Interest in a new game? (poll)

[Tukhachevsky]

Balance of power

I was reviewing the ship designs, and was impressed by the levels of specialization possible with them. Here was some observations I could make with the demo-game settings- My concern is that the game balance could be unhinged, resulting in a blue-only power struggle:

-Aside from the sensor pod, with it's 80 jump xport range and 1 tps movement rate, the overall slant of the ships seems to strongly favour blue play. The red/neutral ships are still relatively stock, while the new blue ships would seem to be capable of mowing down much more defenses- if a player can get the suitable rank(which certainly is a big if, particularly with the admiralty cruiser .

-On the planet side, the planet specs seem fine, although 2 planets per sector, again has stronger implications for reds which depend more on defensive strategies(ie- staged quasar cannon defenses).

So overall, my impression is that the changes will make life as a blue more profitable, and allow greater access to effective combat ships, while reds will have to struggle with relatively weaker tech than before. My suspicion is that promotion hungry blues will make life as a red nigh on impossible. I likely missed important aspects of the balance, so please let me know of those, but with what I can see, I suspect that the current setup would lead to a blue-only game, which could be a tad less interesting.

Kind regards,

Tuk

[Xentropy]

Well, part of the intention of my edits was to strengthen blues, since in stock settings, reds are pretty massively overbalanced. (This is at least the case on small servers with small or solo teams like the ones we get here. With larger--5 man--corps playing mixed alignments, the game balance is better since blues just play a different role.)

The issue is that, until the first mobile planets roll in, blues have, if they're lucky, a fifth of the earning potential of a red. And that's if they're spending their turns PPTing instead of colonizing. If they colonize, their long-term income potential is great, but in the short term they are incredibly vulnerable.

So, the first perogative of a red is to hunt down and steal or destroy as many blue bases as possible, while keeping just one L (or possibly even a U with my edits) stocked just enough to keep citadel upgrades going. If you can lock everyone else out of lvl 2+ cits and get a lvl 4 yourself, the blues have just colonized for you. Even if not, you'll have ten times the fighters of a colonizing blue anyway, so you should be able to steal yourself a higher level cit when the time comes.

The Imperial Dreadnaught may be nice, but getting that thing maxed would take a blue a solid week. Reds can get an IC maxed by the end of day 2. And while the Admiralty Cruiser may be unmatched in the annals of uncommissioned ships, 512k XP is nothing to sneeze at, and I'll be surprised in a small game like this to see one flying around--well, ever, really, but certainly before the game is pretty much over anyway. I more added it as a reason for blues to keep going on the XP gain after they get a dreadnaught at 64k. (If you think that's bad, I've got a ship for blues with max XP designed that's basically just maxed out, but again I didn't plan on seeing it deployed. )

So, yes, I balanced blues up. Also balanced reds down a miniscule amount with some tough rob/steal % settings. But ultimately it still comes down to how well the red utilizes his early (like first three weeks of the game) advantages to keep the blues locked out of getting a good planet going and ever being able to even half-fill an Admiralty Cruiser with figs. It's certainly possible I overbalanced, but if the Admiralty were removed, would you still feel that way?

[Tukhachevsky]

Re: balance

For me, as a long-haul/endurance player, the steady-state situation is of more interest to me, than the inital bloodshed(which is messy, and admittedly favours reds/mixed at the start). However, policing 20000 sectors with two corpies is not a trivial effort, and as soon as the first blue Q-planet is operational, things will permanently tip in favour of the blues, with reds getting hunted down like the dogs they are.

I was planning on playing as a blue for this campaign in any case(I am a bit bored of the dark side), but I think it may be a bit of a hard sell to get reds to stay in this one.

If the rob/steal settings are tough too, that could make things a bit overly dicey.

In that respect, this campaign may be a good way to draw out the superior/best players to play the high risk/reward style of the reds, while more conservative players can stick with the safer setup of the blues. Perhaps if megga-robbing were enabled(a long term cash source requiring mobile planets, cash and high exp), this could provide the long term incentive to balance out the increasingly dangerous situation for the reds.

The admiralty cruiser will certainly not play a factor in the short term (until rear admiral Tuk is cruising with omnipotence in one), so it can probably stay with no ill effects.

As far as potential balancing options, here's a few ideas, which may or may not fit the bill. I can't even guess what the full implications might be.
-If aliens were present in significant numbers, that might make random port robbing more viable for reds on the run.
-If colts were made to be horrendously painful to attack(ie - no escape pod like the fed version + very cheap and plentiful corbo), that might serve as an effective deterrent, while making reds a little more cautious in piloting them.
-Can cloaks be made to be reliable?

