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| Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 08:24  |
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Q: What are "optimal" hab ranges for team games to allow maximum coverage of planets with minimal overlapping of hab ranges?
OK so without going too complex (to start with) let's just break down the possibilities...
Let's say each of the 3 habs can be in one of the 3 locations: left, centre or right. That gives us (check my maths) 27 possible combinations to cover.
So let's say using two races both with 1 immune, 1 wide (covers 2) and one small (covers 1) settings for hab...
Each race will cover 6 ranges with 2 overlaps if they swap their immunities against their small hab band. This gives them a total of 10 our of 27 combinations covered.
If they alternate the wider band against the immunity they cover 6 each with 4 overlaps leaving a total of 8 out of 10.
If they alternate the wide hab with the thinner hab they cover 6 each with only 3 overlaps. Thus the best combination is to alternate the immunity against the thinnest hab band.
This is just some basics. I've not gone into the full number of computations of this... however, someone with a little more time and excel (or whatever) could conceivably plug into it a brand new formula to determine coverage attained by an alliance of (1, 2 3 or more races) with their hab bands based on "average" distribution of planets and not such a broad statement as I made.
Any takers?
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 09:52  |
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Seems simple to me -
example
race 1- left 50% grav
temp immune
widest radiation
race 2- right 50% grav
widest temp
radiation immune
All planets will be habitable by the 2 races.
Granted, with these settings there won't be much in the way of econ, pop growth rate (PGR) couldn't be too high, most tech will have to be expensive and not much in the way of desirable LRT's could be used.
Ptolemy
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 11:43 |
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I was actually thinking of heading down the application/spreadsheet building route. I.e. not just trying to cover everything but rathe taking what you have and checking alliance/team members against this kind of thing to check for overlap.
Example 1:
You meet two races in a game and the possibility of an alliance shows up. One race has a 60% overlap in hab ranges and combined you gain only a 10% increase in planetary coverage. The other race has less to offer (be it tech/ships/resources/etc...) but has a 20% overlap and gives a combined 15% better coverage then you might want to look at the second race.
Example 2:
Building 3 races for a team game you might aim to be able to cover 80% of your territory but you don't want too much overlap of hab ranges. Such an app could help you do so.
Basically I'm talking about avoiding the situation you gave as an example. The two races you posted would have massess of overlap which in turn means masses of wasted points in the race wizard. I'm not tlaking about covering every planet, but if an alliance can cover say 60-70% of their planets in colonists without ANY overlap (probably not possible) then wouldn't you say that's a very good thing?
Maybe I should have put more emphasis on the "with minimal overlapping of hab ranges?" of my question.
I don't have the statistical spread of planets across the hab ranges (I know radiation due to the fact that it's even across the band) for temp and gravity as these are bells curves. Someone (Can't remember) had a bell curve from their own statistical analysis of several hundred galaxies they generated - this data would be all that I need to build a spreadsheet.
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 14:34 |
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There is a utility floating around that uses the planet generation code to generate 10,000 planets. With this you can calculate what percentage of planets in a given universe would be green for you or your team mate based on given hab ranges.
Now, all the math is great and you can spend a lot of time working out optimal hab ranges then, the game gens and BAM  - none of those optimal greens are within 200 ly of your HW. A lot of the early growth has to do with simple luck of the draw, did you get any close by decent planets or not. The trick is growing strong even when the odds are against you from the very start.
As a side note: Having some overlap is not a bad thing - a planet that is 11% for you but 58% for your team mate means that you can land, build some initial infrastructure while your partner is getting there - then vacate for your team mate. Additionally, there is a strategic advantage to be gained by being able to both use a planet - like one team mate being IT and you really want an IT gate at a location.
Ptolemy
[Updated on: Fri, 17 December 2004 14:38]
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 20:22 |
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| TheQ wrote on Fri, 17 December 2004 14:08 |
I came up with the following:
Race1
Grav: 0.12g to 1.00g
Temp: -200c to 0c
Rad: 0mR to 50mR
Race2
Grav: 1.00g to 8.00g
Temp: 0c to 200c
Rad: 50mR to 100mR
This gives you 100% coverage by the two races, virtually no overlap, and about 400+ advantage points left over.
The problem, of course, is the sweet spot in the middle of the hab range. Since these two races are on either side of the bell distribution curve, the bulk of the planets will not be optimal conditions for either race. But, every planet will be colonizable be either you or your partner.
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I'm afraid not.
For example, a planet with High Grav (2.00) and Low Temp (-100c) is basically useless to both races.
And the "bell curves" of grav and temp distribution are very flat , they only slope down in the last ten clicks on each edge. The 80 clicks in the middle are a very even distribution.
