PROPOSAL: In regards to resolving deadlock (Making sieges siege)

[chemical_art]

I hear reports that a race may have complete space control for decades on an enemy planet, yet simply be unable to do anything whatsoever on the ground.

I propose that when a planet is continuously sieged for an extraordinary amount of time (for example, 10 years) stacking penalties on the planet start occurring.  In traditional warfare, the major goal of a siege was to degrade the ability of the defenders through isolation. This isolation lead to an eventual lack of supplies, which in turn lead to degrading conditions until an eventual surrender. I don't know exactly how this occurs in TLF aside from ground bombardment, but I feel like more can be done.

Now how simple or complex this occurs can very a lot.  For example, after an extended siege the following things can occur (not all of them, just example)...

RCI values start dropping
Birthrates fall under natural rate, either stopping eventually at zero or even under (accelerated death rate)
Ground power drops
Static defenses degrade


Now sieging a planet is a lot harder then sieging something small, which is way the time it starts must be over an unusally long amount of time and the effects must start small. It is meant to be stalemate breaker.


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Now, if the above is considered interesting, then it could get a lot more depth fast. For example, if under siege, the defender might start employing smugglers to reduce or prevent the effects of siege. The player could either aid or hinder this smuggling. Various races could naturally be more resistant to a siege, while some races may or may not be inclined to use sieging at all.



Anyway, before I mantis anything I wanted to hear other opinions of a mechanic to prevent stalled assaults where it is clear the attacker has almost complete dominance.

[lifehole]

I've posted a lot about this in the update thread.

I think the problem seems to lie in the fact that the enemy keeps spawning 1-10 ships that will always be there just because that's how fast the game processes, but having more than one ship there at all times never gives the enemy the chance to initiate ground combat, or bombing? I dunno. All I can really "know" is that it comes to a standstill a lot, and it just goes on forever, the rest is just hypothesis.

That smuggler idea is pretty nice because as of right now smugglers are basically nonexistant. There needs to be (as also said in the update thread) some type of interface to see what exactly is happening/why the siege is coming to a standstill. This has happened in every single game since the new update.

[GC13]

A siege isn't going to degrade anything on a planetary scale: these floating rocks are all self-sufficient. The game takes place in the years immediately following everyone becoming spacefaring; nobody's economy depends on imports or exports yet, and everyone produces at least some of each raw material. The worst that would happen is that they'd be cut off from the raw material trade and some miners would lose their jobs because nobody needs that much uranium.

[lifehole]

A siege isn't going to degrade anything on a planetary scale: these floating rocks are all self-sufficient. The game takes place in the years immediately following everyone becoming spacefaring; nobody's economy depends on imports or exports yet, and everyone produces at least some of each raw material. The worst that would happen is that they'd be cut off from the raw material trade and some miners would lose their jobs because nobody needs that much uranium.

But it's a problem when sieges last so long and do so little that they last for 50+ years, and even god mote and time travel don't fix anything. Also I'm pretty sure that you could get RCI penalties or smuggling going on simply because a planet that is surrounded/being sieged is obviously being bombarded, invaded, or has expressed displeasure with there being an enemy fleet blockading the planet; which could be expressed in economic/public order rci values.

I also don't think that people who are sieged should be able to create ships at the sieged planet, it just doesn't make sense. Do they have a shipyard that is hiding from the enemy or what? haha.

[GC13]

But the decreased RCI values would be because of the bombardment, not the siege.

[lifehole]

But the decreased RCI values would be because of the bombardment, not the siege.

But the thing is, is that there is a bug or something preventing any bombardment from actually happening (even with god mote and time travel and millions of power no population loss.) So I can't call it bombardment, and since the defending planet will continously have more than one armada they can't ground invade either.

[chemical_art]

I don't see why both orbital bombardment and time cannotwear down RCI. Public order eapecially would degrade from the stress of a blockade. Economis could hardly function (food from farms could hardly  race cities, raw materials are hindered from reaching factories)

[keith.lamothe]

There's a significant improvement to moving ground-invasion along in the next patch.

Btw, lifehole, the main problem I found in the save you posted (or one of them, I was only pointed at the one by Chris) was that the besieging force was purely (or very nearly so) Skylaxians and Andors.  Both of those races have the IsHonorable flag, which prevents them from doing any kind of orbital bombardment (the main way planets got whittled down, before the ground-invasion improvement I just mentioned).  Andors, further, won't even invade.  They just stay up there and shoot any defense fleet that the target builds.

Anyway, that sieging force took the target planet in just a few months (maybe less than a month, I forget) after the ground-invasion change, so I'd suggest trying it in the next version and then giving feedback based on what you find there.

[lifehole]

Hmm, yeah, that would do it I guess, if that's what fixes it. But I didn't think troops were the problem considering they had god mote/time travel.

