Prerelease 1.010C (Energy, teleporting, and force field tweaks; AI group move)

[x4000]

In the game I've been just playing has been against two Turtle AIs, I did notice a nice progression of a couple of the tech I's, then a Tech II, the the Tech III's. As far as tossing forcefields in, it may be worth trying to get it to increase the number of lower level forcefields, rather then upgrade to a higher level one. It probably needs testing with less defensive AIs a bit more, but it seems a shame to never see anything but a Tech III after the first three planets.

You'll see Mark II force fields all through the system, actually, unless you are playing against technologist turtles or something.  The Mark I force fields are going to be comparably rare except on lower difficulties or the planets right near your home, but the Mark IIs and Mark IIIs should come in about even numbers in most maps.

*innocentwhistle* Haven't had much of a chance to test out how well teleporting engineers work in combat yet, current game is more scorched-earth to try and ramp up the AI's populations to check if things come out reasonable.

Currently things look ok, about 3 hours in and a Tech II world that started around 200ish is now up about a thousand. Tech III worlds aren't too bad to take out with squads of Tech II ships. Tech IV is still nasty, for every assault on a world that started around 800 total ships, with mostly Tech II ships and a Tech III set of parasites (I send in a mixed attack of about a thousand ships), I normally loose around 200 of my ships (usually low level ones), and by the time I build up to hit them again, their net loss is only about 50 to 75 of their Tech IV ships.

Think I really should have Tech III of fighters/bombers/cruisers before hammering them, but it's a nice test of things.

Cool stuff.  I haven't actually put the changes for the turtle AIs in place yet, but I'm glad that is working out reasonably even as-is.  Maybe a rebalancement of the turtles is not needed after all, then?  I haven't played against them at all on any of the most recent releases.

[darke]

Yanked from the other thread:

An attempt from a different perspective, trying to reward the player rather then punishing him (and hopefully being a little simpler as a consequence):

Ships gain "overcharge" from sitting around doing nothing (or even defending) in a generator-enabled planet. Say for the sake of an argument, each minute they sit on the planet, gains them a 1% bonus for 30 seconds, maxing out at 20%/10 minutes, which ticks down every 30 seconds whilst they're running around on a planet without a generator until they're back at baseline.

I do really like this idea, because it also reduces the overall learning curve.  It doesn't emphasize weak points as much as I would like, but oh well.  The only downside that I really see is that this will really help player turtles even more, and this game is already fairly easy to turtle in.  So either I'd need to increase the size of AI waves to compensate for this (which would then make the overcharge effects pretty necessary on player planets), or else this needs some other tweak.  But I do like how this is an optional extra mechanic, rather than a basic requirement that the player gets severely punished for not understanding.

Interestingly, I designed this system to minimise turtling for me.

The other system was just way too open for abuse. Take for example just splitting your forces in two. First force starts at full charge you send it out and get it to whack the first thing near the wormhole, when it kills it (or when you think you've got too much damage/too little charge remaining) you send it back to the wormhole, as you're sending it back, you send your second group out, it finishes off the stragglers and makes it's way over to the second target whilst your first group is recharging and repairing safely on your planet, then the second target is taken out, you send your second group back to your planet, then pull your nicely recharged/repaired guys out and send them towards the third target.

You're continually throwing the AI off balance, continually got yourself at 100%, at the expense of extra time and extra camping.

With the "overcharging", you tweak the charging up/cooling down parameters to make it take way too long that you'll deliberately camp to get a max bonus, but you'll bother with the energy ships because it's relatively easy to deal with to build a few when you're setting the new planets up. Plus with a long "forced camp" type assault, you'll go to the extra effort to try and crank up the charge rate (costing you $$$! That isn't being spent on new ships!) to try to get 5%, or 10% bonus, whatever you can get out of it between assaults.

Also because you're building your ships often not at the current world, if you want to get the benefit of this, you have to toss at least an energy plant on each of your planets between the current one, and whichever is producing; no plant on the planet, means it drains at 1% per 30 seconds, or whatever, but if you've bothered to get at least a minimal power supply of a single energy plant (I'd suggest one of the Type II's, just to be annoying), then the ships don't loose their charge on the way, but instead gain whatever minimal amount they would whilst in transit.

Plus if you've just got a thread of ships heading through the system, at any point in time there's not going to be many ships there. It might be worth to toss enough energy plants down to get up to the max 200% for the standard groupings of ships heading through the planet for particularly well trafficked paths.

