Star Abandonment

How about reducing the resources on a star when it is abandoned, or making it uncapturable for a certain number of turns (each abandonment before the next turn phase increases the amount of turns it would be unusable). Just some suggestions that may or may not be feasible.

The cost is on the player who is suiciding. They have to login each day and move ships around. If you care enough to login each day and do it them Iā€™m cool with it.

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I care enough :slight_smile:

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.

Actually, I think that is totally the expected thing to do, and a main benefit to players who can actually build better diplomacy than others. This game is entirely about diplomacy, secret alliances, back stabbing, and unfairness. Thatā€™s the WHOLE POINT.
Please keep letting me give my stars to my allies if I want to (and vice versa.) Thatā€™s an integral part of the game as I understand it.

Yes, but if you are not playing to win, I think its best you move on to the next game.

My alliance winning because I strengthened it is better than the alliance enemy winning because I couldnā€™t support the alliance in the best way.

How about having the limit of 1 for ā€˜Basicā€™ players and allowing Premium player 2 or 3 per production?

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suicides can be used as a diplomatic tool: help me fight my opponents, otherwise ill hand over my planets to them and you have to face them alone.
this tactic can help getting a big player involved in a fight instead of sitting in his corner and building economy and research.

I think that is an extremely narrow view of your own game, as well as the people that play it. I, and many others, play for more than just the Win. Often, Iā€™ll go into larger games with a couple players I know, and work together so that one of us wins. If Everyone was moving on as soon as they felt they couldnā€™t win, there would so many Concedes and AFKs that the game would be pointless. Probably most 64p games would be done in a week or two, as those with AI players near them early have a huge advantage. Especially now that the AI appears broken and no longer shuffles ships to balance their distribution.

I, personally, have just felt the effects of this horrible change to the game. I am in a position where I am being attacked. There are many powerful AI stars all around the stars I am being attacked at, so the smart move is to pull my forces back and abandon the stars. The AI used to jump to claim them, which would inflict heavy damage to my attacker, and allow me to regroup and reclaim the stars. At the same time, it would weaken the remaining AI stars for easier clearing. However, with this code change, I can only abandon a single star, and not the line of 4-5 that I needed too.

I thought of that idea, but I think it is horrible. I hate pay-to-win style games, and though I am currently a premium player, I would definitely abandon this game if buying an advantage became part of the game. I think premium features need to be mostly cosmetic. With this game, you get to create and administer games, play more than 2 at a time, and the rest are cosmetic. That is a good balance. All pay-to-win games just become a unbalanced mess. Iā€™d rather have a pay per game style if Jay needs the increase in cash flow.

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Yes. I play games with two separate groups of friends (three if you count my team game) and the goal is for the team to win. Weā€™re all aware that who actually wins the game is pretty much up to luck, position, and other factors, but as long as the team wins, Iā€™m happy. Itā€™s a lot more fun.

I disagree - I would rather play with or against someone who is doing something or redistributing stars to others, than have them quit or afk and be left with an AI (at least, with the current state of the AI anyway).

Working hard to grind someone down only to have them quit is usually less fun than working hard to grind someone down only to have them abandon their stars to someone else.

Iā€™m not sure about this. Sometimes a team strategy calls for unequal distribution. Iā€™ve only played one team game, but Iā€™ve played another game where the game ended up split into three large alliances so it may as well have been a team game and in both cases, the goal was the success of the team over the success of the individual and sometimes this called for tactics where not everyone is equal.

Sure, it could be made work, but my point is you lose flexibility. I donā€™t want the game to be too rigid - part of the fun of NP is how unpredictable things are.

I agree with Jay that games are most fun if every individual player plays to win, right through the end game. Those that enjoy ā€œone for all all for oneā€ play style (as I do) should play in team games . However, that game format is still in development (thank you Brian Flowers) and requires substantial setup time. So it is fair to say that many team-oriented players will continue to join individual games and pursue various goals. So Jays attempt to curtail players yielding stars to others will not succeed.

