Effects of multiple home planets?

[chemical_art]

I tried a game with two homeworlds instead of one for a conquest game to see how it would be different. AI for all intents and purposes seemed doubled in their responses, and while player caps are doubled neither energy nor resources are doubled. After realizing this, I gave up because I was already getting energy shortages with no remedy I could come up with.

Now the resource problem I could easily get around with handicaps, but I could find no solution to the energy troubles of having two homeworlds. Has anyone else tried playing with multiple homeworlds for an extended period of time? How can you beat the crippling energy costs? I would love to take advantage of my 10 forts for example, but I'm stuck with the energy problems that would have made 5 hard to place.


Also devs, is it possible to have an option to affect energy production for players? "2x energy" and "1/2 energy", for example?

EDIT: I know energy costs are closely linked to game balance, and that 2x energy for example would throw off most games to make them much easier. I only ask for the option so I can try new methods. You can 1/3 a player's total score or even nullify it if want since it would so dramatically effect balance.

[x4000]

There's a number of people that play with multiple homeworlds quite a lot, and often in the past one of the four players on my team might have an extra homeworld. If you play with 8 homeworlds or similar, it can be incredibly different and difficult. With just two, it is different but no night and day

Remember that you can build mark I-III reactors on each planet, including your homeworlds. It will take a while before you can use your entire cap of ships, but honestly in most respects playing with two home planets is very similar to playing with two actual players, except that tour resource caps don't go up. Assuming you have proper usage of all that extra economy, accumulation isn't a big concern.

You'll want more planets soon, but thats always the case. And remember that in a pinch you can build extra reactors at lowered efficiency if you really have to. But I've never had to. Usually I take another planet in 5-10 minutes after the game starts (there's one that is a pushover, usually), and then you have all you need for a while.

The big difference in a multiple-planet start is that when you lose any one of your homeworlds, you lose them all. That's a balance thing for this mode, and differs from true multiplayer. At any rate, it's a very well-traversed mode, so you aren't in new territory or anything. Might do a weary in the strategy subforum: there are various threads about it.

[Shrugging Khan]

My problem with multiple homeworlds is that the ridiculously high ship caps, in addition to the extra starting ship types and the massively increased numbers of AI ships, just makes the game too cluttered for my caveman brain, and too CPU-unfriendly for my caveman computer 

[x4000]

Yep, the computer thing definitely is a worry -- you officially step outside the normal bounds of play with this, where the CPU requirements can skyrocket if you're doing blobs of doom.

[chemical_art]

There's a number of people that play with multiple homeworlds quite a lot, and often in the past one of the four players on my team might have an extra homeworld. If you play with 8 homeworlds or similar, it can be incredibly different and difficult. With just two, it is different but no night and day

Remember that you can build mark I-III reactors on each planet, including your homeworlds. It will take a while before you can use your entire cap of ships, but honestly in most respects playing with two home planets is very similar to playing with two actual players, except that tour resource caps don't go up. Assuming you have proper usage of all that extra economy, accumulation isn't a big concern.

You'll want more planets soon, but thats always the case. And remember that in a pinch you can build extra reactors at lowered efficiency if you really have to. But I've never had to. Usually I take another planet in 5-10 minutes after the game starts (there's one that is a pushover, usually), and then you have all you need for a while.

The big difference in a multiple-planet start is that when you lose any one of your homeworlds, you lose them all. That's a balance thing for this mode, and differs from true multiplayer. At any rate, it's a very well-traversed mode, so you aren't in new territory or anything. Might do a weary in the strategy subforum: there are various threads about it.

All those lovely energy tactics I do already. I  wasn't sure if there were any specific things a multi homeworld start could give do to boost energy that a single player could not already to help compensate energy. Fundamentally, it still sounds like a player gets twice as much cap without twice as much power, meaning a single power gamer is still the most efficient means to beat an AI. It would be like me switching my ship caps from "normal" to "high" without the ships taking half as much energy per unit. This would be ok if the AI had less then a 2x response, but since the AI does it seems a pretty clear disadvantage in my opinion.

I'll admit I don't know the nuances  of multiplayer gameplay, but I think they get more of a break then a player who selects multiple homeworlds. Unfortunately I couldn't tell you the specifics because I never tried, but I heard there are several "resources that can be shared" among players that a single player cannot.

For example, does each player get access to research per world, or is that shared on a team basis? More critically, can players "gift" reactors to each other with no penalty? Either of these could boost multiplayer games but not multi homeworld games. I'm sorry if this sounds like whining, I'm just curious what extra stuff a multiplayer game allows that makes having more then one total human world effective.

[x4000]

Oh yes, players in multiplayer get more of a break that you do in a multi-homeworld start.  They each have their own research pools, and they each have their own reactor pools, so their energy needs don't become so much so fast.  But as long as you take some more territory soon in, your energy needs start diminishing before they can become long-term problems.  You just can't build to the cap in the meantime, but you don't really need to at the start in most cases, anyway.

