Taking a break from the lighting work, since I'm in an environment right now where I can't accurately see the colors anyway.
Will just drop this here for fun, as an aside: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/
Thanks, that was an interesting read. Clearly you haven't eaten enough of those yet, or you'd see the colors
.
3. Yes, in an ideal world it would be great to have quests/missions, and at one point I was going to do that instead of tutorials, even. However, that's something that I ultimately feel like starts feeling repetitive and also undercuts the sandbox nature of the game.
If the missions are procedurally generated (i.e. detect three capturables nearby that are likely to create synergy) and attempt to suggest things you'd do anyways, they won't really become repetitive. Besides, advanced players could simply turn them off.
TBH you almost already have missions with your Objectives panel, it's just that they are useless for new players because there are too many of them which is paralysing, and useless for experienced players who'd rather look at the map and prioritize from there.
Now if you had a maximum of three at a time with a constant on-screen reminder of the active one like incoming waves, it would be a different story.
You can also have a couple "Basic missions" which send you off taking capturables that combo, and "Advanced Missions" which are more abstract but are guaranteed to be something advanced players will want to do: getting two ship lines to Mark III for example.
A more subtle way of giving "missions" is spawning time-limited resource caches or consumable bonuses on the map, that "happen" to give you resources if you do what the mission would've told you to.
4. It's actually possible that, had the psychological hurdles been balanced out differently for kasnavada as he played, that he would have been a bit more aggressive in some ways simply by nature, while having a core of economic things since he would have felt safe to have that with a shell in there. In some ways I think people are fussing about his strategy while not really considering what factors led him to make those choices. Bear in mind that this is a smart guy (as is everyone here), and he's been led naturally to this strategy based on his years of playing a lot of Arcen titles. I don't see this as a failure on his part or a failure in tutorials, but rather a conflict in the core mechanics themselves. There is a core unbalance in the very central mechanics, in that there's one big scary number that says "don't take too much," and so that leads to all sorts of things since there's also no big scary number to say "you haven't taken enough yet." There's supposed to be a tension in the game between those two feelings, and for people who read the wiki or the forums enough, that already exists... but it's a mental construct they have by reading outside source, NOT something the game communicates to them on the screen inherently. That, to me, is a big problem from which a lot of other things are stemming.
He did mention that the fact that you see neighbouring planets' strength and your own strength, as well as the threat strength building up everywhere, contributes a lot to being intimidated. The strength computation isn't a very good indicator of the amout of trouble you're in, as well laid-out defenses can usually take out a higher strength opponent. kasnavada also pointed out that your fleets rebuild during the battle, which makes them much stronger than an equivalent AI force.
7. There were some comments about Instigator bases popping up constantly, I wonder if those are being too frequent at the moment? I'm not sure how much feedback we have on that.
They can spawn on Lvl IV+ worlds early in the game, which makes you feel pretty powerless about dealing with them and could actually make you lose. Though with some experience and if they're close to a wormhole you can take them out with a quick massed strike, pulling out before triggering a retaliation wave.
8. When the AI is repeatedly destroying the command stations of a player, I wonder if something should change in the AIs favor. Right now it's leading to this kind of stalemate situation when it should lead to a loss instead. I wonder if causing the AIP floor to go up by 1 for every 5 (command stations it kills or flagships it cripples) would be something that adds a slow-burn sort of consequence that eventually breaks stalemates.
Not sure yet how I like that mechanically. But thematically, how do you explain that? The AI crushed you like a bug but suddenly thinks you're more important because of it? AIP increase from losing human cities or cryogenic pods also leave me scratching my head BTW, even though I understand the mechanical purpose of it.
9. Overall I've seen nothing but resistance to the idea of having some form of "AIP counterpart" that is a good-thing-based-on-taking-planets. A lot of other things are being suggested that won't really be very discoverable for players, and/or still don't sit in the AIP counterpart seat (as really the whole "gaining strength and metal and science and fleets" doesn't even sit in that seat, since it's too abstract and diffuse), and/or is something that is time-intensive to create and then test. I think that a lot of what I was suggesting was also coming off as a bit disonnected from AIP, frankly, so I get where the resistance is coming from (I think). With that in mind, I have a new proposal that I think most accurately sums up what I think needs to happen in order to make the game mechanically and immediately clear:
Well, obvious question then:
do you even need AIP sitting up there all gamey and scary, which is prompting you to add *another* number to counterbalance it? Can't it be a hidden mechanic, with some randomness built-in so you don't try to "guess the number"? It would change things so that instead of looking at a number, the player evaluates how much the AI is pissed off by what looking at what is actually happening on the map. As a bonus you wouldn't be making gamey exact AIP computations to figure out how much you need to reduce it to turn off exogalactic wormhole strikes.
EDIT: lol.
I just found this thread. I think you must be feeling like you're living GroundHog Day or something with the same topics cycling over and over.
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Human Progress (HuP)
This would be a new thing, shown prominently on the interface right next to the AI Progress (AIP). The idea here is that you would see the HuP rising, and the AIP rising, and it's clear that one is good for you and one is good for the AI. It's clear that there's a central tension here. At core, I think that this is the thing that needs to happen most of all in order for players to immediately understand "this is a balancing act, not a resource-minimization game." Right now the UI itself is communicating something false.
