I’ve been playing around today with new scaling functions for tech reseach, tech trades, and infrastructure upgrades that should ease that steep curve a little.
Agree with bb, I quite liked the pacing.
I thought BB and I had it planned out great. My major flaw was trusting Cable, he had promised peace and trade if I helped him beat Zoquete, but he betrayed me the exact same time I launched on Jay. From that moment on I didn’t have a chance. I probably shouldn’t have trusted him, but that was my mistake. Oh well.
(I was going to exploit the gates, but when Cable attacked I was spending all my money in the south so I didn’t get a chance)
The eng game pace is fine with me, although the first several days seemed slow to me. Maybe the ditching defender bonus and adding star experience will lead to a more offensive start and it will be more evenly paced.
If the beginning speeds up a bit, and tech scales so it comes in slower then the game would be paced very nicely.
Although I will miss being able to carry a game all by myself. The most satisfying victories are winning 32 players games with no real allies, but that seems impossible here.
Here seems impossible to win without allies because the improvements rate. At the moment you are behind others in banking, manu or experimentation, the difference in income, production, researching will just tend to increase. So, if there are allied players, you must be part of some alliance too.
We organised as: one investing in experimentation, other in manu and other in banking. And until middle game, while you had more stars than every one else (so: more economy, industry and science), the difference was difficult to be noticed, but once the tech reach certain point it just is to much to be beaten by stars number.
The problem in this game (for me) is that you really need to be constantly around to avoid fall behind. It was much more time consuming for me than I expected. Except at the beginning.
And the production is so ridiculous high (for example, one of my stars produces 435 ships/tick), that the carrier travelling speed seems ridiculous low (one of my carriers is going 4ly, what will take 12ticks). If I send one carrier to take one empty star with such production, need to take around 5000 ships just to make up for the production.
The good side of slow carriers is that it doesn’t add pressure on the timing (at least you are free to check every-every tick for that).
I spaghetti-zed what tried to said bc falling asleep and it’s not my native language, so 2x difficult to express.
Think this game should have been for Last Hero. He was the clear winner until the exponential rate of the banking-manu-exp combined surpassed him irreversibly.
I think the problem with that is the instability of the situation of each of us. It’s to hard (at least for me!) to determine what will happen if one of us attacks the other.
Look at the current difference between Cabal and Snorkelwanted (or me). It is mostly the result of Cabal being away today. And just for that, he has now half of the ships production of he or me (2600 vs 5000), or 25% less ships when yesterday he has most than everyone else.
The only thing I can suppose is that my bonus (superior banking) would be useless if fighting alone at this point of the party.
We are addicted to tech. We are slaves of science and money. Please Jay, free us of that and halt the game now 
Yes, I agree. If you don’t have several allies you will lose, no matter what. That will be even more so in 64 player games. In Triton you can win with a 3 player alliance if played smartly, and pretty easily with 4. With the new rules I expect several teams of 6 players to show up in most games. One member for each tech, because if you don’t have 6 and someone else does you’ll get exponentially behind in tech.
I liked being able to check in whenever convenient and have cash to upgrade. It’s very nice not to set alarms for all hours of the night to wake me up for production (am I the only one that does this!?)
Carriers did seemed very slow, and they become exponentially slower as tech speeds the game up. This is compounded by carriers being so expensive.
If it were Triton I think I could’ve pulled the win. With my early ships totals and a smaller defender bonus BB and I could’ve pushed into Jay days earlier. We’d have the border at hour back BB Hip and I could all be attacking South by the time Hip got taken out in this game.
And Zoquete, I wouldn’t have known English was a second language if you hadn’t pointed it out!
My lament to Hero in game seems worth sharing:
I just have not a good job managing these settings, I just don’t have the cash flow and tech I need to be competitive. Sometimes i miss NP1, where the tech was basic and i could get buy on my BS skills.
But then I remember waking up at 3am, with carriers incoming at twitch game speeds, and trying to control,fleets on my phone in a flash browser. Aaaagghhhh!
There’s no way to win without allies in this. And I have no idea what would happen if one of the current big 3 tried to win it for themselves. If I sent huge fleets at someone then they’d just delete the warp gates as is traditional and my fleets would be out of date by the time they arrived. I might as well be turning up in a fleet of timber pirate ships waving a cutlass for all the good it would do me.
The tech trading is absolutely out of control right now. Everyone has techs done in 3 hours max so when you wake up you have to sort out what all your allies have done. If you’re in different time zones as we are then it’s even worse.
We had a brief discussion about TheLastHeros huge fleet but decided it was basically irrelevant (although impressive). We could just out tech it with our alliance and besides, Jay’s smaller fleet was holding it in place so it was nothing we needed to worry about. It was a northern problem for northern folk.
Looping carriers look ridiculous, they set off and within a few ticks the star has more ships than the carrier does.