- Kurt
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
- Groucho MarxReport message to a moderator
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Fri, 17 December 2004 20:35 |
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| Quote: |
Race1
Grav: 0.12g to 1.00g
Temp: -200c to 0c
Rad: 0mR to 50mR
Race2
Grav: 1.00g to 8.00g
Temp: 0c to 200c
Rad: 50mR to 100mR
This gives you 100% coverage by the two races, virtually no overlap, and about 400+ advantage points left over.
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This actually does not cover all the planets - as overworked pointed out, low temp, high gravity planets are not covered. Additionally,
Low gravity, high temp planets will be useless
Low grav, high radiation planets will be useless
Low temp, high radiation planets will be useless
High temp, low radiation planets will be useless
All in all, roughly 30% of all planets will be uninhabitable by both races.
Ptolemy
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 00:00 |
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There are other game plans than non-overlap cover most. One player may go TT, with plan to cover extra later.
Then there is intentional overlap, for example a one-world wonder member with 4 initial 100% worlds, and the other member some sort of wide hab like a -f (as he needs to leave his original worlds).
Then there are combos where some planets are desired left over for remote mining/red colonising. Red colonising would be a narrow hab IS.
Covering only 50% of the hab with every planet a good green plus remote mining can be much better than covering 100% with only 1/3 good greens.
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 03:33 |
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| Quote: |
Covering only 50% of the hab with every planet a good green plus remote mining can be much better than covering 100% with only 1/3 good greens.
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This is in error - covering 50% with 'good greens' would be equivilent to 50 planets out of 100 at around 50%+. Cover 100% with 1/3 'good greens' would be 33 planets at 50%+ AND 67 planets that are green of which most will terraform to 'good green'. Therefore, covering close to 100% will provide roughly 30% more resources.
Take an HG design with a 1 in 2 hab - no immunity and one fairly narrow field. This race will have over 30 planets in 30 years - of which about 10 will be around 50%+, another 10 will be in the area of 30-50% with the remaining 10 being in the 10-30% range. By year 40 with 18% PGR most of those lower planets will already have built their factories with germ shipments and will be terraforming. The 'good greens' will be breeding off poplation to lesser greens in their areas. Also by year 40, tech will be very good, another 4 or 5 planets minimum will have been colonized. This race is played very much like a tri immune HE and requires pretty much the same MM.
Ptolemy
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 05:35 |
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Some overlap is a good thing. Random factor will probably screw you over so you can't colonise anything half decent.
The main idea behind this is to bleed as many points out of the hab settings for races (no-one has looked at having 3 races yet) in a team game to make sure that they can afford as strong an economy/tech/LRT/PGR settings as possible.
Overlap can come in handy, but having lots of overlap between all races in a team will only make you realise how badly you screwed up earlier.
Obviously things like terraforming will alter the hab coverage, but putting those issues aside does anyone know where I can find that application for generating 1000's of galaxies?
If I get the data from that then I can do a spreadsheet for finding optimum points for hab - there may even be some break points in there that no-one has yet found due to the complexities of build 2 races in this way.
Challenge: Design 3 races that achieve 80% coverage of the possible hab values (forgetting about the bell curves). Each race MUST have two cheap technologies and 4 expensive. All races must be JOAT with no LRTS growth of 15% and econ settings of 1/1000 pop 10/10/10 fact 10/5/10 mines no G checked. Winner is whoever has the greatest total (of all 3 races) of left over race points. One winner will be assigned for each number of immunities used (i.e. someone wins most left over without any immunities, 1 immunity, 2 immune, 3 immune, 4 immune, etc...)
This should help out future players of team games to build a highly effective team.
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 13:37 |
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| Quote: |
This is in error - covering 50% with 'good greens' would be equivilent to 50 planets out of 100 at around 50%+.
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What is a good green? An AVERAGE of 50%+? You have lower standards than me. My definition of good green would likely leave you with much less than 1/3 good greens.
I suggest the ideal race according to your math would be to lower the growth rate % so that all planets are good greens. Because that is what you have done in essence once you leave your HW, and you don't put any cost on it.
The 50% all good greens means many of these are REALLY good, closer to 100%. That means earlier expansion may be 80+% worlds rather than 60+%. Similar to difference between growing at 20% and only 15%.
The faster you get the eccon growing the faster you get the terraforming techs.
[Updated on: Sat, 18 December 2004 13:42] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 14:18 |
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| freakyboy wrote on Sat, 18 December 2004 10:35 |
Challenge: Design 3 races that achieve 80% coverage of the possible hab values (forgetting about the bell curves). Each race MUST have two cheap technologies and 4 expensive. All races must be JOAT with no LRTS growth of 15% and econ settings of 1/1000 pop 10/10/10 fact 10/5/10 mines no G checked. Winner is whoever has the greatest total (of all 3 races) of left over race points. One winner will be assigned for each number of immunities used (i.e. someone wins most left over without any immunities, 1 immunity, 2 immune, 3 immune, 4 immune, etc...)