So this also has a sense of a "energy grid" too, rather then just isolated generators.

[PhilRoi]

This thread should presumably be called, 'Prerelease 1.010C'.

The 'charge' system we've been discussing has been through a few iterations in my mind this morning. Here are my current thoughts;

1. All ships and turrets have a 'charge' attribute. Whilst a ship/turret's charge is non-zero they function as they do now. When a ship/turret's charge reaches 0 the following occurs;

-- Ships move at half speed.
-- Shields are set to 0.
-- Reload times are doubled.
-- Tractor beams can no longer be emitted.
-- Tachyon beams can no longer be emitted.
-- Cloaks fail.
-- Cloaking boosters fail.

2. Whilst a ship is at a planet with a friendly Command Station (which now regulate planet-wide power distribution, or something, yeah, whatever ), it does not lose charge, except in response to charge draining weaponry (Energy Vampires etc). This ensures that planetary defense is almost identical to the current system. Also, whilst at a planet with a friendly Command Station, ships and turrets anywhere in the gravity well have a passive recharge rate (very slow) that is proportional to the player's energy (Max - Used) + a base recharge rate. Ships and turrets will lose charge if the player's energy balance is negative.

3. Whilst in close proximity to a friendly generator (regardless of whether there is a friendly Command Station present), ships and turrets have a fairly high recharge rate. A small generator can recharge 10 ships simultaneously, whilst the large generator can recharge 25 ships simultaneously. A generator will need to be constructed at beachheads in order to provide charge for turrets, and potentially space docks and mobile repair stations. This generator could be a high priority target for the AI, and hence a new, 'fortified generator', could be added to the research tree.

4. Whilst a ship is in a system that does not contain a friendly Command Station, the following actions cause a reduction in charge;

-- Moving - The number of charge points lost per unit distance traveled increases exponentially with the number of hops the ship is from a system containing a friendly Command Station.

-- Firing - The number of charge points lost per shot is dependent on the ship type.

-- Repairing - Self explanatory.

Scouts are exempt from movement related charge costs. This ensures that the new system will not affect scouting. Scouts will, however, decloak if energy draining effects reduce their charge level to 0.

A passive-move command is added to cover situations in which the player may wish to conserve charge for whatever reason.

5. As we discussed earlier, the implementation of a system similar to this requires the addition of a number of auxilliary units, including Energy Vampires and Mobile Batteries.

6. What problem were we trying to solve again?

I think you basically nailed it.  I will also be including some rebalancing of the energy reactors (if players are building several large reactors per planet with the current system, this would 1. cost way too much, and 2. give 100,000s of extra unused energy).  The energy vampires as a ship class would wait for an expansion, but I'll probably make some sort of "energy vampire turret" in the meantime.

Here's another thought -- I'm thinking that it might make sense to NOT have movement be affected by reduced charge.  We basically already have engine health for that, and having a bunch of ships lose charge and then go slow way in enemy territory is likely to be really annoying.  For scouts, the removal of cloaking and cloaking booster is enough to make the charge loss deadly.  For other ships, just being so much less effective in combat (or tractor beams, or whatever) is reason enough.  I'd also add that force fields without charge should fail.  This really sets up a very interesting local power system, which I really like.

...And now, part of me is wondering if a global energy balance actually does fit with this at all.  That was basically intended to be a sort of population cap limiter, but now this new system is much more elegant and localized.  I had been looking for a system-within-a-system, as I said last night, but I really like the system that we're arriving at, and I think that having the global energy costs only adds complexity that isn't really needed.  Thoughts, everyone?

depends on what your goal in changing the mechanics is?

making the player spread out the reactors isn't all bad.     I don't mind having to do that.  but I don't want to turn them into charge-up stations either.
Preventing excessively deep penetration of enemy territory isn't terrible either if that is one of your goals as well.  I can understand that as a goal.

how to balance it?

well my initial reaction is to say.  sure  no problem.  A reactor sets up an energy field that is capable up recharging at a certain rate.  this enrgy field is also capable of projecting through wormholes,  but the field loses strength every time it goes through a worm hole.  say energy field strength is =  (energy stregth of reactor)/(1+ #of jumps from reactor)   now for ease of math we will just round this number down to the nearest 10.  lets pretend we have a long line of planets connected like a string of beads.  with one reactor at the end of the sttring.   so you get a falloff like 1000/500/250/120/60/30/10 and then nothing....

