Small rule change today. You can only abandon one star each production period. This will prevent losing players abandoning whole empires.
Could it be little higher? Say a percentage of total stars?
I often use the abandonment to lure the attacker and this will drastically affect this tactics. (I only play large 32+p games)
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@Qwerty how about ten percent max per production cycle.
There have been times when I can see I am in a bad position so abandon stars for an ally to take over. This is a tactic I have used when double crossed to allow me to hand my remaining stars over to a more honourable ally to get back at the person who double crossed me.
Also used when a pair of allies reach first and second place in a game so the second place player can hand over stars to the first place player to give them enough to reach victory conditions easily.
One per production would slow this end game down unnecessarily.
As a recent beneficiary of the tactic I am wondering what all the fuss is;).
A player who is so inclined will hand over stars to a favored player one way or the other.
Now, if there were a system of capacity caps in place of the current techs, this tactic would be much less effective 
A limit is good, but one seems low.
Also, can I abandon the same star more than once a day?
This is already affected me drastically. I’m being attacked an can’t let allies through, and by the time I could abandon stars, it’d be too late. It also means that (in the 64p, scanned trading only) it inhibits the whole swapping stars to allow further trading. I already don’t like such a low cap. Increasing it would be beneficial to a lot of people, even just to 3-5 or so.
This is indeed a very big deal in the 64 scanned trading game. What is the rationale? Important enough to impact games in progress?
This limit also disables any burned earth tactics.
I certainly agree with this change. But like most mention it would be better to max it to a x% off all stars (or all owned stars)
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I haven’t seen many people abandon stars at the moment so I’m not sure how much of an issue it is.
I definitely think one per cycle is too small though, I like the suggestion of having it be somehow proportionate to number of owned stars like Sjeng suggested.
I don’t know why this change is considered necessary but I dislike changes being made to the rules in mid-game. Is it really too difficult to make adjustments starting from the beginning of new games?
I don’t recall anyone bringing this up on the forums prior to Jay implementing the change.
Once again, seems a bit drastic, was it really a problem, can we have a rethink on this.
This also kills the ability to hand off stars to teammates in organized team games. Hopefully this is quickly followed by an automatic transfer of stars to Formally Allied players in Team Games, or it is a team game killer.
I think this was less of a problem than the Mass Gifting problem that was an actual issue when someone wanted to screw another player out of ranking at the end.
Not a good update at all.
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I’ve seen two games now basically completely broken as players handed over large empires to an ally because they were losing. This is a practice I wanted to stamp out in all games right away.
This is what I hope to prevent.
If you are working hard to grind down an enemy its totally unfair for a losing player to just hand off stars to an ally. Not only does the receiving player get all the star with economy intact, they don’t have to expend any ships capturing them. (not insignificant if you ask me.)
The player that should be reaping the rewards of hard fought combat is left facing a larger stronger enemy as a result of their efforts.
If a formal ally is helping you defend your borders, keep in mind they can just give you the ships.
If you want to reward a formal ally for their help you can cut a path for them to the front line by abandoning stars, but you just need to plan ahead a little.
We should talk more about team games, but given the current rules, if i were taking a team game seriously, I would hand all the stars of the team over to a single player. No tech transfer costs, all research concentrated on the highest priority area.
If anything I think team games need some mechanic that forces all empires on the team to be the same size, or perhaps have multiple players all logging in to manage one empire.
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Jay, you are focused on discouraging suiciding into one player to favor another. That practice has been around as long as I’ve played NP (3+ years omg!) I have found that in most cases it does indeed hurt gameplay, but not always. Whether or not it does has a lot to do with the motivation of the losing player. Score settling, especially, from a previous game, is almost always hurtful. In the smaller circle games, where you basically have an NAP on one side to fight on the other, often requires the implied or stated threat of suicide to enforce the NAP, and sometimes your bluff is called. Finally, a final act of selflessness to help a teammate, who can argue with that? So it depends.
btw, I have learned that anticipating and steering a suicide bomber is an important part of diplomacy, for better or for worse!
Star abandonment is indeed an efficient way to suicide. But suicides happened before that code was written, and will afterwards. Unfortunately, the rule you have imposed seems to have unintended consequences as well, documented in this thread.
This is heading slightly off topic, but I think you have the wrong impression of how teams are treating Team games. It is a team effort. Your suggestion of dumping everything into a single player defeats the team working together entirely. As a house rule in the one I organized, we stated that a team must strive for the top 3 spots in order to be the winning team. We set the star % high enough that the most efficient method would be for a single team to be declared a winner, then concede to end the game. This is preferable to a single player needing to take 400-500 stars for victory due to the current game limitations.
In both of the games I have played, particularly the one I organized, each team had their own method of handling things. Mine in particular assigned tech in a very flexible way early on, utilizing a specific strategy. Others had a primary researcher working mostly on a single tech, with the other two members gradually falling behind in Science, but focusing on ship production and expansion.
My team also treated our three systems as a single entity with three branches. Purchases were handled as a group. Stars were transferred simply for tactical or expansion reasons. Particularly to give a path so that one player could expand along side another. Otherwise ships were passed back and forth based on where they were needed. It was even commented by another player that we were a well oiled machine.
Maybe NP2 isn’t well suited for team play. Some of us have made it work, but this change makes that harder. Abandoning stars isn’t the problem, nor is limiting it the solution. A player can still suicide all of their ships in one direction, pulling them off stars in front of the one to whom they are gifting them. The only difference is the loss of Econ, but usually the salvage helps rebuild part of that. This does prevent Formally Allied players from transferring stars because they can’t attack a vacated star.
The root behavior isn’t going to change simply because you add more restrictions.
Yeah, I think this is how it probably should be and I think the rules should enforce it somehow. Either the stars literally belong to all three players, or a team is required to redistribute stars so they remain even.
We could simply re-enable star gifting in fixed team games. Then you don’t need to abandon stars at all.
Suiciding into somebody is different. Thats called fighting back. You are still actually playing.
Totally true. I must admit that.
I have never backstabbed, but I was in a position where I was just steamrolling over everyone thanks to extremely well played start of the game. Well, my targets did just what you would expect, they all joined their forces against me (futile, haha), but moreover, they suicided and abandoned their stars for others. Well that annoyed me a lot!
This is wrong. It indeed works, but it is wrong game mechanics.
If you are being devoured, you can still get help from others, but handing over stars which would be a reward for someone’s hard work is just unfair.
Not actually. I understand what Jay meant by saying to give all the stars to one ally. But it was a bit thick.
In the team game, we sort of divided our stars accordingly to the importance of a tech being researched. Whoever did Weapons had the most science and most stars, then Manufacturing, then Terraforming.
Money, Ships and Stars were handed over as in your team. We had tables of cheapest infrastructure upgrades as well. This is the infrastructure distribution. I think if it weren’t for FISTs breaking our agreement, we would have been higher on these tech than you. (We actually had readings saying that before they attacked.)
So, if you are sending your ships into one player, and withdrawing or abandoning stars in favor of another, you are still actually playing. What if you actively defending some stars, and abandoning others?
But just abandoning all your stars is quitting, and bypasses the AI admin. I get that, and is pretty lame, but I have never seen that behavior. And if that happens, wouldn’t all the neighbors, friend or foe, have a shot at the empty stars?
Seems we are splitting hairs here?
Perhaps we simply need to impose a cost on the behavior if we want to discourage it, probably on the acquirer. Perhaps you have to destroy a carrier to use the resources on a star, however acquired?
Again, your capacity limit system would directly address this issue. The more I think about the applications of that system, the bigger a fan I become.