While the parameters have worked really well, Industry (and Ships) continue to be the main winning strategy. I’m wondering if we could tweak things so you could win by using a strategy from “The Martian” - “Science the Sh*t out of this”
I.e. The current mods from default params are:
Weapons start at Level3 and are LOCKED (whoever gets W4 first has a too-big-of advantage)
Experimentation is LOCKED at Level1 and Manufacturing is Expensive to Research
EPIC (64 stars/player) Galaxy with Far Distances
HomeStar is 20/20/4 rather than 5/5/1
Starting Cash is $2000 (don’t spend it all at once, but lots of carriers to expand is recommended)
You start with ONE star that has 50 ships
The Map is MIRRORED … so you each have IDENTICAL starting positions.
Real-time games favor those who are willing to forgo sleep, so the play is turn-based SIX ticks/turn.
I am wondering how it would play out if Science was cheap … but that might be too much. A counter-balance to that would be combined with making Techs more expensive to research … but now we are getting complicated.
Any suggestions/ideas … and takers who want to try a test game?
Without allowing weapons to upgrade and having Manu expensive pretty much negates most of the benefit you can get out of science. You could go all in on science to boost your banking/terra to be able to buy more econ/ind but you’re better off just buying econ/ind in the first place. With Manu set to expensive it’s cost in science to achieve higher levels is prohibitive; you probably gain more ships long term by spending the credits on industry.
I think bringing Manu back to standard but making other techs especially scanning and range but possibly also terra and/or banking cheap might do more to entice a higher buy in on science.
First, the “problem” with allowing Weapons to be researched is whoever gets there first get a HUGE advantage … so the luck of an Exp hit can be significant and negate other smart play. We actually saw this in one game where the person I was playing got it one tick before me … but was enough to be a game swinger since fleets were all in motion.
Good point on Manu - the idea behind making it expensive was so that the middle/end-game doesn’t turn into just a Manu-Fest. So yea, making the tech cheaper would be one approach … but I’m wondering if just making Science “cheap” would play out.
Have you considered making Industry expensive instead of making Science cheap? Guess that would give Science a little bonus that will not be too heavy.
Aditionally, you could make Economy cheap - opening more strategic aspects of the game.
@nick.muzzio - As I’ve mentioned a number of times, the “problem” with allowing Weapons research is whoever gets the next level gets a HUGE advantage. I had one game where I literally got it one tick behind the other player - made all the difference in the world (since both sides put everything in motion) and if it had gone the other way, I would have won instead of losing.
@DarkDragonwing - Good suggestions … and yea, those might be combinations to try, but I’d like to see how just changing Science to Cheap alters things - @kexsel and I just started a game … so we’ll see how it plays out. I have another game already created with same cheap science param - let me know if you want a rematch against the Jolly Green Giant!
@HULK, that is the thing about science, you need it to make a huge advantage to make it worth it. I would like to see the chart of how many ships you make with indy vs how many ships you lose do to the weapons advantage. I bet it’s not as big a difference as you think when you consider it take a lot of effort to smash your ships into the enemy to utilise your advantage. I think the thing that upsets it is the random exp hit which makes it “unfair” if there was no exp then if you chose to do weapons early on instead of terra/manu it might not help enough to overcome the other players growth. Then once they gambled the growth (almost like doing econ instead of indy early on) you can then switch to weapons and hopefully prevail.
I agree it makes more sense to scrap exp than weapons. Since exp is random, it could lead to an unfair advantage, but all things being equal, you might as well be rewarded by better weapon tech if you spend more on science than your opponent…
Of course ive never played a 1v1… so I’m kind of trolling
