stellaris complaining
Two unfun changes I've been grappling with:
- At some point they made it that a planetary FTL inhibitor stops working when the planet reaches 50% devastation, which is a really weird idea to me? It means you can't actually develop a planet to work as a military chokepoint, the amount of defensive structure on it is mostly irrelevant to its functionality as a piece of 'stellar terrain', which is not fun mechanically or thematically
- Hyper relays are an okay idea but in practice the disconnect between system and galaxy view makes them finicky and awful to work around during war. Ships jump around in really annoying ways and you have to do a bunch of little tricks to not get screwed over by it
Like, there's so much shit but the only thing you can totally rely on in a war is raw fleet strength, and the AI is basically always going to have bigger numbers. Everything else is fuzzy and difficult
stellaris idea
Idk how to fix hyper relays but an idea I think I prefer is to add a starbase building that increases sublight speed in systems x jumps away, where x is the number of the building built (much like trade hubs)
If two starbases have overlapping range of increased speed area, ships can jump directly from one to the other. You could also model the planetary effects of hyper relays this way; any planets in affected systems get the benefit if there is a continuous path of affected systems to the capital
That way jumps are from the center of the system, avoiding a lot of awkwardness, they have broader usage than just developing specific systems with a construction ship, and their usage scales through the game along with starbase size
