Do you think that as long as you are sticking with this new rule, that you could please add some quick code to mark the stars that are currently not producing? Make their names or ship counts red or yellow or something? Or maybe make their resources circle a different color.
It’s REALLY tedious right now to go around with a calculator figuring out who can still produce ships and who can’t.
@JayKyburz It seems like all you need to do to circumvent this rule is to designate one of your lower-resource stars as a ‘stockpile’ star and have all of your carriers drop off their ships at the stockpile.
I ran though a quick simulation of this here: Neptune's Pride
In that game currently have amassed 50,000 ships on my homeworld
.
Is this tactic within the intention of the new rule?
I considered that, but it does mean there are stars in your empire undefended. Same as if you just had 50K carrier looping around picking them up.
I guess my question is why do you want to stockpile the ships?
I fully accept that this rule is not ideal, but I do want something in there to encourage the use of ships to conquer stars. I want to encourage players to act after the game has been running a long time already.
How about an upkeep mechanic where you have to pay $X from your production income for every ship?
Any other suggestions?
I half seriously above suggested attaching a decay rate to a carrier. But totally seriously, a decay rate plus reintroduction of carrier experience might be very cool.
I don’t know why anyone would want 50k on a star before or after the rule change. It seems like if you are bound and determined to stockpile that many ships, it’s still possible.
That might could work. Personally I’d prefer no change at all since some people do prefer long cold wars, but as an option, sure. If you do introduce some rule encouraging offensive play, my vote goes to scaling production back gradually. Also, to allow this rule to scale and not become too limiting, I would either:
I guess I’m looking for an in-game, narrative explanation for the rule.
If the narrative is that a star cannot supply a fleet beyond 100x its resources (not enough food for the crews, not enough energy to keep the orbital jets operational), then a 50,000 ship fleet shouldn’t be allowed to exist regardless of whether it came into being as a result of the manufacturing capabilities of one star or from being amalgamated from the manufacturing capabilities of 100 stars.
I’m seeing this crop up on stars in my current games where I’m not deliberately trying to stock pile (I’m actually attacking 2 players atm!) I have central drop off zones for looping fleets and now I feel like I’m being penalized for my strategy. This needs modifying imo… probably either the decaying methods mentioned above, or just a higher limit.
As I said earlier (and several others agreed), I think the new rule would be much more palatable if it was 100X the TERRAFORMED resources of the star rather than the NATURAL resources. The former is much more scalable as “inflation” naturally increases the number of ships … with a corresponding increase in Terra.
I’m guessing an easy coding change @JayKyburz - highly recommended.
I too am having this happen unintentionally in my large game. I have 150 stars and Im pretty darn good at logistics…but I still have stars no longer producing simply because the loops or supply lines havent picked them up yet.
Im also a hyper aggressive player and at war with a 2+ players. I really am trying to attack and get ships to the front line.
If I were to have to live with this i’d have to buy a lot more carriers, WG’s, and only make logistical hubs of ships in my supply line only at the highest resourced stars. The logistics in endgame with so many stars can be incredibly complex already and having to work around this makes it that much worse. I can respect Jay’s desire to bring about this sort of change, but if we end up going with a limit like this, the limit is too low imho.
OK, you guys have convinced me this rule needs to be better thought out and I have pulled it for now.
I still want something that discourages players from stockpiling ships though.
I like the ‘upkeep’ alternative Jay mentioned above. I can imagine something like:
Every tick there is a $1 maintenance cost per 100 ships in the player’s navy. If the player runs out of funds, ships die out starting from the largest fleet in the empire.
This would disincentivize stockpiling and also increase the value of Economy and Banking.
What if overloaded stars ate into (or disabled) the local economy?
In history we see that as huge armies camp around small towns the soldiers ate all the food and pretty much completely disrupted life for the local populace. A very large army needed food, metal, resources etc, and trampled land to the point where crops no longer grew.
Edit: Oh and it would be great if affected stars were identified on the main map in some way, using red text for the star name/data fields or something.
@JayKyburz: Could you please elaborate, why you want this:
I would advice to first make sure, that a big majority of this community is positive on your goals.
When that happens, this community will undoubtly produce tons of ideas of how to reach these goals.
By the way: Big kudos for letting yourself being convinced by the community and taking this change back! That takes a very special kind of courage!
Thanks @Camelorn
Well I first started thinking about it because of the wear and tear on the servers, but I should be able to fix that easily.
I’m pursuing it because I think games should have a momentum that brings them to inexorably to conclusion. I think this keeps the game exciting for all players, the winners and losers.
Now in theory the game already has this, because as you start to get ahead, you get more science and better tech and the strong get stronger etc, but in some games it’s not working.
Perhaps some players find it difficult to to see they have the advantage and should push home for victory, this is fair enough and all part of the game.
But perhaps a winning player doesn’t want to push for victory because they are just enjoying the game. I’m not a huge fan of this because, when you are on the losing side it can feel a little like a cat playing with a mouse. I think it’s polite to get in and finish off the weaker empires. (Because I think there is an obligation for all players to keep logging in and playing until it is very clear they have lost.)
My first reaction was to punish large players for not using their resources to bring the game to a close, ie stop ship production. But perhaps this is not the right strategy.
A time limit is a nice, clear and obvious way to bring the game to an end, but I think it would be very difficult to pick a good time limit, and it would really suck to hit the limit just when you were about to win by conquest.
It’s not the biggest problem facing the game right now so I don’t want to stress over it too much. I threw in a quick fix which which was probably a mistake, we’ll see if we can do better in future,
I think you almost got it to be honest… when you read the comments here the overwhelming response is nice one for trying something new, and by adding either the upkeep or decay approach it might work… and please please don’t add game time limits!
Sorry, that is extremely overpriced. My maintenance cost per day in my latest game would have been 1,000,000$ and I didn’t stockpile anything. It just took a week (warp speed) to get ships from one side of my empire to the other side.
Sure, I could have built 500 economy on every star and every ship would have been fine 
I’m not completely against a maintenance fee but it would have to be much lower. Also it should be paid only when a galactic cycle is completed.
I like the idea of a slow degradation of manufacturing efficiency depending on terraformed ressources more (see xjhdexter’s post 7).
Can we confirm this is really turned off? Because I’m still seeing stars in my game that aren’t producing because there are too many ships there.