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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Sat, 01 February 2014 18:52   |
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 skoormit |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama | |
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XAPBob wrote on Sat, 01 February 2014 10:25
Define "own" - does an invasion and evacuation the next year constitute ownership?
Does it mean you can stop people attacking you by blockading their planets to make sure people keep 20 planets occupied?
"Own" means colonized. If your colonists are on the planet, you own it.
An allowance must be made for invading planets. Something along the lines of: "If you begin a turn with more than 20 planets, your submitted orders for that year must include sufficient evacuations to reduce your planet count to 20. If you are unable to do so, <insert some suitable penalty here>."
I'm not convinced that blockading another player's planets to keep him from invading your own planets is a viable strategy. If you are strong enough to blockade his planets, he's probably not invading yours.
Quote:
I suspect that IT (pop gating) and IS (freighter growth) would be overpowering, HE are obviously stuffed (unless they can have 40 planets) - JoAT have their normal 20% bonus - but that's stylistic in a way that the HE 50% isn't.
IT advantages are certainly stronger in a spread out scenario.
Would the IS freighter growth be that much stronger than usual? The IS can (eventually) benefit from overpopping all his planets and thus can get more production per planet, but it will take a long time get that much growth per turn from freighters.
I'm fine with letting HE have twice the number of planets. Probably they are still stuffed.
JOAT is probably not as strong as usual. They still get the +20% capacity, but they can't leverage their +20% per turn growth into a long-term population advantage. Eventually everyone gets their 20 planets and fills them up.
[Updated on: Sat, 01 February 2014 18:53]
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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Sun, 02 February 2014 06:38 |
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skoormit wrote on Sat, 01 February 2014 15:47Proposal: eight players in a large sparse (384 planets), but no player may own more than 20 planets at any one time.
Thoughts?
Interesting.
384 planets for 8 players = 48 planets / player
Considering HAB ranges from 1 in 3 to 1 in 7: this would be between 16 to 7 habitable planets (before terraforming). Tri-immune HEs and ARs are out of the question anyway.
Mmh.
This probably means that growth by expansion and conquest will work only with your first neighbours. Afterwards you might exchange one of your 20 planets against a better planet but that's it.
I am not sure wether players have enough incentive to fight. Or that those who fight are not too much at a disadvantage in comparison to those who just research.
But perhaps this is your intention? Everybody builds up, researches to level 26 and THEN the alliances meet to fight a few battles before the game is over?
In this scenario it is very likely that the alliance with the most players will win, a restriction about size of alliances might fix this.
[Updated on: Sun, 02 February 2014 06:39] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Sun, 02 February 2014 20:22 |
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| skoormit |
| Lieutenant |
Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama | |
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XAPBob wrote on Sun, 02 February 2014 17:49I was hoping to bring the habs close enough that there wouldn't be enough planets to go around either - maybe a 1/4 max hab?
Hmm. So you are proposing a restriction on hab ranges by defining what the center point must be for each factor (for non-immune factors), as well as a restriction that overall habitability may not be more than 1 in 4?
I think that plays right into Altruist's point that you'll have to beat one neighbor to get to 20 planets, but after that there's not much of an incentive to attack anyone else.
Which is to say, there's not the usual natural incentive of adding conquered planets to your empire as a pure gain.
But what about the idea that the limitation is on number of orbitals, not on number of planets colonized? That achieves my primary goal of reducing planetary MM in a larger universe, without mitigating the incentive to continue to attack.
If I'm sitting here with my 20+ planets, 20 of which have orbitals, and you are sitting there with same, I'm still tempted to attack for the gain in mineral and resource production. If I conquer a planet at which I want to build an orbital, I'll have to scoop all the colonists off of one of my existing orbital planets for one year. A bit of a pain. But then I can plop them right back down and continue getting resources and minerals.
This lets HE back in the game. They can enjoy colonizing many many planets so long as they don't exceed the orbital cap. In theory it should reduce the impact of HE lacking gates somewhat, since other races will have fewer nodes on their gate networks.
Heck, maybe 20 orbitals is too many. What if you can only have 10?
[Updated on: Sun, 02 February 2014 20:23]
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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Mon, 03 February 2014 11:52 |
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| skoormit |
| Lieutenant |
Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama | |
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XAPBob wrote on Mon, 03 February 2014 10:13Can you not delete a SB design? I'd be surprised if you couldn't. Why check that but not ship deletion?
Bah, you are right, of course. My brain is muddled this morning. I was confusing this issue with a different one involving warnings when deleting queued designs.