This should help out future players of team games to build a highly effective team.
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Different numbers of players on the team require different strategies, I would have thought.
For your three players example, taking grav and temp 90% wide, and splitting rad into 3 equal sections gives 1039 points remaining between the players.
In the EAC vs IRC game there were 8 players per team, so a more complex strategy worked better. Also, the fact that they had CAs with orbital adjusters meant that the whole team got free terraforming which means you can take much narrower hab ranges.
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 15:54 |
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It's actually much easier to design a 3 race team than a 2 race team. There are more options. For a 2 race team I wouldn't want 100% green planets - more on the line of 70-75% is much better - and a little overlap so that there are some low greens useable by both races. My other choice would be one team memeber as a tri immune HE.
There are some external driving factors in creating a team (or any race for that matter). Number 1 on the list being the size of the universe and number 2 the number of players. These factors determine how fast a race needs to grow to warship production - and how many of what type of warships need to be produced.
Early ship procduction obviously costs a lot of growth resources - as we all know. So, does the race grow at breakneck speed to between 7 and 10k resources by 2430 with ship production then slow it's growth curve? Or, does it try to survive with diplomacy until at least 2440 building only econ?
Before anyone designs races for a team or an individual game they must first - without doubt - decide on an overall game plan. Then, and only then, design the race to match that game plan.
Designing a great HP race that will hit massive resources in 2450 is useless - and a losing race if in 2430 you have no space navy and your neighbor waltzes in with 30 PB frigates and 20 black cat bombers to hit your HW.
Ptolemy
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 18:33 |
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the 4th and 5th immunity comes from having more than one race.
A 3 race alliance would have 9 immunities max.
My point was that while 3 races with 3 immunities guarantees 100% coverage it also costs alot of points. No immunities with 80% coverage and 10% overlap is good, but 3 immunities with 80% coverage and 10% overlap is also good, but the latter costs alot less points! Hence the differeing categories!
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sat, 18 December 2004 19:12 |
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Ahhhh - and here I was, thinking that I could be factory and mine immune 
I'm just teasing Freakyboy - I was in a fun mood and wanted to use some of our nifty smileys to give everyone a smile.
 On the serious side though, immunities cost a great deal that has to be sacrificed somewhere else - in economy, LRT's and tech costs. The PRT that is best able to work with immunities is obviously the HE. All other PRT's sacrifice something else to have an immunity.
To be truly competitive, a race really needs 18% pgr in any standard game and space docks are 'almost' a must. 19% pgr with space docks is even better and 20% pgr without space docks will work if the universe size is not small - this is also the place where an immunity for any non HE race is the most possible since a 20% pgr with an immunity simply costs too much to have enough productive planets, but an 18% pgr with an immunity will likely be very successful.
The fundamental rule applies - if you can grow big enough you can afford expensive tech.
There is another fundamental rule question for races; 'how much MM do you want to put in for the game?' Tri immune HE's and SD's require the most MM then comes wide hab ranges that have lots of planets. So, MM = planets^3 or planets^2 + minefields at least - use 'planets' as one minute. If you want to be able to play in 3 games at the same time you must choose lower MM variations to be able to give each game 100%. If you choose to give 100% to one game only then you can choose a high MM design. This of course will vary greatly depending on the size of the universe you play in.
In a nutshell, there are so many possibilities in Stars! that each and every game is a challenge and always interesting. This is why the game still is so popular after all these years - created back at the start of the internet explosion - and before Windows 95.
What I am happiest about the most is that these old .exe's happily run even in Windows XP and under Linux shells. To me, Stars! is chess on an intergalactic scale. Nobody can ever tell me they are 'guaranteed' to win a game. All any player can do is maximize potential probabilities. We all can see all the mathematical definitions for any specific situation but we can only make a best guess as to the probability factor. Stars! to me is a shining example of extremely good programming. I should know - I've been a computer engineer for over 20 years and so much of what I see today wants to make me puke.  
Ptolemy
[Updated on: Sat, 18 December 2004 19:13]
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Mon, 20 December 2004 02:36 |
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How about three temp immune, grav immune, rad 33% cover, -f races 
Nearly every star would end up at 95% after terraforming.
[edit: just realised how bad that looks in the race wizard, I guess they'd have 1-imm 1-wide, which kinda defeats the object...]
[Updated on: Mon, 20 December 2004 02:41] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Mon, 20 December 2004 05:30 |
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 iztok |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1206
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Hi!
| Dogthinkers wrote on Mon, 20 December 2004 08:36 |
I guess they'd have 1-imm 1-wide, which kinda defeats the object...]
