I am cool with any changes you want to make in game.
I can’t wait for carrier experience. But I remember you had to scale it properly for the number of ships. The previous version made it easy to get say +40 points, swamping weps levels. Or maybe it’s a point for a win, not for ships killed.
Buying experience for a star is a great idea. Should be expensive, and scale quickly, say 500, 1000, 2000, 4000 etc. And like Econ is destroyed when the star changes hands.
I like the idea of getting rid of defender bonus in lieu of experience. Although a person playing aggressively would likely not have any combat on his own stars, meaning exp stays down.
With carriers it’s weird. If it’s based on ships destroyed then it’s hard to scale, but probably worth it once we figured it out.
It can’t be based off combat wins. Amy instinctive response to every rule change is coming up with ways to “cheat” by gaming the system. If carriers get stronger by winning battles regardless of ship totals, what’s to stop two allies from trading low level stars back and forth to beef up all their carriers? It’d be really easy to coordinate and get out of control pretty quick.
OH!
What if… what if we made it so small stars, because they are a smaller system to defend… gain that defense Experience faster than the big stars!! That would give a strategic worth to small stars, they’re easier to protect!
What if we kept the defender bonus the same and instead added a Galaxy Creation Defense Bonus or something that diminished over time.
and what even are the changes that we could expect if some of get into a larger game?
I am fine with rules change. I also want to say that I like the competing scan range idea, really would make it more valuable. I had the same thought about scan decreasing carrier cost, but I like your idea better. That being said I think range decreasing carrier cost would be very good. Like improvements to engines make it them cheaper to produce. I’ve been wanting to improve my range all game as well but manu, banking, exp., and weapons are far more important.
Good ideas being thrown around.
What I’m getting is scanning ony shows ship counts if you’re two levels higher (or one?) while blocking your own ship counts being scanned. Star location is available to everyone, and you can see the owner the star if it’s in your scan regardless of level.
Range decreases carrier cost (love this idea!) and it makes sense too. Not sure how it would scale etc.
If we change range and scan like this, all techs will be equally viable for the first time.
Ditching the initial defensive bonus in lieu of exp on stars. Stars start with some exp which creates a defense bonus early game. Not sure how exp on stars goes up, if its combat then lots of stars won’t ever get exp, especially if you’re on the offense. Exp can maybe be purchased also? Would have to scale high and fast.
Carriers get experience by killing ships, and get an increased weapons levels as they get more exp.
Wormholes! I haven’t been following that thread but I’m sure Jay has something figured out. Can’t wait to see these in action.
EDIT: scan shows evening? lol I was tired when I wrote this and didn’t catch the bad autocorrects.
Quick thought on star exp, I also don’t think it should be decided by battles. That would really discourage offensive playing, and would probably lead to really long stalemates.
How about maybe sacrificing ships for exp? I don’t know about purchasing it because that would hardly make it ‘experience’.
It’s a really tricky concept, maybe just make star exp constant for each star throughout the game? Add a new tech which would increase star exp for all your stars (kind of like terra)?
Also, I’d love to see carrier experience back as well. It doesn’t have to affect gameplay in anyway, just a cool feature like in the original.
I think this sounds awesome to who ever has the higher tech level but would make it vary hard as the person defending without it. Currently there isn’t anything in the game that directly hinders other players and i can see this causing a lot of people to quit because as soon as one person gains the tech advantage with this it takes away the ability to counter attack or position any sort of real defense when you dont know where or how many ships could be heading towards you. Especially when you have a cluster of stars together being affected.
Why not just make range/scanning cheaper than the other technologies. That would be my simple solution.
I’m not really sure why all techs have to be equally “good”.
Even if scan and range were cheaper, there would be no major benefit to researching them, and I’d be just as likely to ignore them. Cheap crap is still crap. (Obviously they’re not crap, but the metaphor still applies.) In triton the only reason I would push range really high was because it helped a lot when I had hundreds of carriers bouncing around. Since they’re so damn expensive here I wasn’t able to get very complex loops set up, and didn’t need more than level 3 or 4.
Other chance is to make every other technology worse.
For example, if we have logarithmic growing with banking (example again: you get economy+log(x)$ where x is the banking level), at some point will be interested in a different thing, like scanning.
Just more crappy ideas from me…
Other possibility is to have some unblockeable things that depend on certain level of certain technologies:
Etc.
You can really see the effect of the new techs now in the graphs. Ships counts are exploding, really the top three players are the only players with a chance.
We might find that having a solid alliance is now too important. Even more than before.
Hate to think how large the battles would get in a 64 player game. I’d have to start shortening ship numbers with “K” or “M” 25K instead of 25000 ships for example.
So, I need to have a look in a spreadsheet, but now that you economy and science is growing at basically an exponential rate. tech * infrastructure, we need to scale the costs at a similar rate. Tech upgrades should be tech * tech reseach points and Infrastructure upgrades should be inf * inf space bucks.
Trades could perhaps cost tech * tech * tech space bucks to slow down the large alliances and give the little guys a chance! (tech cubed! )
I think this is definitely worth considering. being large is good, but log growth would prevent players running away with a victory for just sitting back and growing thier economy.
I think Last Hero should be doing much better in our current game for taking the initiative and being aggressive.
Would the weaker players have a chance to rally against the top three players ?
So, no, not a chance. This game will be over in 36 hours.
Hmm, Hero was on the verge of a breakout, until 2 things happened. He had the misfortune of allying with a player who proved inept at the new tech setup (ahem). And our strategy was flawed, as we tried to take out Jay before we turned south. So we in the north fought amongst ourselves while the south cohered effectively. We’ve all seen that dynamic play out in normal games.
So,yes, these settings reward clever exploitation of the settings and effective trading. But accelerate everything, and are absolutely unforgiving. And leader momentum is even more powerful.
The south saved me by sending me tech.
I was forced to use warp gates to move ships into defensive position, but hero didn’t take advantage of my gates to accelerate his attack.
So looking at the graph, missing a few hours of check-in could lose the game ?
I don’t know about that. This game had a leisurely pace for most of the game. I found the constant production of cash to be liberating from the tyranny of the production cycle. It’s more that once players started going down, the aggressors by acquiring new ind and sci woulld snowball their shipcount and research because of the multiplication with existing banking and exp levels. So while Hero and I were stalemated against Jay, the three southerners rolled up Hipster and went straight into Heros southern flank. It seemed like we ony dimly perceived the threat on Thursday and the writing was on the wall by Saturday. So,at least the end game doesn’t drag out.
Unless, of course, the top 3 decide to contest each other for the win. Hope springs eternal;)