0.91 The “Resistance” mechanic is underwelming.

(The above pic is from the "Coup" card game.  Highly recommended!)

Resistance has been bothering me as being uninspirational for a while now and I was curious if I was missing something. Earlier today on the discord Brad clarified that in its current iteration resistance simply increases the time for planetary invasion succeed. IE 30% resistance means that it takes 30% longer for an invasion to “happen.”

My criticism of this is that this is a fairly useless mechanic. If you’re to the point of being invaded, then in my experience it doesn’t really matter how long it takes. And the current mechanic means that invasions are 100% successful anyway, so there’s no “fighting the assailants off”.

Recall that in both GC2 and GC3 invasions could “fail” during which the attacker could lose the invading transport. Indeed, in prior GalCiv iterations invasion vessels, Legions, et al., were largely disposable – civs would make swarms of the things knowing that a lot of them wouldn’t “stick” and sink an enemy planet, but you were betting that some would get through.

In GC4 Invaders are not disposable, rather they persist indefinitely and can conquer an unlimited number of planets. In my last game, for example, I never lost a single invader all game, I’ll bet a single invader conquered a dozen planets. So the present iteration of the invasion play and mechanic is pretty different from those that preceded it and, to be frank, I do not feel that it’s better.

Enter the Resistance mechanic, and what could be done better. Generally I see two broad areas that could be targets of improvement:

• Resistance vs Invasion (ie “Soldiering”) should be more important, and an arms race.

• Resistance should do more to “harden” planets aside from outright invasions.

Resistance vs Invasion:

First of all, invasions should be able to fail, with a participating transport destroyed. The defensive mechanic for doing this should be Resistance.

I envision something like this. Resistance % minus Soldiering % = Fail % per turn. With base Resistance something like 10%.

For example Resistance +25% vs Soldiering +20% means: Reistance 35% (base 10% + 25%) vs Soldering 20% = 15% chance for invasion to “fail” per turn of invading.

“Fail” means 1 participating transport is destroyed. If more than one transport is invading, then the invasion continues. If no more transports are left to invade, the invasion stops.

The #turns invasion takes could be based on the same variables it is now, with the duration modified by Resistance minus Soldiering.

If invasions are more deterministic, they also shouldn’t need to take so long, is another tweak that could come out of this. Although I think the current invasion duration seem just fine to me, I’m not really opinionated about this last point.

Resistance should do more to “harden” planets aside from outright invasions:

So here’s a bit of a broader aspect of potential uses for investing in Resistance. The term “Resistance” is a pretty broad term and as such would be easy to expand to other aspects of planet hardening.

• Brad mentioned Resistance making culture flipping more difficult.

• Resistance could reduce the severity of other planetary misfortunes. Such as

  • Xeloxi causing you crime,

  • Festron eating your citizens,
  • Drengin getting slaves from you (which I will propose in my Drengin post later),
  • Starvation (which I am also going to propose later also)
  • Espionage-driven events that might happen to you (later when Espionage exists).
  • and other bad planetary events

In short, there’s a lot that could be done with Resistance, and it’s not very exciting the way it is.

I’m sure other people have opinions on this as well, it’d be good to hear more ideas regarding this mechanic.

Cheers,

-tid242

edit: PS, please give us back the old triangle-shaped "Invader Ship" icons!!!