In continuation of this conversation from the Videos thread:
Very good ideas here about making fighting meaningful! I also sent a suggestion to HG a few years ago that touched some of the ideas that Polyphemus had.
I wrote I wished systems had a “state” and missions had an effect on the state. By state I mean these tracked properties that can be high or low: flora, fauna, sentinels, pirates, population (and also some for repair, break-in, photo, find missing person missions).
If I accept nothing but “kill animals” missions, the balance of the state should tip, and the system should offer more “feed animals” missions. If I have repaired everything, the system should tip to a state where I get paid to sabotage stuff again. Similarly, getting rid of too many sentinels should lure in pirates; and vice versa.
Also sentinels should have real priorities, currently they can’t tell the difference whether I picked a flower or blew up a depot - they get equally angry and are equally lenient/forgetful afterwards. It’s fine to treat a newcomer’s flower theft as trivial, but they should react differently to a hardened repeat offender, so to speak.
This way, when I want to explore in peace and quiet, I have the option to not harvest anything right in front of sentinels eyes to get away with it. And if I want to be a gangster I know which of their buttons to push to lure them out faster or longer or stronger.
I can slowly ruin an extremely peaceful and abundant system, but I can also slowly rebuild an aggressive or depopulated system whose balance was recently tipped by another passing player perhaps. (And over a few days time, the balance could revert to its original state, so they don’t have to track our tiny impact forever.)