mod seekers - would an all-powerful unknown entity add or ruin things?

[Death Approaches]

so, as most veterans know, there's ways to cheese the game, even on true random Brutal, you can camp the starts, stay at the mining station and civilian farming station start sector til fully researched and farm space rock for energy and fuel and research without making too many excursions into the rest of the galaxy til you're good and ready, and with the ability to purchase crew now, even staffed up.

there's no pending threat of anything unstoppable, a black hole to swallow you up, a wormhole that will open in front of you to portal you to some random sector way on the other side of the galaxy, etc.

or what about some subspace entity, a galactic monster, who eats spaceships; drawn to, I dunno, our pathfinder beacon maybe. you stay in a sector more than - I dunno pick a number - let's say 48 hours - and a spatial distortion forms, and if you don't leave within 24h, that's it, you can't leave, you're dead. game over.

something to minimize the camping, to make you build on the run, as it were. yep I know you wanted to strip everything here, but we got to go! yep we're not getting paid we can't finish that station, we got to go!

so, yeah: thoughts? would this add to the challenge, or just be a survival harassment mechanic that becomes tedious?

[Alex_D]

Although I consider camping a valid survival strategy, I like those ideas. These could be added as a challenge for the veteran player, as a mod.

Like more random events. The hyperspace engine failure, at most sets up the engine room on fire. Other events could force the Player to stop mid-space lane, and either fight or flee, either way taking damage.

Alternatives are to have some sort of anomaly that would break havoc on the crew, like a Siren world event but much worse. I'm sure there are plenty of ST-TNG/VOY episodes to draw ideas from.

I'd add a way to make the jammer fails at the most inopportune moment. Which results in a good excuse to keep spare super blocks.

I'd take a page from Cosmoteer, and allow Player designed ships, after a community vote of sorts, to be featured as NPC faction games, like late game adversaries. This can also include more of the Independent NPC factions encounters in Hyperspace. Imagine facing a hostile 3x3 behemoth indy ship/fleet on a forced hyperspace stop.