Thursday, September 15, 2011

Galaxy Legion: Xecti Pathway Detector

A couple days late, but there's a new temporary mission up in Galaxy Legion. It has the now-standard experience to energy ratio of 55 for 25. It takes 60 completions to get the reward and you can get 15 of them. The reward is pretty unique this time around as it is a trap.

Traps are an interesting mechanic in the game. You can set a trap on your ship or on a planet and it stays there until a timer runs out or it gets triggered. Then it does something and disappears. A typical example is a trap you set on your ship that lasts a week and then if someone attacks you there's a chance they'll get debuffed to be unable to participate in combat for an hour. (They can use a null fuse artifact to remove it or wait out the hour.) This is a nice effect in that it may stop them from killing you but it doesn't really do much. But I get like 10 of them a week, so it's ok that it doesn't have a big impact since I can keep using it for a minor impact.

Having a trap be a mission reward is a bit different. I get 10 of the other trap every week without doing anything except have some artifact generating planets. I have to spend 1500 energy to get this trap and I can only get 15 of them so it better be pretty powerful and unique. Fortunately this one is. It's game altering! For one thing it lasts a year. So they're not expecting it to get triggered very often. You use it on a planet and it triggers if someone successfully obtains a scan of your planet. It doesn't matter how they learn about your planet, but when they do the trap triggers. You get immediately told that the planet was scanned, you get told by whom, and they can't share the planet with anyone for a day.

Without this artifact you can't really know if someone finds your planet until they attack it. (There is an artifact you can use which will tell you how many other people have found your planet but you don't know when to use them. If you're paranoid you may be using them every few days on your best planets but there's always going to be windows where people could find your planet and attack it.) Now you can sleep comfortably at night knowing that there's no way someone has found your planet without your knowledge. And if someone should ever find it they can't bring in help to attack it. Worst case scenario they can try to take it over alone and take one shot at the invasion.

I'm not even sure they'll get told when they hit it. If they don't then you're even safer since they probably won't even take their one shot until you get online yourself. Even if they do you're still pretty well off. One person may have a 5% or 10% chance to take over my best planet. 60 people with a 5% shot? They're over 95% to take it. That's a really substantial improvement and I get a full day to deal with the problem. (Probably I get Honest Bung to find a planet flux and just flux it away.)

So it's good, but you only get 15 of them. It feels like you should only use them on particularly good planets and save a few to retrap a planet that does get scanned. If you did the previous temp mission that put a lot of passive cloak and defense on a planet then it makes a great target for the trap (if there's no defense on the planet you still get notified when someone finds it but they get to take a 90% stab at it). So I think the planet needs to be so good you're willing to put up at least a nominal defense to use the trap. Personally I only have one planet good enough to do that (though I may build an awesome demon planet with my Mylarai racial) and  only did the mission 3 times. I figure I won't need more than that until the mission comes back around and I can grab more if I need them then. But I absolutely had to get a couple to really lock the door on my best planet.

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