Pirates
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« Reply #52 on: March 23, 2008, 11:18:50 PM » |
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I agree with all of Prophet's suggestions.
In order to correct some of the commented upon problems and implement some of the new ideas, I would suggest the following.
Recombine the three servers. All styles of play will be accommodated in a single game. (Multiple servers only further fractionalize an already too small user base and lessen interaction between the current groups because most people now play in one of the other but not both.)
Expand the gal map to a 3 x 3 grid with the current map as the center.
Each of the nine maps would represent a galaxy and have a unique map. There would be a 1,000 turn cost to warping between galaxies.
It is an on-going saga and never ends (ala WARS) but monthly winners based on top ten alliances/ individual scores. No more D-Days (only the strong love them, which means 90% of players hate them) and no tediously slow restarts. No more maxing of cash. When an individual player hits max cash, he just gets +1 in another counter and resets to 50% of current cash on hand or in stash. If she runs out and has a positive value in the max counter, decrement the counter and resupply with 50% of max to the active. The only adjustment to ships is that defense can only be 10% of HP, so even maxed ships (which continue to max at the other current values) can be killed by other maxed ships, if there are enough attackers.
Put the central (current) galaxy under council protection and only allow flying missions and encounters in it. No building bases, system fleets, planets or PvP attacks in the central region. This would give noobs or low involvement players a safe haven where they could learn the game, build their skills, power and knowledge and give the grinders a place to grind, but with very little chance of finishing a round ahead of the more daring and successful players/alliances who did their business in the uncontrolled gals. (Maybe allow one base/system fleet per player in the protected galaxy, to experiment/ become familiar with.)
In the outer, unprotected regions, double mission/encounter rewards, base production/earnings and allow all advanced features. (Another way to look at this is gold bonuses would only become available in the unprotected galaxies, even for gold players who chose to park in the neutral gal.)
Allow each alliance to claim one star system for the alliance and make it so all member's ships, system fleets and bases at their system present a joint defense against attacks, so that every defender attacks in turn until all attackers have been beaten or all have had a battle. If more than half defending ships are eliminated, the attackers take control of the system and inherit any bases and planets there and any remaining defending ships are scattered to the wind, each fleet warping to a random place.
When an alliance has built bases at every star in a quadrant, they control the quad and their fleets will automatically move to defend any planet in the quad. But system fleets and bases would, naturally, be bound to the planet they were constructed at. Bases/Mines can be built by any member of the team at the planets/quad that is controlled by the team. Of course, this will mine them out more quickly, but no one bothers with mining once they have high levels of replication skills anyway.)
If you randomly hop into an alliance's home system/quad and there are more than double your FP in combined defenses, you bug out, back to the starting point of the hop, with a report that you have evaded X Allaince's Home fleet. (The odds of this happening often are low because it's going to be a big universe and the locations of allaince home ports will become public information before long.)
This would encourage teamwork because it would take multiple, large, attacking fleets to take over a claimed system. And would give people a place in the battle galaxies a semi safe place to park. For instance, if ten attackers attack 20 defenders, they will each fight two defender's bases/fleets. If one attacks, he would fight 20 times. If 20 attack ten, each defender would fight two. With the matchings being strongest attacker vs strongest remaining defender. So in a ten attacks 20 situation, #1 attacker would fight #1 and #11 defender.) And would increase the intensity and complexity of battles to a level far more interesting than single PvP's are. And it would encourage all players to get into an alliance because surviving very long in the eight non protected gals would not be very likely for solo players.
And add a new mission type, Scout System, that gives FP of combined system fleets, number of bases, number and FP of defenders (but not their specific ships.) System probes can be performed remotely, at the cost of ten turns per probe in gal and 100 turns out of gal.
At unclaimed systems, anyone can attack anyone they find there, but with the following modifications to the battle rules.
1. Specific mission objective: marines, workers, credits, segments, minerals.
2. When players are of equal (within 10%) TP (not FP) the max booty is 10% of the goal resources.
3. When the players differ in size, the max booty is adjusted up or down by a scaling factor. Perhaps something along the lines of +/- 1% for every 10% difference in TP, with a max of +100% (20% of total available on target) and min of 1%.
4. No more remote attacks. You can only attack people in the current system.
5. Three levels of alliance relations, Allies, Neutral, War, with all defaulting to neutral until changed.
6. Can not attack ally fleets. Always automatically attack enemy fleets within a settable percentage of FP or automatically warp away from any that exceed your FP by the set amount to a point somewhere in the current region. Which could leave you far from your alliance system and unable to return immediately.) Non allied players (those not in alliances) are always neutral. No auto attacks, but you can always attack manually if desired or set up your to automatically attack neutrals. This works in both directions, no matter if you were sitting at the planet when they arrived or are the one doing the moving.
7. All warps use the number of distance/turns you warp. Including warping away from retalliations. Warps are never further than 50% of available turns. When you run out of turns or there is no system within 50% of your turns left, you can't warp away. Meaning if someone with a retal has more turns than you do and is willing to burn them until you run out, you get hit. And the attacker will be able to tell when the defender is running low by seeing the hops to the new location getting shorter. Or, alternatively, players with retals can also warp in pursuit and not burn turns. Just so both sides are the same price. Or something in between, say like warping costs 10% of the distance moved.