So what would be the purpose of HuP? I'm thinking that it would be something kind of along the lines of AIP, but also with its own flavors:
a. As HuP rises, you'd have a mark level floor that would gradually rise. At some level your mark level floor becomes 2, and so on. Same as the AI with AIP. That makes inherent sense.
b. As HuP rises, I think that being able to get more resources out of existing planets COULD be an interesting thing. Aka things like having the max science and hacking points per planet go up by 5% for each 50 HuP, or similar. This is a lot like how the AI gets more reinforcements and budget as its AIP goes up. This would also lead to some annoying backtracking to gather science, though, potentially, so I'm not sure how I feel about that ultimately. We'd need some sort of other way of going back to planets to get science and hacking points if we did this.
So maybe, instead, you just get a lump sum payout of science and hacking points for every X HuP you hit. Windfalls are fun!
Or just a % bonus to all production, i.e. each point you gather actually gives you 1.05 points.
c. I think that certain hacks should potentially be gated behind the players having a certain amount of HuP. By the way, HuP would be shared between all players in multiplayer. Essentially I'm thinking that things like hacking the dyson sphere for powerful units should be something like "minimum 200 HuP." And we should have the Overlord be WAY more powerful now, but have a series of hacks (maybe 4?) that weaken it in different ways. Each of those hacks would require a certain amount of HuP in order to do them. And in the future we could gate other things behind HuP if we wanted to, as well.
Or we could just make the overlord get weaker as HuP rises, to a certain point.
You'd have to find a good rationale for gating those if you want to enable suspension of disbelief. I imagine HuP could represent human morale or overall population support, but why would the Dyson sphere or Overlord care?
All right, so how do we GET HuP? Things that we want to encourage players to do:
a. Players would get the same amount of HuP from destroying a planet that the AI gets in AIP, I'd say. This would be the biggest source of it. But you'd only get the amount from the command station, not the warp gate, so you'd be losing ground if all you ever did was take planets with nothing on them. And this plays nicely into gate-raiding being something that helps you but raises AIP without raising HuP.
b. Players would get some HuP from capturing ANY fleet, any GCA, etc. Some would give more than others, I'd say. This is where the players get the HuP to balance out or exceed what the didn't get from warp gates.
c. Destroying certain AI weapons, like alarm posts and similar, might come with a small HuP reward? This kind of gets us into "optional implicit quests" territory, which I like.
Overall the message of the game can then become something along the lines of "you probably can't win if AIP gets too far ahead of HuP, and once HuP gets beyond (some number) it's diminishing returns in general, and once AIP gets beyond (probably same number) it's dangerous to the point that you might lose anyhow."
The overall idea seems that you can look at HuP and AIP side-by-side and see if you're winning. I find that kind of misleading. You can only compare comparable things - in the case of the AI, it gets X strength in waves and reinforcements that scales directly with AIP. With how you're describing HuP, the human player gets a number of small bonuses that don't automatically translate X strength. In other words, the AIP to AI Strength relationship is way more direct than the HuP to Human Strength relationship. It seems like a risky proposition to line them up and say with a straight face that the comparison is meaningful.
The problem is also that if the game is still challenging and interesting, you should lose on difficulty 6-7 if you destroyed too many planets or AIP-raising buildings like alarm posts just for the HuP, acquired the wrong set of capturables (say, mostly fleets like our topic starter was doing) and picked the wrong planets to hold. But you might get to this losing situation even though the HuP is telling you you're clearly way ahead of the AI and should win! I hope you like the smell of torches and pitchforks in the morning.
One interesting solution would be to make AIP good for you as well as being bad:- For instance as the Milky Way AI systems come back to life to deal with the new threat (you), dormant encrypted resource nodes, factories, weapons and utilities disseminated on all planets come back to life. You can't reactivate them yourself, but if they activate in your territory you're the one that gets the benefits. So you're pissing off the AI, but paradoxically the angrier it is, the more beneficial structures reactivate for you on the planets you captured.
- You could attach any of the systems you listed above to AIP directly, I'm sure a thematic justification could be found for each one.
- This should really capture the "pushing your luck" feeling.
Barring that, I think it's better to give small incentives to do certain things that might help you, without promising implicitly that it'll win you the war like HuP does. Here are some additional draft ideas:
- My Nemesis idea could take the some of the focus away from global AIP to what's going on locally, by making which warlord/miniboss sub-AI you're currently annoying the most more important than the big picture - because it diverts more AI reinforcements towards that area. It also makes other areas weaker, which you can exploit to expand a bit easier.
- Taking a page from Risk, give a bonus for holding any complete "constellation" of space, i.e. contiguous named groups of stars that divide up the map. Hopefully one that'll be somewhat easy to hold due to chokeholds. This could play into my Minibosses idea - defeat the miniboss and hold its whole territory for a resource bonus. But even standalone it gives you a mid-game objective to pursue that distracts you from your existential worries about rising
Global Warming AIP.
The idea is that you won't be able to hold more than one or two of those territories, but it naturally pushes you to try and acquire a fortified territory with a minimum of entry points so you can build economic stations.
- SimCity-like Advisors (text-based, don't think we have time to make animated faces that talk to you). These wouldn't necessarily give you resource bonuses, but would try to identify weaknesses in your setup and suggest things to build/capture/etc. Make them a bit goofy so the player knows he can't trust them 100%. - This is basically a reward-less version of quests that advanced players will ignore by default.
- Without any HuP mechanic, you could still have a prominent display of Overlord strength next to the AIP, and provide means to the player to lower it. This at least gives the player a global indicator of progress that directly corresponds to something on the map, and it's a "feel good" number that progresses in the good direction rather than a feel bad number.
