Impossible to lose the game as long as you hold 1 planet

[Nodor]

I recall the mechanics from the early days with the mark 1-3 generators and the lack of efficiency for those reactors beyond the first. 

I remain a fan of that system because it forced you to expand and limited how much you could scale.   This shouldn't be an issue with fallen spire given the turf you need.. but it will be an issue if you have to defend it.   

As to the homeworld defense, I lost a game Friday when an Exo blasted the ZPG on my homeworld and I went negative on energy, and then my Command Station went boom as the shields were gone.   

With Exo's, setting up 5 or so space docks near (on?) your logistic station chokepoint and supporting them with 30 Mark 2 engineers means not rebuilding after a major fight, despite losing all of your ships a couple of times.   I think decreasing the scrap value for superweapons makes sense - but golem scrap feels low  - is there a happy medium in there?   I've been playing against a Golemite (level 9) and killing the golems is a lot more difficult than I remember and feels unrewarding. 

[Draco18s]

I recall the mechanics from the early days with the mark 1-3 generators and the lack of efficiency for those reactors beyond the first.

The problem with that system was that it cost resources.  So you had keybinds to turn power generators on and off to keep yourself at "just barely positive" energy.

[Aklyon]

I only barely remember those. (As in, i played the tutorial once, got lost, played it again after quite awhile and wondered where all the energy generators dissapeared to)

[keith.lamothe]

I only barely remember those. (As in, i played the tutorial once, got lost, played it again after quite awhile and wondered where all the energy generators dissapeared to)

"Nice Reactors you've got there.  Be a shame if somebody patched them out."

[kasnavada]

As I put in the other thread... I would propose this to solve the problem seen here:
- scrapped metal is the square root value of the metal cost. Cubic root if it's not enough. This solves the problem of exos giving too much metal.
- recycling needs to be removed from stations completely. A new "recycling" building, which is capped at 1/planet and  10/game will give 100% salvage value. You can unlock another salvager which gives 200% more recycling, capped at 1 per planet and 2/game. The last one cannot be built at homeworld.
- salvage is then divided by the difficulty level squared, then multiplied by 1000.

A MK1 fighter would give:
- 400 cost => 20 metal, then * 1000/64 = 310 metal on diff 8, 200 on diff10.
A wave of 1000 fighter would then give 310 000 / 200 000 metal.

A wave of 4 MKII flagship would give
- 200 000 * 4 = 447 * 4 = 1788 metal, which in turn would do 27950 metal on diff 8, 17880 metal on diff 10.

A "standard" late 8/8 wave would give about 400 - 500k metal. Sounds fair to me given the low danger of those waves.

To get further, a golem would give :
- 40 000 000 => 6324 base metal, then 98820 metal on diff 8, 63240 on diff 10.

I have not done the math, but I estimate that exos in the last 8/8 game I played, with around 200 AIP usually came with about 4 dozen starships, 4 golems / dire guardians and hundreds of small ships, would net around 1 - 1.5 million metal. Instead of the current around 8-10 million or more.

Also, assuming you direct those to the planets which your salvagers are on, you can get triple this amount with the proposal I'm making.

Salvage at lower diff level would be insane, but it's supposed to be easy. So, who cares ?

PS:  Maybe I've got errors in the math. Feel free to correct / improve if you feel like it 

[TechSY730]

Although I am glad to see that the HW salvage rate is getting a nerf, my intention was that the other command station's efficiency rates (especially the Mk Is) would get a buff. (Again, with home rate no worse than Mk. III of any of the three types)

Isn't 40% also the logistics Mk. III's efficiency rate?

EDIT: I'm not asking for 25% or something like that for Mk. Is. That would be silly.
But 10% at the best for Mk. 1s? That seems a bit much...
Actually, thinking about it again, if we consider home command center to be a "Mk. IV" command station, sort of, then maybe 4x better than best Mk. I does make sense.

Though I wonder if a growth rate like the harvesters have for the salvage effeciency  rates would work better than straight up linear growth over marks.

[Nodor]

I recall the mechanics from the early days with the mark 1-3 generators and the lack of efficiency for those reactors beyond the first.

The problem with that system was that it cost resources.  So you had keybinds to turn power generators on and off to keep yourself at "just barely positive" energy.

