Poll

If we were to take away the bonus to ship cap from multi planet starts, would you be:

In favor of that.
8 (20.5%)
Not really caring.
22 (56.4%)
Generally opposed.
6 (15.4%)
Really upset about that.
3 (7.7%)

Total Members Voted: 0

Author Topic: Multi-planet starts: a poll  (Read 4099 times)

Offline x4000

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #15 on: December 05, 2010, 12:47:08 am »
Ah!  Clever Sunshine, yes, that is very truue on the shipcaps being (1/(n+1))*(doubled ship cap).  Can't believe I didn't think of that.

Also true on the lack of knowledge.  I could beef that up for multiplanet starts, but that might feel too easy, I'm not sure.  I'm tempted, but it's not equivalent to multiplayer, because unlocks are per-player.  So though there's an extra 10k knowledge per player in multiplayer, that's only useful for unlocking more variety of ships between the various players, not more ships overall from the players.
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Offline wyvern83

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #16 on: December 05, 2010, 12:48:34 am »
Part of a problem with multi-planet starts is that your team loses 10,000 knowledge per additional planet you choose, giving you less access to advanced ship types or diversity.

You mean because you're taking an 'additional' spot that could go to an extra player? (who would add an additional 10,000 effective knowledge to the team's pool of resources if they were to be in the game)


I'm not tired so I must admit I don't understand what (1/(n+1))*(doubled ship cap) works out to be.

Edit: I need to go to bed apparently.

Offline Sunshine!

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #17 on: December 05, 2010, 01:04:34 am »
For a 16 planet start, 16k knowledge might seem a bit excessive to start with, plus the additional 48k knowledge from gathering (64k total), but also consider that you will be facing 16 waves every time.  That will also only allow you to unlock 8 fleetships fully with 4000 left over.  Given the magnitude of the attacks a player will be facing, that seems like it may not actually be enough to stave things off once you hit 100 AIP or so (5 planets, another 15k knowledge, two more ship unlocks at most).

Part of a problem with multi-planet starts is that your team loses 10,000 knowledge per additional planet you choose, giving you less access to advanced ship types or diversity.

You mean because you're taking an 'additional' spot that could go to an extra player? (who would add an additional 10,000 effective knowledge to the team's pool of resources if they were to be in the game)

Yes, that.  Both players will likely tech up their initial bonus ships, and then at its extreme one player would go starships and the other fleetships.  It's that kind of diversity a player loses when using a multi-planet start, and it's made up for by simply having an excessive number of fleet ships.

By (1/(n+1))*(doubled ship cap), I mean that the approximate number of ships one would have (should have?  This formula doesn't actually hold if you check how many ships you'd have in an 8 planet start), then for 1 player you'd have 1/2 of the doubled ship cap (so normal ship cap), 2 players would be each player gets 1/3rd of the doubled ship cap (so 2/3rds of the doubled ship cap total), etc etc until 8 players, each player (may?  I don't know) get 1/9th of the doubled ship cap (so 8/9th of the doubled ship cap total for ships shared through everyone).

Offline ShadowOTE

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #18 on: December 05, 2010, 01:20:19 am »
16 planet start? Sounds more like you're kicking off the grand counteroffensive with a "line in the sand" mentality (lose another world and it's game over for any hope of victory!) than playing the valiant human resistance... although that is an interesting potential game mode.

Offline wyvern83

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #19 on: December 05, 2010, 01:24:53 am »
By (1/(n+1))*(doubled ship cap), I mean that the approximate number of ships one would have (should have?  This formula doesn't actually hold if you check how many ships you'd have in an 8 planet start), then for 1 player you'd have 1/2 of the doubled ship cap (so normal ship cap), 2 players would be each player gets 1/3rd of the doubled ship cap (so 2/3rds of the doubled ship cap total), etc etc until 8 players, each player (may?  I don't know) get 1/9th of the doubled ship cap (so 8/9th of the doubled ship cap total for ships shared through everyone).

ah, gotcha that makes sense. Thanks for explaining it to me.

Offline Sunshine!

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #20 on: December 05, 2010, 01:35:36 am »
16 planet start? Sounds more like you're kicking off the grand counteroffensive with a "line in the sand" mentality (lose another world and it's game over for any hope of victory!) than playing the valiant human resistance... although that is an interesting potential game mode.

I only did it once, since they said they'd fixed it.  It certainly has a different feel to the meek 1-planet start, and sometimes it's nice to just start out with your economy roaring (think about it as instead of the AI having wiped humans out already, the Human/AI war is just getting started, and I'm planning on curbstomping the toasters).

Offline RCIX

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #21 on: December 05, 2010, 03:37:01 am »
I'd be against it -- with the low caps, it's a little like trying to fit an 8-foot tall person in a 4 foot tall building -- they're going to be banging their head against the cieling a ton. By that, i mean you'll have a ridiculous economy but not the ability to produce a meaningfully large amount of ships to soak up all of that production. Perhaps it might work in that you'll have oodles of resources available to produce myriad shiny gadgets like Mk III+ Ion Cannons and more, but....
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Offline superking

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #22 on: December 05, 2010, 04:31:59 am »
in RL,  I think it would be perfect if the enlarged shipcap existed for fighters/bombers/starships, but not for any unlockable bonus ship  :)

Offline snrub_guy

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #23 on: December 05, 2010, 10:11:53 am »
I don't personally play this way yet, but it's an interesting problem.

If you are worried about it being hard to defend against the increased waves and single HW death thing, how about increasing the caps on turrets and support structures like fortresses and force fields, but leave the ship caps at the same level as a normal game. Offensively you are back to the same level (well plus the extra ship types), but defensively you are buffed enough to cover all your homeworlds.

