So this thread is about invaders, which some people consider Spoilers. You have been warned. TLDR: Don't enable invaders.So I wanted to play a fresh game of the newest Aurora version. Looking at the new features added in 1.11 and 1.12, one of the new features are Rifts. "Great" I think, this gives me an excuse to play with invaders turned on. So I setup a game, planning a long campaign with the intent of testing a lot of stuff.
Enter the year 57 of my campaign: Mysterious aliens are sighted... in Sol. The researchers initially classify them as "Sol aliens" and try to establish communications, but their faces turn to horror as they refuse communication and start slaughtering freighters around Jupiter.
So yeah, this is the situation. Invaders turned up... in Sol. I play on 20% research speed, which means I am just researching Magneto Plasma Engines, while the invaders run around at 11km/s. You might think "This is clearly broken" and you would be right. I tried to fix the game with SM mode, but apparently you can't delete enemy fleets in SM mode.
So just for fun I spawn in 50 heavy cruisers, which fire 10 volleys of 1000 Anti ship missiles each on the invader fleet. Unfortunately, despite my 29km/s missiles having a 34% hit chance against 10km/s ships they have a 0% chance to hit against the 11km/s invaders. Maybe they have ECM, but 0% chance seems a bit harsh. Out of 10000 missiles, 0 are intercepted by point defense, 0 hit their target. With this, I consider the savefile bricked beyond repair, which is unfortunate, because I would have liked to continue it. Some of you will probably say "Losing is fun", but this is not really true, if there is nothing you can do about it. Well I guess I could have stayed in Sol until I researched Antimatter Engines, but this seems even less fun and also good luck with that on 20% research speed...
Here are my suggestions:
- Invaders can't stay in their current implementation, or no one will enable them. To show how ridiculous they are, think of an option in Civ, where after 100 turns the Barbarians get 10 Main Battle Tanks somewhere. No matter what kind of tech level you have achieved, whether it's knights or musketeers, you will be completely wiped out by that and the only chance to survive it is to hope they spawn far away from you. I hope you can see that such an option would be terrible and no one would enable it if they knew what it meant.
- In my view, Invaders are supposed to be an endgame challenge, like the endgame crises in Stellaris: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Crisis
This is evident by their high tech level, which you need to match in order to fight them. - In order to work as an endgame threat, they should obviously only appear in the endgame and not while people are still in the Ion Engine age. The appearance of invaders or rifts could be set to a year (which changes depending on research speed settings), number of ancient constructs awakened or simply the amount of research generated. E.g. as soon as >50% of empires generate X Million Research points, Invaders can spawn.
- Another factor is the distance, in which the invaders spawn. Just as you can set a minimum distance for NPRs in the game settings, initial invader spawn locations should have a minimum distance to Sol by default. They can obviously invade Sol later, just like any other system.
I hope I could convince you, that invaders are broken in their current state and that they need some changes. I'm open for discussions.