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Someone voted for "Battle Board Overload" and "0.2% Minimum Damage" as allowed. If the other answers weren't all over the place, I would have thought the person was a troll.

I seem to be surprised lately what others think should be allowed. For me it all comes down to balance. Some of those items are fairly unbalancing, but some are just common sense (to me).

Glad to see that all 4 people voted "Ban" to "[freepop] Hack"....

-Matt

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Why the votes against allowing False Public Player Scores? To pull this off involves a significant amount of MM, a significant loss of resources/turn and through building significantly more freighters, and is discoverable by intelligent recon analysis since the freighters have to move off-planet and then back in relays. If you can pull this off more power to you I says.

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This can't possibly be on par with the pophack since it's not free; you have to pay a cost in MM and resources. Yeah, you don't pay the full cost in resources, but you do have to have a significant amount of potential resources in freighters off-planet every year, so it is costing your resources in addition to the cost of building the extra freight capacity this takes. If you're IS not so much.

And it is discoverable. If the leader is SS then it makes discovery more difficult, but that's the point of SS. If you are willing to invest yet more resources you can cloak the off-planet fleets to an extent even if you're not SS, but again more resource costs.

But it is counter-thematic for a PP game as any game that has PP turned on is deprecating the sort of recon analysis that discovering False Player Scoring requires, so I certainly understand why a PP game would want to ban this exploit; I'm just arguing that it shouldn't be default banned since it opens up some lovely opportunities for Machievellian maneuvering and resourceful recon analysis, which are both facets of the game that I really enjoy.

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vonKreedon wrote on Thu, 18 March 2010 10:12

The Target Overload

Target Overload can be avoided, for the most part. Don't select a planet as the end point for a chaff sweep. There, that takes care of 99.99999999999999999999999999% of the incidents that show up.

For the rest, select "merge with fleet" if you are jumping in warships.

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and the Exploding Minefield Dodge IMO both need to be allowed because it is just too difficult and onerous to avoid them.

Maybe.

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To avoid the Target Overload you have to never use crash sweeping

Doubtful that the subject would ever come up if it was just chaff, in space. At a planet, its an issue.

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or forget to merge on arrival those 300 Nubs in 105 fleets you gated to the concentration point.

Rarely does that ever happen. People usually gate to a rally point, and if they don't, it is even rarer to ever have that many ships gate to a planet under attack.

Usually it is just someone who wants to be a jerk. I also point at this and say it is a manipulation of the limitations of the Stars code. Hence, banned!

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That's just too onerous to play for an already MM challenging SD race.

When did SD become difficult MM? That's backwards, SD forces MM on everyone else.

I get Player #1 slot.

-Matt

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I cant believe people actually want to allow Battle Board Overload. I was told it can ruin the game and actually mess it up to the point its unplayable. Besides its a dirty trick.

Anyone notice how the 3rd guy really wants like all the cheapo tricks allowed. Seemed that way to me.

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Public Player Scores is a fairytale anyway. Chaff counted as Escort Ships? Outposts with 200 pop counted towards score? C'mon!

Anyone trusting PPS deserves what they get.

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mlaub wrote on Thu, 18 March 2010 18:59

Quote: or forget to merge on arrival those 300 Nubs in 105 fleets you gated to the concentration point. Rarely does that ever happen. People usually gate to a rally point, and if they don't, it is even rarer to ever have that many ships gate to a planet under attack. Usually it is just someone who wants to be a jerk. I also point at this and say it is a manipulation of the limitations of the Stars code. Hence, banned!

Or they want to use the "0.2% min dmg bug"

Which usually means they get the 1st slot of my "extinction" list.

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[Updated on: Fri, 19 March 2010 10:56]

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[Updated on: Wed, 23 June 2010 23:26]

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magic9mushroom wrote on Thu, 24 June 2010 05:25

Whoever said that chaff is "not a bug" is a fool. It is; you're exploiting a hole in the targeting algorithm that forgets to account for one missile - one kill. Split Fleet Dodge is likewise an abuse of the game's simultaneous turns - you can't give your fleet orders to "split if they split, don't split if they don't".

Amazingly, when you list these two "bugs" together, the really huge difference between the two stands out:

the Jeffs tried several times and across several versions to fix "split fleet dodge", which is a nasty weakness of the fleet targeting algorithms.

the Jeffs never tried to "fix" chaff, which is widely acknowledged as a neat counter to missile power. Further, if you think about it, you'll realize that however you tweak the battle algorithms, there'll always be some cheap contraption that'll attract more firepower than it should.

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[Updated on: Mon, 28 June 2010 05:15]

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magic9mushroom wrote on Mon, 28 June 2010 11:11

Chaff is still an exploit. It makes utterly no sense that your ship captains would be that utterly STUPID.

Yeah, it is an exploit. As many others, an useful one. The only way to fix it is to add a lot more brains, and more guesswork, to the targeting algorithms. And even so, elaborate "ruses" might still exist.

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There doesn't have to be "something which attracts more firepower than it should".

