Thanks Dioxine! Again, love the mod. It's hard, it's fun, and just has a really good feel to it. I have a few specific things I had some thoughts on, and keep in mind I'm only in my first playthrough at the mid-level difficulty, so a lot of this stuff may be wrong or ignorant.
1) Resources: I'm not sure if this is different at Jack Sparrow difficulty, or maybe it gets harder later on, but the game really loses that dystopian-lack-of-resources edge very quickly. So far I've never been exactly rolling in it, but after the first mission or two I've never felt like I needed to be shy about buying whatever I wanted off the blackmarket either. But this is just atmosphere, and you shouldn't sacrifice gameplay for it.
2) Pogroms: I love these so much. Love them so much that I despise them. I love how hard and tense they can be, and how protecting civilians is important enough that you can't just level the map to protect your soldiers. I don't necessarily agree with how it's implemented in the strategic layer, however. You're a band of pirates (essentially well funded raiders with a sweet base and ship), certainly you can be the world's mutant police force if you want to be, but the game is set up to punish you for just being a pirate and focusing on making money and attacking targets of opportunity. Pogroms have obviously been part of the mutants' reality for a while, why does the Mutant Alliance suddenly expect you to be willing to jump to any part of the world at any time? You could make the argument that they're at least aware of you, and therefore would ask you for assistance with local pogroms, but I shouldn't be expected to care about what's happening in N.America when I'm an opportunist operating in Europe.
Perhaps this could be simulated by only having negative effects from pogroms that are on the same continent as one of your bases (even if you totally ignore them), but a huge increase in rewards for dealing with them anyway. Maybe the same sort of set up, but instead with exponential differences across distance from your nearest base. This way, there's a more tangible cost to building a wide network of bases: you have to take on more responsibilities with the locals as you network with them.
3) Base Defense: These are also mostly perfect, I just thought of a tweak for them strategically. I thought that it might make more sense for the AI to become less and less likely to assault your base each time you successfully defend it, sorta representing the heads around Earth thinking, "that didn't work so well last time, why do it again?" If I remember correctly, the severity of the base assault scales with score and time. This means that you could purposely be more bloodthirsty (by shooting down ships) in the beginning of the game at the expense of profits and having to risk early base assaults; however, if you manage to defeat several of these, it might make your overall campaign easier by making later, more difficult base assaults less likely.
4) Alliance Advisors: how do these guys work? Like i see the scanning doohickey and the medkit in their weapons slots, but the Bootypedia also suggest that they're packing some voodoo that I can't figure out how to use. Actually, how does voodoo in general work in this mod?