now to add the complexity..   multiple reactors have a cumulative effect  say two reactors on adjacent planets in the arrangement above.
1000/500/250/120/60/30/10/0   first reactor
500/1000/500/250/120/60/30/10/0  2nd reactor
1500/1500/750/370/180/90/40/10/0 net energy field

dare we look at 3 reactors?
1000/  500/ 250/ 12/  60/ 30/10/ 0   first reactor
 500/ 1000/ 500/250/120/ 60/30/10/ 0  2nd reactor
 250/  500/1000/500/250/120/60/30/10/0  3rd reactor
1750/2000/1750/870/430/210/50/30/ 0  net energy field

The rounding factor can be modified to reduce reactor reach.  for example the 3 reactors above would look like this instead
1000/ 500/ 200/100/   0  first reactor
 500/1000/ 500/200/100/    0 2nd reactor
 200/ 500/1000/500/200 /100 /0 3rd reactor
1700/2000/1700/800/300/100/0 net energy field

or the amount of energy produced can be balanced according to the different types of energy reactors.  larger reactors would obviously produce more energy and have a deeper reach into enemy territory.

then all we need is an energy view on the galactic map  showing the current power distribution and energy drain.

something like this should be easy for a Database specialist to code

then ships are fine as long as the energy drain for the planet doesn't exceed the power distribution to that planet.

when it does then ships begin to exhibit the effects.   the effects could be as described above.  where they begin to lose "charge"

but what if you only exceed the energy by a small amount.  what do you do with the energy that is making to the system?

every ship has a  charge stat that shows as a percentile what its charge status is and like engine determines the effectiveness of certain systems on the ship.   Just divide the power availible by the power drain to get a percentile. greater then 100% gives you a net positive change to ships in that system.  a negative percentile gives you a percentile that you can use as "charge damage" to apply to the charge level of ships in that system.  when the stored charge reaches 0 then game on in terms of energy shut down effects.  you can use numbers above 0 to have other preset effects at as well if you want( but for simplicity i'd say leave it all at 0 for now.)   Obviously some ships will be able to store more then 100% of a charge and operate outside the energy net for longer without problems.
(like scouts, let them charge to 200% but take 1/4 the charge damage other ships take for being outside the net.)

you can set the charge level to update at whatever frequency works well.   the more often the better but we don't want to overload the CPU cycles.  every minute maybe?  your the expert on CPU load.

 

[x4000]

The other system was just way too open for abuse. Take for example just splitting your forces in two. First force starts at full charge you send it out and get it to whack the first thing near the wormhole, when it kills it (or when you think you've got too much damage/too little charge remaining) you send it back to the wormhole, as you're sending it back, you send your second group out, it finishes off the stragglers and makes it's way over to the second target whilst your first group is recharging and repairing safely on your planet, then the second target is taken out, you send your second group back to your planet, then pull your nicely recharged/repaired guys out and send them towards the third target.

You're continually throwing the AI off balance, continually got yourself at 100%, at the expense of extra time and extra camping.

No arguments from me on that point at this stage.

Interestingly, I designed this system to minimise turtling for me.

With the "overcharging", you tweak the charging up/cooling down parameters to make it take way too long that you'll deliberately camp to get a max bonus, but you'll bother with the energy ships because it's relatively easy to deal with to build a few when you're setting the new planets up. Plus with a long "forced camp" type assault, you'll go to the extra effort to try and crank up the charge rate (costing you $$$! That isn't being spent on new ships!) to try to get 5%, or 10% bonus, whatever you can get out of it between assaults.

Oh -- somehow I had missed how long it takes to recharge this.  I was focused on the 30 seconds part.  In that case, I agree, that might solve some of the "cherry picking" tactics you were mentioning.  I still think this would cause base defense to be a bit easier, and thus would require a bit of ramping-up of the AI waves in that regard, though.

Also because you're building your ships often not at the current world, if you want to get the benefit of this, you have to toss at least an energy plant on each of your planets between the current one, and whichever is producing; no plant on the planet, means it drains at 1% per 30 seconds, or whatever, but if you've bothered to get at least a minimal power supply of a single energy plant (I'd suggest one of the Type II's, just to be annoying), then the ships don't loose their charge on the way, but instead gain whatever minimal amount they would whilst in transit.