There is no question that star abandonment is an important tool for managing formal alliances, especially in team games, and limits on that ability are an huge annoyance. I have less sympathy for the use of the tool to defeat the AI.

Youā€™re right, there is nothing I can do to stop it, but I we donā€™t have to make it so easy. What I particularly dislike is abandoning all your stars then never logging in again.

I know there is no real way to prevent this, but this is a culture that I think will ruin the game.

I donā€™t want NP to have an ā€œold boys clubā€ where you canā€™t get in an alliance unless you know the right people.

I donā€™t want the deck stacked against a new player when they join a game because there are 3 or 4 friends already in an unbreakable alliance.

All players should always play to win.

I understand this is not how everybody wants to play, an this is why Iā€™m planning on implementing the fixed team games, in which case every team should be playing to win.

Ditto what Jay said about the ā€œold boys clubā€ - Iā€™ve run across the unbreakable alliances many times ā€¦ which can be quite discouraging to new players who are basically used as cannon fodder.

Having played a few times (and seen some of the same names pop up), I actually consider it a bit of a challenge to try to sniff out these alliances and then rally others against 'em ā€¦ but itā€™s a ton of work and rarely works.

Having said all that, one star/cycle really limits this as a game play option. Iā€™ve used this in team play to swap stars back-n-forth with an ally ā€¦ and most recently when I had to go offline for an extended time I abandoned many stars for my teammate to try to help them out. So I think itā€™s useful/acceptable in those situations ā€¦ but yea, I can see it being abused.

Jay, youā€™re overestimating how much our ā€œunbreakable alliancesā€ actually win.

Especially in bigger games, itā€™s likely that we wonā€™t be able to coordinate as effectively or a large group of players will end up against us. Thereā€™s one game right now where my 4-sided alliance added a 5th and that among other factors has doomed us. Thereā€™s another game (Jay, itā€™s the one with all of this controversy) where my alliance wonā€™t win the game. I remember another one where none of us finished top 3. Weā€™ve probably lost more than weā€™ve won.

I get the point about ā€œbarrier to entryā€ and ā€œcannon fodderā€, but I think the bigger games would actually help those players a bit. And itā€™s not as big of an issue as you think.

Not everyone is hyper competitive. Not everyone comes to NP2 just to win. There are plenty of people that just want to play a game and enjoy the interaction with people. I think trying to insist that everyone always plays to win is short sighted and unreasonable.

Iā€™m not a professional gamer, Iā€™m not getting paid to win. I might join a game to try a new tactic, roll play a race for fun, or to support a friend that has fewer wins than I do. All of those are valid reasons to join a game, and there are countless others. If I wanted to win every single game I play, I would never play a game like FTL. It is an awesome game, but brutally difficult to win. I also wouldnā€™t play StarCraft 2 or any Halo game if I always felt the need to win. There are pro-gamers playing those. I usually am cannon fodder, but it is still fun to play a game. Even more enjoyable when I can get together with friends to play. We more often than not get slaughtered, but a game is a game, and playing it with friends will almost always be better than going in solo with the only purpose being to come in first.

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An easy way to discourage groups from joining together is to have more than one system generated game at a time. Each time a player joins, rotate which game is being offered. Hide player data until the game stars, just like you hide the map in Dark Starts. The system generated games are the only one where those concerns should exist. If you enter a custom game, you take the risk that the designer invited their friends. Go into those games with your own friends.

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Thatā€™s an interesting idea about hiding identity of players in the system-generated games until the game starts. Perhaps the new star abandonment rules could also apply only to system generated games?
Or alternatively, make it an option when creating a game? Having a player abandon all their stars for an ally has never been a problem in the games Iā€™ve played - this could be because I generally always play custom games with friends.

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I just abandoned a star on tick 40 and now I canā€™t abandon on tick 64. I should be able, shouldnā€™t I? To each possible way to interpret ā€œeach production periodā€ it should be valid: A whole production period (24ticks) has passed, and also the two moments are from different cycles!