Institute a cash reward for destroying ships, whether in attack or defense. Obviously could vary in its power, such as $1/ship or $1/10 ships. Encourages attacking/defending intelligently and rewards good strategic play. Discourages too much turtling/waiting for other people to fight and then picking them off.
Call it salvage.
Maybe tie it to Tick count? $1/ship count=tick number. May need testing between total ships destroyed that tick, or limited to each battle. You don’t want it worthless at the beginning, but you don’t want it getting out of control later. I’ve seen fleets of 150k ships, so even in a late game situation, it would only be an extra $150 in a turn.
I agree with you with scaling, that is a great idea. Although I think a ship number=ticks is too weak to be an actual bonus. After 1 day you would get $1/24 ships? I would think tick number/10 or /12 might be feasible, but I feel the number of ships increases exponentially during the game. What would really be ideal would be rewards based on the total number of ships in the galaxy. like X% of all ships in the galaxy are worth $100 to kill.
I have just realized another situation where this rule would make the game better. In a game right now I am being attacked by 2 players at once. I have better weapons and am defending intelligently using the calculator and I will kill hundreds of their ships without yielding any stars. But I make no gains from this, I just lose a bunch of my ships and wait to be attacked again. I could push forward and become even more vulnerable. Those are my only two options, and I get no reward for killing hundreds of their ships on defense.
Probably right, it would need to be altered a bit. I examined a battle report I just received, and I would not have gotten anything out of it.
Since we would be calling it salvage, you could make it the total ships killed in each battle divided by the Tick. Even taking the total ship count of my battle, I only ended up with a little over $1. Maybe multiply that by some number. A new research area? Reclamation? Salvage equals (Level)x(TotalShipsDestroyed)/(Tick)
The important thing is to determine an amount that will give an incentive to fight without drastically unbalancing the economics of the game.
I do like this idea and have been thinking about it a little over the last few months.
In addition to salvage, I was thinking that bring back the experience point system for carriers might be a good mechanic to reward players for attacking.
You could also turn salvage upside down and have an upkeep where you have to pay money from your production each day for each ship you have. It would cost you money to have ships sitting around doing nothing.
I’d say the upkeep cost could cause economic stagnation, but I’m not sure it would actually be true unless the upkeep was pretty steep. Games get to the point where the daily income becomes tedious to spend, hence the bulk upgrade.
It is a tough call, I think salvage would be a helpful mechanic to promote early fighting, yet should not get overly powerful in the later game. Upkeep could do damage early on, by forcing you to throw away forces to stagnate.
I fully support this idea. Defensive players get bonuses for smart defenses. Aggressive players can’t afford to “simply” throw their weight around. And there is the possibility to farm industry for credits between allies. Mwahahha.