Fixing Starchart Missions - Feb 2016

Introduce something similar to Sabotage Caches to more mission types (they're on 5 tilesets already, we can add them to the remaining 8) as well as a standard "rotation A" drop as a reward to non-endless mission types; that immediately makes captures, deceptions, exterminates, and Mobile Defenses better. In addition to increasing exploration, it offers additional levers to adjust resource rarity. You could also add something similar to Medallions to all mission types for EVEN MOAR EXPLORATION, and I'm partial to having it be a Void Key, with keys now requiring one from each member of a party, but that's not exactly relevant. Depending on team size, clear speed, and tileset confusingness, I'd say that the average Non-Endless gets a Rot C anywhere from every 5 minutes (four players, geared specifically for speed runs, minimal tileset confusingness) to every 15 (one player, playing on the Earth tileset). However, Survival and Defense are trash on starchart already, and these buffs would make them lag behind significantly with their time invested vs rewards schemes.

For Defense, I would much rather have a super intense fast paced set up; basically, instead of operating as it currently does (here's 60 enemies... okay, you killed those, here's 60 more) instead have it operate similar to a Tower Defense's system for waves, with waves coming every X amount of time, rather than after you finish the last one. So every 40 seconds from the start of a wave, the next wave starts (unless you kill all enemies, then the count down drops to 5 seconds). You still have to secure the area at the end of Wave 5. This can be fine tuned; with that number set up, Rotation C would come every 800 seconds, which is about 13 minutes; increase the gap between waves to 45 and it goes to fifteen minutes, decrease it to 35 and it's every 11-12 minutes. Defense has an advantage, though, in that you're guaranteed to get that rotation C easily, you've got higher spawn density (which means more Random Drops), and it's pretty straight forward/simple, rather than being potentially complicated or party-splitting. You could even add Hit-Squad esque "assault teams" of high power squads jumping in to increase the value of defense and make them better for affinity farming. They still lag behind Interception due to the unique quirks of Interception, but it'd be much closer.

For Survival, you can actually fine tune it differently. Replace the "survive X amount of time" for a rotation with a progress bar; in addition to time based progress, completing "optional Objectives" (Say, go to a tile, hack a particular console, or go kill a particular enemy, or destroy X target, or locate Y item and take it to location Z, etc) can make it progress faster while ramping up the enemy pressure faster. Complete the optional objective, shave 30-60 seconds off the time til the next rotation, a new one pops up. This is on top of managing the life support. If you operate on the assumption that a Survival rotation takes 5 minutes without player intervention, each objective shaves one minute off the time to the next rotation, and it takes roughly a minute to complete each secondary objective, you get to a rotation C in 10 minutes.

Keep in mind that these options do not touch on Excavation or Interception, the two current problem children; I'd have to see numbers to judge if the buffs to the others render the problem children too weak, but what these suggestions do is introduce levers to adjust things. Obviously, if there's a 100% chance of getting an R5 core for completing a capture, but two of the three caches are alloy plates and credits and you'd need the last cache to get another R5 core, captures are just going to be speed ran instead, but if each cache was 5 R5 cores, no one would ever play survival unless they needed something specific from it. There's gotta be a middle ground somewhere though, and I'd love to futz around with it. Is defense going too fast? change up how long there is between waves. Are survival rotations speeding past like a freight train? Reduce the amount of progress optional objectives give.