AI Bases, planet based objectives, and a use for credits

Now that automatons are in beta, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring about how AI could be used to give the base game more purpose and motivate player growth and ingenuity.

First suggestion is to add multiple levels of pirate bases both to the surface of planets and the space around planets. Each base should command patrols and be under a hierarchy of bases/ships/stations. Something like Mothership (one per planet) > sector station (one per region of planet, "owned" by Mothership) > planet bases (mining, processing, patrol outpost, etc. "owned" by sector stations).

This ownership hierarchy should be combined with a basic logic that allows attacks at any level of the hierarchy to affect other levels of the hierarchy. Examples of this could be: when a sector is repeatedly attacked it should receive more defensive ships sent from the mothership (while the sector station is not destroyed). When mining is attacked less patrol ships are sent from the sector station. Sectors closer to the mothership should be bigger and harder to destroy. Destroying the mothership should cause the strength of the associated sectors to effectively slowly dwindle. Patrol vehicle type, frequency, and aggressiveness would all be reasonable outputs for the logic of this system.

Adding some logic to the way patrols are sent out opens up possibilities for the player to approach each sector. Do they want to try gunning straight for the sector station/mothership straight away or strip away at the supply chain supporting it first? Play defensive and not attract attention? Either way, player choice in approach is vital.

A way of bolstering this and making credits useful is making mercenary outposts where you can hire a ship or more to follow you around for a set amount of time (with some extra collateral paid in case the mercenary ship is fully or partially destroyed after the time is up). This would add the trader/defensive engineer route of paying your way to victory while mostly staying out of trouble.

Overall I know this idea is potentially complicated to implement, but if the logic of the hierarchy is kept simple I think it would be a great way of bringing old players back to the game. People would have a distinct objective to achieve with clear ways to work towards the victory. In order to keep the game fresh for longer playthroughs, sector/mothership difficulty could scale up alongside game time. Clearing a planet/mothership would feel like a worthwhile task and lend itself to a greater sense of player ownership over the world.