I don't get the problem?



The cravers consume anything useful from the planet, how would you put it back?

At the very least it is inconceivable to me that the sowers could not remove locust points in some manner but I still think it reasonable that any race, given enough time or effort, that can terraform planets from barren to jungle could remove locust points.

I think, that there shouldn't be a way to remove locust points.

Or may be .0,5 per turn for Sowers.

This thread is the origin of discussions about options for other races to remove locust points from conquered planets.

Other threads about this have been archived:

/#/endless-space/forum/29-archives/thread/13735-suggestion-sowers-negate-cravers-locust-points



Feel free to post here about this topic here and inform yourself about the variations the threads listed above have already discussed, but don't open new suggestion threads for anything alike.

Kairyu wrote:
And that concept works AMAZINGLY well with both gameplay and the Craver mentality! Even a hive race like them would be smart enough to know that they'll eventually eat themselves into starvation if they don't ditch dead planets to let them recover... albeit over millenia without other races to do it for them.

I think the Cravers are so single-minded they wouldn't consider this. If they weren't so single-minded they wouldn't be Cravers. Part of the beauty is that eventually they will run out of planets and eat themselves to extinction.



The concept of the Cravers is undermined if some race can simply come in and restore desolate Craver rocks to their former states.

From what I can gather, having at least the Sowers able to negate the Cravers in this way is actually very lore-friendly, seeing as both were created by the Endless and all that (one to devour, one to make habitable). You'd imagine a race that could 'create' other races in this manner might have the foresight to have one that can cancel out the other. Although technologically given the other feats of playing God at your disposal there's nothing to suggest that a planet couldn't be made, if not exactly a treasure-trove, at least useful.



Besides, it creates a potential for grand strategy. Who wants to conquer a barren wasteland? "United Empire wasteland is best wasteland"? o_0

i have a suggestion to change the craver-sower problem

i'd like to add a tech that allow craver to consume a world, turning it in [DEPLETED] a [BARREN] world with [POORSOIL], doing that they would receive a massive empire-wide FIDS bonus which last for 15 turns, that would introduce new mechanichs to cravers: assault empire->consume enemy worlds->use newly obtained resources to prepare for the new cycle



i would even add a new tech to the sowers to remove the [DEPLETED] status throught a new building, but returning to the original planet would require a lot of effort neverthless (Terraforming,fixing the soil, etc..)



and for those who think cravers to be too strong remember that they are usually mobbed by alliances..

Krantz86 wrote:
i'd like to add a tech that allow craver to consume a world, turning it in a [BARREN] world with [POORSOIL], doing that they would receive a massive empire-wide FIDS bonus which last for 15 turns, that would introduce new mechanichs to cravers: assault empire->consume enemy worlds->use newly obtained resources to prepare for the new cycle

Barren and Poor Soil sound like a great idea, the empire-wide boni not so much.

Why should cravers not simply terraform planets into barren ones with their locust-points?

They are supposed to leave only lifeless husks behind them and that sounds quite fitting to me.

Krantz86 wrote:
i have a suggestion to change the craver-sower problem

i'd like to add a tech that allow craver to consume a world, turning it in [DEPLETED] a [BARREN] world with [POORSOIL]

Wouldn't cravers just terraform it back up?

Kairyu wrote:
To those saying that they can't fathom how any faction would "un-deplete" a planet, I don't think that's what the removal of locust points means. Those resources are still gone, but instead those living on the depleted world are simply slowly developing ways around it; More careful and consciencious mining and harvesting programs, farming improvements to compensate for minerals lacking in the soil, conservation and reintroduction of native plant, animal and microscopic species, import of new materials from other worlds outside of true trade routes, and recycling programs that make sure nothing on the planet goes to waste. Since the general ideas behind these fixes are present in the technology tree already, it makes sense that it's just a very slow revival process using what's on-hand.

You don't need to tapdance around the issue, Kairyu: we develop the technology to turn a barren planet or a hostile ball of lava into a garden world, so why is it far-fetched to think that we might be able to restore a planet depleted by the Cravers? The Cravers don't consume a planet because of any supernatural aspect, they consume it because they strip it bare and move on. Well, we're quite good at taking bare worlds and making them lush, so why can't we even spend Industry points to remove Locust points? The Cravers could do this too, but it's utterly outside their understanding to even wish to do this so no Craver empires ever get the option.

Draco18s wrote:
Wouldn't cravers just terraform it back up?

well that could be a possibility but you should consider that removing [POORSOIL] and turning a [BARREN] planet into something good (at least arid/tundra) requires a lot of effort.

if a Craver player/ai can attack one of your weaker systems and in 2-3 turns, every planet has become a wasteland before you can think about reconquering it...

and as craver sometimes you just feel like destroying unkeepable systems

PS: note that normally you can't UN-DEPLETE a planet so depleting one in 1 or 2 rounds...

The thing is when you locust, you don't destroy the environment or the ecology, you just take all of the useful resources, like you mine all of the resources and take all of the food.



