While I'm sure this is something that probably just didn't make it into the Alpha, there has been one thing I noticed in my past games and those of some of my friends I want to speak up about.



Something should happen to a race if you take over their home system. If something already does happen in game, well, I don't think that it is visible enough. I just found it strange that over the weekend I fought a war with the Horatio, and since I had to go through their home system to get to the rest of their territory, I took it over. But the war still lasted for a large number of turns. Shouldn't a race be all but crippled if you take over their starting area, which should technically be their base of government and all that?



I'm not calling for something like in Rome: Total War, where if you take over a place's capital you get all of the lands that they had (or did the lands go neutral?...err, I can't remember now, it's been a long while since I played that). Maybe the rest of the systems should splinter into sub-factions, some who realize that "Crap, we need peace now before we get slaughtered" and those who want to keep fighting, or...something.



Home systems just don't seem to be that important right now, while you'd think they'd be the one place you'd really want to protect and not lose.

In many 4x games, the game assumes that the capitol is relocated to the second biggest city/star. For example, Civ IV and V work this way. In many real world wars, the same thing happens; the government picks up "in exile" or in another city which has not yet been captured. I agree that some loss of happiness might be a good idea. But still, since the home planet is usually the highest production system, with the most improvements, losing it is already a pretty big penalty.

Okay. Endless Space is my first 4x game, and I never thought of that possibility, really. It'd be nice to see, then, the new "Home" system get that special box around the population number to indicate it is now more than a simple system. I wouldn't mind being able to simply chase their government around, only conquering in the order that they set up base. Heh, that would be fun...



But yeah, I figured it would be a big penalty, the game just didn't seem to reflect it that well. Horatio was still building decently sized fleets fairly quickly and throwing them at my systems. Though, I suppose I may have just been running into that infinite fleet bug, now that I think about it.

Something happened to the horatio home system after they declared war on my craver empire. I removed all the planet improvements, terraformed their worlds to barren/lava and left it for them to recapture.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I figured it would be a big penalty, the game just didn't seem to reflect it that well. Horatio was still building decently sized fleets fairly quickly and throwing them at my systems. Though, I suppose I may have just been running into that infinite fleet bug, now that I think about it.

You were running into the AI setting all their planets to dust, raising tax to 400% and rush-buying everything.

MC8192 wrote:
You were running into the AI setting all their planets to dust, raising tax to 400% and rush-buying everything.

Ohai! Is that how it works! That makes a lot of sense. It is not good AI design, but it fits all the facts we have seen.

Yeah, not smart for the AI at all. It didn't even save them in the end. They should have just taken my offer of peace, I didn't want the war to begin with.



At least I know why this happens now. I might have to adjust some of my diplomacy tactics. I don't think I'll be trading them Dust anymore, if they just do this when war starts.

alright davea, yeah I figure it's something like that. since the earliest strategy games AI gets stealth bonuses/exploits to keep up with human players.

will be interesting to see how it's developed - depends if amplitude wants the game to be a singleplayer game with a multiplayer feature or the other way round...



@FinalStrigon I like the ideas in your post. I'll just point out - one victory condition is capturing all the opponents home systems.

davea wrote:
In many 4x games, the game assumes that the capitol is relocated to the second biggest city/star. For example, Civ IV and V work this way. In many real world wars, the same thing happens; the government picks up "in exile" or in another city which has not yet been captured. I agree that some loss of happiness might be a good idea. But still, since the home planet is usually the highest production system, with the most improvements, losing it is already a pretty big penalty.

Hum. A happiness loss would be good, not too harsh, but still significant to hamper the other systems.

In Twilight Imperium 3 (a boardgame of space 4X) there's a race that has a very very bad starting position and there's no affect tied to the HS.