As I see it, if colonization was turned into a predominantly blue only activity, and reds could find a way to prosper by raiding, stealing, while maintaining a safe harbour for their ships, that may be a solution. The sentinel is probably a good start, if it had respectable defensive odds. If reds can't feasibly defend their gear, there is no way they can keep their loot.

In light of the shifted dynamics, what I could see happening here is blues operating larger colonial spaces using their twarp colonization capabilities to get resources for their ships, while reds would be stealing from ports(and potentially weaker planets) to get the cash they need, to purchase suitable defenses for small pirate strongholds.

Kind Regards,

Tuk

[aeturneus]

One important aspect of red/blue balance in the early stages is definitely corp size. If corporations are very small - 1/2 players - and fig clounds go up faster with a few more players than last game, then it's going to be extremely difficult to cover 20k sectors while cashing enough to actually do anything if a base is found. If corps are 3+ it's more feasible for a red corporation to actually hunt over the whole 20k universe. Of course, then we're likely talking mixed corps...

I suspect that if the corp sizes are kept down to 2, the only feasible red strategy to win as red (without changing to blue at some point) *may* be traps and blockades on the class 0 ports, and blowing stardock to prevent blues from getting better ships. Maybe this would work, maybe not.

If we play a solo game it's impossible to ever blow stardock, and red has to count on getting lucky, finding enemy systems early w. minimal cost, and then spend the rest of the game hunting through increasingly dense fig clouds - sounds like a long shot to win, in any case, but at least blues would be pretty vulnerable if they are colonizing solo, so a red might be able to keep up if he scores enough planets early on, and possibly switches alignment after the first couple of weeks.

As long as corp sizes are kept way down red is going to be hard to win with early, and the long term game is clearly in blue's favor. The fewer reds playing, the easier it is for a blue to get a Q cannon going, but I really don't see anyone staying red more than a few weeks - what's the point?

I haven't played in a few months so my perception of this may be a bit off, but that's my sense of it. Of course, I'm into switching alignment after a few weeks on stock settings too, so this is just a bit more so.

[Xentropy]

I'm trying to figure out where you guys think the blues are going to get the resources to defend their bases.

Okay, with 2-player corps, mixed corping is almost definitely a bad idea, since if you go red, you're going to want your partner red so you can clear each other's busts. So I'll focus on the double red vs. the double blue setups. For simplicity's sake, I'll use the following earning's baselines: PPT earns 2k/turn (including travel time between port pairs; this is actually estimating on the high side), SST earns 8k/turn (an estimate on the low side, but includes the red spending turns furbing himself since I'm not discussing mixed corps), SDT is irrelevant with ptrade % of 75, and once mobile planets are available, planetary pair trading earns 12k/turn and buy-dump-RTR earns 20k/turn.

Double blue will likely have one player grid (set up fig clouds) and PPT with all or most of his turns, while the other colonizes with all or most of his turns (at least starting the second day after the first day's profits go toward getting a commish, finding a few suitable prospective home sites, and so forth. 500 turn game, both players PPTing and gridding with Merfs can earn maybe 2M credits, enough to commish and outfit one ISS properly and get the first few gen torps (note gen torps and atomic detonators are both much more expensive than usual, both to inhibit pbusting--which isn't as necessary due to the low steal % anyway--and because less of these edited planets are necessary, or even likely to exist due to the limit of 2 per sector) for the first few possible home sectors going.

Starting day two, only one blue PPT's, earns 1M and gets himself also into an ISS (or maybe an IBB with the additional XP of a second day of haggling). The other colonizes those new planets and brings material in to get cits going (with a little ingenuity and some fancy footwork, some cits could start on day 1, but that's somewhat irrelevant). Now for some planetary bang-for-the-buck quickie calcs: deserts will produce 2000 fighters and 10000 ore per day with 30000 colos (value 1M if you sell the ore--unlikely), oceanic will produce 1000 fighters and 15000 organics per day with 30000 colos (value 1.7M, but you have to upgrade the ports to handle buying that org), glacials will produce 750 fighters and 6000 equipment per day with 30000 colos (value 1.2M, same issue with big enough ports to buy it). These are all slower cits, so there will be at least one L active, most likely, which will only produce 1000 fighters and 15000 ore with 30000 colos (value 1M if you sell the ore--again, who sells ore?). So best case, not including the amount you pay to build and/or upgrade ports to handle selling the stuff you produce, and assuming bases 10 hops from Terra (reasonably close in a 20k universe), it'll take 1750 turns (using teleporters once you get those cits built) to get a planet to the point where it's earning 1M a day worth of material and fighters. I'll call that 4 days worth of turns for the colonizer, since he's likely to spend 250 other turns on other miscellany, moving existing colos around perhaps, or moving material around to get cits going, etc. So after the first day without getting much colonizing done, finally on day 5, after 4 days of heavy colonization, the blues are earning 2M a day instead of just the 1M the one guy PPTing is earning. Cumulative earnings for the first week: 2M (first day dual PPT) + 1M + 1.25M + 1.5M + 1.75M + 2M + 2.25M = 11.75M.

