Future changes and thoughts... For 1.0.8

[zarkwizard]

As always player feedback is VERY important to us. We compiled a list of changes we are looking at making to the game and would like to get feedback and thoughts to make sure we are addressing the main concerns. If you have something to add, it would be a good time to let us know while we are still specing everything.

Some changes are being made to allow better access to the game, and also the ability to not lose time when you want to build or train something. See below for details on time changes.

Main issues as we see them now:

Land Grab:
This is obviously a huge issue. Obviously those spending a lot more time in the game to uncover the maps are the first to grab the planets. In the beta you use to just be able to claim a planet with a flag, so we added ships you had to build to claim it. That has turned out to not work so well either. More resources means it's way easier for people to build things.

Plans to thwart the activity:
At the start of the game you'll be able to control 10 planets. You will require a Planetary Control Center (PCC) to acquire +5 planets per orbital PCC. You will need a population at a planet to have factories to be able to build the PCC. If you have 2 planets that have PCCs, and you own 20 planets, and you lose a PCC in battle you will keep your 20 planets, but you will require 2 more PCCs to start acquiring new planets. ie 3 x PCC = 15 Planets, plus your Base of 10 planets.

Taking over Planets with Massive Armies of small ships:
Seeing a fleet of 400 Battleships, or 400 Battle Cruisers take over a planet is not our intent.

Plans to thwart the activity:
Planets, ships and orbitals will all be changed in the next version 1.0.8. Please refer to the combat change thread for the details. Lee has been working very hard on compiling a list of changes, as well as laying out all the changes. Now is the time to speak up. You can find the comabt thread here: http://www.zarksoft.com/cms/showthre...mbat-Revisions We have created a combat simulator and are running multiple tests on the data to make sure combat functions how we would expect it to.

Building Super Capitol Ships:
For the most part we don't think there is a current reason in the game to motivate people to build the Super Cap (Warlord) ships, other than the PK. The PK obviously has a special ability letting you destroy a planet that gives it a reason to be built. The other Ships like the Monitor, or Super Dread really don't have a reason at this time.

Plans to change the reason:
After much debate here are our thoughts. The Super Cap skill will allow Monitors to "Absorb" damage. Rank one would give the Monitors 20% damage absorption, and every rank up would give it 10% more. So at max rank the Monitor would absorb 100% of a single attack. This would be a great way to protect your fleets from taking damage on other ships in your fleet. You would be able to bring Super Dreads in to attack a planet if you wanted to take it over, and build Monitors as damage absorbers for your army. It would also help in the case if you have a PK destroying a planet, the Monitors would be able to absorb damage that would have other wise gone to the PK.

RO and you:
Currently traders are the only ones that can really acquire Rare Ore. So it makes it difficult for others to acquire the ore needed to build the more difficult things in the game.

Plans to change this:
AMC (Advanced Materials collection) will be going away. All players will be able to acquire Rare Ore. Since the Planet Grab will be toned down we felt it wouldn't make a difference anymore if we let anyone acquire the ore. Traders will still be able to build faster, and screw people on trading, but with the changes going in for PCCs it will be much more difficult to do the massive land grab, which in turn will make it more important to acquire things like Gas planets that produce abundant amounts of rare ore.

Time requirements for Researching, and Building:
Currently you must start something to have it begin training, or building then wait a required amount of time while that object builds.

Plans to Change this:
We are going to be adding new stats to a planet. They will be RU (Research Units) and PU (Production Units). RU/PU is gained at a rate according to the planets population. Their will be a slider on the planet screen that allows you to say how many points are going to either Research Units, or Production Units. Default for a planet with be 50%/50%. Building a Refinery at a planet will increase the PU, just as building a Science Center at a planet will increase RU. Researcher will have a slight innate RU bonus, Traders will have a PU bonus. So if you had a planet with a high population you could set it to PU 100% and all off that planets Unit allotment will go to PU, and nothing will go to RU, just as you could focus a planet on RU rather than PU. Focusing several planets on RU will help you earn Research Units to acquire skills faster.

How RU Works:
RU is a global stat that will go in to a research pool. You will use the RU to purchase skill upgrades. As it stands now you must wait to start training a skill, and if you forget to change a skill, you my find yourself training a rank 2 of a skill you didn't want. Rather than have people "lose" the time we will allow them to purchase skills using RU that is acquired from their planets. This will make it so that skills will insta train of you have the required RU to purchase a skill. Prerequisite requirements will still stand. Example you must have a Tier 1 skill in a specific tech in order to train a Tier 2, even if you have enough RU to buy the Tier 2, you must still have at least 1 Tier 1.

