Shipyards limit?

[ravenzachary]

Ok, on the ships screen you should change the header to say:

Objects built x of y (1000 max)

This will remind all players there's a hard limit.

In games as large as 12x12, as the tutorial server is now, this means out of those 144 galactic sectors, any given player won't effectively be able to colonize and control more that about 10 galactic sectors actively or 20 galactic sectors passively. If you are architecting games so that they end with 7-15 large players at the end, then the cap will support that goal. If that was not your intent, then the cap will harm things.

My fear is this: trader player grows to 10-20 galactic sectors, extracts billions and billions in ore, gets attacked by a player and as an act of vengeance, creates a stack of 1,000 Dreadnaughts that just jumps from system to system. No one can defend against that and no one would be willing to abandon all their ships to create a competing stack of 1,000 Dreadnaughts.

"If you attack me, I am going to abandon my goal to win and just create a stack of 1,000 Dreannaughts to take you out."

We essentially have a nuclear option in the game, which could either help to balance or make endgames totally chaotic and frustrating.

Let's see how this plays out. I'm currently skeptical of the limit.

[zarkwizard]

Ok, on the ships screen you should change the header to say:
Objects built x of y (1000 max)

That is currently on the ships screen. Right at the very top "Objects build x of <cap>".

It is also on the build screen via objects available count.

"If you attack me, I am going to abandon my goal to win and just create a stack of 1,000 Dreannaughts to take you out."

I suppose if someone makes that threat, take it seriously.. While they aren't a warlord, it was never our desire to gimp anyone from taking a seriously aggressive stance.. It's the chance you take when attacking other players. You'll have some that might go off the deep end and abandon their end game, just to thwart you. It's kind of the point. It also allows them to build a massive fleet to go for the artifact win, which everyone has that ability. You'll need fleets like that just to fight the aliens to take their planets with the artifacts.

Would that single person be able to destroy the entire galaxy, hardly.. Could they cause some serious damage to those around them.. Yes, most certainly. You all better band together and find his home world and destroy it, before he acquires more home worlds. Did the Borg feel bad about destroying planets? Did Star Fleet have enough defenses to fight the Borg... simple answer is no (and Star Fleet probably wouldn't have won if it wasn't a movie in their favor).

Raising the object cap to 5000, wouldn't change anything. The ultimate mechanic will remain the same. What's to be said that a player doesn't do the same thing, then built a fleet of 5000 ships, instead of 1000. It doesn't change anything in the long run. When we ran the numbers with the changes in place we felt that the scale wouldn't change anything in the long run. We'll see how things play out in a real game, and then decide based on player feedback, and their thoughts as to the balance of objects.