You don't harvest the atmosphere and turn plants into a barren world!

Igncom1 wrote:
The thing is when you locust, you don't destroy the environment or the ecology, you just take all of the useful resources, like you mine all of the resources and take all of the food.

You don't harvest the atmosphere and turn plants into a barren world!

if you want to harvest meagatons of dust, minerals, meat, water(which is the most precious after dust) in a couple of years you're bound to use extreme metods, like core/crust detonations to expose mineral veins, forced gaciation to turn seas into ice to mine, etc...

things like those tend to turn any living thing into ashes and atmosphere into a thin layer of poisonous gases... not that craves care...

No doubt that they full on ravage the planet, but even they wouldn't do it to the extent that they would kill off their own population and destroying their own factory's.



Otherwise we would get a -100%FIDS after a planet has been used.

my suggestion was an option to fully consume a planet/ system which had no use for cravers, afterall if you conquer some border worlds which you don't care about

why don't you just take all you can before moving away? noone tell you to keep them afterwards



they wouldn't do it to the extent that they would kill off their own population and destroying their own factory's.

cravers do that quite often



Otherwise we would get a -100%FIDS after a planet has been used.

[BARREN][POORSOIL][DEPLETED] have a very similar effect

Krantz86 wrote:
my suggestion was an option to fully consume a planet/ system which had no use for cravers, afterall if you conquer some border worlds which you don't care about

why don't you just take all you can before moving away? noone tell you to keep them afterwards

So you want an option to consume a planet? Ok i can see the appeal behind that.

they wouldn't do it to the extent that they would kill off their own population and destroying their own factory's.

cravers do that quite often

Why? that's a stupid idea, they are evil not suicidal.

Otherwise we would get a -100%FIDS after a planet has been used.

[BARREN][POORSOIL][DEPLETED] have a very similar effect

It would also add and extra bunch of tags to your planets that would confuse newer players, it would function better as an extension to the current locust banner.

Apologies for the necro but, as a relatively new player I've only just come across this "problem".

The primary concerns in the thread seem to be those who believe such a change would be detrimental to the Cravers playstyle and one of simple logistics.



If the technology which unlocked rebuilding were placed far enough down the tech tree, perhaps even contributing to a scientific victory or even a wonder victory (perhaps each restored planet is worth half or a quarter of an upload centre?) then it should have little impact on the Cravers - but would allow the reconstruction of stripped worlds by those who would see themselves as the successors to the Endless.

In terms of logistics... I imagine that, given the apparent inspirations behind the lore, the obvious method would be von Neumann machines (of the sort which can convert a gas giant into a short lived star). Perhaps the planet suffers a -100% FIDS penalty during the operation (the entire populous has to be evacuated due to the vast quantities of Dust which would be being thrown around).

A common complaint I see is that by conquering Craver planets you tend to get penalized in that often they are already depleted and there is no way to remedy the depletion so each Craver system is worth less than a normal system.



I propose 3 changes that may make conquering Craver systems equal strategically to conquering non-craver systems.



[LIST=1]

Any non-craver race that conquers a planet with locust points will remove said locust points at a rate of one per turn. Sowers will remove locust points a double the normal value.

If the system has the equivalent system improvement to the Craver "Intensive Cultivation Logistics" (looks like a tractor), the locust points will be removed a double the rate.

Any race removing locust points will recieve a +.5 diplomatic bonus per locust point removed per turn, and a 5% trade bonus per locust point removed per turn. The diplomatic bonus will apply to all non-craver races they are currently in contact with.

[/LIST]

Hm. I do like the idea of being able to fix Craver worlds. Even when you're playing them, it's kind of depressing to have the cravers win: the galaxy will be consumed, and everything will perish, the end. I think you might need a little tweaking, though. Maybe halfway between yours and xyquas's: Sowers have an innate ability to remove locust points once a turn (since terraforming worlds is their racial schtick), and everyone but the Cravers gets access to a tech (a dead-end off to the side, so you don't have to waste points if you're not in a game with them) that'll let them remove points (and for the Sowers, improve the speed). I think the diplomacy bit is a good idea, but scaling it like that might be too powerful xD Maybe just a flat couple points for actively working to restore worlds, regardless of how many. The points could be based on the other faction's alignment (for instance, +10 rep with Good races, +5 with Neutral, and +3 with Evil).

To those saying that they can't fathom how any faction would "un-deplete" a planet, I don't think that's what the removal of locust points means. Those resources are still gone, but instead those living on the depleted world are simply slowly developing ways around it; More careful and consciencious mining and harvesting programs, farming improvements to compensate for minerals lacking in the soil, conservation and reintroduction of native plant, animal and microscopic species, import of new materials from other worlds outside of true trade routes, and recycling programs that make sure nothing on the planet goes to waste. Since the general ideas behind these fixes are present in the technology tree already, it makes sense that it's just a very slow revival process using what's on-hand.

