[Informational] Blacknova Traders

[GasBandit]

Welp, I'm done with this game.

Steinman decided to block off another trade area to outside access. I scan the planet, find it has level 13 everything and 350k fighters and 300k torps.

I have level 20 everything and equal fighters and torps.

Here's how the combat goes -

So obviously planets do not follow the 2% rule, they just launch a ton of torps, well above even 100% of their torpedo launcher level. And torps ignore shields, remember? I didn't have a prayer against a supposedly much inferior target. So basically what this boils down to is who builds up planets first and just gives them a shit load of (dirt cheap) torps gets permanent control of those sectors.

I kept finding stuff broken about this game, but it was all little stuff until this - this is too gamebreaking. The Intransigent had a level 25 hull and level 20 everything else - that's 43 trillion in upgrades. And a level 13 planet trumped it with a bad design decision.

I'm out.

 

[Rovewin]

Yeah I had level 18 - 20 offense stuff and my scan only showed a few thousand fighters when I had 400k and about equal number torps and the planet whooped me too.

 

[bhamv3]

Is this something Dave can tweak? Nerf torpedoes a bit? Because if I'm reading Gasbandit's screenshot correctly, torpedoes are capable of destroying more than their own number of fighters. (74k torpedoes destroyed 128k fighters)

 

[GasBandit]

Is this something Dave can tweak? Nerf torpedoes a bit? Because if I'm reading Gasbandit's screenshot correctly, torpedoes are capable of destroying more than their own number of fighters. (74k torpedoes destroyed 128k fighters)

Torpedoes do 10 damage each. So 74k torpedoes do 740k damage.

I had enough cash accruing interest on Gasbandia Prime to refit my ship back to level 20 everything, just so my planets weren't level 1 again. If anybody wants the few trillion credits I have left, I've deposited it on GasBandia Prime in sector 711, and landed there.

I have 1.5 million torpedoes. About 20k more are manufactured every few minutes.

Good luck.

 

[GasBandit]

I wonder if making genesis torpedoes cost a billion each would fix the imbalance?

Starting from nothing, I made over 60 trillion in less than two days.

There's no price fix to this problem, planetary torpedos are just broke.

 

[bhamv3]

I wonder if making genesis torpedoes cost a billion each would fix the imbalance?

Not by much, I think. Once you get your hull to a decent size, a billion is fairly easy to make.

Instead of making planets harder to create, I think it would be better to make it easier to dislodge a planet. Right now, planets are nearly impossible to defeat, so the obvious strategy would be to control as many trading stations as you can by creating planets. The game becomes a mad scramble to create planets, and once your planets are made, you can rest fairly easy.

If planets were easier to defeat, there would be more ebb and flow, with people weighing up the risk of attacking a planet in order to reopen a trade route.[DOUBLEPOST=1389077865,1389077401][/DOUBLEPOST]Just took up Gasbandit on his offer. Now I have no ship.

 

[Rovewin]

Torpedoes do 10 damage each. So 74k torpedoes do 740k damage.

I had enough cash accruing interest on Gasbandia Prime to refit my ship back to level 20 everything, just so my planets weren't level 1 again. If anybody wants the few trillion credits I have left, I've deposited it on GasBandia Prime in sector 711, and landed there.

I have 1.5 million torpedoes. About 20k more are manufactured every few minutes.

Good luck.

Even if someone does manage to defeat your planet they will only get 10 million credits. I took a planet that said it had 900million credits on it. It even showed 900million when I captured it and went to transfer it over and it only allowed 10 million to go to me and all the rest vanished. Same with the other planet I took.

 

[Rovewin]

Yeah it does remove the base.

 

[GasBandit]

Just took up Gasbandit on his offer. Now I have no ship.

I wish you'd screenshotted the fight. I'm curious to see what over a million torps does to a ship.

Even if someone does manage to defeat your planet they will only get 10 million credits. I took a planet that said it had 900million credits on it. It even showed 900million when I captured it and went to transfer it over and it only allowed 10 million to go to me and all the rest vanished. Same with the other planet I took.

Ok, I'll move the cash back into my ship, that should up the reward. That's another annoying little broken thing about this game, though. There were times I had tens of trillions of credits just accruing interest on that planet. If you ask me, that it all just gets deleted except for 10 million is a bigger injustice than someone actually taking it from me.

 

[bhamv3]

I wish you'd screenshotted the fight. I'm curious to see what over a million torps does to a ship.

Wish granted.

 

[GasBandit]

Wish granted.

View attachment 13549

Wow. Torpedoes hell, the beams got you.

It also confuses me, because when I attacked Stienman it said his planet had 0 shields. Maybe he didn't have the energy to power them. But because it checks whether the attacker dies before it checks if the planet dies, I lost what should have also been an automatic victory.

Also, looking at the numbers, it seems that the planet limitation on torpedoes is 10% of the maximum ship load for the level in question, not 2%. So basically, planets can launch 5 times as many torps as the equivalent level ship.

