way myself if i want
I'm not an achievement hunter really but i think it might have inspired me to play this way on my own accord to make things harder... it wouldn't be the same though and i'd personally prefer a slightly more reactive/influencable FP system to choose at the start of a game. However, i can see how if this was only for a minority of players then perhaps arcen's time would be better spent elsewhere.
thing is though, there is something here that i reckon works in the sense of extending the game experience and increasing the challenge, because i found it more satisfying to pull off just forming a federation today in the FP game than forming a unified fed and winning in any of my previous games.... felt more strategically satisfying to have kept things from disintegrating completely before i got my federation started, and i still have so much story left to play out in that game with a federation i really care about and worked so hard to pull off.