Bright confetti that confuses radar. Hot flares. Minuscule sources of radioactivity. Laser pointers blinding sensors. Big balloons coated in radar-reflective paint. Dummy torpedoes that make lots of noise. Whales. Waves crashing on reefs. Kids with toy guns. You name it. The world is full of things that confuse automatic targeting. Learn to live with it. Or you won't live long.

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If the targeting algorithm for torpedoes and missiles merely replaced "ship armour" with "MAX(ship armour, torpedo/missile damage)" then chaff would disappear.

Most likely it would just change. To empty CCs or perhaps Nubs.

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Also, I'm not sure when the JRC series of patches were. Were they after the discovery and widespread adoption of chaff?

Yup.

[Updated on: Wed, 30 June 2010 09:00]

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vonKreedon wrote on Tue, 29 June 2010 17:58

in the real world you are in a group that is being pursued by a stronger group one of the obvious things to do is to split up. It's like the punchline to the joke about the two guys charged by a bear, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I have to outrun you."

Except that it's more like the two guys being chased by a couple dozen bears and when they split *all* the bears follow just one of them.

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I've had a couple of games that banned split fleet... The rule used was something like 'no fleets can be split unless in orbit of your own world'. It's an awkward thing to try to remove from the game.

Fleets that scatter away are effectively out of the game for a couple of turns - more if you knock out the nearby gates, so it comes at a price. Also, as vonKreedon says, if you pursue with multiple fleets, it will try to pursue as many as possible. It's risky though, as if your opponent knows you will do this they can take advantage of this to ambush a smaller part of your fleet. It's also rather imperfect - I've chased a fleet of 10 with 10 seperate fleets, only to find some of the splits pursued by more than one, and some by none. I think multiple splits and merges by the target(s) can really mess it up badly.

For sure, it would be nice to be able to put some logic into your orders, like: 'Pursuit order. Split behavior: split fleet proportionally according to presence of enemy design x in each fleet fragment'. Something for Nova, or any other clones that pop up

Chaff depends on a simple flaw in attractiveness algorithm (as pointed out, it'd not be hard to fix it for missiles,) but I'd say this is a flaw that adds richness to the tactics - just look at all the long threads on chaff, anti-chaff, anti-anti-chaff, shielded chaff, damaged chaff, freighter chaff, chaff vs jammers, etc etc etc.

IMO, it's quite reasonable for chaff and split fleet to be allowed in most games. It's also nice to see either/both excluded for a change of pace sometimes. I like cake.

[Updated on: Wed, 30 June 2010 12:54]

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Dogthinkers wrote on Wed, 30 June 2010 18:41

Fleets that scatter away are effectively out of the game for a couple of turns - more if you knock out the nearby gates, so it comes at a price. Also, as vonKreedon says, if you pursue with multiple fleets, it will try to pursue as many as possible. It's risky though, as if your opponent knows you will do this they can take advantage of this to ambush a smaller part of your fleet. It's also rather imperfect - I've chased a fleet of 10 with 10 seperate fleets, only to find some of the splits pursued by more than one, and some by none. I think multiple splits and merges by the target(s) can really mess it up badly. For sure, it would be nice to be able to put some logic into your orders, like: 'Pursuit order. Split behavior: split fleet proportionally according to presence of enemy design x in each fleet fragment'. Something for Nova, or any other clones that pop up

Whatever targetting algorithm it is, it's totally messed up.
I've targetted fleet#'s that still existed the following turn and they weren't chased. I've targetted one fleet of MMLs with dozens of separate hunters and they all went for one MML after that fleet split ...
But the best part happened few years ago where the enemy targetted a fleet that I split up in several smaller ones and they ended up at the same spot as my *unseen* and *not targetted* cloaked AR HW killer fleet that was on the same location (and not merged!) as the other fleet in the turn that was targetted.

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Chaff depends on a simple flaw in attractiveness algorithm (as pointed out, it'd not be hard to fix it for missiles,) but I'd say this is a flaw that adds richness to the tactics - just look at all the long threads on chaff, anti-chaff, anti-anti-chaff, shielded chaff, damaged chaff, freighter chaff, chaff vs jammers, etc etc etc.

Yup, chaff is good.



mch

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vonKreedon wrote on Wed, 30 June 2010 17:51

Stars will make some attempt to have your fleets follow different target fleets. Am I imagining this, and if so how is it that opponents are able to track and kill my minelayers when I split them?

Yes it does. It's far from perfect but can be used to catch your ships.

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Micha wrote on Thu, 01 July 2010 03:57

Dogthinkers wrote on Wed, 30 June 2010 18:41 Chaff depends on a simple flaw in attractiveness algorithm (as pointed out, it'd not be hard to fix it for missiles,) but I'd say this is a flaw that adds richness to the tactics - just look at all the long threads on chaff, anti-chaff, anti-anti-chaff, shielded chaff, damaged chaff, freighter chaff, chaff vs jammers, etc etc etc. Yup, chaff is good.

Better if it wasn't inconsistent. Starbases could use that protection.

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