Conquest of Solar Systems

[Deantwo]

You do (finally) have a reasonable point that people could forward deploy shields offensively.  Listening posts seem totally unimportant to me (thats not how mortius found you by the way).  However, out of curiosity how would your proposed scenario be different from someone colonizing multiple systems and forcing you to spend a week besieging each of those instead (assuming you feel the need to prevent listening posts from existing)?

It usually takes more time and effort to colonize a new solar system then it does to colonize a new world in an already colonized solar system, so spamming cities in multiple solar systems is more work.

Sieging a solar system would cost you at least one warship each, instead of one warship per world, so you can much easier siege multiple solar systems at the same time.

Also, yes I think players should have to actually build stuff to defend themselves, not just be imbued with the magical property of taking a week to besiege despite potentially being stick flinging barbarians.

The time to siege a solar system should definitely be lower for tiny outpost systems, unless the player actually invested time to build a big city in each system.

But it does again lead into the whole issue of needing a way for cities gaining value with age or effort put in. If the city was quickly built by just tossing down a standard package of buildings, it should not have the same value as a city you spend weeks optimizing and months defending from raiders.

Before we have a way to assess the value of a city better, we only really have population numbers and capital status to base it on. However it is also the state of the whole solar system we are interested in, not just individual cities in the solar system, so number of cities might matter too.

Having the requirement for protection be that the solar system have at least one military headquarters seem simple and easy to achieve by any newbie player.