I have lots of thoughts about Proteus that I haven’t had the chance to type up yet… but on the topic of trading, I don’t see how to limit the number of trading partners. Even if it’s set up so that I can only trade with one person, it would be really simple to coordinate a trading circle and work around it. I send weapons to Pan, he sends my weapons and his mfg to Karma, then Karma sends his banking and Pan’s mfg to me. We’re all still just trading with one person. I agree in Proteus big alliances are overpowered. But in Triton I think they’re lots of fun, especially in the bigger games. Nothing’s more exciting than getting 8 smaller guys together to take on the leaders, and any sort of alliance limitation cuts that out.
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Some more detailed thoughts on technologies. One of the features I think is the best about Proteus is that it has managed to make each technology relevant for the whole game, and the differences between them largely one of strategy. In Triton, a lot of techs have high early value and then hit a cliff edge. Assuming you want to have techs relevant all game, here are some thoughts.
Experimentation, Manufacturing & Technology
I actually like the idea of linking the effectiveness of infrastructure to technology, I hate the implementation. The problem is that the numbers scale rapidly and continue to grow at a rapid pace as your infrastructure increases. Income, science and ship build get to silly numbers very quickly and the mid game is even hard to compare to the early game because of the scaling.
You have a model for tech improving effectiveness that is much better: the way manufacturing scales in Triton. This gives a much more gentle scaling that provides obvious benefits without quickly blowing things out of the water. The same model could easily be applied to the banking and experimentation technologies. However, I think the way you phrase it isn’t very clear. I’d describe it something like:
“Each point of industry produces a total of 5 ships every production cycle, spread over each tick. For every level of manufacturing technology you have (including the first), you gain a 20% bonus to ship generation (i.e. 120% at level 1, 140% at level 2 etc).”
This is mathematically the same with a different description. You’d likely want to change the base level and % increase (e.g. maybe Econ is 9 base and 10% increase) to balance the game. I have a model for comparing technologies that could relatively easily be adapted to test some combinations out on this if you are interested in going down this path.
Terraforming
Keep it. Without it, you need to have the cost and income scaling from Proteus that hurts the brain, and initial star quality becomes MUCH more important. Terra is already a competitive tech I don’t see that it needs to change.
Scanning
Scanning is a fairly underrated tech anyway (as in people don’t value it enough) but Proteus’ manages to essentially combine Triton scanning and experimentation to make for a tech that is more competitive to the others in late game, without being super effective early game. In short, I much prefer the Proteus version of this and would support that coming into Triton to replace current experimentation mechanics.
Range
Range is a tricky one. The change that makes range good in Proteus is the 12 hour warp gates. I am honestly undecided which warp gate model I prefer, or whether some combination of the two would work (e.g. speed up to a cap of 12 hours). As it stands in Triton, range over 10 is rarely if ever useful.
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I would like an option where you could exclude hours of the day. So say: Exclude 0h-6h and have real time in the others.
I know that you can do this manually today, but that is not the same.
Thanks everybody for your feedback and thoughts. I am reading it all and thinking about it.
I’ve been playing a game of Proteus to refresh my memory and I came to say the scaling its ridiculous. I just don’t like that 1000 ships is a lot one day, then almost none the next. Ships themselves just depreciate in value so fast!
Also, while I like the idea of not having a production that is good for some players, and bad for others (because they are sleeping) I just don’t really like having cash dribble thought the day. Perhaps a middle ground of a production every 8 hours or so would make sense.
Also with regard to alliances and backstabbing, I was thinking we might have a special tournament game with total anonymity. They game generates you a name and icon, and no badges or renown. Play as if you have a new account every game. Then to encourage players to play it, I’ll create some special new badges of some kind.
Also, I should be able to detect a backstab in code. When two players that have been trading tech and cash start fighting. I could dish out some special rewards for that. I guess I could also somehow reduce a players rank / renown for settling for second place. Calculate how much damage you dealt to the winner and if its “not much” assume you didn’t play to win.
Anyhow, I agree with a lot of what everybody has said above and in they next few weeks, (perhaps a month) I’ll propose an actual todo list. I’m not going to be able to make everybody happy I’m sure, but I would rather do it mostly open here on the forum if I can.
Also, I have a “hello world” app running on a new server. work has officially begun. (to be clear, we won’t be playing on this server for years)
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How about this for a crazy idea.
You get 10 points for a win, then everybody else gets points in order of how much damage they dealt to the winning player.
So for example. The winner get 10. They player that dealt the most damage to the winner gets 9, then second most amount of damage to the winner gets 8 etc.
Reward the players actually attacking the winning player.
“Second place” becomes the player who dealt the most damage to the winner, not the player that helped them to victory!
Immediate thoughts:
- Wins would be undervalued. Rapidly decreasing points down the ladder is very common in sports (and Triton) for a reason. But I suppose this was just an example anyways (not sure if there will be 9 players at the end that have dealt damage to the winner always anyways).
