Did you abuse Knowledge raiding? a poll to cry on --- post 3.152 :'(

[Lancefighter]

As far as there not being enough knowledge for unlocks, that's a completely different discussion, eh?  The knowledge-per-planet could always be adjusted upwards as the game evolves and there is more content competing for the players' attention. 

Perhaps you could make the knowledge per planet dependent on the number of planets in the galaxy?

Because it seems to me (noob as I may be) that taking away knowledge raiding makes smaller maps even harder.

as i recall, smaller maps were never meant to be played. It was intended that you would have your *smallest* a 40 planet map.. i believe..

[x4000]

I like it a nice round number like 2,000 or 3,000.

Well, it's definitely not to be 3,000, so that would keep it at 2,000 only.   Really it would be some multiple of 250, in the end.

As far as there not being enough knowledge for unlocks, that's a completely different discussion, eh?  The knowledge-per-planet could always be adjusted upwards as the game evolves and there is more content competing for the players' attention. 

Perhaps you could make the knowledge per planet dependent on the number of planets in the galaxy?

Because it seems to me (noob as I may be) that taking away knowledge raiding makes smaller maps even harder.

Well, the smaller maps are very different in style in general, and tend to be harder.  You need to take more of the planets, you get less knowledge in general, anyway, and so you have lower ship caps.  But, on the flip side, there are tons of goodies right on your front door, the AI home planets are really close (both good and bad), and the games are so short that the AI doesn't have much time to reinforce.  And while your knowledge is very low, the AI progress also is very low -- it has to be -- which also compensates.  I'm pretty happy with the balance on those maps, and I don't think that knowledge raiding was a prerequisite for them.

People have been suggesting knowledge adjustments per planet based on map sizes for a while, but I think that would destroy the balance at all the various levels of play unless AI Progress and a whole bunch of other factors were also scaled up.  And when you get into that, you're essentially just rebalancing the equation without actually changing much in terms of difficulty, and it risks putting a ton of imbalance into something that is already balanced pretty well. 

In summary, the tiny maps are a different game entirely, not a shorter version of the main game, which I think is the main disconnect that people come to.  That's simply by nature of the game.  It would be like playing soccer with the same number of players, but on a field that is 1/4 the size of the regular field.  That would change a ton of factors, and mostly not for the better.  My recommendation is always to play on 40 planets or up, but some players like the alternate tiny map game style, so that's why it's there.

[rubikscube]

chose everything besides never

[ShadowOTE]

X4000: URE IN MAH COMPUTR, SAPPIN MAH KNOWLEDGE!

[bongotron2000]

I wasn't ever really sure that k-raiding was actually abuse as such, though in my current game vs a lev6 and lev7 I've been doing it wherever possible (i.e. just about everywhere). Even took a few systems that had lots of connections to others just so that I could do more raiding. Usual strategy was to fly the fleet in (pretty much all my MkIII/MkIV and starships), neuter the system, then fly in the ARSes* under a forcefield. Of course, with 5 ARSes and a large and powerful fleet, it's all pretty easy, just time consuming.

Probably, I'll wait until I finish the game I'm on before upgrading to 3.052. These changes should certainly make me think a lot more about where and when I do k-raiding.

* Apologies for general childishness, but is there anyone else here who is British and finds the references to ARSes really funny? 

[Winter Born]

X4000: URE IN MAH COMPUTR, SAPPIN MAH KNOWLEDGE!

Lol

[Doddler]

What would be cool is if there was a game modifier for 'relaxed knowledge restrictions' that allowed Mk I and Mk II ships to gain knowledge from non controlled systems.  And on the knowledge increase, even if the default were adjusted, maybe an option to adjust knowledge per system would be nice, like chose between 1000 and 3000 in 250 knowledge increments.  Well, I'm the kind of person that would prefer configuration options rather than mandatory global changes.

[Ktoff]

Per System knowledge-adjustment...

This could lead to some interesting strategic choices. Say some planets give 3000 instead of 2000 (but are more heavily protected).... In terms of AIWar lore it would even make sense to increase the knowledge on MkIV and MkIII planets. I mean higher technology makes it easier to rediscover something. Maybe 2500 for a MkIII planet and 3000 for a MkIV planet. This would increase the total knowledge that can be gained without 'giving' knowledge to the player and create an incentive to attack higher Mark planets.

[Sizzle]

Doddler, I think the change was really more to bring the game experience (sharply) back in line with the design goals for knowledge raiding.

I don't think (though he may prove me wrong) that x4000 is at all interested in providing options to go back to the 'broken' state we were in before.