That was a horrible design decision.

What is also interesting is that apparently there is no limit on fighters. None. If I have 1.1 million fighters on a planet, 1.1 million fighters engage the attacker, end of story.

Also, again no salvage from defeating an attacker.

 

[Dave]

Okay, so tell me what you think I can do to fix this imbalance. Because I will.

Also, you'll note I don't have a ship yet. I'm doing this on purpose to see how easy/hard it is going to be for people to join late. I have a feeling it'll make things impossible.

 

[GasBandit]

Okay, so tell me what you think I can do to fix this imbalance. Because I will.

Also, you'll note I don't have a ship yet. I'm doing this on purpose to see how easy/hard it is going to be for people to join late. I have a feeling it'll make things impossible.

Honestly I don't see what you can do that doesn't involve a code rewrite. Granted that's less difficult here than most games because PHP doesn't compile to binary, but it's still somebody else's undocumented code to have to sift through and alter. What needs to be done is the planets need to be subjected to the 2% torpedo use limitation as ships are. Since planets consider their torpedo launcher level to be 1 level higher than their owner's ship, a planet will still have a slight advantage in combat vs a ship of the same level as the owner, but it will not be insurmountable like a 10% limitation which currently makes a level 12 owner's planet absolutely unassailable to a level 20 ship.

As for your worries about late joiners, you might be right, the way things are headed. The nature of progress in this game being exponential, every day that passes will see more and more trade ports closed off to the public as planets are built and sectors are claimed. To survive they'll have to join the Team that gives them the most access to trade ports, and even then they only subsist off the scraps of the leader/highers up who are moving millions of cargo per turn, driving down the profitability for those who don't yet have economy of scale on their side. It might not even help if planets were less invulnerable, because the sectors will just change ownership (and therefor exclusivity) rather than go back to being open/free trade.

I'm not sure what can be done about that, apart from a complete overhaul of upgrade pricing and possibly making each genesis torpedo cost 10x more than the previous (IE, 10 mil for the first, 100 mil for the second, 1 bil for the 3rd, etc). The problem is that the advancement curve is basically y=x^2 when it needs to be y=sqrt(x) for latecomers to be able to catch up (as noted in previous posts, the formula for effect of a system's level is 100(1.5^(Level))). I guess that's just another conceptual design flaw, sadly. It would be better to have it be something like 150(sqrt(Level)) (and naturally multiply that x5 for energy max) but you'd need to completely re-balance upgrade costs to be cheaper and more linear, otherwise we'll probably top out around level 10.

 

[MindDetective]

It looks like there is a setting to change the amount you can capture from a planet. it is presently set to 10,000,000 but that limitation can be removed, it seems.

Honestly, GB has it. The exponential nature of the advancement curve puts a lot of pressure on players to keep up. It is still a viable game, but it forces the end-game to be after only about 4 days of play.

 

[GasBandit]

Basically, here's how the progression graph goes now (100(1.5^x): (every X tick is 5 levels, with 50 being max level)

And here's how I think it would be better to go (10000(sqrt(x)):

Right now the balancing factor is that every upgrade costs triple what the last one did. Which around level 20-25 starts to slow progression down drastically, I found. But No matter how much you slow it, it's also slowed for everyone who comes after while still giving exponential benefits to those who came first.

The costs should be balanced a little more for the second one, maybe each upgrade costs 1.5 times as much as the previous? I don't know, I've already crunched more math than I planned.

 

[MindDetective]

80% seems high on that last point but I like the rest of it. I'm not sure the growth curves are very adjustable, though. The rest ranges from easy to difficult but doable.

 

[Chad Sexington]

Man, I just start to contemplate getting into this game with y'all, and then there's charts, and math, and gamebreaking conversations... I missed out, man. I want to make charts and math!

 

[GasBandit]

Basically the way things stand, growth LOOKS exponential but you basically hit a brick wall at 25. I can't find a way to plot upgrade price as a function, as it basically starts at y=1000 when x=1 and y doubles for every x after that. Maybe that does sort of balance it for latecomers, because when you get to where I was... progression pretty much comes to a halt.

Doesn't address the planetary torps problem though.

 

[GasBandit]

Alright, well, let's see how this goes then. I'll keep on trucking and try to switch to planetary stuff once I get back up to where I was. I had 9 bases already.

 

[GasBandit]

So tell me, when I attacked your planet yesterday, were you level 12 on most systems? Because I scanned multiple planets and their systems all reported 13. I'm curious to know if that was a sensor failure.

 

[Dave]

So does repeated scanning give the same result or should you scan 3-4 times before trusting the results?

 

[GasBandit]

That was very likely sensor failure. At the time you were attacking me I was at or near level 20 in beams and shields, and I think cloaking. Your sensors were probably reporting very bad values.