I'm actually wondering if maybe this system is not to use energy reactors at all, actually.  Because the cost structure is all wrong, and maximizing the number of these overcharge stations would then give ridiculous energy surpluses.  Maybe these should be something new, something like "Overcharge Pods" or something like that.  And of course they would cost lots of energy, requiring more reactors to be built -- so that would cause you to need more energy, rather than giving you extra vast quantities of it.

Plus if you've just got a thread of ships heading through the system, at any point in time there's not going to be many ships there. It might be worth to toss enough energy plants down to get up to the max 200% for the standard groupings of ships heading through the planet for particularly well trafficked paths.

That is pretty cool.

So this also has a sense of a "energy grid" too, rather then just isolated generators.

Yeah, I would see doing something like with the Overcharge Pods or whatever.  They would have the sense of a grid of coverage, rather than an isolated thing.  I'd probably make these an unlockable tech for 500 knowledge (again, one of those "candy" techs).  This one is pretty highly valuable, though, I think -- though its costs might outweigh the benefits in certain circumstances, too, which would hopefully keep it from being just a no-brainer.  Actual decision points are good.

[darke]

*innocentwhistle* Haven't had much of a chance to test out how well teleporting engineers work in combat yet, current game is more scorched-earth to try and ramp up the AI's populations to check if things come out reasonable.

Currently things look ok, about 3 hours in and a Tech II world that started around 200ish is now up about a thousand. Tech III worlds aren't too bad to take out with squads of Tech II ships. Tech IV is still nasty, for every assault on a world that started around 800 total ships, with mostly Tech II ships and a Tech III set of parasites (I send in a mixed attack of about a thousand ships), I normally loose around 200 of my ships (usually low level ones), and by the time I build up to hit them again, their net loss is only about 50 to 75 of their Tech IV ships.

Think I really should have Tech III of fighters/bombers/cruisers before hammering them, but it's a nice test of things.

Cool stuff.  I haven't actually put the changes for the turtle AIs in place yet, but I'm glad that is working out reasonably even as-is.  Maybe a rebalancement of the turtles is not needed after all, then?  I haven't played against them at all on any of the most recent releases.

I haven't managed to find a Tech III planet to camp near for a while yet (the Tech III's and IV's I hit, I'd only been near them for 30 minutes or so), I still suspect it's going to be the higher level planets that really make things hurt. The main issue is just getting the forces together for them. A thousand Tech II ships I can take on with about a thousand ships of a mix of Tech I to III with acceptable losses. A thousand Tech III ships I'd need about the same mix of Tech II to IV ships to feel confident that I'm not hurting my production too much by taking it down.

Currently my hammering on the Tech IV with I to some III ships, is taking long enough that in the grand scheme of things the AI is winning. Once I get the number of ships down to an acceptable level (probably around 400, another 3 or 4 assaults), then I'll have hit the tipping point when I can get in and encamp on their wormholes with a hundred or so ships and some repairers to keep down the spawns, then slowly work around taking out the two tech III forcefields and the mass of units underneath them (need a slightly larger radius lightning missile, it's only big enough to take out about 2/3rds of a forcefield's ships; either that or make them immune to forcefields, which I guess is probably the better idea).

So it's possible to take out a turtling Tech IV world with only Tech II-ish hardware, it's just not worth it really.

[x4000]

depends on what your goal in changing the mechanics is?

making the player spread out the reactors isn't all bad.     I don't mind having to do that.  but I don't want to turn them into charge-up stations either.
Preventing excessively deep penetration of enemy territory isn't terrible either if that is one of your goals as well.  I can understand that as a goal.

These are excellent points.  I think the actual goals got kind of muddled along the way.  See some of my later posts in this thread, but basically I'm mostly interested in making the player spread out his/her reactors.  The deep penetration prevention is not really a goal per se, as mostly that is already handled by the wormhole command posts already.

I like the growing concept of an Overcharge Pod or whatever, since it will potentially enable players to take on the really-tough AI planets that they otherwise could not take on.  I think that's the main thing that one adds, as well as some alternate logistical decision points.

how to balance it?

Those are some impressive numbers, but I'm moving a bit away from this whole concept in general -- I think that, while it would indeed be straightforward for me to code a lot of that (if time consuming to optimize the CPU load, as you say), the whole concept of charge is just too opaque for users.  The "overcharge" concept is nicer because it is optional and completely localized, and in other respects also a bit simpler.