The knowledge per planet incremental slider might be doable (or as ktoff suggests -- higher knowledge on higher mk worlds), but again poses all sorts of balance considerations.  x4000 is in charge of creating a compelling game experience, not necessarily opening up all sorts of options to make the game how we think it should be.  To a certain extent the developers MUST enforce the game design principles, as sometimes what the community wants is not necessarily what is best from a game design perspective for the game's overall health.  

[x4000]

Yep, Sizzle pretty much summed it up.  Normally I'm all about configuration options, but with something like that it's so core as to be something that can't be tweaked without affecting... so much else.  If you want extra knowledge in a game, there's a cheat for that, but then it flags your game as a cheat game (as it's destroyed the difficulty balance).

I'm also not a fan of making the per-system knowledge a variant thing, that's been discussed to a fair degree in the past.  I feel like there enough factors that people have to crunch in their heads when deciding which planets to take, and adding on an extra complexity of the knowledge-per-planet doesn't seem like positive complexity to me.  It also could create knowledge-starved or knowledge-over-rich map starts based on the random map seed, which is something that would wind up tying players hands in an unkind way, I think.

I've been thinking about the numbers some, and I think that having the knowledge-per-planet cap increased to 2500 would be what would make the most sense.  Some of the starship lines (thinking here of Riot, mostly) might need to be a bit more expensive in knowledge with that change particularly, as I feel like already they're already kind of borderline, but all in all this might ease the pain of the knowledge raiding takeaway some, and give players more options, sooner, without the tedium of the knowledge raids.

If you figure a player before might have knowledge-raided at least 5 planets if they were hardcore into that (or really, more like 10+, but we'll say 5 to be conservative), that would have been 10,000 extra knowledge than a non-knowledge-raider would have had in the game.  That's equivalent to 20 planets worth of this extra 500-per-planet knowledge.

The difficulty of the AI tends to creep up over time, and has taken some jumps with the recent border aggression stuff and so on, so this is something of a rebalance of the game, but I think it will be a positive one.  It prevents people from feeling like they need to knowledge raid in order to be able to play with much of the stuff (which, looking at the numbers, there is 300k+ worth of stuff you could spend knowledge on in a given game, so even with an extra 10k in a single game that's not game-breakingly too much).  And that then frees us up to make the AI even more devious, which we certainly have several things on the slate for (the entourage behavior, etc).

[Ktoff]

I'm also not a fan of making the per-system knowledge a variant thing, that's been discussed to a fair degree in the past.  I feel like there enough factors that people have to crunch in their heads when deciding which planets to take, and adding on an extra complexity of the knowledge-per-planet doesn't seem like positive complexity to me.  It also could create knowledge-starved or knowledge-over-rich map starts based on the random map seed, which is something that would wind up tying players hands in an unkind way, I think.

Sorry, i didn't know this came up in the past. But i was thinking more in the direction of making higher level planets more valuable...

The complexity issue is very true, though...

[x4000]

No worries.  I just feel like making the higher-level planets more valuable is inherently dangerous, actually -- because then there's an incentive for people to go giant killing, so to speak.  That in itself can turn the game into more of a grind, whereas right now the levels of the planets are completely unrelated to any of the potential rewards -- if an ARS is on a high-level planet then that's unlucky, but there are only 5 of those, and you might just as well find some hugely useful stuff on a poorly-defended mark II planet.

There are so many factors in this game, that with a lot of the stuff I have to think about how it all fits into the kind of overall equation that makes the game fun to play and at all balanced.  That's the tricky thing with knowledge in particular, but also the seeding for planets in general, etc.

[wyvern83]

x4000 is in charge of creating a compelling game experience, not necessarily opening up all sorts of options to make the game how we think it should be.  To a certain extent the developers MUST enforce the game design principles, as sometimes what the community wants is not necessarily what is best from a game design perspective for the game's overall health.  

Agreed. And I don't think it hurts to be reminded of that fact every once in a while either. His design direction is essential to AI Wars so I'm willing to go along on this one, though I think accepting the transport nerfs was harder.

[Mánagarmr]

Yes, I think I did. I saw it as a natural part of the game. I will probably try to keep doing it, but we'll see. I'm slow to adapt

[rubikscube]

I got a real question here, what's the point of mk2 science labs? you say dangerous environments, i tend not to choose to send my science lab when a cpa is happing or send it right next to wormholes.

You say it's faster, i say i don't care if it collected at a speed of 10 PER MINUTE as long it doens't take overly long like 1 per minute I don't need knowledge like i need emergency ships and i tend to save my knowledge for hours and hours at once

I tend not to use mobile builders, and obviously if i wanted to k raid i would have to, but isn't that kinda over kill? how about a knowledge colony ship, with reduced building time, and ships at that system will only attack when it's finished?

still neutering is the best way for me