Planet defense mk II

[GeeWhiz]

I agree with Strongbad, until they overhaul the mechanics, it's pretty difficult to take the game seriously.

SG7 and ChickenHawk, the two of you probably log more hours in this game than everyone else combined. You are online constantly. So for you to claim that the gameplay is balanced is also hard to take seriously. If you are building 100+ battleships in 4 hours, that means you have at least 10 full population colonies with enough RO at each to keep up production. Obviously, you are Traders, because neither other class has the faintest chance of keeping up with that rate.

As I was explaining to ChickenHawk just before he double crossed our alliance (haha), my entire objective on Nergal was to see how much RO I could collect as a Warlord without trading. I suspected it wasn't possible to reach 440k and I was right. Even with a number of Jovian outposts and rank 9 in Advanced Materials Collection, do you want to know how much RO I have? 34k. And that's with spending NONE of it along the way. I could have researched Capital Ship Construction days ago, but what would be the point? Build 5 dreads and then be completely broke?

Now, I was playing what I consider aggressively in terms of expansion, but obviously not even close to aggressively enough compared to what these guys are doing. Maybe the game just isn't for me, but if it's about crapping out outpost and colony ships 24/7 and micromanaging where they go, I'm not interested. I already spend more time on this game than I want to, if you want people like me to keep playing, you have to do more to level the playing field.

Here I am thinking I'm being productive building 4 battleships an hour, and then these guys talk this nonsense. It's silly.

Also, protip: Traders are broken.

I agree with JetJaguar -- I am trying out a trader on another server and have already killed off one player by pking his planet with battleships simply because I went for them right away knowing from Irakalla that it can be done by a trader type. When I hear that one can build so many battleships that is only true of one of the character types with such impunity. I am playing my trader as a Warlord to prove the point - and can mess up any of the weaker or newer players I want to as long as I do not want to win as a trader. And even then I bet I have a shot if i kill off as many players I can or keep others busy while I search for the artifacts along the way.

I personally feel that there are two major areas that need effort right away. Balancing of character types and administrative tools. If one of these areas was working well I think it would be easier to be patient with the game. Listen.....we have no battle reports! That is not something small to have missing from a war type game. That is simply frustrating.

I like the devs - they listen and are involved. I hope the player base will still be around by the time things improve. I wish they had had more keys to have done a proper beta test.

[JetJaguar2000]

To think that one can win putting 10 minutes a day is nonsense. You cannot put this game on an autopilot. There is lot of decision to be made.

This is where you're wrong. A well designed game could be played 10 minutes a day. And I disagree, there aren't really any significant decisions to be made in the game right now. The only real tactic is to swarm outpost and colony ships all over the place. Everything else is actually "autopilot" after that.

Decisions can be made quickly. If the gameplay actually focused more on making meaningful decisions a few times a day, it would be much more interesting. Make it more strategic, more tactical. Right now it's just swarm outpost ships, build up more resources than the next guy, build huge stack of ships, and start smashing his planets. Even putting aside the issue with Traders, this style of gameplay rewards the guy who sits there 10 hours a day maximizing efficiency by not "wasting" any time offline.

Right off the top of my head, I can imagine a (somewhat artificial) mechanic that could sit right on top of the existing gameplay: Limit the number of orders you can give a ship/fleet/colony in a given day. Make it so that each order is meaningful and measured. This way everyone gets the same chance to take actions, and you don't gain an enormous advantage by being willing to sit around all day shuffling ships around.

Anyways, I know they are planning to add some stuff to limit land grabbing, which is good, but there is still more to do. I really can't stand the colony defense situation as implemented now. It is still too hard to do anything about colonies once they get big enough (unless you're one of these guys who builds 300 battleships per hour), and conversely once yours gets taken you have almost no chance to get it back. I severely dislike the whole "all or nothing," "rock paper scissors" vibe of attacking planets. I would much rather see a system where attacked colonies sustain "permanent" damage (of course you could "repair" as some kind of factory action) so that you don't risk suiciding huge fleets with no gain whatsoever if you miscalculate or mis-guess the strength of the defenses.

The way I'm seeing combat playing out is that you work in your little corner of the universe building up an empire, you put a decent amount of time in, you think you're doing ok, and then the next thing you now, someone shows up with a 500 ship fleet that you have no chance against, and the game is effectively over for you. It's dumb and boring if you're not willing to be the guy doing that.