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... but IMO it is the right solution. To make a good couple one race should have grav immunity, temp 60 centered, rad 30 wide 16 clicks from left edge. The other race should have grav 60 centered, temp immunity and rad 30 wide 16 clicks from right. Both settings give with terra-15 about 35% good planets, 75% liveable. Together they'd have ~70% breeders, with only few percent non-liveable.
The first race could be of any PRT, but IT would be best for the second race (more prop research, intersettling easily done).
BR, Iztok
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| Re: Hab ranges for 3 players |
Tue, 21 December 2004 07:00 |
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| mazda |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 655
Registered: April 2003
Location: Reading, UK | |
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One way I think of the hab scheme is via a cube.
To split the whole hab into half we simply cut the cube in half to form two flatter bricks.
This can be done by splitting any of the 3 hab bands into half and keeping the other 2 as full bands, not by splitting all 3 bands into half.
Once you can visualise the difference between the two above actions then you are sorted.
So, as stated, for 2 players we simply split one hab band into 2 equal pieces.
Now the only way to split it for 3 players and keep the "habs" the same shape for all 3 players is to split one band into 3 equal pieces.
This would look like your typical liquorice allsort with 3 different colours.
Since the minimum band we can have is 20 wide then you are going to get a lot of overlap with max terra.
An alternative is to make a cut in a different direction.
e.g. at a particular Temp value.
So we "give" player 3 part of the temp band, and he has to cover all the grav and rad since he is the only player who can live in that part of the temp band.
That means we have to take that part of the temp band away from both player 1 and player 2.
This leads to something like :-
Player 1. Grav all, Temp 0 - 140, Rad 15 - 35
Player 2. Grav all, Temp 0 - 140, Rad 65 - 85
Player 3. Grav all, Temp -200 - -120, Rad all
By "all", I mean anything from the middle 70 (which will cover the rest with max terra) up to an immunity.
You can clearly see which player will be able to live on any given planet.
Player 3 covers 1/3 of the temp band (-200 to -60), and players 1 and 2 cover 2/3 of the Temp band, and split it equally between themselves by splitting the rad band.
So each player gets 1/3 of all planets, which seems fair (but possibly doesn't look it at first).
With 4 players you would just split 2 bands exactly down the middle (split your cube into 2 halves, and then split the two halves into quarters).
With 5 take the same route as for 3. But give player 3 Temp -200 to -96. This gives him 2/5 of all planets.
Split that scheme equally into 2 (along the rad or grav).
Then split the remaining block into 3 as you did the whole block. Works out something like this :-
Player 1. Grav all, Temp -176 - -96, Rad 15 - 35
Player 2. Grav all, Temp -176 - -96, Rad 65 - 85
Player 3. Grav 3.20 - 8.00, Temp 24 - 140, Rad all
Player 4. Grav 0.23 - 1.00, Temp 24 - 140, Rad 15 - 35
Player 5. Grav 0.23 - 1.00, Temp 24 - 140, Rad 65 - 85
Each player gets 1/5 of all planets with only the minor overlap at Rad=50 again.
Note these are all rather narrow starting habs, but with a CA in your team that shouldn't be a problem.
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| Re: Hab ranges for team games |
Sun, 26 December 2004 16:18 |
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| joseph |
 | Lt. Junior Grade |
Messages: 440
Registered: May 2003
Location: Bristol | |
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As Mazda pointed out team game with 8 gives ideal.
Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 Team 4 Team 5 Team 6 Team 7 Team 8
Low____High___Low____Low___High___High___Low____High
Low____Low___High____Low___High___Low___High____High
Low____Low___Low____High___Low___High___High____High
Assuming that one of your team is a TT CA you can shrink all 3 habs to a minimum (20 wide). Lows should be somewhere between 20-40 and 30-50. Highs 60-80 and 50-70. This gives eventually practically 100% on every world in the universe (and each of those worlds will be like a 1WW homeworld!).
If you have less in your team you have to cut down on the permutations a hab range of 25-75 in one field will eventually have every world habitable (although only 60% at 100%) this requires 4 teams
Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 Team 4
Wide___Wide___Wide___Wide
Low____High____Low___High
Low____Low____High___High
Even less and you have to cut down the permutations again
Team 1 Team 2
Wide___Wide
Wide___Wide
Low____High
If you have an odd number then you need to have one team cover 2 teams places
ie if you had 7 in your team you would have the following race cover teams 7 and 8
Wide, High, High.
In my opinion it might be worth making that one a –f but that’s a whole different thread.
Hope this helps.
[Updated on: Sun, 26 December 2004 16:21]
Joseph
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