Yeah G3.0 Aruru right. Destroyed 112 ships of cat swift at one of my systems. Hope he has learned
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.
Also! do populations grow linearly? Maybe they shouldn't. They definitely don't grow linearly in real llife. Maybe there should be some kind of generation thing. Like, 16 hours, the population doubles. So it would take 5.8 days to grow it completely, but the strength of the colony would stay relatively low for a few days. The numbers would need to be balanced, obviously, but I would welcome a change where a new colony is something precious that would need to be protected for a little while. And maybe if you take over a struggling colony, it just kills the whole population and turns into an outpost, to prevent people from just being total vultures about it?
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)
Yeah, I'm fine with homeworlds being well defended. I'm also fine with 400 Mu colonies being well defended. It's just that it's too easy to get to 400mu and on the way up they're orders of magnitude too difficult to deal with. Maybe colonies should require terraforming to get up to their current strength, but homeworlds can start off at that level? I don't know. A new colony should be barely hanging on though, not immediately become an impenetrable fortress until you're two weeks into the game :-)Originally Posted by Leedot
I would propose that homeworlds be given special "strong" status, but that new colonies be much weaker and take much longer to reach "full strength." As the previous poster points out, it takes only a few hours for a colony to hit 400mu, at which point it is effectively indestructible until much later in the game. This allows for lots of annoying plays by land grabbers (I still don't understand why land grabbing isn't kept in check the way attacking homeworlds is, but ok) who can take ownership of huge swathes of the game very quickly.
Building a colony should be a very risky proposition, especially if you're considering doing it in an area where it is likely to be attacked. Right now, you can swoop in to an opponent's space, knock out an outpost with a very small fleet of ships, and drop a colony ship in its place in a matter of minutes. If you can avoid a counter attack within, literally, 2 hours, you're golden. You now have an effectively permanent foothold in their space, and there is nothing they can do about it.
EDIT: Btw, I think you guys should really reconsider how you frame the strength of colonies. I don't know if this bothers anyone else, but the idea that an "undefended" colony is actually capable of handily obliterating everything up to huge fleets of capital ships just feels bizarre to me. It makes you wonder what role the explicit orbital defenses are supposed to have. A laser defense array, as strong as it is, adds literally nothing to the strength of a colony. It's peanuts in comparison. I think colonies should automatically build some kind of defense units that are observable as orbitals, if for no other reason than to give some visual parity with the actual defensive units.
Last edited by JetJaguar2000; 06-01-2012 at 05:56 PM.
Two things I can think of:
1) Repeatable queues. This would be good for defences and replicate NP.
2) Automatically build something when the resources (or research) are available. A simple implementation might be that you could add stuff to the queue even when you have insufficient resources and it'd just sit at 0% until they are available (or build up to whatever % you can currently afford). This would increase the amount you can do per login and eliminate those situations where you don't quite have enough resources but can't login again for eight hours.
I feel similarly about the pain in the neck that is attacking a colony with a few cruisers, then just planting an orbital defense array there. The investment required to remove it is way higher than it is to put it in. It's a less egregious problem than the colony problem though.
No, I think they grow faster in the beginning and taper off somewhat as they get larger. I believe part of that was to get them to the 100Mu at least, relatively quickly so that their defense would go up.
It was done like that because a huge complaint in beta was that colonies were so easy to take over, because you couldn't build anything until the population got up there.
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