Dave's Galaxy

[Kai]

forgot to mention
- using the scout defence is godawfully tedious and boring

[Chenier]

It used to be easy to grab, and still is but you have to send a few more ships. Still if they use scout defence you are screwed. Main reason, its a society level 50 planet or more when you arrive, it takes 50 days to get a colony to that lvl and you likely would have a smaller population as well. I try to only target newbies that haven't logged in for a week or two, no need to chase people away from the game.

Then perhaps a good idea would be to make it so that capitals don't capitulate until you have bombarded to society level to below 10 (or 5)?

If newbies weren't such an attractive target, they wouldn't even need scout defense.

[fodder]

is it pop or lvl that makes them attractive?

[De-Legro]

is it pop or lvl that makes them attractive?

Both

Then perhaps a good idea would be to make it so that capitals don't capitulate until you have bombarded to society level to below 10 (or 5)?

If newbies weren't such an attractive target, they wouldn't even need scout defense.

That would help in the case of very new newbies. Now what about the guy that has just gotten to 10 nice little planets? We could weight the capitulation % to the size of the empires, that might encourage people to war against empires of similar size.

[Kai]

The problem is not limited to newbies.

[Chenier]

The problem is not limited to newbies.

Apply the same thing to all planets, then. Capitals can't be captured until lvl is reduced to 5, and other cities can't be captured until lvl is reduced to 10.

[fodder]

there's no such thing as capitals though..... (unless you count regional gov.)

[Chenier]

there's no such thing as capitals though..... (unless you count regional gov.)

Planet list suggests otherwise.

Unless "states" are regional goverments.

[Vellos]

We could weight the capitulation % to the size of the empires, that might encourage people to war against empires of similar size.

This is a good idea.

Larger empire, higher capitulation %. Creates an inherent check on big empires, limits the breakneck colonization process. No need even to have a comparison for this to work out well. It protects newbies and small empires of all kinds, provides some check to super-massive empires, and gives smaller empires a basic advantage over bigger ones. I see this as kind of how, in BM, smaller realms can run higher tax rates.

This would actually incentivize wars against BIGGER nations... though almost certainly not enough to make it worthwhile.

Also, the more planets you lost, the stronger your defenses would get.

I would envision the capitulation differences as fairly large. A player like uranus, or hierulf, or zootcat might have a planet that, based on its level/population/fleet attacking it/whatever, has a capitulation chance of 30%. An identical planet attacked by an identical fleet, but in an empire with, say, 3 planets, would have a capitulation chance of maybe 5%.

[Tom]

Planet list suggests otherwise.

Unless "states" are regional goverments.

"states" is just the name for planets beyond a certain society limit. Not sure what the precise value is.

[fodder]

76... interestingly the lvl to start building mind control..

---
i'm turning my lvl 100+ planets into oil+food sub + sling shot planets... +enable foreign trade... technically gets 50k a turn in taxes (20%) after expenses... going to see what'll happen...

[Chenier]

"states" is just the name for planets beyond a certain society limit. Not sure what the precise value is.

Heh, that's a weird way to label them. I thought we could found multiple states that we could then divide into provinces.

[Qyasogk]

For point 1 he is referring to the current state of the game, and is quite correct

For point 2 he makes a valid point, most games of this nature have some sort of system to try and provide balance between large and small players. Otherwise attracting new player becomes almost impossible because even if they aren't wiped out soon after starting, they quickly realise that there is no chance they will ever catch up to the established players, and leave out of frustration.

It seemed to me that he was offering a lame critique of my suggestions rather than talking about the "current state of the game." The whole point of my suggestions were to solve the problem of a player being invulnerable by building one scout.

The game already has these balance problems. The first day I signed up to player DG, it was immediately obvious that some players have more than a 10,000 times the planets, resources, and money than other players. The only way empires are defeated is if they leave the game, and that's ridiculous.

One way you can level the playing field a bit is to have a D&D like progression. Therefore the higher up you go the longer it takes to advance to the next level, rather than every round everyone goes up 1 level.

[De-Legro]

It seemed to me that he was offering a lame critique of my suggestions rather than talking about the "current state of the game." The whole point of my suggestions were to solve the problem of a player being invulnerable by building one scout.

The game already has these balance problems. The first day I signed up to player DG, it was immediately obvious that some players have more than a 10,000 times the planets, resources, and money than other players. The only way empires are defeated is if they leave the game, and that's ridiculous.

One way you can level the playing field a bit is to have a D&D like progression. Therefore the higher up you go the longer it takes to advance to the next level, rather than every round everyone goes up 1 level.

Even if society level increases slowed down, I would still be able to send out masses of Arcs with all my planets. Besides it feels rather artificial. Something that generally works in these types of games are efficiency penalties, things like corruption etc that make the return from each extra planet diminish. The problem then is that empire get to a "stable" state and lose any reason to want to expand and war each other.

We all agree that scout defence makes large active players too difficult to fight, the problem is that the scout defence is also the only thing protecting small players from aggressive larger ones, thus any fix needs to address both issues.

[Qyasogk]

Larger empire, higher capitulation %. Creates an inherent check on big empires, limits the breakneck colonization process. No need even to have a comparison for this to work out well. It protects newbies and small empires of all kinds, provides some check to super-massive empires, and gives smaller empires a basic advantage over bigger ones.

This would actually incentivize wars against BIGGER nations... though almost certainly not enough to make it worthwhile.

Also, the more planets you lost, the stronger your defenses would get.

This is a fantastic idea. Still doesn't solve the 1 scout defense problem, but does somewhat address the player inequality problem. I would also suggest that planets who are at war with lots of players, mind control, or high taxes, or heavy polution which makes it miserable for their citizens should modify the capitulation rate. Those people would WELCOME their new overlords. On the other hand, maybe systems that have recently been captured from another player would still have a higher capitulation rate from war shock, and it would take a while for the citizens to become "content" with their new leaders.

I definitely think that people who have fewer planets to retreat to will fight harder to save their world, than someone that has tons of systems. So your reasoning of having fewer worlds equals a lower capitulation makes sense.