Story; Conflicts

Post ideas & suggestions you have pertaining to the game here.
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robotarozum
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We start with Korolov v. Charon. That works great.

We end with Commonwealth Fleet v. Ares. That works okay, but I feel like the big gap between these two combat zones causes it to swell and make up a disproportionate part of the game. In my last playthrough I destroyed 13 Ares stations, 1 Ranx, 1 Huari, 4 Sung; I killed more Sandstorms (293) than the next two highest hostiles combined (281 Lumi Drones and Corsairs). IIRC past playthroughs weren't so dramatic, but still. Ranx/Huari/Sung all get a blurb on the Galactic Map, but the overwhelming majority of actual engagement is Ares.

Suggestions:

Commonwealth Militia v. Sung
Already happens to some extent, but getting access to a Sung capital system/mission with sufficient rank would be great. It always confused me why the slave coffins listed Jiang's Star as the Sung home system... and nothing special happened there. The Sung have a lot of variety but it's pretty easy to not see it, which seems like a waste. There doesn't need to be any great material reward, the sense of accomplishment from crushing a slave ring is pretty significant.

Huari
They've got their little Sung interaction, I think the best solution is to just take their name off the galactic map. Unless there's a lot of development for them in the works, they have 1 ship and 1 station: just not interesting, and the Militia makes a much more plausible rival for the Sung in terms of breadth and strength.

Dwarg v. Luminous
A lot of the conflict in Transcendence is black and white: shippers v. pirates, government v. slavers, even in the government v. government of Commonwealth/Ares it's very clear who the good guys are and we have little/no opportunity to side with the other team. Dwarg and Luminous have much in common: they're annoying, there's a lot of them, they make use of subhuman soldiers (zoanthrope and AI respectively). They can even stay auto-hostile until the player makes contact through a neutral mediator (CDM? advanced auton dealers? Makayev?) and goes one way or the other, neither side shows much concern for its foot soldiers.

The Luminous rewards would seem to me to be more and more advanced computing things (giving the quantum CPU a little more oomph in the process) and ending the random Drone attacks. I've always found wingmen in Transcendence to be more trouble than they're worth, but disposables with no penalty for loss could be useful? And being able to sic a Behemoth on an enemy with non-WMD would be pretty delicious.

Ranx v. Teraton
On the surface this seems like a black/white conflict again, but the most straightforward player path is to obliterate everything deemed hostile (and any friendlies you can get away with, which in my case tends to mean a lot of Ferians) which seems to fit right into the Ranx worldview. The Ranx Empire are the only sovereign with a detailed official backstory and are supposed to be geopolitically (astropolitically?) relevant, and in the game we can easily get more interaction with a measly little Cartel.

Solution: picking sides. It makes sense for the Ranx to start off hostile and the Teraton to start off friendly, and it even makes sense for them to both use Rin (quite the thorn in the side of the Ranx) as the Ringers got a head start. They definitely wouldn't use Commonwealth credits, and establishing a third currency is more trouble than it's worth. The mediators here would be the Ringers: the Teraton are Ringers with a bad attitude so there's no love lost there; Ringers would naturally harbor fondness for the Ranx as de-evolved miners just like the Ferians (which again would drive the Ranx nuts). Unlike the other mediator, getting sufficiently Ranxy (and an Empire offers so many interesting rank schemes) would let you turn on the Ringers too.

The downside is this would probably require Teraton/Ringer ships of some kind. No matter how formidable a base is, by this part of the game it's trivially easy to outrange and destroy any stationary object. The upside is an endgame high tech installer not based on the Ringers (like Ares there's just too much of them), wiping the neo-smirk off all their neo-faces, and we know the Ranx love cannons so why not let us call in guided artillery strikes? Interplanetary artillery - got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? It could be restricted to systems with Ranx outposts, or at enormous cost (possibly in materials rather than rin) we could purchase a towed artillery system that could be set up arbitrarily near any system's sun. Phobos got you down? Call in a megaton space strike: 1000d8 + 1000 worth of thermo damage is sure to brighten your day.

.

tl;dr: there's too much Ares, just enough Charon pirates, and not enough everything else. I feel adding any of these conflicts would keep Ares from having to do too much for too long, be interesting in their own right, and establish the Wild West feel of the Outer Realm that currently feels like Ares and CSC and everyone else get out of the way.
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robotarozum wrote:We start with Korolov v. Charon. That works great.