So, yes. Just change to a one-off design and then delete that design. Takes a year to do it, so we have to be more specific with the rule wording:
"You may not have more than X orbitals built at any time. If you begin any year with more than X orbitals, you must delete orbital designs until you have X or fewer orbitals remaining."
That allows you the following scenario:
Year 0: You have X orbitals and are on the warpath. You give your attack fleet orders to conquer Nivenyrral.
Year 1: Attack succeeded. You now own Nivenyrral. Queue a "Big Phat Starbase" on Nivenyrral. Create a new "Teeny Little Fort" design, and queue one on Pegasus (which already has an orbital).
Year 2: You start the turn with X+1 orbitals. Delete the Teeny Little Fort design. You now have X orbitals.
If you forget to perform a downgrade in year 1, you are left with a potentially painful situation in year 2. You will have to delete a design. Hopefully you have a design that only 1 or 2 planets have. Otherwise...ouch.
[Updated on: Mon, 03 February 2014 11:56]
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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Mon, 03 February 2014 14:00 |
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| skoormit |
| Lieutenant |
Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama | |
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m.a@stars wrote on Mon, 03 February 2014 12:26Are you sure it's the planets that increase the MM and not the 500+ fleets each roaming around in a thousand different missions?
You are right. Fleet MM is the big portion of the total time cost of MM. My theory is that if production capacity is bottlenecked, then fleet count is constrained.
I wonder if that will really be the case, though.
I would guess that HP race designs are going to be the order of the day. You are going to want as much production out of your population as possible, and in the proposed large uni with eight players you'll have time to climb a fairly slow econ ramp. Probably 15/x/16 factories or thereabouts will be the norm. With 1/1000 pop efficiency, that means 3.4 resources per 1k pop.
You'll put your X orbitals on your best non-breeder worlds. Figure an average of, say, 500k pop for your producer planets. That's 1700 resources per planet, times however many orbitals you are allowed. At this point I'm leaning towards X = 10.
With ~17k total resources to spend on ship production per turn, I suppose you can still have a proliferation of small fleets (when you aren't focusing on main warship production) and end up with just as much fleet MM as in a game with no limits to orbitals.
At this point though I'm intrigued enough by the idea of a game with an orbital limit that I'm willing to overlook the fleet MM. Who's with me?
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| Re: Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM |
Tue, 04 February 2014 11:34 |
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skoormit wrote on Sun, 02 February 2014 15:35Another option: define some incentive that makes it wothwhile to attack.
Perhaps: For every HW you own (other than your starting HW), your planet cap increases by some number (maybe 5 - 10).
Or perhaps we redefine "own a planet" to mean "have an orbital." Therefore planets without an orbital do not count against your cap.
Both options are very good ideas.
The latter probably even the better one because all PRTs seem playable with a very wide range of different designs, strats and tactics. The downside is the additional MM. The advantage is that it forces to play in a way you probably should play in a long game anyway: defining clusters of one production center with a circle of support planets and freighters with auto-orders ferrying to and fro.
Another idea would need some universe editing: lowering the number of Stars even more.
skoormit wrote on Mon, 03 February 2014 22:04XAPBob wrote on Mon, 03 February 2014 14:14AR basically banned now - maybe allow them unlimited forts (no gates/drivers allowed)
Unlimited empty forts only. Would AR be even remotely viable in this setup?
ARs:
# Large universes usually means long games = minerals will get a critical factor = AR starts to get interesting.
# Allow them unlimited orbitals and they become a true contender for victory.
# As a rough guess, without testing, I'd judge them dangerously enough that you should NOT ban the battle order "Kill starbase"... large/sparse should give them plenty of time to prepare against attacks.
Additional MM and anti-too-time-consuming-measures:
1) I'd repeat my suggestion of an alliance restriction along the lines of what Wizard introduced some years ago: "No bigger alliances than 2, ally can be changed only once every 10 years". An alliance of 2 players can already add quite some time, an alliance of 4 players and the MM of your 60 planets starts to look feeble in comparison to what's going on in your email-folder.
2) Ban SD. Or better not SD but mines altogether. It's a large/sparse universe and one could say that the huge black void between the stars serves as an alternative to mines. Thick belts of mines (and those you must expect in a long game) are IMHO an insane major MM-factor.
Nevertheless, please, rate my suggestions rather low, because I won't play in a large universe and more important are what the actual players of the game want to have. But I do like all ideas and thoughts how to define games that reduce MM while still keeping the strategical and tactical depth of Stars.
[Updated on: Tue, 04 February 2014 11:40] Report message to a moderator
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Game Concept: Larger Map with Less MM