[x4000]

I haven't managed to find a Tech III planet to camp near for a while yet (the Tech III's and IV's I hit, I'd only been near them for 30 minutes or so), I still suspect it's going to be the higher level planets that really make things hurt. The main issue is just getting the forces together for them. A thousand Tech II ships I can take on with about a thousand ships of a mix of Tech I to III with acceptable losses. A thousand Tech III ships I'd need about the same mix of Tech II to IV ships to feel confident that I'm not hurting my production too much by taking it down.

Currently my hammering on the Tech IV with I to some III ships, is taking long enough that in the grand scheme of things the AI is winning. Once I get the number of ships down to an acceptable level (probably around 400, another 3 or 4 assaults), then I'll have hit the tipping point when I can get in and encamp on their wormholes with a hundred or so ships and some repairers to keep down the spawns, then slowly work around taking out the two tech III forcefields and the mass of units underneath them (need a slightly larger radius lightning missile, it's only big enough to take out about 2/3rds of a forcefield's ships; either that or make them immune to forcefields, which I guess is probably the better idea).

So it's possible to take out a turtling Tech IV world with only Tech II-ish hardware, it's just not worth it really.

Hmm, all of that actually sounds pretty good.  I mean, alerting a high-level turtle planet to your presence should come with some pretty stiff penalties.  All of the rest of that sounds good, by the way.  I'll be interested to see how things turn out if you should find yourself encamped near a higher-level planet for too long.

[darke]

Interestingly, I designed this system to minimise turtling for me.

With the "overcharging", you tweak the charging up/cooling down parameters to make it take way too long that you'll deliberately camp to get a max bonus, but you'll bother with the energy ships because it's relatively easy to deal with to build a few when you're setting the new planets up. Plus with a long "forced camp" type assault, you'll go to the extra effort to try and crank up the charge rate (costing you $$$! That isn't being spent on new ships!) to try to get 5%, or 10% bonus, whatever you can get out of it between assaults.

Oh -- somehow I had missed how long it takes to recharge this.  I was focused on the 30 seconds part.  In that case, I agree, that might solve some of the "cherry picking" tactics you were mentioning.  I still think this would cause base defense to be a bit easier, and thus would require a bit of ramping-up of the AI waves in that regard, though.

Yeah, you want to have the charge/discharge numbers to be unbalanced, otherwise you're back to the problem with the previous version. To work nicely it seemed to need to have a "quick charge" (otherwise it would force turtling), and a "long discharge" (so you could do actual deep raids to take out a data center and the like), which just encourages cycling your units.

It's technically a good tactic, especially when you're first starting to hit a new world, but it's pretty cheap and themeatically looks silly.

Also because you're building your ships often not at the current world, if you want to get the benefit of this, you have to toss at least an energy plant on each of your planets between the current one, and whichever is producing; no plant on the planet, means it drains at 1% per 30 seconds, or whatever, but if you've bothered to get at least a minimal power supply of a single energy plant (I'd suggest one of the Type II's, just to be annoying), then the ships don't loose their charge on the way, but instead gain whatever minimal amount they would whilst in transit.

I'm actually wondering if maybe this system is not to use energy reactors at all, actually.  Because the cost structure is all wrong, and maximizing the number of these overcharge stations would then give ridiculous energy surpluses.  Maybe these should be something new, something like "Overcharge Pods" or something like that.  And of course they would cost lots of energy, requiring more reactors to be built -- so that would cause you to need more energy, rather than giving you extra vast quantities of it.

If you ditched the global energy counter, and called it something like "local planet energy surplus" (assuming that the planet itself produced enough energy for "itself", but not enough to support the massed ships floating above it...) you could rejig the energy reactors for this purpose.

Or just make the new ships, call them "energy transmission pylons" or something just to make it a bit obvious that they're just siphoning energy from a world elsewhere to boost the local grid or something. If you model it after real world power transmission somewhat it will feel more intuitive for people learning it in the tutorial, since people generally have a vague idea of how power gets from the place it's made to where it turns the TV on. (Resisting the urge to quip something like, "except Americans" here. )

So this also has a sense of a "energy grid" too, rather then just isolated generators.

Yeah, I would see doing something like with the Overcharge Pods or whatever.  They would have the sense of a grid of coverage, rather than an isolated thing.  I'd probably make these an unlockable tech for 500 knowledge (again, one of those "candy" techs).  This one is pretty highly valuable, though, I think -- though its costs might outweigh the benefits in certain circumstances, too, which would hopefully keep it from being just a no-brainer.  Actual decision points are good.

