Holding Loss And Contestation
This page explores how claims and frontiers can be fought over, destroyed, and lost.
It does not describe final game behavior. It captures the current direction and the main unresolved questions.
Goal
The goal is to make claims and frontiers genuinely contestable without making long-term colony building feel disposable.
The loss model should:
- make claims and frontiers risky enough to fight over
- make loss feel meaningful at the site level
- avoid passive maintenance chores
- treat colonies differently from lighter holdings
Current Direction
Claims and frontiers should probably be losable.
The current direction is that losing them should be a real total loss at that site.
That likely means:
- infrastructure at that site is destroyed, captured, or stripped away
- invested resources at that site are lost
- the owner no longer controls that site
Colonies are currently treated differently. One strong direction is that they can be damaged heavily but are not removed outright by hostile action.
Claims
Claims likely need to be vulnerable enough that the map does not freeze too early.
One strong direction is that claims can be lost through active hostile pressure such as:
- direct attack
- sustained raids
- blockade combined with active pressure
- destruction of critical infrastructure
The current direction is that passive decay is probably the wrong model.
Frontiers
Frontiers should be more resilient than claims, but still destructible.
Likely loss pressures include:
- direct military assault
- sustained raids over time
- destruction of key frontier infrastructure
- capture or destruction of critical command structures
Frontiers should probably be harder to remove than claims, but still clearly removable.
Colonies
Colonies are currently treated as the exceptional case.
They may still suffer:
- disabled infrastructure
- suppressed production
- local devastation
- blockaded traffic
- long recovery times
But one strong direction is that hostile action should not automatically transfer or delete the colony itself.
What Should Not Happen Automatically
Losing one site should not automatically delete unrelated nearby sites.
In this idea space, that means:
- losing one claim should not automatically delete another claim, frontier, or colony nearby
- losing one frontier should not automatically erase all other nearby sites
- losing one site should not make the stellar object permanently useless forever
Open Questions
- What exact active pressures should be required to destroy a claim?
- What exact active pressures should be required to destroy a frontier?
- Should claims and frontiers use the same destruction logic with different thresholds, or different logic entirely?
- Should destruction and capture be separate outcomes?
- How much recovery room should players have before a claim or frontier is fully lost?