I would be. In fact, I would welcome it.
You should not always be able to stop things like this by burning a resource or picking a decision, like some kind of mana, but you should always be able to mitigate away most of the effects by planning ahead. Knowing that your stuff can be crippled will force you to build in redundancies and plan for actual worst case scenarios. Thats the mark of a good strategy game.
I would not call current situation of "I see choke point, I put 1 station there, I safe" Good Strategy. Having to think about what happens if this or that happens, is good. It might force you to always keep a small reserve fleet near a critical starbase, for example, which also helps to neuter things like doomstacking.
Or, knowing that my static defences can be rendered impotent - and worse, instantly capturable whilst disabled/powered down - it discourages me from building them in the first place. It takes away a large point of the strategy of choosing whether to invest in defences or not, since the defences are unreliable and can go from "too costly to bypass" to "non-existent" in a single action. This is *not* the mark of a good strategy game, because it takes away credible options from the defender.
I'd also say it's far from "see choke point, put station there, now safe" at the moment. It's usually "establish a defensive point at which my fleet and station *combined* are strong enough to hold off an enemy attack with minimal casualties", or "use the station and a fleet to make a defensive point that the enemy have to commit in force to be able to take - possibly leaving me free to use other elements of my fleet to attack elsewhere.
I'm already (unless **vastly** overpowering my enemies) having to keep substantial fleets near critical starbases unless I've been able to push through and past my enemy's defenses and they can no longer threaten my critical starbases.
I'm also interested in what redundancies you're suggesting, unless you mean to always have two deep bastion defenses at the edge of your space, which can mean needing six or seven bastions just on one border if your respective colonisation patterns have resulted in a two wide contact point between your civilisations - and if you touch this particular enemy at two locations you could be looking at needing eight or nine bastions to effect a two deep defensive wall.
Besides to me it seems dreadlyndwirm is exagerating how much of a hassle it is to rebuild a starbase (it is certainly not the case), and how little effort it takes for ops to succed (it is being described as a mere "pay 2000 energy, profit" move. It isn't).
A slight correction here.
Yes, you have to establish a substantial network to be able to do it, but (unless I've been vastly misinformed) the espionage power builds up generally against one particular opponent and is available for *any* action against them, meaning that the only really noticeable trigger cost is the energy credits.
It's also worth remembering that it isn't going to leave the starbase going back to my hands once this proposed disabling of the whole station is over - it's going to go to the enemy who disabled it and then sent in a fleet to capture it. Even if it *did* destroy it rather than hand it over, intact, to the enemy, that's still *vast* amounts of alloy compared to the energy cost to take the action. (And remember, I'm addressing the "disable the whole station" suggestion, not the "destroy one module" version.
And I will restate it, unless there's a lot more going on with degrees of success/right asset usage here, 2000 energy to disable one random module does seem too weak - although disabling a module on the right starbase at the right time could be highly impactful - and if this is all it does, then it certainly needs some review. But that cost to completely disable a full citadel is too cheap.
As in any game worth of the name there must be challenge. This game's wars are already too easy as it is. I would welcome being put on my toes all the time. And it is not like there are not defense mechanisms to espio. All I am saying is, this is being painted as something it is not: a mere "push button, destroy starbase" for the AI to use all the time for no cost at all and you cant do nithing about it, ansld rebuilding sours the entire game. It is not that.
I'm responding to people who painted it as wanting "push this decision, disable starbase" (which, let's face it might as well be "destroy it" in most warfare scenarios).
I'd also feel that you're starting to push the edge of strawmanning my position here. I'm not saying "for no cost at all", and I'm not saying there's nothing at all that can be done on the way to them getting the spy network in place - although if they get to the position where they've got the energy and spy network in place, it does seem that at that point there's not a lot that can be done.
I would prefer annoying and useless to annoying impactful. Primarily since in most games i've played with espionage mechanic's the ai have a hardon for spaming the player with espionage. If for example the espionage could disable a starbase theoretically an ai federation could simultaneously disable all your starbases instantly crippling your economy by sending you way over fleet cap, or completly preventing you from building new ships during a war.
Obviously the best option would be non-annoying impactful effects but i'm not sure what they would be an people likely wouldn't aggree on what they would be either.
I'd have to agree here that having a couple of allies together both (or all) triggering this effect at once and turning off starbases could be devastating - it even means that having the two deep bastion wall no longer works. Enemy A turns off the starbase next to them, Enemy B turns off the next starbase down the line, their federation/alliance attacks straight through the absence of defensive measures, thus making the "have some redundancies" plan a little more tricky to handle.
Or they turn off your shipyard(s) as they push through the edges of your space and cripple your fleet. Now you can't reinforce for (X period) at all.
It's a good thing when you can't perfectly predict what's going to happen in a strategy game. Chokepoints dumb down the strategy by reducing your options to just the one, obvious choice.
"Removing the ability to use the available defensive options presented by the map is a **good** thing".