How PU Works:
Planets will produce PU based on the population of the planet, and various skills. PU is specific to the planet, and not a global item, nor can it be traded, or harvested. It is unique to the planet and it's population. EXCEPT: If you build Matter Transmitters. A MT will allow you to share all resources, a production units between all your planets. Ships, orbatals etc will require PU to be build in stead of time. Building a unti will require a few things, the correct amount of RO/CO/PU, the correct skills. If all those things are in place you will be able to insta build the unit. No more waiting.

Hey you forgot about Warlords:
No, we didn't. Warlords will have a unique ability that will allow them to gain CO/RO from ships they destroy. They will be able to assign a single world that will get resources from combat. They will be able to change which world is getting the resources anytime, but only one world can be assigned. Only Warlords will have this ability.


Colony Ships, and Outpost Ships:
Currently a "free" starter population gets moved to a new planet.

What's going to change:
When you create a colony ship is will take 50mu of your population from the source planet. This will reduce the planets population according. An Outpost ship will take 10mu of you population from the source planet. Those populations will be deposited on the destination planet. If the ship is destroyed before it colonizes a planet that population will be lost. This causes more of a cost to be applied to your colony ships. The resources used for building the ship, and the colony will all be deposited at the new destination.


* One little note: This is a living document at the moment, and some things may change slightly because I typed it wrong. It should be fairly straight forward though.

[ravenzachary]

Awesome!

I still think colonized worlds are too powerful defensively. I lost 350 Battleships trying to take a colonized world. It should be easier than that considering the ship build limits. I'm not sure anyone has lost a colony in any games played so far.

[zarkwizard]

I still think colonized worlds are too powerful defensively. I lost 350 Battleships trying to take a colonized world. It should be easier than that considering the ship build limits. I'm not sure anyone has lost a colony in any games played so far.

We have been using the new combat simulator to determine effective armies. The way combat works currently isn't the same as the new combat. Basically damage is spread across a lot of ships at once in the current system. While 350 Battleships could be good if someone doesn't have enough orbitals, in the case of stealthed orbitals it could prove to be deadly.

Under the new combat system stealth orbitals will only have an initial 1 free attack round bonus. If the orbitals are stealthed, and their orbital stealth skill is higher than yours they will get a free round, where as if you have a higher or equal stealth orbital ability they will not get a free round of attack.

[Wrath]

Thanks, zark, sounds like a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes - totally appreciate it!

Two 'main issues' that I think would merit attention and I do not see mentioned for a 1.0.8 update would be:
1. easier ways to track harvest and/or trade routes and/or incomes
2. functioning push notifications

All the land grab changes and research time requirements won't help me at all unless it gets easier for me to wrap my head around where my harvesters are coming or going and how much I'm getting from those trades/harvests. In addition, I see forum threads with long calculations showing math involved in how much resources can be carried, or how long different ships take to travel one sector, etc. -- so anything extra along those lines that could be added in-game would also be very welcome.

[zarkwizard]

1. easier ways to track harvest and/or trade routes and/or incomes
2. functioning push notifications

That is on the list of things we are looking at doing. We are trying to determine a decent way to handle it on the small devices and we are working on some screen mockups and so forth trying to figure out how to do it. I didn't put it on the list because it's not a sweeping change to the game. It's more of a visual thing, but it is in there for client changes.

[ravenzachary]

functioning push notifications

+1! We definitely need working Push Notifications.

[VanderLegion]

+1! We definitely need working Push Notifications.

This is critical. As i said in my last post here, the whole reason I started with combat stuff is cause someone captured every outpost I had in an entire sector. I had no idea I was even being attacked until I loaded up my turn one time and had a whole lot less outposts all of a sudden. I'd already been building a fleet for defense, so as soon as I noticed I was able to start taking them back, but if I'd known I was being atttacked when it started I probably could have prevented him from capturing a lot of them...

[SG7]

I still think colonized worlds are too powerful defensively. I lost 350 Battleships trying to take a colonized world. It should be easier than that considering the ship build limits. I'm not sure anyone has lost a colony in any games played so far.

Seeing a fleet of 400 Battleships, or 400 Battle Cruisers take over a planet is not our intent.

1.) It looks like colonized worlds are even more not less protected!
2.) I still have to think over the changes since they are altering the game in a dramatic way. Possibly fast simulations of new conditions could tell if we have balanced game. However, I am fully aware how difficult it is to make full scale simulation of the Universe
3.) I do not think that the land grab can be avoided. I do not even see anything wrong in it! As long as everyone knows about it than there is a fair fight for it. This proposal just delays and slows down the process making it more elaborate. 10 minutes players will always lose against 1 hour players. That is all. Ultimately without the land the economy cannot expand. The other extreme is to disallow any expansion and give everyone the planets up front. Well, I am not fun of it at all but that is a remote possibility.