- It’s not certain who will be the winner at the end. You want to encourage open fights even in the endgame, but might make players act even more cautiously before attacking all out. “Fighting the winner” successfully would entail that player no longer finishing as the winner, not helping the player who did most damage, but the one who held back and was resourceful enough to collect the victory afterwards.
- And most importantly, this system can easily be played. Let’s say I’m in an alliance with another player the whole game, I’m at 45%, they are at 40%. No one besides us two can endanger our victory, so we agree to a deal: A few stars before I have 50% and win, we kill the alliance and they just send most their ships on a few of my well-defended stars. I take the victory and bahm, they did most damage to me and get 2nd place anyways. If there was a big war and someone else did a lot of damage to me, we can just draw it out a bit longer and repeat the above a few times, but normally the ship growth should usually limit that problem.
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This reminded me of some of the games in the early days on NP where we would all, always turn on the winner and cut them down. The games would settle into a kind of equilibrium go on forever.
By all means play about with variant games and run them. But I can’t stress this enough: I do not see the problem with (non-formal) alliances as they stand, particularly in large games. Generally it’s not that straightforward to coordinate in a way that keeps everyone happy. I think we are seeing more shifting politics in the 64p games than we did in the 32p as empires rise and fall. But having said that, after you’ve played with a group for over a month, negotiated boundaries and routes and supported each other, I think it’s perfectly reasonable not to want to do a final backstab at the end - especially as you’ll almost certainly be teaming up again in future.
The current 64p map lends itself more to people growing their own direction with their back covered though, maybe try some other map configurations?
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If I understand Jay correctly, wasn’t the suggestion to have a special game type which encourages back-stabbing? If that’s the case, then I would support that. It would certainly be fun to jump into a game which encourages back-stabbing, where everyone understood and was prepared for what might happen… 
However, if the suggestion was to change things to encourage back-stabbing in the wider game, then I’d have to agree with @Kaine. It would put a lot of players off, including me. If you have spent a lot of time and effort to overcome all other factions, you want to celebrate that victory not destroy everything in a desperate and selfish race to the top position. I have very recently been the victim of that kind of desperate act… it wasn’t enjoyable.
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Cough cough sentries cough ahem…
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If you want a game that is less alliance focussed, just turn off the ability to trade tech and make it faster to research… that game would be much more strategic on an individual level.
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lol, I wasn’t referring to the recent 64 player game. That was pretty painful as well, but I’ll no doubt run into the culprit again sometime…
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I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be nice to have a “random” main game option with it’s own medal: each game has a random configuration requiring players to adapt strategy and style to the strucutre of the game, rather than do the same thing the always do. Variable tech costs/banned trading etc could all be parts of that.
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my thought for making smaller alliances (smaller being a relative term there could be more players in the smaller alliance) more competitive is to be able to link sciences. the big alliance has 4 empires working together. the rest of the galaxy are trying to fight them but don’t have the science to keep up with the big 4.
so here’s a thought. allow a percentage of alliance B player 1 science to combine with Alliance B player 2 science to research the same tech. say the percentage is 75% (just a figure I pulled out of the blue no thought other than it was easy to do the math- would have to be tested or maybe even a sliding scale?) both player 1 and 2 have 100 science when combined they have 175 science to research the tech of their choice (must be same tech).
of course the big 4 can do the same thing, but that would also limit how many techs they can research. preventing them from forming a monopoly on Weapons, Manufacturing and Terra.
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I like were the idea about pooling science go, kind of like formal alliances.
There will be probably a lot of reasons against simple pooling but maybe there is something to get out of it.
But then we need proper limitation so it can’t be abused.
I think if the big 4 pool on just weapons, with the current Triton tech, they would just crush the others, as even with low manu, if you manage to get double weapons…
I agree it needs limitations.
How about the science cannot be any higher than the highest person with science in the game?
Hi Jay,
I am totally find with the proteus engine, it’s just the rules I am not 100% on. My recommendation would be to just give us the ability to turn on all the different rules at will.
For example
Wormholes = one or off (or maybe like warp gates common, dense etc)
gate speed (4x or cap at 12hour or something like that)
Retain infrastructure on captured stars true or false ( or give us options for each indy, science econ separate maybe)
gather economy on the cycle or on the tic
enable scan science true or false
etc etc
This will solve all your issues as now the the user has the control to mess with the different options and can’t complain anymore 
-Nick
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This reminds me of an old post: https://forum.ironhelmet.com/t/crazy-idea-to-make-the-game-more-friendly-to-new-players/4068?u=wfmcgillicuddy
Always surprised to find a part of the gray matter that the Jameson’s hasn’t degraded
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Thanks for the link. I have absolutely no memory of writing that. I should probably read back through the forum and read what other interesting discussions we had.
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