Alien Hate Loss from Hab Destruction

[anonusername]

I haven't played the same for about a year, and I have noticed some new/odd behavior on the latest stable patch (0.3.99). Previously, driving alien hate over 50 prior to the total war deadline would result in hate loss for every hab they destroyed. On the current patch, they still attack my habs but there is barely any loss of hatred no matter how habs I let them destroy. e.g. in my current save they have destroy about half a dozen habs without any serious hatred loss. I started with about 68 hate, and by viewing my save files I can see hatred dropping by about 2 points per month. I cannot tell if this is simply natural loss over time, or if it is simply from the average loss of 1 or 2 habs per month.

Is the hatred reduction from losing habs much less than in prior versions, or am I doing something to disqualify myself from the hatred loss?

[johnnylump]

You're welcome to shoot us a save where one of your habs gets popped by the aliens and we can watch what the code does with it.

support@pavonisinteractive.com

[neilwilkes]

I w ish I had saved my last attempt now.
Had a similar issue - Hate Meter was at 3 bars, having dropped down from 4 bars and all seemed okay.
Then out of nowhere I lost all 6 Earth Orbitals in just 3 turns - that was the end of that run.
I literally had 2 fleets going from orbital to orbital, wiping out 2 orbitals each turn.
This occurred after I killed 2 Protectorate agents who were causing havoc in my home nation

Time to start again, this time making certain I defend my Orbitals.
Another valuable lesson learned - and this is not a complaint at all, please don't misunderstand me - one of the things I really like about this game is the fact that winning is never guaranteed.

[anonusername]

You're welcome to shoot us a save where one of your habs gets popped by the aliens and we can watch what the code does with it.

support@pavonisinteractive.com

I don't think its a bug, from further investigation I am losing the minimum 1 hate from each hab destruction. It's just a lot less than the 5 hate from the previous patches. If I am reading the dissembler right, it now removes only 1 hate per hab tier, although for some reason I still only lose 1 hate for T2 habs. I suspect it has something to do with the various checks relating to AI goal importance and such.

It would be nice if the game made whatever mechanics influence whether you "qualify" for additional hate reduction more clear. I don't think it even mentioned the double hate loss for having 0 fleets and an active Alien Admin.

[johnnylump]

I'd still like to see the save.

"Hate" isn't supposed to be a variable you can directly manage; it's not reasonably knowable in the game universe with any specificity. I know a lot of players who know about the specifics of the mechanic try to minmax it but the game's intent is you play intuitively within uncertainty rather than treat it like a value you can control directly.

[anonusername]

I'd still like to see the save.

"Hate" isn't supposed to be a variable you can directly manage; it's not reasonably knowable in the game universe with any specificity. I know a lot of players who know about the specifics of the mechanic try to minmax it but the game's intent is you play intuitively within uncertainty rather than treat it like a value you can control directly.

Unfortunately I didn't keep the save, just waited out the hatred spike and rebuilt all my habs afterwards. It was still fairly early, so it was manageable.

I thought one of the objectives or xeno techs mentioned that aliens destroying your habs would reduce hate, and in older versions it was that simple. Now, it seems that you can drastically reduce the rate of hate loss by increasing the "importance" the Aliens consider your faction to have. Even if the specific numbers are never disclosed, it would be nice to have some sort of notice that it will become much harder to reduce hate if you raise the hidden "importance" value too high, and what actions tend to make it go up. It actually makes me minmax my hate a lot more because I can no longer get away with just a couple of destroyed orbitals if I inadvertently go over during the first decade. On older patches I only really used my knowledge of the underlying numbers to pick the correct MC limit for a certain % of hate. I wasn't looking at the exact hate for e.g. assassinating a servant beyond "don't do a bunch in a row or the aliens will get pissed."

I like the stricter hate mechanics overall because in older versions pre-total war hate was trivial to manage since destroying a few T1 habs in LEO would drop it by so much.