I assume that Energy Collectors are auto-built on every planet you own.   The idea behind making Matter Converters (200 Metal/Second for 50K energy) less efficient per converter built on planet is to avoid players with a huge scrap income from dropping 20 on their homeworld and building them in 2 seconds with engineers because the perimeter had been penetrated by an Exo Wave and they had lost a few Energy Collectors.    Having to delete a LOT of stationary defenses to get back to positive energy, while fighting an Exo,  was a key component to many of my early losses in prior (pre 6.0) eras. 

Removing the micro removed a typical source of loss and is one of the reasons the game is easier now.    I'm not going to have 40 Mark 2 engineers on all of my planets and making excess energy sources distributed makes people place less towers (because of micro avoidance) and increases the "lose 10 planets, you probably failure cascade chances."  This thread started as a complaint about not needing to defend what you have captured.  This change would change the defense calculus.

[Aklyon]

As far as I can tell (and I might be completely wrong), for megasalvage it doesn't seem to be the amount of ships or other things thats specifically the problem, but the tendency of exos to bring heavy weaponry with them (with their huge metal costs), and then the heavy weapons get shredded by defenses expecting large swarms of spacecraft, not just one (or one dozen) massive strength ships they can focus holes into once all the fleetship escorts have vanished into a puff of space dust.

[Tridus]

I assume that Energy Collectors are auto-built on every planet you own.   The idea behind making Matter Converters (200 Metal/Second for 50K energy) less efficient per converter built on planet is to avoid players with a huge scrap income from dropping 20 on their homeworld and building them in 2 seconds with engineers because the perimeter had been penetrated by an Exo Wave and they had lost a few Energy Collectors.    Having to delete a LOT of stationary defenses to get back to positive energy, while fighting an Exo,  was a key component to many of my early losses in prior (pre 6.0) eras. 

Removing the micro removed a typical source of loss and is one of the reasons the game is easier now.    I'm not going to have 40 Mark 2 engineers on all of my planets and making excess energy sources distributed makes people place less towers (because of micro avoidance) and increases the "lose 10 planets, you probably failure cascade chances."  This thread started as a complaint about not needing to defend what you have captured.  This change would change the defense calculus.

Agreed. There needs to be a smaller cap on the amount of energy you can get per system. That nullifies this problem entirely and makes holding enough territory to power everything important. It also boosts the importance of Economic Command Station unlocks (as well as the ZPG) because they can boost the power per system dramatically.

Some way or another, matter converters need to be more limited than they are right now.

(Also agreed about Exos giving too much salvage.)

[TechSY730]

There is a change coming up for 7.036 (not out yet as of this writing) that will give a matter converter cap of 10 per planet. Might not be severe enough, but something along those lines should keep things in line.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Try sub-linear scaling of salvage given by a unit again (over unit base cost). The current nerf of salvage cap per planet helped, but is not enough.
However, since that nerf helped, the new sub-linear scaling should be less severe than the "original try".
Also, I would prefer a consistent formula (sqrt, Nth root, log base B, something like that) rather than discrete tiers or else you could get the counter-intuitive result where a more expensive unit gives less salvage in total (not just proportionally) than a unit that is less expensive, but that is less of an issue in my mind.

Just as a reference, here is the "original try" that never got to see the light of day in a public release (recovered from the history archives of the release notes):

Salvage has largely been a popular addition, but over the weeks since its introduction it's become clear that the overall magnitudes just get too large and dominate the game (mainly by making the human players swim in more metal than they can spend, at least temporarily). So the value of salvage now scales sub-linearly with metal cost, rather than 1:1 with metal cost. This applies to both human and AI usage of salvage.
Examples of the new scaling:
A 1000 metal ship (very cheap) still gives 1000 salvage.
A 2000 metal ship now gives 1,400 salvage (70% of previous)
A 10,000 metal ship now gives 4,600 salvage (46% of previous)
A 100,000 metal ship now gives 22,600 salvage (~22% of previous)
A 500,000 metal ship (for example, an FS Cruiser with no modules) now gives 75,933 salvage (~15% of previous)
A 1 million metal ship (for example, an FS Battleship with no modules) now gives 142,600 salvage. (~14% of previous)
A 5 million metal ship (for example, a Zenith Power Generator, though one of those dying in a salvageable case would be tricky) now gives 542,600 salvage (~11% of previous)
A 10 million metal ship (for example, a MkV Hunter Killer) now gives 1,042,600 salvage (~10% of previous)
Golems cost even more than that, but are only counted at 10% of their metal value for scrap already, so a 40-mil armored golem counts as 4-mil, and has a salvage value of 442,014.