I've had this happen multiple times (looking back at it they were all honorable races) and it just goes on for infinity. The save I'm referring to was the one with the Boarine planet being sieged, but the andron one works too, just wasn't a full example, e.g the boarine one has the attacking force have god mote/time travel, and that still didn't have anything happen.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yeah, that would do it I guess. But the race needs to surrender. I've had this happen multiple times (looking back at it they were all honorable races) and it just goes on for infinity. The save I'm referring to was the one with the Boarine planet being sieged, but the andron one works too, just wasn't a full example, e.g the boarine one has the attacking force have god mote/time travel, and that still didn't have anything happen.

If it's the Peltians I can see a reason for them to surrender.  "Make Peltians Surrender Really Early Against Overwhelming Force" wouldn't be a bad suggestion to mantis, I think.

But with the rules as they are in the current version: _why_ would the Acutians surrender to the dark-sky fleet of Skylaxians and Andors in orbit?  As you saw, the Acutians were in no serious danger.  They were probably laughing at the "honorable" buffoons in orbit while swimming through pools filled with gold coins.

There is surrender logic, but it doesn't fire unless the situation is actually desperate, rather than simply looking like it ought to be so.

[lifehole]

Hmm, yeah, that would do it I guess. But the race needs to surrender. I've had this happen multiple times (looking back at it they were all honorable races) and it just goes on for infinity. The save I'm referring to was the one with the Boarine planet being sieged, but the andron one works too, just wasn't a full example, e.g the boarine one has the attacking force have god mote/time travel, and that still didn't have anything happen.

If it's the Peltians I can see a reason for them to surrender.  "Make Peltians Surrender Really Early Against Overwhelming Force" wouldn't be a bad suggestion to mantis, I think.

But with the rules as they are in the current version: _why_ would the Acutians surrender to the dark-sky fleet of Skylaxians and Andors in orbit?  As you saw, the Acutians were in no serious danger.  They were probably laughing at the "honorable" buffoons in orbit while swimming through pools filled with gold coins.

There is surrender logic, but it doesn't fire unless the situation is actually desperate, rather than simply looking like it ought to be so.

Yeah I understand what you mean (I edited my post while you made that post since I realized that's not really the point I wanted to make.) I just think that after a certain amount of time being sieged it should end, for either side, because I've seen the sylaxians homeworld just get sieged/taken because they didn't want to abandon the planet they had been sieging for upwards of like 30+ years.

Also, thanks a bunch for changing the ground combat logic. See, I'm not trying to order you around here, but this is the save I was speaking of, and this is the situation which I am really confuzzled about. Dunno if you have the time to look at it, you've changed the game enough on my "behalf/inspiration" already.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah I understand what you mean. I just think that after a certain amount of time being sieged it should end, for either side, because I've seen the sylaxians homeworld just get sieged/taken because they didn't want to abandon the planet they had been sieging for upwards of like 30+ years.

The bill to "abandon the pointless siege to defend our homeworld" was probably still stuck in the Skylaxian Senate's "subcommittee for the determination of whether to form an additional subcommitte for the examination of our homeworld's defense requirements".

But yea, races could be less monomaniacal about attack actions.  Hopefully that will be less of an issue in the future, though.

[lifehole]

Yeah alright. Thanks a bunch for listening to the community, it's really a rarity in this industry nowadays, haha. You're listed as the sole programmer for this game in the credits so I imagine you have a lot of work to do, thanks for taking the time to come into this thread and respond.

Really I think the solution for this stuff would just be to have a certain period an attack on a planet can last, say, like, 10 years or something; then force the AI to re-evaluate.

[ptarth]

• The race war AI for defending/attacking should be updated to stop them dropping all of their ships on an enemy siege target and leaving all of their own holdings undefended.
• War right now is either an all or nothing procedure, if more depth was added to the AI diplomacy, then we would see more emergent behaviors that were interesting and allowed for interesting player interactions. War reparations, Tithes, releasing planets, etc.
• Add another race-relationship called Quarantine or Blockade. In it, the winning race leaves enough ships to destroy any new ships produced by the looser at the homeworld of the loser. The rest of the ships go back to their daily life. If anyone else shows up to violate the blockade, the winner can act to defend the loser in some way.
• If one race has a ground multiplier of 25,000 and 2 billion soldiers, the second a ground multiplier of 10 and 100 million soldiers, is it really honorable that the second race doesn't bomb the first race into oblivion instead of challenging them in hand to hand combat?

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah alright. Thanks a bunch for listening to the community, it's really a rarity in this industry nowadays

And a community this helpful is also rare, we really appreciate the feedback

You're listed as the sole programmer for this game in the credits so I imagine you have a lot of work to do, thanks for taking the time to come into this thread and respond.

Chris actually does at least as much of the programming work as I do nowadays, but for the first few months of the project it was just me on that part (with him handling the design and project-management, etc).  He may just not have gotten around to updating that.

Really I think the solution for this stuff would just be to have a certain period an attack on a planet can last, say, like, 10 years or something; then force the AI to re-evaluate.

Actually an "Attack Planet" action does have a finite duration (something like 3 or 4 years, I think) after which it clears the action and checks for a new one from all its possible actions.  But it may just continue to pick the same one, for similar reasons.

Or possibly it's clearing the action, and its fleets aren't actually being reassigned.  Anyway, we'll see if it continues to be an issue.