It’s basically NP2 turbo trading edition.
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I agree with everything Snorkle said.
I haven’t really checked in much the past day or so, but things are completely out of control in my opinion.
And remember, if things got this big in an 8 player game where the leader has 50 stars, imagine how crazy it would be in a 64 player game where it went two months longer and the leader has 200 stars.
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Why are you still trading at all? Its not like you need to stay competitive with those of us you are running roughshod over. Anything you need you can conjure up out of thin air, you have so much exp. Perhaps your trading arrangement has outlived its usefulness?
What I find most intriguing is the concept that the ship growth rates at defending stars far outpaces the attackers travel time. So in fact an end game battle would heavily favor defense, and would be a giant pain in the keister. Therefore the top three should just resign in place and call it quits.
So we have game mechanics that favor trading cartels, reinforce leader momentum, and encourage unbreakable alliances to divvy up win, place and show amongst each other rather than fight to the finish. I don’t think we need any more of that than we already have. Bummer.
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which would argue for geometrically increasing trading costs (as Jay has proposed), log rather than linear growth rates (again vetted above), and fleet attrition perhaps tied to scan tech (your truly and others). So we stay tuned for V2.0
I’m going to be watching this thread like a hawk to get in on the next iteration of Proteus!
In NP2 Triton, the tech research progressions RP requirements increase incrementally in a stair step manner, look sort of like a poor man’s log function, except the math is easier to process.
I am not playing this game but I am watching as much as I am able to see but here my opinion… Since everything is sped up due to everything being multiplied it would make sense to increase the amount of points it takes to research each tech.
If science is now multiplicative maybe the amount of points needed should also be times the amount of the current level for the tech. So the first tech might be 144, the second tech is x2 so research would cost 1442=288 and the third level would cost 2883. Or maybe just have it as normal but seriously increase the cost way over very expensive rules…
Banking could still make the normal amount of resources but just pay out per hour by doing 75*banking tech level divide 24, then the result is the exact same amount of money you get in the normal games but payed out every hour.
I also dont see why everything has to be sped up and why terraforming has to be removed… I really like having more tech to research even if they are useless to research, because it makes the game more complex.
Maybe you could cap the levels of infrastructure per star, and when you get more research the cap increases, so maybe your industry could only put 50 ships per star until you researched more manufacturing but then everyone is going to have the exact same amount of ships and there will be no challenge. But the point is I just want to put in some ideas that gets other people thinking as to what would be possible, as they might come up with other ideas or they will give an idea that will make someone else come up with a good idea.
I have made a few designs for games and also maps, so here is just a few things to think about:
- Opening scouting
Is scouting at the start of the game fun to find more resources, is it based on some luck, should the opening have any elements of luck, how long does the opening last.
The trick is the have a medium sized opening of the game and try not to have any luck at all in any strategy game… Unless it is a luck based strategy game.
An idea might be that, once you have captured a star you are not allowed to build on the star until a certain amount of time has passed since it has been captured.
Another idea might be that you can build carriers with specific traits like an RPG. I know this has been suggested many times but here me out because this is different. When you build a carrier maybe you can have options to increase speed, defense,attack, or have scanning range on carriers. Basically upgrading your carriers like having carrier experience… But each upgrade would cost extra money when you build the carrier and they cant be overpowered on speed or anything or maybe you can only add one thing to each carrier.
Having scanning range on carriers or have the option to place scanners on carriers would make scouting in the early game fun because you build specific carriers to scout. So instead of having different types of ships you can actually build your own type of ship just from a carrier.
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Middle game
The middle game is where all the players decide by making the best moves they possibly can who is going to win the game or who will have the most chances of winning the game… This should last around 75% to 85% of the game. -
End game
The end game is where the winners are technically already decided and it all depends on whether the winner can prove he has won by turning the battle into a win and not just a theoretical win. This should be the shortest part of the game otherwise the end game is just one or two players grinding down a win that everyone knows is going to happen, we dont want this to be a long part of the game.
By the way I cant wait for these updates to roll out so I can play it myself ;p
Because if one of us didn’t trade and the other two did that would be the end of that guy by the end of that day. We’re trading for survival.
Ah. Now I better understand Mssr Z
So if Z and Cabal wanted to, they could block your win? So it’s a failure of will? That’s very different.
I’m only ‘winning’ in the sense I have more stars. That’s of little consequence right now, Tech is way more important than infrastructure and physical assets once you’re past a certain size. The real leaderboard is who has the most tech.
Well, the win condition is still star count. You and Z are tied everywhere, but Cabal is lagging in Ind and sci. There is one player left intact, and bits and pieces of two other players. Map access is critical, and deals might yet be arranged that could effect the outcome.
So other than the scaling, and maybe the pace now, the only thing that keeps this from being a donnybrook of an end game is the will of the winning alliance to mix it,up.
Which is the same as almost every other game I’ve been in.