Yeah. If the "pods" are sufficiently expensive, and non-mobile, then having cheap knowledges aren't too bad.

Either that if there was a negative downside, such as if any world with a "pod" in it, got an increase of 25% of the numbers of the ship in a wave or got waves more often (the extra energy being broadcast attracts the AI or something). That would compensate it for being an "optional" thing (so you don't need to globally increase the waves), but give the planets that are getting a stronger defense and extra kick if it is being used.

[x4000]

New version:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,210.msg1778.html#msg1778

[x4000]

Yeah, you want to have the charge/discharge numbers to be unbalanced, otherwise you're back to the problem with the previous version. To work nicely it seemed to need to have a "quick charge" (otherwise it would force turtling), and a "long discharge" (so you could do actual deep raids to take out a data center and the like), which just encourages cycling your units.

It's technically a good tactic, especially when you're first starting to hit a new world, but it's pretty cheap and themeatically looks silly.

I'm not quite certain I'm following this part.

If you ditched the global energy counter, and called it something like "local planet energy surplus" (assuming that the planet itself produced enough energy for "itself", but not enough to support the massed ships floating above it...) you could rejig the energy reactors for this purpose.

Yeah, that was part of the other concept, but I think that gets overly complex.  So really I'm kind of looking at this as being pretty separate from the existing reactors.

Or just make the new ships, call them "energy transmission pylons" or something just to make it a bit obvious that they're just siphoning energy from a world elsewhere to boost the local grid or something. If you model it after real world power transmission somewhat it will feel more intuitive for people learning it in the tutorial, since people generally have a vague idea of how power gets from the place it's made to where it turns the TV on. (Resisting the urge to quip something like, "except Americans" here. )

Ha -- many of us Americans do know what the score is, even if some of us are a little slow when it comes to the "magic" of the teevee and other such modern wonders.  That's a minority of the population, though, I think.  Something along these lines is what I had in mind, anyway.

Yeah. If the "pods" are sufficiently expensive, and non-mobile, then having cheap knowledges aren't too bad.

That was what I was thinking -- moderately expensive, and non-mobile.

Either that if there was a negative downside, such as if any world with a "pod" in it, got an increase of 25% of the numbers of the ship in a wave or got waves more often (the extra energy being broadcast attracts the AI or something). That would compensate it for being an "optional" thing (so you don't need to globally increase the waves), but give the planets that are getting a stronger defense and extra kick if it is being used.

Ooh -- I like that.  Then it would be something that has a nice risk/reward aspect to it, without having to rebalance things for other players in such a way that might require them to use this feature to succeed.  Very nice.

[Admiral]

I think for now the "Charge" idea should be held in abeyance until it's fully fleshed out and prefaced by a "mission statement" indicating what gameplay problem/tactic/strategy we want to solve or add that will be interesting.


I think that the simple way to handle having players have to spread out energy is to do it the somewhat like original way.

If you have P planets, and R reactors, they all run at full efficiency if each planet has within N of R/P reactors, where my initial suggestion for N is 1 or 1.5. You could floor or ceiling the value and use that instead of using an N, if you like.

You might scale R for Regular vs. Advanced, in some manner.

Any planet that has more than N + R/P reactors starts having efficiency reductions until they get to minimum efficiency (10% is what you posited). This could be a linear reduction based on P, so that it hurts more quickly as P gets higher, thus forcing you to spread out more.

That information could be in the Intel summary (Reactor Efficiency).

This also doesn't hurt someone who has to fall back to fewer planets, and automatically rebalances as the AI starts taking planets from the player.

If you don't own a planet (no command station) but still have reactors, one question is how to judge the efficiency of those reactors, etc.

Cheers!

[Revenantus]

I think for now the "Charge" idea should be held in abeyance until it's fully fleshed out and prefaced by a "mission statement" indicating what gameplay problem/tactic/strategy we want to solve or add that will be interesting.

Agreed. I've lost sight of what we were originally trying to achieve with this system. We now almost seem to be working backwards - rationalizing systems and then analyzing their effects on gameplay. Let's decide what the final results of this system should be before continuing to consider mechanics.

I think that the simple way to handle having players have to spread out energy is to do it the somewhat like original way.

If you have P planets, and R reactors, they all run at full efficiency if each planet has within N of R/P reactors, where my initial suggestion for N is 1 or 1.5. You could floor or ceiling the value and use that instead of using an N, if you like.