Here's why things are unbalanced the way they are: it's actually to bring things back into balance.  In multiplayer, if you had a team of players that thought as one, that acted with perfect efficiency, and who played at the top of their game, it would actually be an easier game than if you had a similar theoretical single player individual.  The reason for this is that efficiency for the team at large is definitely lost in multiplayer for most mortals; while there are many advantages of having three or four brains instead of one, there's also other things that don't run as smoothly, and the game is built to compensate for that so that the apparent difficulty for most players is going to be the same in multiplayer and in solo.

Now, when you get to a single player with multiple starting homeworlds, those extra inefficiencies of trying to get two or four or whatever people working together no longer exist.  It's all you, all the time.  So the game doesn't go out of its way to give you extra energy and such.  Multi-planet starts was actually a player-requested feature back pre-2.0, and this ultimate designed was arrived at over time with players who used it.  The general consensus seems to be that the game is balanced in this mode, but that it's not at all the same game as a single player start, or even a multiplayer game.  Which is sort of the goal, I guess -- it's a different game mode, and feels like it more than a little.

If you're just looking for the same game, but faster, then I suggest giving yourself and both AIs the same positive handicap, instead of having multiple starting homeworlds.  Say, 200% for each of you, for instance.  When all players and AIs have the same average handicap between them, it doesn't count as a cheat for achievements and what have you, and it just leads to yet another variant off the main game.

[Nalgas]

In multiplayer, if you had a team of players that thought as one, that acted with perfect efficiency, and who played at the top of their game, it would actually be an easier game than if you had a similar theoretical single player individual.  The reason for this is that efficiency for the team at large is definitely lost in multiplayer for most mortals

Beat me to it, but that's exactly what I was going to say.  I usually play fairly large-scale multiplayer games with five or six people, and while we may have absolutely ridiculous numbers of ships and resources and whatnot, it's very, very hard to coordinate that effectively between so many people.  I find it substantially harder than with only one or two players for that reason.  It's not a completely fair comparison, because not everyone is the same skill level, but we have a hard time playing difficulty 6/6 games with six players, while the last time I played with just two, 7/7 was a complete joke.

You may have a whole lot more stuff at your disposal, but if you can't use it effectively because you can't keep everyone organized on that scale, it doesn't do you as much good as you'd think.  In the same situation when you're the only player, it's much easier, because you already know everything that's going on.  It's a lot quicker and more accurate to convey a thought from one side of your brain to the other than translating it into words and hoping everyone heard it and understood it over the Internets.

[chemical_art]

So the extra breaks from multiplayer help compensate for the human's poor ability to communicate? I can see that.

Admittedly, it is this exact issue that prevents me from getting into multiplayer games. I don't expect to intimately cooperate with my allies. I do want our strategies to compliment each other, but during the actual execution I'm pretty silent. I expect my ally to watch their sphere of influence first and then only spare help when they can. This makes me a terrible ally in my opinion because I don't want to become bogged down in complex operations that require extensive communication. If it involves much more then "Help take X. Help hold Y" I don't want to hear about it, because I am stubbornly autonomous. Of course I think I'm making the best moves, but I doubt my teammates would feel the same.

[Nalgas]

Admittedly, it is this exact issue that prevents me from getting into multiplayer games. I don't expect to intimately cooperate with my allies. I do want our strategies to compliment each other, but during the actual execution I'm pretty silent. I expect my ally to watch their sphere of influence first and then only spare help when they can. This makes me a terrible ally in my opinion because I don't want to become bogged down in complex operations that require extensive communication. If it involves much more then "Help take X. Help hold Y" I don't want to hear about it, because I am stubbornly autonomous. Of course I think I'm making the best moves, but I doubt my teammates would feel the same.

Yeah, if you're playing on a non-trivial difficulty, that can get you in a lot of trouble in a game like this, especially if you have different play styles from each other.  Things one person does can affect how the AI responds to other people, so if they all do what they think is in their best interest without some sort of coordinated overall plan, they can end up screwing over not just each other but themselves, too.  A very simple example is how we managed to lose one game in about 15 minutes, when one person decided to go clear out a bunch of warp gates surrounding our starting planets to reduce the number of points of attack in the first wave...and then all the ships from half a dozen planets he'd been through while doing that attacked my system simultaneously.  And then everyone else's next to me.  That was one of those "from now on, no one does anything like that without telling everyone else first" moments.  Heh.

[chemical_art]

Admittedly, it is this exact issue that prevents me from getting into multiplayer games. I don't expect to intimately cooperate with my allies. I do want our strategies to compliment each other, but during the actual execution I'm pretty silent. I expect my ally to watch their sphere of influence first and then only spare help when they can. This makes me a terrible ally in my opinion because I don't want to become bogged down in complex operations that require extensive communication. If it involves much more then "Help take X. Help hold Y" I don't want to hear about it, because I am stubbornly autonomous. Of course I think I'm making the best moves, but I doubt my teammates would feel the same.