Let's say now the PPTer has a big toll grid and does more port upgrades to sell planetary material than PPTing, and helps colonize. Earnings growth is now double, or 0.5M per day, with twice the colonization getting done. (I'm assuming Terra has infinite colos available for simplicity sake; running out of colos would make the blue corp's life an even bigger pain.) Second week cumulative earnings: 2.75M + 3.25M + 3.75M + 4.25M + 4.75M + 5.25M + 5.75M = 29.75M. This is all assuming none of the reds find anything and your plans go perfectly.

Now, the red corp. Day one is a wash with the blues, for the most part, since it'll take both of your PPT earnings to earn enough creds and experience for the first couple of maxed out Colts for SST. Once the SST starts on day two, though, look out! Both reds SSTing will earn 8M on day two. They've already almost outearned our poor blues after an entire week! A lot of that cash goes to ether probes to get every bubble and dead end in the universe logged before the toll clouds get sufficiently large. The only effective blues are going to be the ones who build in tunnels or even right out in the open (but far from Class 0's and thus "off the beaten path" as it were) instead of in any sort of dead end.

Okay, so, Day 3 you earn another 8M and probe yourself to 85-100% explored, depending on how effective the grids are yet. Day 4, every dead end without a port in it gets figged, costing half your turns, so you "only" earn 4M. Days 5-7 you earn 8M each and spend all of that on figs instead of probes now that you have your map. Cumulative first week's earnings: 46M. That's after paying for furbs and such (since I was already taking their cost into account in only allowing 8k/turn for SST) but before buying the initial Colts and all those probes.

So, after probes and ships and other goodies, you've got yourself about 30M to play with. 150k figs or so. Blues won't have more than 30k figs after paying for those ISS's and commissions and spending turns colonizing. So even if you fail to find the blues before those level 2's go up, even assuming you have bad luck and hit their planet with all their figs (because they were clairvoyent and knew where you'd hit), you've got enough to take out two blue corp's combined resources if you managed to find them.

Or to just note where they are to hit after the second week. Because while they'll have bought or produced another 150k fighters that second week, you'll have another 280k. That's 430k for you vs. their 180k. Still plenty to take that planet right before it ticks over to level 3 and earn yourself a quazar. By the end of the third week, if you haven't stolen yourself a mobile planet, I'll grant you're pretty much dead since your earnings advantage has all but disappeared by that time. If you can at least have a mobile planet along with the blues, you can continue to outearn them with BD-RTR vs. ptrading and make up for their supplemental income from farms for another week or two beyond that.

I'm really not seeing how screwed reds are here. I'm seeing how precarious the blue position is even in a game with edits favoring them this much. Sure, blues can end up winning just by nature of outnumbering reds... If only one corp decides to go red, it will be impossible for them to deny ALL FIVE blue corps their farms. But they can still certainly hold their own by stealing the farms and pwarps of, say, two of their five rivals.

[Xentropy]

Oh, and to answer a few direct questions:

1) I could make cloak fail 0%, but keep in mind you get the first 24 hours "free". The fail chance is only checked at extern, and only if you've been out of the game over 24 hours at extern. The default fail chance of 3% pretty much never triggers, and I wanted to see it happen now and then so I set it at 10%. I'm not in love with that setting though so if you guys would rather cloak fail be turned off, that'll work. If I do turn cloak fail off, though, Fed tow will be set at 0 people per sector, because I don't like the idea of someone cloaking in Fedspace and being invulnerable forever, and I find AMTRAK silly, so I'd rather the towing just be automatic than see people force the tow with a cheesy tactic.

2) Megarob isn't really an option. Turning on MBBS mode changes way too much to be something I'd really consider. It sets rob/steal %ages in stone, it makes atmospheric Q-cannons FOUR TIMES as powerful, it's just plain silly. It also doesn't require any experience at all. That's the bug, see. You can steal >3M credits with the standard fail chance no matter your XP. I'd rather see reds work at gaining XP to steal large amounts of credits at a time. Sure it's a little less profitable than megarob, but it can come close, without the whole, "Woo, I'm using an intentional bug," factor.