You might scale R for Regular vs. Advanced, in some manner.

I absolutely disagree that generator efficiency should be scaled with the number of controlled planets. This would actually mean that capturing a planet could cause the player's energy balance to become negative as their existing reactors would become less efficient. I feel that it would also be counter-intuitive to new players. A, 'Final Stand', scenario in which several thousand ships attempt to defend a single planet against the AI is a fringe case and suggesting that the player simply doesn't control enough territory to provide the resources to deploy all those ships is thematically consistent.

[x4000]

I think for now the "Charge" idea should be held in abeyance until it's fully fleshed out and prefaced by a "mission statement" indicating what gameplay problem/tactic/strategy we want to solve or add that will be interesting.

Agreed. I've lost sight of what we were originally trying to achieve with this system. We now almost seem to be working backwards - rationalizing systems and then analyzing their effects on gameplay. Let's decide what the final results of this system should be before continuing to consider mechanics.

I'm with you both on this.  There are a lot of potentially-interesting things being discussed, but they are all becoming kind of ad-hoc.  I think the most promising potential avenue is that which darke suggested recently, which has basically turned into Overcharge Pods, but the benefits of even that are kind of fuzzy.  He thinks it will help avoid a "cherry picking" strategy that he currently finds effective, which is cool but very limited, and I think it might help players take on very high-level planets that are otherwise out of reach, but this might be very unbalancing.

I think that the simple way to handle having players have to spread out energy is to do it the somewhat like original way.

If you have P planets, and R reactors, they all run at full efficiency if each planet has within N of R/P reactors, where my initial suggestion for N is 1 or 1.5. You could floor or ceiling the value and use that instead of using an N, if you like.

You might scale R for Regular vs. Advanced, in some manner.

I absolutely disagree that generator efficiency should be scaled with the number of controlled planets. This would actually mean that capturing a planet could cause the player's energy balance to become negative as their existing reactors would become less efficient. I feel that it would also be counter-intuitive to new players. A, 'Final Stand', scenario in which several thousand ships attempt to defend a single planet against the AI is a fringe case and suggesting that the player simply doesn't control enough territory to provide the resources to deploy all those ships is thematically consistent.

I'm with Revenantus on this one -- this is how it was implemented in 1.010C and up (not per planet).  The energy ramifications of taking a new planet if it were per-planet based would just be way too counter intuitive, and the only real negative case I can think of with the current model is that fringe "Last Stand" case.  If you survive the last stand, it shouldn't be too hard to take a couple of the empty planets back, since the AI doesn't resettle them.  The other nice thing about this approach is that it is a huge deterrent to doing a "booming" style of turtling.  You need to keep capturing more territory not just for knowledge now, but also to get the energy you need to support a larger fleet.  Looking at my savegame from the past versions, when I bring it into the new version I only needed to expand my reactors onto four other planets beyond my first (out of my 16 held planets).  So even with this change, it's not like you need multiple reactors on every planet, or something like that.

[Fiskbit]

Actually, teleporting ships don't follow group move semantics anywhere -- on a local planet, across hops, nothing.  I think that's just going to be one of the limitations of teleporting ships, which somewhat offsets their "instantly there" ability, which is particularly useful when shifting a bunch of Mark II engineers between your planets, or across planets to an existing battlefield.  So I would think that teleporting ships will either be the last ships to arrive at a battle, or the very first by far.

I was playing with teleporting ships today and had a mixed fleet that I told to group move to a collection of AI ships. My teleporting ships jumped there instantly and were annihilated because I forgot that they don't obey group move. Please, please add in some sort of group move functionality for these ships. At the moment, having no such functionality means that players have to micromanage these ships more or simply not include them in mixed fleets (which is a pain and difficult to remember). I could tell all non teleporting ships to group move to the target and then move the teleporting ones in at that time, but that's just worthless micromanagement I have to do when group move should hopefully be taking care of it. There's always a safe area to move these ships to while the group move is happening, too, so it's not like they're in any danger because of this limitation. It just means more painful work for the player, or a major penalty (the ships all die) if they forget about it.

My suggestion is that when a teleporting ship has a group speed, it teleports once every few frames by some distance that will make it keep up with ships going that speed. This should be computationally cheap, and it'd get around the problem well.

[Spikey00]

I wouldn't mind that--though as of this moment I find it relatively easy to macro two groups of units (just me).

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ORLY 1.009C?