(BTW Raven:
If you are talking about your loss trying to take my colony than FYI
a) it was well protected
b) I have taken not one, not two but 18 homeworlds already.
c) Do not worry; I am not planning any revenge on you as I am very peaceful guy. No hard feelings Raven!)

[JetJaguar2000]

These are good changes.

By far the most interesting, in my opinion, is the attempt to put production and research on a mutually exclusive axis. I really like the idea of being able to focus on either a robust production platform, or a robust research platform, or something in between. I think your goal here should be to foster different play styles. Instead of having everyone blasting through the same research, and ramping up production simultaneously, create diversity by giving players the option to focus on research rather than production or combat, etc. The proposed changes sound good, but you should make sure that these options are well balanced; you may want to consider changing some of the research technologies, for example, to work better "on their own" as an alternative to production. I think this will take some time to sort out, because it's not totally clear yet what sorts of things a "researcher" could do better than a "producer," since the main mechanism of interaction and progress in the game is the production of ships.

I also like the idea of the Planetary Control Center, but I would take it a couple of steps further: PCCs should only grant you the ability to control planets within some radius of where it is built (say, 5 - 10 squares). Coupled with the expense of building them in the first place, I think this would add a HUGE strategic element to the game that doesn't exist now. If you actually had to make hard decisions about WHERE to create expansion opportunities, things would be a lot more interesting, especially when led to contention over particular areas of space.

Which brings me to another related suggestion. One aspect of the game I find a little obnoxious is how ships have unlimited range. What this means is that geographic location has very little meaning in the game. The most extreme example of this is how an opponent can send a fleet directly to your home world and blow it up, regardless of how big your empire is, or how far away it is from the enemy. This has always struck me as pretty artificial.

What I would LOVE to see is the concept of "contest fronts." Having a radius-based PCC could be one aspect of this. I would also propose that the range of your ships be limited in a similar way. Maybe they can only travel 2x the radius of your nearest PCC from it (modified by ship type). Alternatively (or in addition), create another orbital unit, the Refueling Station, that could further extend the range of your ships. What I'm looking for here is a way to establish geographic relevance. For someone to invade your territory, they should need to have built up a refueling "supply line" from their territory to yours. Ideally these refueling stations are defensible, but not ridiculously so. REALLY ideally would be for this mechanic to provide some balance between hardcore players and more casual ones. If a casual player is facing an invasion from a superior force, they may not be able to defend against the attack, but they should be able to muster the forces to destroy the invader's fueling stations, thus cutting them off and delaying invading ships while the refueling station is rebuilt. (A third super-interesting step in this direction would be to allow players to grant or deny access to one another's refueling stations -- maybe this casual guy can't even destroy a link in his invader's supply line, but maybe he can convince a third guy to deny the invader access to an open refueling station he is using!)

Obviously, these would be significant changes to the mechanics, but I think they would be good ones. I've been playing Starbase Orion again recently, and it struck me that the ship movement limitations are a big part of the strategy involved. Having to make decisions about where to build outposts in order to get your ships to where they need to get makes things interesting. Again, give meaning to specific regions of space. Right now it doesn't matter where you start, as moving ships around is just a matter of time (and avoiding black holes). Make expansion be grounded in the physical space of the galaxies.

That's all for now.

[zarkwizard]

JetJaguar2000 : You bring up good points. While I am not totally against saying ships can only fly a certain distance from a world, or a ship has a certain amount of fuel for distance it can travel it might make the game a little restrictive. I'm not sure how that would play out. While I personally don't have a major issue, I think it might cause some fundamental problems. We would have to give it some thought.

I like the PCC thoughts.. We would have to go through some universe big bangs and try to determine proximity for systems. Either we create more planets or have to change the algorithm for the way the big bang generates a universe. Some good thoughts though.

You certainly bring up some interesting points about the space travel. If ships were give a limited range for how far they could travel it would make things a lot more interesting. You would have to slowly acquire planetary hops to get somewhere. I would think a few things would have to happen for this though...

1 - We would probably undo the fog of war. So you would see all the stars. If you want to travel somewhere you would "jump to a system". Once you were in warp you are locked in to the time it takes to travel to that system. How far you can jump depends on the type of ship/fleet.

2 - How would people encounter a black hole? If you are warping along and go past a hidden black hole does the black hole expose and you lose your ship, or are they visible and destroy everything passing by in a given radius?

3 - Using a jump gate to jump to a beacon, would this still allow you instant travel to a planet you control with a beacon bypassing single jumping from system to system?

Obviously waypoints would have to be introduced to the game to allow that kind of navigation.

Just some thoughts about the future of the game, not something we are currently planning.. If input is enough for it, they are certainly things we would consider implementing in the future.