An Elo system might work. Lots of adapting would have to be done for multiplayer. I’ve only ever seen it in 1v1 style games. Its hard because even if there are 14 weak players and another veteran, the game becomes a lot harder for you. That would have to reflect in the scores given after the game. Although an elo would dissuade people from playing 64 player games because it’s so hard to win, you’re almost guaranteed a drop in elo, where in a 16 player game you’d be more sure of a win. Less of an incentive to help the alliance to victory even if you come in 4th or 5th because you’ll get a negative impact on your elo.
Overall it might work, but I don’t love the idea. I was thinking more of a leaderboard that just showcases consistently strong players without adding in negative incentives to the actual gameplay.
An easy fix to people fixing games just for rank is to say if the game doesn’t have 70% real players and continue for at least 10 cycles then it doesn’t award rank or victories, and renown is not available.
(That reminds me of another point- I’ve soon some people join a game, give somebody all 16 of their renown, then leave the game and the renown sticks. Can we make it so renown can’t be awarded until the game starts?)
I am definitely against decaying ship count, with warp gates things will already me against the leaders. However I like the idea of a federation of sorts for weaker players. Maybe once a player passes a threshold of 60% of stars to victory, players with half his star count half reduced trade cost? Obviously the numbers could be tweaked, but it has to be set so that the reduced trade doesn’t come until mid-late game.
The change in your ranking in these systems can be based on assuming that a multiplayer game can be equated to every player playing a 1on1 with every other player in the game. Finish first, you win every 1on1; finish second, you win all but one… finish last, you lose every 1on1. You don’t have to finish first to improve your ranking, you just have to do better than enough players that have a higher ranking than you. Incidentally this means that it’s best to fight until the very end as you might finish one place higher and your ranking may just go up instead of down, (or at a minimum it will go down slightly less than it would have done).
Secondly, the more players you have in a game the less your ranking is affected. This takes account of the fact that if you have an actual 1on1 game with Champion McChampion face and lose he’s almost certainly played better than you. If you’re both in a 64 player game and you finish below him then maybe he was just lucky to beat you because you shared a border with Captain Kamikaze and he shared one with Pacifist Pete.
What about ship upkeep costs? Bigger the fleet, bigger the costs. Scaling carrier costs only dings me if I have to buy another carrier, while ship upkeep would ding me every cycle regardless, and it would hurt the strongest players the most.
The Civilization series did that and it really changed the strategy behind having a huge standing army.
Did you forget to mention hoe the races all have buffs and debuts in different techs? I like that a lot.
Also, is terraforming out now? I’m not seeing it anywhere.
Holy crap, these expensive carriers are going to wreck me! I’m one of those guys with double my star count in carriers by the end of the game. Adding 25$ to the price every time you buy a carrier might be too much in my opinion. That means your 40th carrier will cost $1000! In 64 player games most people have carrier counts in the hundreds by end game. Having your 100th carrier cost $2500 is going to be completely game changing. Every player will have to build completely new strategies.
Although I can only assume that by how expensive everything is now, the value of a credit has changed a lot also. To put into perspective, a 40 resource star now costs $50 to build a single economy point. Way different than before.
Carriers costing more because of buying more carriers does not make sense. A factory builds cars or carriers each an identical copy of the previous, should always cost the same. Usually in the modern economic market place, building and selling more cars will drive the price down.
However, I think carriers with greater HR tech would cost more, because of the engines upgrade and increased fuel capacity.
The new pricing might work. We have to see how it scales with the new economy, which is the point of the trial game.ets see how that goes and then discuss further changes
Only problem with that is there won’t be complex carrier systems looping ships forwards as fast as possible. But I guess it will be the same for everyone so it won’t be game breaking.
This might be too complex, but it’s an interesting idea. Perhaps we have two classes of carriers.
A transport class that is cheaper to buy (still scales in price but not nearly as much). The catch is it operates with severely reduced weapons level so in combat it gets demolished by attacking fleets way smaller than it.
Then you have a regular carrier (or attack carrier) that scales quite expensively. These carriers get combat experience, operate on a normal weapons basis, and increase in price a lot every time you buy them. That means it pays to be careful with theses guys, you want to preserve experience as well as avoid purchasing another.
I like this concept a lot. Although I would add the caveat that you can only send transports to planets that you already own or are unowned, and if they happen to get into combat then they have decreased weapons