[SG7]

JetJaguar2000 -I am not against changing the mechanics for this game. I am not against improvements. I did well with the current system by understanding its strong and weak points. That is it. Rules are rules. If game requires you to trade you have to trade. If game requires you to grab planets you have to do it. There is no other way to win. You cannot stop a running train with your bare hands.
It happened that I had some time on my hands. Would I prefer to play 10 minutes a day? Yes, I would.
I understand your point of view. All your points are valid points. They are worth serious consideration.
I just have difficulties to design or imagine a real time system where everyone has the same chance to win regardless of playing 10 hours, 10 minutes or 1 minute. Such system does not exist in real life.
The proposed new mechanisms and battle changes will make this game very different game.
For better I hope but I have no doubts that it is very difficult to please everyone.

[Wrath]

I asked that question already. The dev said yes. You are a winner if you fulfill any winning condition.

Not to hijack this thread, but this certainly seems like it will affect how players in future games will approach the game. Doesn't that blur the lines between any of the three specialties? All Warlords will sign up as Traders, but fulfill the win condition of Warlords - so why have specialties at all, since already any specialty can research all tech requirements for all the other specialties, correct?

I'll admit, this game isn't how I imagined it would be. I didn't realize how similar each of the three specialties would feel before I started. I thought Traders would be the ones out harvesting and trading - as in trading CO/RO to Warlords to power their armies in exchange for a peace treaty, protection or building defense systems; or by trading to Researchers for the Researchers to study and manipulate the CO/RO. And I thought researchers would be focused solely on research and sell that knowledge to Warlords to build armies or to Traders to improve their CO/RO accumulations. That sort of interaction. I didn't realize we would all end up doing virtually the same things - harvest routes, outposts, colony ships, trade routes, research queue.... repeat daily. I have tried playing each specialty type on different servers and unless I go to my research queue in each one, I could easily forget which win condition I was aiming for since all the procedures are basically the same.

And now it turns out I don't even need to know which specialty I signed up for.

[ChickenHawk07]

Actually Wrath, you are partly correct. Traders can't build any warship larger than a Dreadnought. So they would be unable to defend against Warlords if the Warlord had enough RO to build them. With the new proposed changes to RO collection, it is Entirely possible that the trader will be rendered obsolete.

[zarkwizard]

I'm working on a detailed post of things we have been discussing internally that will address stuff from this topic. Once I finish the write up offline I'll post something detailing some of our thoughts.

We have spent a lot of time listening to you all, and how the mechanics work. With the new battle simulator coded, and running tons of simulations we have discovered several weaknesses in the system, and are working very hard on trying to come up with the final info on the changes we are looking at.

We certainly want your feedback on the info, it will help us make sure this is a game you all look forward to playing. Getting the balance down so it plays smoothly is #1 on our list before we start adding anything else.

[SG7]

I don't even need to know which specialty I signed up for.

Each speciality gets unique skills and bonuses. They are not the same.

[Parsons]

Thank you Zark! We appriciate you keeping us updated on how things are going.

[ChickenHawk07]

Thank you Zark! We appriciate you keeping us updated on how things are going.

Agreed! Definitely looking forward to getting my hands on that battle simulator as well ;-)

[Mablung]

The most fun I've had in this game is figuring out the rules the hard way, by trying stuff. I've spent way too many hours on this, but that's because it's been a challenge, and I've enjoyed figuring out things before others have, like you can send ships out of your beginning sector, and there are a whole bunch of empty systems in the middle sectors. And there's an extra bonus you can exploit which I don't feel the need to explain, but I will explain to Zark when this game is over.

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about Strongbad's issue. I was on the receiving end of his kind ministrations and I went "hunh ...". The colony he attacked with his 700 ships was a starter colony. His first attack stripped it of all its orbitals, and then I got to watch his second attack, and the colony didn't even lose any population. As for myself, i would chalk that up to a lesson learned and change my strategy accordingly. I know there is some randomness to combat, as I have seen fleets of twenty to thirty cruisers wiped out when attacking an outpost with 2 beam arrays, but I've also seen a fleet of 40 or so cruisers take an outpost with 4 beam arrays with 50% loss. I don't know if this situation involved randomness, or if you just can't take a full size colony without any capital ships, or if it matters that the colony was a "starter" colony.

The problem is that, if 600 or 700 ships of battleship size or smaller can take any fully populated colony, then the military victory is going to happen every time and there's not much point doing anything else. I suspect Zark has done something to make it necessary to do the high level research in order to finish the game, but who knows? The fun for me is figuring it out.

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