One thing that bugs me and maybe it shouldn’t is that the further the game goes along eventually the factions will war it out with each other which I understand, that whole different ideals thing however wouldn’t it make more sense if a haven attacks another instead of out right destroying it they take it over? As it is it’s already kind of a pain to keep personnel rolling in to replace losses but the closer to end game you get the downright more painful it is to even lose a single body. Any thoughts?
From reading posts, I think many players think like you.
In current state of game design, I think it would be too easy to shift haven from a faction to another. Moreover in my opinion it doesn’t suit the lack of population, or population changing froma faction to another that simply. Anu becoming NJ or the reverse, makes hardly any sense. And if Syn looks more pacifist they look also firmly glued into their ideology. It could make sense for Syn to Anu or NJ, the reverse less.
Now for sure more complex mechanisms would be more interesting but would require design and tuning, just change an Haven faction isn’t enough in my opinion.
Use more training centers and recruits, focus one base for them, later on two bases to spread your area of control.
Overall yeah it’d make sense. The majority of people are never “true believers” they just want to be left alone and couldn’t really care who’s in charge. “The king is dead, long live the king.”
You don’t have to change the population ideas if you have all the guns but you will run into problems in the long run.
I’ve used the mod that changes faction Einsatzgruppen into raiders, they wreck one installation instead of gunning down thousands of civilians routinely.
In keeping with the spirit of the factions, I think they could all do different things to Havens. Like, New Jericho are fascist assholes, so of course they’d just blow everything up. They could destroy the Haven but turn into an NJ-exclusive scavenging site, where they siphon resources off. Anu could just absorb the Haven, and let conversion do the rest, turning it into their color. Synedrion could try to convince people to join the cause(s), which could be represented by a random result between destruction (people rebel) and turning the Haven’s colors. That’s the simplest way I could think of right now where the style of war already represented by the differing weapons could be depicted on the geoscape, but I’m sure more creative people could come up with better stuff!
I think recruiting people should be a central thing. Not tied to havens. If I want someone there should be a bulletin of some kind (like in Jagged Alliance 2). And as you progress as your standing with the other factions change soldiers from those factions could come and offer their services.
I never lost anyone while fighting, so the recruiting wasn’t a problem for me, but the destroyed havens show that there is real change, there is war going on. I don’t think we need too much micromanagement. What I would’ve wanted was some more option to scavenge things :). I love research and everything tied to it. And seeing that a newly researched weapon shreds the previously hard to beat enemies brings a sense of accomplishment.
I like that idea because you can help smuggle weapons to the insurgents or help maintain order in that Haven. To expand on that, if you recruit a soldier from an NJ Haven, they should be sympathetic to the NJ faction and have opinions about other factions. They don’t have to leave the squad, but it will give soldiers personalities and connections rather than like robots. This is what lacked in XCOM 2 War of the Chosen where the three leaders didn’t like each other, but their soldiers didn’t say anything to each other.
Yes, it was very strange to me as well when first saw that the defeated haven is outright destroyed. The idea behind it seems clear: to put pressure on the player as the endgame is nearing and reduce trading and recruiting options.
From a Lore perspective it is a hit and miss as it makes sense from their diverging ideology but makes no sense considering that their ideology is not that diverse (see above: why would pacifists mass murder simple mutated folk when they themselves argue that they can live together with the mutated world)
So the havens need to be destroyed but it does seem to make little sense that the survivors are mass murdering way more then the aliens that are set out to do so but there are other options:
Have the winner haven capture some of the pop, and resources of the looser and take it back to their base making it more populous and powerful. The proportion of captured (convertible) pop might even depend on the attacking and defending faction to keep it aligned with lore (NJ: minimal amount of captured pop, but highest amount of looted resources when attacking ANU but medium amount of captured pop when attacking Sinendrion)
This would still reduce player options but would actually benefit the attacker and would be fun for a player to support them in order to be better prepared against external attacks. They would grow and build/recruit with their additional pop and resources. This would be also a prefect balancing mechanic for the winner havens to hold on again the onslaught of the Pandorans longer and thus the player more motivated to “assist” them during invasion. Instead of dozens of weak havens we could end up with only a handful of strongholds where the rest of the survivors got “dragged” into
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Never thought of the lore aspect before
You make a good point i think this would add a lot to the game