"Removing the ability of people to strategise by trying to force the opponent to have to attack through a fortified location with a supporting army/navy (an ancient and historical strategy) is a good thing."
Never mind that it's removing a strategic option - which might just be "attacking directly over the border is too expensive for you know, so you have to go wildly out of your way to attack me", or "I've fortified the border, so to attack me you have to come through my allies, giving me time to prepare a massive counter attack".
And even without being able to instantly negate a fortified location, you still can't perfectly predict what'll happen. Perhaps they'll attack anyway, just with more force than you expected. Perhaps they'll find a way around your defences (think "attack around the Maginot line by going through a weak neighbour"). Perhaps they'll make an alliance and come in from a different direction to the one you were expecting.
And I don't see how having an "obvious" choice of "use this espionage ability to turn off a defensive station, anywhere, at any time you've built up enough spy network in the empire as a whole" becomes any more strategic?
If you have to plan around the fact that someone can disable that base, the answer is not "and then they just run amok in my empire until they hit the next chokepoint." You prepare for the unknown and the answer becomes "I have to plan around the important targets." You end up having to actually make judgment calls about where to invest your defenses. Those judgment calls might be wrong, because the game hasn't literally scripted in the answer for you, but that's the essence of a good strategy game.
I'm already having to make those judgement calls, but they're currently predicated that anyone getting past my border will have been at least slightly damaged by my bastions that I keep there, or that the bastion will have delayed the enemy fleet enough that I can get my fleet in motion. The bastions are already defending "important" targets.
And, depending on the war goal the enemy are using, "running amok until they hit the next chokepoint" can be devastating enough - since their claims are likely between the two chokepoints, so unless they need the extra war exhaustion or occupation score, they don't necessarily need to breach the next chokepoint. In some ways they can determine the "important" targets by what they've claimed.
And of course, the "important targets" from my point of view may well be anchorages or shipyards that are protected by a bastion. If they save their "turn off a starbase" action until they reach that, then I don't necessarily have many ways to plan around that, and the "important" targets will fall very rapidly once their defensive chokepoint is bypassed.
Now, I could spread them around all over the empire - but at that point I can't easily defend them all, so I'm likely to at least temporarily lose some of them unless I can stop the enemy fleet dead (which unsurprisingly usually requires the majority of my fleet and forcing an engagement at a strong bastion.
Certainly this should be limited. I’m happy with restricting it to one starbase (ie one operation at a time). But in that case it wouldn’t mean that your starbases in general are useless. It just would mean that you have to build redundancy into your defenses. You can’t count on one single base to make up your defensive wall, because any individual base is vulnerable. Instead you have to plan for defenses on an empire-wide basis. That, in turn, would mean prioritizing which systems to invest in over others.
"Redundancy" doesn't work here, unless you're suggesting multiple layers of bastions at every chokepoint.
It means that functionally having a single bastion at the border becomes **less** of a tactical or strategic option, as it's an obvious target to shut down.
Having a two deep layer of bastions is *almost* practical, unless the border is reasonably wide (say a couple of system wide with no single choke point), or you having multiple access points between two empires/alliances.
And, again, the internal defenses are already in place in important systems - but they generally rely on attacking fleets being damaged or delayed at the border **as the tactical idea of fortifications suggests**.
f anything, I would argue that this debate underscores what a terrible design choice chokepoints were. When taking out a single base can reliably cripple an empire’s entire defenses, it shows how much we as players have come to rely on the model of “find the pre-scripted choke point, stack all defenses there, #strategy.” When they announced a move to chokepoints, this was exactly what critics of the system warned would happen.
We have to work with the tools we've been given, and we're left in the position that setting up border defenses could be effectively pointless - but without the options that systems being able to project effects into neighbouring/nearby systems would give.
Even without the hyperlane/chokepoint system though, the problem of being able to turn off the border defences and walk straight through would still be a problem. It would still be an issue with "jump denial" auras that spread a certain distance from a given starbase. It would still be a problem with "enemies cannot warp through this area of space" auras from a given starbase.
In either case you'd still be able to just outright ignore a tactical and strategic decision by the defender to set up a defensive border zone.
Now, overall, I agree that the current version seems a bit weak (2000 credits to maybe, possibly hit something important), but it's far, far to cheap to turn off the entire of a top tier, fully operational
deathstar citadel-class battlestation with defensive platforms *and allow it to be captured without a fight*.
Would raising the cost more make me any happier with it? I don't know. It seems vastly overpowered to be able to turn off a good portion of a nation's defensive ability in a critical battle immediately before the battle, and in such a way that it means a weaker nation who was relying on the *strategy* and *tactic* of fighting at a defensive point that gives them an advantage can no longer do so (or conversely a more powerful nation that had managed to draw a weaker nation into a "hammer and anvil" scenario suddenly finds the anvil isn't there). For me this takes away from defensive strategy by making it so that what should be a reliable asset just isn't reliable.
