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/I can't respond to everything, but here are some thoughts:
1. Glad that the issue that I'm laying out here is clear now to more folks, although I think that people are also jumping on kasnavada in some ways and kind of missing the larger point. Yes there should definitely be more variance and/or there are certain things that he could in theory have done differently, but I see that as a bit of a separate issue from the FEELING that he's had that he shouldn't take more territory because it isn't worth it. I'm concerned about that not just because he brought that up in this context, but because it has been a running theme since 2009.
2. Based on some of kasnavada's comments, it's possible that in his situation the AI needs to do a better job of just killing him and getting it over with. That's hard to really say if that's accurate, or if it's his general sense of being beaten-down based on the back and forth history of his game, though. Clearly looking at his saves with and without context of what he's been through in it gives really different emotional reactions, which is... actually very interesting in its own right. But I'm not sure what to do with that information.
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. The problem, to me, is that there is a big overarching number that indicates "you should take few planets." There is currently NO corresponding big overarching number that indicates "oh, but you should take at least X planets." As a consequence, people's natural psychology works against them. It creates an unpleasant feeling of uncertainty that drives some people away. No mechanics that aren't "a corresponding big number of some sort that is as clear as AIP is" would surmount the psychological hurdle that I've observed in people.
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 wouldhave 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.
5. Why shouldn't you hold every planet you take? Some planets are too expensive to hold. You only have so much energy, and there are also metal costs that are recurring if you take losses, or the opportunity cost of putting a fleet somewhere to keep a planet from being lost over and over again. But you DO need to capture so many planets in order to get the science from them, plus whatever other upgrades, so naturally you'll wind up capturing more than you can afford to hold. That won't always happen, and is heavily dependent on the map type and other factors, but it definitely happens a lot.
6. Puffin, you had a pretty cool idea for how to redo some of the techs so that all ships have two tech lines (hull and weapons), and the hulls are more widely applicable but more pricey, and the weapons are cheaper but much more limited. I had to think about this a lot, but I do think that this would create an interesting amount of tension in its own way, too. For people like kasnavada who presently feel like all the techs are out of reach because they all average a similar cost (mostly), this would provide new "obvious cheap" techs that would probably make even a single planet feel more valuable. I expect that it would contribute to a "good kind of angst" about what to unlock. So this seems like something to do, if you feel like tackling it!
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.
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.
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:
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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!
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.
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."
I want for the UI to inherently communicate the balancing act that is this game. It doesn't do that right now, and no amount of adding new things to capture or tutorials or tooltip text is going to fix that. We need HuP or something similar, to make it mechanically clear and immediate. HuP is inherently kind of redundant, which is actually kind of the point: I'm not looking for the game to be radically different than it is now for people who know how to value the stuff they can already capture. I'm looking for the interface to communicate that value as clearly as it communicates the fear of AIP. Right now the UI itself is lopsided.
And before anyone suggests it: making the HuP just be a visual estimate with no actual benefits to you is something that I think people would see right through. Not to mention that it wouldn't have that tangible
feel and sense of relief that I imagine that this would give. Getting science dumps when you're looking at 3 planet's more of HuP is something that creates yet another tangible goal that isn't there if HuP was just tracking your other conquests. And let's face it, leveling up and getting windfalls just plain feels good. That's an important thing to counteract the scariness of taking territory when you see the AIP rise, which inherently
feels bad.
Right now there are too many cases where the game gives you something that is ambiguously good (hope I picked the right fleet) or definitely bad (well, the AIP went up, that's definitely bad, I hope it was worth it for what else I got). I think that we need something that is unambiguously good (yes, I'm that much closer to my next windfall from HuP payout! I wonder how I'll choose to use it, but it will be sweet to have it!).
Thoughts welcome.
