View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0014416 | The Last Federation | Suggestion | Apr 22, 2014 3:45 pm | Apr 27, 2014 5:12 pm | |
| Reporter | GC13 | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 1.002 (Tech Acquisitions And Planetary Attacks) | ||||
| Summary | 0014416: Burlust leverage needs to be improved | ||||
| Description | Right now Burlusts are by far my least-favorite species to deal with—yes, even below the "alright, thanks for the advice, now we're going to charge you if you run dispatch missions with us for a while" Evucks. Why? Because their leverage mechanic is rather poorly balanced. You have very few options to get leverage: bribery seems to be rather nice, but very expensive; blackmail is also very expensive but gets you almost nothing; and killing their leader doesn't cost you a dime, gets you huge leverage, and boosts your influence a lot too. If I was given a blank design document to re-work the Burlusts to be more interesting, here's what I'd do: *Keep the setup with one prime warlord and two sub warlords. There are presumably many others, but these are the only ones who are recognized as strong enough to deal with outsiders. *Make blackmail cheaper and more profitable. *Keep bribery about the same. *Add in a new way to gain leverage: doing joint missions with the warlord. There should be several of these that you can choose between, and might be attacks on other warlords' assets, weakening the species as a whole, or against external enemies that the warlord will profit from destroying. *More ways to spend this leverage. Such as: *Make them give me technology. *Demand that they give me raw materials. *Have them build me an outpost for my services. *The typical trade route/call off a war (the Prime-only, I'd assume) stuff. They may be warlords, but by virtue of their position they *do* command significant economic resources that I can ask for. Each warlord would need stats for how much resource extraction and stockpiling was *theirs*, and they might ask you to help them get some it from each other, but I think it would make things a lot more interesting if you could get things done with the Burlusts some way *other* than killing their leader over and over. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
| related to | 0014627 | new | Burlusts blackmail simply too useless | |
| related to | 0014277 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Burlust duels still exploitable. --Collated Feedback |
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As I think about it, I think I'd like to change how duels work with Burlusts. If they're being reworked anyway, I think duels should be changed from a ship-to-ship battle to a contest of strength between the Hydral and the warlord. The Hydral is far stronger than the Burlust, of course, so will win. He gains leverage over the warlord, but that warlord loses standing in the process, threatening to demote a prime to a sub and a sub to irrelevant. It's a matter of risk, not cheesing an enemy who will, as attempts to balance it are made, typically be ridiculously easy right up until it reaches nearly impossible. |
