Doesn't this foster the type of MMO experience you were hoping for? Get together with 5 or 6 other players and take him down if you think he's going to run away with the game.Originally Posted by JetJaguar2000
Doesn't this foster the type of MMO experience you were hoping for? Get together with 5 or 6 other players and take him down if you think he's going to run away with the game.
Agreed, and I may not win because someone could win with one of the other victory conditions. I think FINbit has 50+ planets and that gives him enough of an economic base to do big things.
I should add...I want a game where the player who plays 15 minutes a day (3 times, 5 minutes each, for instance) can hold his or her own against the land grabber strategy player who can jam out many more play sessions in the first week to sprint ahead. I think the land grabber strategy is actually a bad one for the game quality unless it's pursued by multiple players simultaneously to share the wealth. In the case of Aruru, being the first real game, people didn't think of that necessarily as an option.
Exactly. The vast majority of players are not going to be dedicated enough to pursue this strategy (this is an iPhone game after all), which means the guys that do are going to have a lock on the game. There is also a discrepancy between the way the mechanics are advertised (long form, play a few minutes a day) and the dominating land grab tactic that requires a significant investment in micromanagement. To me this is a problem.
Also, land grabbing is just another Zerg rush tactic in a different form. There are systems built in to the game to prevent homeworld zerging, so why is this form of rush sanctioned? The outcome is the same: zerging player who "knows what they're doing" shuts out other players before they have a chance to get their bearings.
A lot of talk about victory conditions but no mention of Neptune's Pride where the way to win was to be the most sociopathic diplomat (as long as you didn't fall too far behind militarily). The inclusion of such a fully featured chat system in EotE leads me to believe that the devs want us to go down this route.
In NP Raven's strategy would probably lead to him being the first player eliminated and coming in last place. But even in NP the last couple of days can become very hectic and often players will just surrender since they don't want put the time in and are happy with a podium finish.
EDIT: One thing NP has going for it is that every star you own automatically builds ships (it's a very simplified "4x" game) and there's of course a defender bonus. So if a player rarely logs in his homeworld is probably going to be better defended than a player who moves regularly and has their ships attacking. This means that attacking the homeworlds of even idle players will cost you a lot of ships which you don't want to waste in a war. So the final standings in NP are generally the winning alliance top, the idlers next, and the other players who lost wars last.
I think the strong colonies in EotE is aiming towards this but there probably needs to be a more complicated build queue for the same full effect.
Last edited by KyleMac; 06-01-2012 at 02:55 AM.
In my sector a pretty big war erupted, but I think if there are too many passive or idle in a sector it's just too easy
Yeah G3.0 Aruru right. Destroyed 112 ships of cat swift at one of my systems. Hope he has learned
Neptune's Pride is a great game and the backstabbing / intrigue are definitely some of the qualities that I'd like to see carried over to Empire. I think one of the big things that makes land grabbers a target in NP is that the player standings are always known so the front runners are obvious which makes the need to form alliances more clear to other players as well. We've recently been talking about implementing a more clearly defined scoring system in Empire as well so players would have more awareness of what's going on in the world around them without revealing exactly what they're doing.
Kyle - When you say a more complicated build que what do you mean? Longer build times? More steps in a tech tree to accomplish certain tasks, etc..
I feel like colonies scale up in strength too quickly. You get to 400 Mu population pretty much immediately, in the scope of the timeline of a game. It takes so long to produce ships and move them, that a colony will almost certainly be able to defend against any number of units at the early stage of a game. If someone lands a colony ship nearby, there's basically no way to get rid of it until much, much later. I feel like colony populations should grow slower and the defense strength should not be linear, to allow for early game technology to take out low population colonies. I feel like the reward to risk ratio of sending out a colony ship is pretty out of wack at the moment. I'm fine with a full population colony being able to defend itself against lots of stuff, but it's just way too easy to get to a point where the time, resource, and strategic investment required to pose a threat to that colony is really unreasonable.
By a nonlinear growth, I mean that it should basically stay at a 1Mu defense level until about 150Mu, then grow on a really strong power curve up to its current level. Like raise it to the 6th power and let it grow from there. I also think that populations should grow at a rate that is about 20% of what it is now. It should be a much bigger deal to grow a colony to full size. That would also make the population growth science projects worthwhile.
Last edited by fieryspoon; 06-01-2012 at 05:20 PM.
Spoon - We were actually talking about this just last night. I'm a big advocate of homeworlds being strong as someone being wiped from the game should be a big deal imo but regular colonies are very easy to establish considering their strength. (and that's without getting into the fact that colonies can have populations over 400mu)
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