3) If I really wanted to kill the red game I could turn off steal from buy ports, but that would be truly killing reds. I'm not trying to kill reds here, I'm just trying to give blues a chance, something I don't see them having in a low-player small-team game where they can't join a mixed corp and play a role. Blues are great at the roles of colonization and, thanks to the ISS, hunting and conquering. But a corporation made up of JUST colonized planets and ISSes without the credits to fill those ISS's with fighters is incredibly impotent. Thus I balanced things up a bit, making their hunter/invader ships even more powerful (though they'll still have trouble filling them early) and giving planets a little more oomph. Reds, on the other hand, work great solo, since even without an ISS, having such huge earnings potential gives you a lot of flexibility.

4) I don't think the Colt changes are necessary because if you think it's going to be hard for reds to find blue bases in a 20k universe, it's going to be nigh-on-impossible for blues to find reds mid-SSTing, since that can be done anywhere in the open map, not just in dead ends, and tends to move around constantly and easily.

[aeturneus]

Good case for blue shift, Xentropy. To be clear, last game we started with two competitive corporations, both with one blue and one red, hoping for a balanced game. It was a e-probe war that burbel & oerdin won, finding our bases before we found theirs, with SPQR making some mistakes in an attack that cost us a lot of turns. In the upcoming game, esp. if it goes solo, I think you're going to see huge amounts of eprobes going off in any game settings for the first few days, which is going to make it very hard for reds to hide their newly acquired colts from other reds who are also probing. That was true last game, we lost quite a few colts to the other side. Also, reds will be figging bubbles against each other, increasing the reconnaisance workload for each red. This will be more of an issue the more red corps there are. That's reasonable imho, but reds fighting reds will necessarily cut into red income and give blue a bit more of a chance to come up through the middle & get some planets going, esp. once the fig clouds are really pervasive. The more players, the more figs, the more difficult total recon is. I haven't actually tried to start as blue since I restarted the server... so balance towards blue is good, but hopefully there will be other game factors associated with more players that also help blue gain ground. The best scenario for blue is that the reds all find one or two of your planets as they go L2 or maybe even L3 and burn a lot of resources fighting over it, while you sneak a few others up the stages that nobody finds, even if they are a couple days behind.

That's another reason I'm strongly in favor of single player corps this time - it's less of a zero-sum game, and while there's a lot of fun to be had co-operating, a more diverse strategic environment is definitely a good thing.

In any case, it's percentages. I see it being quite difficult to root out all blue planets with a significant number (3+) of other reds out there getting in the way. At the same time, it's more difficult for a blue to actually sneak a few citadels up the stages with all those reds buzzing around, but they have a better endgame.

[Xentropy]

Well, one thing that's become pretty obvious is we're definitely not going to have a lot of players, and we're probably going to have teams as small as possible. The fewer players, and the smaller the teams, the more powerful reds are. Thus, the edits are there to counter that somewhat.

In a solo-only game, anyone who isn't red is dead.

[aeturneus]

What if reds weren't allowed to corp, but blues could? Increase # of red corps, while possibly having 1 blue corp.

Suppose 3 single red corps and a blue corp. After 2-3 weeks reds could take on a rookie apprentice to move up to 2 persons.

This would play towards the piracy picture Tuk painted, esp if the blue corp maxed out at 5 people with a few rookies, trying to escape the predations of the reds, who are also pirating each other.

It would even work storyline wise, since it's easy to imagine that evils would have a hard time working together with all that power at their disposal & no moral restraint, while goods are building new lives for millions of people, freedom, liberty and all that.

[Xentropy]

Could work. Though I've always found it's tough telling people they have to follow different rules, especially when those rules aren't enforced automatically. What's to stop the reds from info-sharing and/or megacorping even if not officially corp'd?

Things seem to work out better when people have the freedom to test the boundries. Set the boundries up as best you can so things will work out automatically the way you like and cross your fingers. If you've done it right, no one will know you're doing anything at all. (To pseudo-quote God in the Futurama where Bender meets him. )

[aeturneus]

Originally posted by Xentropy
Could work. Though I've always found it's tough telling people they have to follow different rules, especially when those rules aren't enforced automatically. What's to stop the reds from info-sharing and/or megacorping even if not officially corp'd?

Valid point. However, nothing stops people from collaborating in this way in any game. I suppose there might be additional temptation to work together, but that'd be most likely in the case that the blues get ahead. The blues could also end up hiring an evil to keep tabs on things