8. Warp disruptors/stabilizers are capped at 50% (level 25) to prevent those who are willing to spend all their turns on techs can not gain an overwhelming advantage and force everyone else into a never ending arms race of using turns on techs. And the formula for stabilizer/disruptor effectiveness is
Warp Chance - (WC * (stabil - disrupt))
Which means, even at max disrupt against no stabil, the most you could increase your odds would be 50% of the initial odds. So, if you were 10x more powerful and had a 10% chance, the max you could have is 15%. Since your reward for that attack would only be 1% anyway, there would be no big incentive to attack much weaker players. You take a shot and if they warp, they're gone, but you did cost them a bunch of turns. Which means weaker players could sustain dozens of attacks without losing significant percentages of their resources, but could lose a lot of turns and wind up far from home or safe port.
9. The winner of a battle gets scrap recovery from all ships, their own and enemy's, destroyed in battle. 50% of ships cost and 50% of marines. Surplus marines are held in reserve in a separate group on the mothership, just like workers are on the secret base or mins are on the mothership. When you add marines to new ships, they are first drawn from the available pool until exhausted and you have to spend credits hiring more. You can hire reserves and resupplying marines after battle is only done from your ready reserves. When you scrap a ship, 100% of its marines go into the reserves. (There are naturally material recycling losses, but marines can just disembark and odds are not many of them will not fall the gangplank. And, I would like to be able to control how much of my cash on hand can be used up on marines before I am willing just to sacrifice my ships and percentage of targeted item rather than continue to resupply marines.)
10. As long as a player, defender or attacker, has at least one surviving ship to report in, they get a full battle report. Otherwise, simply a statement their fleet was wiped out in a battle at x location.
11. Motherships always warp away if their fleet is entirely destroyed in a system battle, even if their side prevails in the overall battle. In PvP battles, the Mship warps away after losing a battle and being plundered.
12. No more nebs. If you need to be AFK for an extended period, you park in the neutral zone.
13. Auto resupply of fleets after losing battles, just like resupplying marines, if that option is turned on by the player and up to the percentage of mothership cash selected.
As weaker, protected area players got stronger/bolder, they would begin making border raids into the wild regions, meaning to retreat back into the safe zone after flying some high value missions. But, with auto attacks, if they happened to run into more powerful non allied fleets, they would get warped deeper into the region. Perhaps running into more hostile fleets and burning more hours and risking running out of turns deep into hostile territory. And the stronger players/alliances would most likely tend to congregate near the borders of the protected zone, making cross border raids a risky venture for weaker players.
The whole crux of this is the auto battles in the unprotected regions. You're playing whether you are logged in or not. You will get battle reports and may have gained or lost things while you were not logged in, but the odds of being seriously damaged would be fairly small. There would be far more battles, but the loses to individual player's wealth would not be greatly diminished, even if they had lost several battles since last logging in. You gain stuff (creds, mins, marines, from successfully defending against attacks) so you may just as well have improved your standings as lost stuff while you were AFK.
While the changes would be extensive, a lot of the current issues would be addressed and the game would be more varied and active, without forcing anyone to adopt a certain style of play. And it would add a lot more random events. Any time you hop to a new system (without scanning it first) you risk running into a more powerful enemy fleet and getting warped far away. Perhaps making it impossible to quickly return to your alliance system, leaving both yourself and your alliance less well protected. Any time you do a coordinated team attack on an enemy alliance system/quad, you leave your own team's system quad undefended (or less well defended) and may end up all scattered all over the universe and a long time before you could regroup to defend. Which adds new considerations for the players to make as to how many of their turns need be held in reserve to provide warping and returning to base after forced warps capability.
Now, I know a lot of the present day killers are going to say that this will reduce their chances of PvP battle and force them so spend more time playing. Which will most likely be true in the short run. But the main objectives are to increase the retention of new players and to add more variety and randomness to the game. If successful, over time, there really will be far more players and the chances of finding targets in the unprotected gals will increase. And, frankly, people who spend a lot of time playing, should do better than insiders who know all the tricks and can currently beat the pants off everyone while only playing a very limited amount of actual time. Those players do deserve to do well, but not to the point of dominating the game and driving away newcomers. And it will introduce a whole new aspect of team battles that can be had for the taking at any time once an allied system/quad was located. The only way to control multiple quads would be to take other alliances systems. The losers would simply regroup and rebuild somehwhere else. But the winners would be forced to split their player fleets between the controlled quads and holding many would reduce the chances of defending all and the shoe would soon be on the other foot. Or they would be forced into making major investments in system fleets/base tech to attempt to hold them without a lot of player fleets being present.
And it provides for all styles of play, no PvP, wars and SO on one combined system, rebuilding and maintaining contact and cohesion within the entire user community. And, to further encourage that, add a newspaper where everyone can read reports about major events (large team battles.) And allow an alliance an extra ten members for every quad they control.
And of course there are many possible variations within the multi galaxy framework. Perhaps the entry point to a galaxy is a council controlled base where you can safely warp in and do system scans from, so that your 1,000 turns aren't wasted or result in instant annihilation or losing many more turns warping deep into the gal and away from the ext, and weaker players could get in some high value missions without too much risk, at the cost of spending ten extra turns for every planet visited for system scouting, whereas stronger players can just fly them without scouting and let the chips fall where they may.
Finally, I do not claim any of this is deeply or well thought out and it is only offered as a banquet of ideas for purposes of discussion.
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