Nycidian wrote:
3. Any race removing locust points will recieve a +.5 diplomatic bonus per locust point removed per turn, and a 5% trade bonus per locust point removed per turn. The diplomatic bonus will apply to all non-craver races they are currently in contact with.

Maybe just a flat bonus for bringing a planet out of a depleted status? Less overpowered that way.

Nycidian wrote:
In fact in a really long game I can see a craver player abandoning old worlds, just hoping players will take them over and fix them so they can come back and ravish them anew.

And that concept works AMAZINGLY well with both gameplay and the Craver mentality! Even a hive race like them would be smart enough to know that they'll eventually eat themselves into starvation if they don't ditch dead planets to let them recover... albeit over millenia without other races to do it for them.

No it doesn't make Craver game play utterly useless, nothing in this proposal discourages Cravers from consuming worlds.



In fact in a really long game I can see a craver player abandoning old worlds, just hoping players will take them over and fix them so they can come back and ravish them anew.



That fits the whole idea of Cravers more than current game play where Cravers just stay on a world and don't move on.

GC13 wrote:
If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

The craver's gameplay is called "consume worlds", I.E. they consume worlds. If you were to make it so anyone could fix a decimated world, it would make this gameplay type utterly pointless.

Nycidian wrote:




[LIST=1]

Any race removing locust points will recieve a +.5 diplomatic bonus per locust point removed per turn, and a 5% trade bonus per locust point removed per turn. The diplomatic bonus will apply to all non-craver races they are currently in contact with.

[/LIST]

That sounds extremely overpowered.

GC13 wrote:
If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

Exactly what i wanted to say just couldn't find the right words, thank you.

TheFrozenOne wrote:
Cravers are meant to be a horrible blight on that galaxy as they devour worlds, leaving them stripped clean. This makes the Cravers much more detrimental, forcing other players to colonize "untainted" systems before them. If it were possible to "enrich" planets again, it would ruin this system. So it's going to be a no for me.

If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

I fully support this idea. Maybe a little tweak can be added: All non-cravers races get a researchable tech that unlocks an improvement. This improvement removes the collected locust points as proposed in the opening post. So you could decide to make use of over exploitation or to stop this in favor for the long run. I imagine this improvement as something that removes a planet anomaly. Maybe soil revivification could unlock this one.

Cravers are meant to be a horrible blight on that galaxy as they devour worlds, leaving them stripped clean. This makes the Cravers much more detrimental, forcing other players to colonize "untainted" systems before them. If it were possible to "enrich" planets again, it would ruin this system. So it's going to be a no for me.

With the exception of the sowers, I don't seee how any of the other factions can be said to 'enrich' the worlds they colonise. They all use the materials, minerals etc. of the planets they inhabit, just in a less intensive and more sustainable way than the cravers. If the cravers have sucked up all the readily accesible/most useful resources, I don't see how anyone but the sowers might go about putting them back again, as they need to to consume them just like the cravers do (just less intensively). Lore aside, I think it removes, or greatly reduces, the unique mechanic of the 'time bomb' that makes the cravers so menacing.

A depleted planet can't have been permanently scourged or you wouldn't get anything from those planets, a depleted planets resources are just much harder to access now that the easily accessed ones were stripped off by the Cravers. It makes sense that a normal race would slowly redress the ecological disaster the Cravers left behind and a race like the Sowers would do so much quicker.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I didn't think so. I still don't understand why terraforming doesn't work to do that, but sorry, I'm taking this off topic now...But, again, I do like your idea. It would be nice to actually start being able to fix up the planets that I (in my opinion) liberated from the Cravers.

Then why can't the craver's just terraform their planets to remove the locust points? As I said, they are supposed to be permanently draining these planets by stripping them of anything useful. You can't terraform a planet if there's nothing to terraform from, right?

Nycidian wrote:
Currently nothing in the game removes locust points as far as I am aware.

I didn't think so. I still don't understand why terraforming doesn't work to do that, but sorry, I'm taking this off topic now...But, again, I do like your idea. It would be nice to actually start being able to fix up the planets that I (in my opinion) liberated from the Cravers.

I think this removes the whole 'time-bomb' aspect of the cravers that makes them so unique and threatening to the galaxy. The whole point is that they are devouring the planets they live on, leaving only husks remaining. This doesn't mean that they are eating everything, so replanting or terraforming will make it fine (such as with a barren planet). Instead they are stripping every useful lifeform, mineral, and element from the planet, and leaving it WORSE than barren. I like that as the cravers expand the other factions are pressed to quickly retake the systems, or contain them collectively, as they really do leave the death of everything in their wake.

Currently nothing in the game removes locust points as far as I am aware.

I like the idea and your plan, but I have one question.



Wouldn't terraforming remove all locust points? Or, at least, shouldn't it? If I take over a Craver system and start the process or turning it into a Terran or Jungle or Ocean world, wouldn't it be implied that in that process resources are restored as the planet becomes something else? Or am I misunderstanding what these points are?