Yeah, if you're playing on a non-trivial difficulty, that can get you in a lot of trouble in a game like this, especially if you have different play styles from each other.  Things one person does can affect how the AI responds to other people, so if they all do what they think is in their best interest without some sort of coordinated overall plan, they can end up screwing over not just each other but themselves, too.  A very simple example is how we managed to lose one game in about 15 minutes, when one person decided to go clear out a bunch of warp gates surrounding our starting planets to reduce the number of points of attack in the first wave...and then all the ships from half a dozen planets he'd been through while doing that attacked my system simultaneously.  And then everyone else's next to me.  That was one of those "from now on, no one does anything like that without telling everyone else first" moments.  Heh.

Well, I would assume that as a general policy you don't raise AIP without letting the team know first. That and digging up the agro, and the general lack of forethought as to how warps fronts vs. AIP work...

I also fail to consider that  everyone doesn't always think through their actions

[Nalgas]

Well, I would assume that as a general policy you don't raise AIP without letting the team know first. That and digging up the agro, and the general lack of forethought as to how warps fronts vs. AIP work...

Yeah, those things all tend to fairly quickly become informal rules.  Even if you do always manage to keep that in mind, though, the much larger AI fleets tend to require constant cooperation on offense and defense, because most of the time one person can't handle a whole lot on their own when the AI is sending six times as many ships at you as usual.  It frequently results in enormous threat numbers, whether from incompletely clearing out systems or ships retreating from waves, and even if you mostly keep on top of it, there's often enough looming over a system that you can't even move your ships out of it on your own without risking an invasion, so in some situations even fleet movements have to be coordinated.

I also fail to consider that everyone doesn't always think through their actions

Heh.  Very, very true.  On the other hand, that sometimes results in some of the funniest or craziest parts of the game, when everyone's scrambling to deal with the consequences.

[x4000]

Yeah, team communication is always a fun and funny thing.  It's one of my favorite aspects of playing strategy games in general (I always play co-op against the AI with my regular 3 players), and AIW in particular.  My group actually works quite well together in the main, but most of our losses come from one or two individuals out of the four of us lone-gunning in a stupid way.  Sometimes it's me.  But it's incredibly more entertaining and dynamic than playing alone, no matter how good the solo game is in any game.

[Nalgas]

My group actually works quite well together in the main, but most of our losses come from one or two individuals out of the four of us lone-gunning in a stupid way.  Sometimes it's me.

For once in a game, it's usually not me in AI War.  In Magicka, on the other hand, I frequently end up being responsible for 70% of the enemy kills...and 90% of the deaths of my own team.  Heh.

But it's incredibly more entertaining and dynamic than playing alone, no matter how good the solo game is in any game.

Something else I like about it is that it makes me play differently from how I would on my own, depending on who I'm playing with.  With my regular group, we've never had a campaign take as long as 15 hours.  On my own, I probably wouldn't take less than 20 unless I had the difficulty set too low.  They're just slightly more aggressive than I am.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I find that starships have a better feel in normal ship caps/2 hw than they do in high caps/1 hw, so that's what i usually play.    It's also more interesting to have more bonus ships at the start.  OTOH i do think that multi-hw energy economy is messed up, especially if you are trying to support high energy cost items like space-time manipulators and fortresses.   Even ZPGs only go so far.

[Giegue]

Admittedly, it is this exact issue that prevents me from getting into multiplayer games. I don't expect to intimately cooperate with my allies. I do want our strategies to compliment each other, but during the actual execution I'm pretty silent. I expect my ally to watch their sphere of influence first and then only spare help when they can. This makes me a terrible ally in my opinion because I don't want to become bogged down in complex operations that require extensive communication. If it involves much more then "Help take X. Help hold Y" I don't want to hear about it, because I am stubbornly autonomous. Of course I think I'm making the best moves, but I doubt my teammates would feel the same.

Yeah, if you're playing on a non-trivial difficulty, that can get you in a lot of trouble in a game like this, especially if you have different play styles from each other.  Things one person does can affect how the AI responds to other people, so if they all do what they think is in their best interest without some sort of coordinated overall plan, they can end up screwing over not just each other but themselves, too.  A very simple example is how we managed to lose one game in about 15 minutes, when one person decided to go clear out a bunch of warp gates surrounding our starting planets to reduce the number of points of attack in the first wave...and then all the ships from half a dozen planets he'd been through while doing that attacked my system simultaneously.  And then everyone else's next to me.  That was one of those "from now on, no one does anything like that without telling everyone else first" moments.  Heh.

Well, I would assume that as a general policy you don't raise AIP without letting the team know first. That and digging up the agro, and the general lack of forethought as to how warps fronts vs. AIP work...

I also fail to consider that  everyone doesn't always think through their actions

I'm sure that doing small things like destroying a special guard post would be fine.