This would be too steep of a change given the per salvage cap per planet nerf, but it will help give an idea of that I am talking about.

[Toranth]

There is a change coming up for 7.036 (not out yet as of this writing) that will give a matter converter cap of 10 per planet. Might not be severe enough, but something along those lines should keep things in line.

Might not be severe enough?!  I think 10 is already crazy-low.  By the end of a game, it is not unusual for me to be running 75-100 matter converters, while holding only 10 planets.  Others are usually abandoned when not needed anymore.  Putting a limit of 10 means I can't afford to lose anything anymore, while putting a limit of less than 10 would be requiring me to take and hold more planets simply so I can defend the planets I already have!
Remember, a full set of Mk I turrets is half as powerful as it used to be, but costs the same energy - about 200,000.  The full set of Mk I and Mk II turrets, which together are about as powerful as the older set of Mk V turrets, costs 10,000 Knowledge and 400,000 energy.  Weak defenses are a net drain, because you need to build a Matter Converter.  Medium defenses are a major drain, because you need to build 5 Matter Converters - leaving you a maximum of 5 for powering other things - like your fleet, which you are trying to use to actually win the game.


And since Matter Converters just got a serious nerf with the new per-planet limits, are the other costs (construction time, resource/sec cost) going to go down?

[TechSY730]

There is a change coming up for 7.036 (not out yet as of this writing) that will give a matter converter cap of 10 per planet. Might not be severe enough, but something along those lines should keep things in line.

Might not be severe enough?!  I think 10 is already crazy-low.  By the end of a game, it is not unusual for me to be running 75-100 matter converters, while holding only 10 planets.  Others are usually abandoned when not needed anymore.  Putting a limit of 10 means I can't afford to lose anything anymore, while putting a limit of less than 10 would be requiring me to take and hold more planets simply so I can defend the planets I already have!
Remember, a full set of Mk I turrets is half as powerful as it used to be, but costs the same energy - about 200,000.  The full set of Mk I and Mk II turrets, which together are about as powerful as the older set of Mk V turrets, costs 10,000 Knowledge and 400,000 energy.  Weak defenses are a net drain, because you need to build a Matter Converter.  Medium defenses are a major drain, because you need to build 5 Matter Converters - leaving you a maximum of 5 for powering other things - like your fleet, which you are trying to use to actually win the game.


And since Matter Converters just got a serious nerf with the new per-planet limits, are the other costs (construction time, resource/sec cost) going to go down?

Someone did mention that they felt that the energy increase of the turrets when they went per-planet caps was too much; can't remember who though. Not sure if they meant it should go back to old energy usage per turret, or just a lesser increase per turret (current ones are 2x per turret of old ones).

Still, that would only cut down you 75-100 converters to like 40-70 (depending on how much the energy usage got tweaked down too, and how much army you had), so a cap of 10 would still be a pretty noticable nerf.

[Nodor]

We still have the 10/10 bug.   How we help Keith make the game harder to stamp out that bug matters.

I would argue that making it more difficult to defend everything is more interesting strategically than having 700 turrets on every planet and having the AI send so many ships it smashes 700 turrets without blinking.

Jumping between 7.001 and 7.035 it's obvious that a LOT of progress on the 10/10 bug has been made, and frankly, I'm having more fun as a result. 

[keith.lamothe]

We still have the 10/10 bug.   How we help Keith make the game harder to stamp out that bug matters.

FWIW I haven't had any confirmed cases of that (iirc) since 7.029 or so.

[Wingflier]

We still have the 10/10 bug.   How we help Keith make the game harder to stamp out that bug matters.

I would argue that making it more difficult to defend everything is more interesting strategically than having 700 turrets on every planet and having the AI send so many ships it smashes 700 turrets without blinking.

Jumping between 7.001 and 7.035 it's obvious that a LOT of progress on the 10/10 bug has been made, and frankly, I'm having more fun as a result.

Agree with the above. If you can't handle the energy situation that comes with defending your planets, turn down the difficulty.

Having said that, with the increased turret costs perhaps each energy collector could be a little more forgiving about giving the player the ability to defend itself ;p. Overall though, seems like things are looking good.