Just a thought.

Offline Sunshine!

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #24 on: December 05, 2010, 11:55:57 am »
I'd be against it -- with the low caps, it's a little like trying to fit an 8-foot tall person in a 4 foot tall building -- they're going to be banging their head against the cieling a ton. By that, i mean you'll have a ridiculous economy but not the ability to produce a meaningfully large amount of ships to soak up all of that production. Perhaps it might work in that you'll have oodles of resources available to produce myriad shiny gadgets like Mk III+ Ion Cannons and more, but....
in RL,  I think it would be perfect if the enlarged shipcap existed for fighters/bombers/starships, but not for any unlockable bonus ship  :)

Would it be possible to give player's ships a bonus to HP and damage to make a single-player standard cap of ships have the same HP and damage output as the larger ship cap that the player would normally get in a multi-planet start?  As in, for an 8 planet start with small unit scale, all player ships/turrets/whatever would get a x3 bonus to attack and damage, with a commensurate increase in cost (ship cap goes from 49->154), while AI ships are left as they would normally be.

Offline UberJumper

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #25 on: December 05, 2010, 08:23:26 pm »
Personally i like the multi home world start as it is right now. It makes the game both faster to win and faster to loose. If you lower the ship cap then what do i spend my resources on? An ION Cannon? Something that i might spend 10 minutes building, and then forget about as my line moves up?

I say leave it as is. >_>



Offline Suzera

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #26 on: December 05, 2010, 09:15:40 pm »
16 planets is suicide unless you take your difficulty 1hw down a lot. You get about 6.5x as many units but deal with 16x as many waves. Try adding 2 to your difficulty with single HW and that's about how many units you deal with to defend against, proportionally.

The 3k knowledge per planet will not allow you to get mk 3 everything, and you have nowhere near enough power and resources to make all the mk1 ships. Just having more bonus ship types adds very very little. Particularly since turrets are better for defense in general anyway, among other things, and there's tens of thousands of knowledge of those. It takes 2.5 planets to get a ship to mk 3. You need to spend much of that knowledge from the HWs to get turrets, since your ship cap:wave amount modifier is much worse than 1HW. By the time you're done, you might have 3 ships to mk 3, some turrets and maybe flagship. Those ships are likely to be triangles or their replacements, not autocannon pods or mirrors, whether you have those ships or not.

It's really, as uberjumper said, faster to win and faster to lose. More punishing of mistakes, but good strategy and tactics gets rewarded more as well.

The AI worlds also do get more reinforcements and such with a multi-hw game and the planets are of significantly higher average tech levels so it's not like you're getting more ships with reckless abandon, but the comparison between human defense and AI offense for more homeworlds is about the same as human offense to AI defense so BOTH sides have the potential to quickly lose.

The current hot problem isn't that the game is going faster. The problem is the planet skipping and bypassing most of the game's depth. Making more than one homeworld suicide just narrows playstyles in the game and does nothing to encourage using more aspects of the game. You'll alienate people who want to play 80 planet maps while taking 40 of them to beat the AI games that last 4 hours for no other reason than to make people who like the game to take 20 hours instead (and can easily just keep it taking 20 hours by selecting 1 hw instead of 8 when setting up the game) happy. It's like removing the ability to play with 10 planets. 10 planet maps net a really quick game too, where you can easily "deepstrike" across the entire map, but I don't see a huge push to remove that feature from the game because you can win a 10 planet map in a blink.

As a comparison to Civilization, it would be like only allowing gargantuan sized maps, and no smaller, because smaller ones make the game end too quickly. You just decrease the potential userbase to only those that feel like playing multi-day games of Civ. This isn't a pvp game. You don't HAVE to have an equivalent time with 1hw as you do with 8hw. You don't HAVE to choose the same difficulty for the AI as everyone else. You aren't LOSING THE GAME if you aren't as good as someone else, or are using different settings. I think everyone is just feeling like they're all losing the game because they can't win the same speed with 1 hw as 8, neglecting the fact that they too can try to win with 8 hws too. Nothing is stopping them.

As a side note, I stopped playing multi-hw for now because it's too dangerous since I can't so easily floor AIP forever to keep defense trivial. I've sort of gone back to school in 1HW.

I say just leave it as it is so those that don't like taking 20 hours to win a game can have faster games without resorting to the shallow game that is 10-20 planet maps.

Edit: OR OR, add a super-blitz game mode where everything does four times the damage over again as blitz, everything costs 1/4 as much to build, takes 1/4 as long to build, 4 times as much armor, waves come four times as often, AI reinforcements come four times as often, ships move double the speed of regular blitz and so on. I'd probably play 1hw mostly with that and be fine. The main reason I multi-hw is because a single hw game usually takes far longer than I'd like. Setting the speed to +10 is too choppy of a workaround and screws up scrolling horribly.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2010, 09:36:07 pm by Suzera »

Offline Ozymandiaz

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #27 on: December 06, 2010, 11:40:47 am »
I am in favour.

Imo, multiplanet start in single player is almso tlike cheating ;P
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Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #28 on: December 06, 2010, 03:38:05 pm »
Anything more than a 2 HW start is seriously OP anyway. I have to admit, I never play with multiple homeworlds simply because I consider it such a game-breaking feature.
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Offline Salamander

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Re: Multi-planet starts: a poll
« Reply #29 on: December 07, 2010, 01:05:20 pm »
I voted not really caring. I've never started with more than one homeworld, although I admit I've been tempted.