Ok. The combat numbers must have been off due to insufficient energy I suppose, as it had you having 74k beams (which would be about level 15 and a half actually) and no shields, so I suppose what really happened is I attacked a planet with 74k energy stores.

Torps are still broken though. I had level 20 beams and torps for sure, and you had over 10x my torp damage.[DOUBLEPOST=1389125325,1389125288][/DOUBLEPOST]

So does repeated scanning give the same result or should you scan 3-4 times before trusting the results?

I did scan 3 times, and got mixtures of ??? and 13 reported back to me. At this point I'm not sure I'd trust scanning at all at less than 10 scans with no ???s

 

[Dave]

How would you feel about direct access to the files? I could give you a login to the cPanel that woudl allow you to change the files yourself.

 

[Dave]

Fair enough.

 

[bhamv3]

Ever wanted to run a trade route 20 times, and enter 120 by mistake? I just did. Drained the trading post entirely and used up all my turns.

Guess I'm sitting around for a while.

 

[bhamv3]

Does anyone else think engines should be nerfed a bit? Right now, within an hour of starting the game, a player can upgrade their engines to the point where realspacing anywhere takes 1 turn. Distances become meaningless, and warp links (as well as warp editors) are underutilized, in terms of strategy and tactics. Maybe being able to realspace everywhere in 1 turn should only be available to extreme-end-game players, such as with level 30 engines.

 

[GasBandit]

Does anyone else think engines should be nerfed a bit? Right now, within an hour of starting the game, a player can upgrade their engines to the point where realspacing anywhere takes 1 turn. Distances become meaningless, and warp links (as well as warp editors) are underutilized, in terms of strategy and tactics. Maybe being able to realspace everywhere in 1 turn should only be available to extreme-end-game players, such as with level 30 engines.

After 15 or so engine level, when everything turns to 1 turn realspace, it's really just about the combat roll - IE, if someone attacks you, they roll their engines vs your engines to see if you outmaneuver them.

And I really doubt you'll see level 30 engines for a long time. The cost of upgrades is 3^x, which means level 20 is 3.4 billion, level 21 is 10.5 billion, level 22 is 31 billion, 23 is 94 billion, and so on, tripling every level, until level 30 is 205 trillion.

That's that' brick wall I've been talking about.

 

[Chad Sexington]

After 15 or so engine level, when everything turns to 1 turn realspace, it's really just about the combat roll - IE, if someone attacks you, they roll their engines vs your engines to see if you outmaneuver them.

And I really doubt you'll see level 30 engines for a long time. The cost of upgrades is 3^x, which means level 20 is 3.4 billion, level 21 is 10.5 billion, level 22 is 31 billion, 23 is 94 billion, and so on, tripling every level, until level 30 is 205 trillion.

That's that' brick wall I've been talking about.

Ho-holy crap

 

[bhamv3]

After 15 or so engine level, when everything turns to 1 turn realspace, it's really just about the combat roll - IE, if someone attacks you, they roll their engines vs your engines to see if you outmaneuver them.

And I really doubt you'll see level 30 engines for a long time. The cost of upgrades is 3^x, which means level 20 is 3.4 billion, level 21 is 10.5 billion, level 22 is 31 billion, 23 is 94 billion, and so on, tripling every level, until level 30 is 205 trillion.

That's that' brick wall I've been talking about.

Well 30 was just a number I was tossing out at random. My point is that realspacing in 1 turn should be more of an end-game privilege.

 

[Dave]

I could always make the universe bigger as it takes longer to real-space travel. However, it would hose newer players that don't use warps.

 

[GasBandit]

Well 30 was just a number I was tossing out at random. My point is that realspacing in 1 turn should be more of an end-game privilege.

I would have thought so too, but unless this whole "shift to planetary economy" thing Stienman was talking about pans out, 20-25 is the end game.

 

[GasBandit]

Planet production is staggering at large scales.[DOUBLEPOST=1389218221,1389217897][/DOUBLEPOST]I'm allowing port trading in my sectors again.

Oh, well if you're going to be that way, I guess I may as well open my sectors, too.

 

[MindDetective]

Oh, well if you're going to be that way, I guess I may as well open my sectors, too.

No, go buy all his energy then annihilate him!


Also, I stopped playing until any revisions are made and a reboot occurs.

 

[GasBandit]

No, go buy all his energy then annihilate him!


Also, I stopped playing until any revisions are made and a reboot occurs.

I'm not playing "seriously," I'm just seeing if the planetary economy is all it is cracked up to be. I still say that problem with the planetary torpedo launchers is gamebreaking, but if planets become useful for something other than area denial, then it may impact the game less.

 

[GasBandit]

Hey, @GasBandit, let me know what happens to your planets that have more than 90 million citizens. I'm not anxious to find out myself, but I am curious.

Hrm, I haven't been letting my planets get anywhere near that populated. Since the planetary max is supposedly 100 million, every time a planet starts going over 50-75 million I make another planet and move the excess colonists there.