We end with Commonwealth Fleet v. Ares. That works okay, but I feel like the big gap between these two combat zones causes it to swell and make up a disproportionate part of the game. In my last playthrough I destroyed 13 Ares stations, 1 Ranx, 1 Huari, 4 Sung; I killed more Sandstorms (293) than the next two highest hostiles combined (281 Lumi Drones and Corsairs). IIRC past playthroughs weren't so dramatic, but still. Ranx/Huari/Sung all get a blurb on the Galactic Map, but the overwhelming majority of actual engagement is Ares.

Suggestions:

Commonwealth Militia v. Sung
Already happens to some extent, but getting access to a Sung capital system/mission with sufficient rank would be great. It always confused me why the slave coffins listed Jiang's Star as the Sung home system... and nothing special happened there. The Sung have a lot of variety but it's pretty easy to not see it, which seems like a waste. There doesn't need to be any great material reward, the sense of accomplishment from crushing a slave ring is pretty significant.

Huari
They've got their little Sung interaction, I think the best solution is to just take their name off the galactic map. Unless there's a lot of development for them in the works, they have 1 ship and 1 station: just not interesting, and the Militia makes a much more plausible rival for the Sung in terms of breadth and strength.

Dwarg v. Luminous
A lot of the conflict in Transcendence is black and white: shippers v. pirates, government v. slavers, even in the government v. government of Commonwealth/Ares it's very clear who the good guys are and we have little/no opportunity to side with the other team. Dwarg and Luminous have much in common: they're annoying, there's a lot of them, they make use of subhuman soldiers (zoanthrope and AI respectively). They can even stay auto-hostile until the player makes contact through a neutral mediator (CDM? advanced auton dealers? Makayev?) and goes one way or the other, neither side shows much concern for its foot soldiers.

The Luminous rewards would seem to me to be more and more advanced computing things (giving the quantum CPU a little more oomph in the process) and ending the random Drone attacks. I've always found wingmen in Transcendence to be more trouble than they're worth, but disposables with no penalty for loss could be useful? And being able to sic a Behemoth on an enemy with non-WMD would be pretty delicious.

Ranx v. Teraton
On the surface this seems like a black/white conflict again, but the most straightforward player path is to obliterate everything deemed hostile (and any friendlies you can get away with, which in my case tends to mean a lot of Ferians) which seems to fit right into the Ranx worldview. The Ranx Empire are the only sovereign with a detailed official backstory and are supposed to be geopolitically (astropolitically?) relevant, and in the game we can easily get more interaction with a measly little Cartel.

Solution: picking sides. It makes sense for the Ranx to start off hostile and the Teraton to start off friendly, and it even makes sense for them to both use Rin (quite the thorn in the side of the Ranx) as the Ringers got a head start. They definitely wouldn't use Commonwealth credits, and establishing a third currency is more trouble than it's worth. The mediators here would be the Ringers: the Teraton are Ringers with a bad attitude so there's no love lost there; Ringers would naturally harbor fondness for the Ranx as de-evolved miners just like the Ferians (which again would drive the Ranx nuts). Unlike the other mediator, getting sufficiently Ranxy (and an Empire offers so many interesting rank schemes) would let you turn on the Ringers too.

The downside is this would probably require Teraton/Ringer ships of some kind. No matter how formidable a base is, by this part of the game it's trivially easy to outrange and destroy any stationary object. The upside is an endgame high tech installer not based on the Ringers (like Ares there's just too much of them), wiping the neo-smirk off all their neo-faces, and we know the Ranx love cannons so why not let us call in guided artillery strikes? Interplanetary artillery - got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? It could be restricted to systems with Ranx outposts, or at enormous cost (possibly in materials rather than rin) we could purchase a towed artillery system that could be set up arbitrarily near any system's sun. Phobos got you down? Call in a megaton space strike: 1000d8 + 1000 worth of thermo damage is sure to brighten your day.

.

tl;dr: there's too much Ares, just enough Charon pirates, and not enough everything else. I feel adding any of these conflicts would keep Ares from having to do too much for too long, be interesting in their own right, and establish the Wild West feel of the Outer Realm that currently feels like Ares and CSC and everyone else get out of the way.

Dwarg are enslaved by the Sung on the drones and the Huari are part of the same Sung arc. There's more story for them then is in the game right now.
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I think the balance of factions is pretty decent. I'd agree that there may be a bit too much Ares stuff, but overall it's pretty good. It provides a lot of diverse enemies and doesn't have any real downsides. There's also a lot of backstory that isn't in the game yet (potentially in extensions, potentially in later versions of the game).
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robotarozum
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Fair enough.
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