Federation PointsFederation Points are a reaction to the symptoms of a major underlying problem in the game. They should be removed. The only thing advantage of Federation points over Influence (that I can think of) is to put a harder cap on the length of time it takes before a Race can join the Federation. Redesigning the Influence system is already necessary and will solve most (if not all) of the problems that Federation Points are supposed to solve. I strongly believe they should be removed and forgotten about, at least until the Influence system is fixed.
Why did Arcen add Federation PointsThis is the thread that inspired Federation Points.
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15396.msg170138.htmlThat is a pretty shallow thread and I think that Arcen over-reacted. I believe that Arcen have planned the game to to last 50+ years and when players were regularly able to complete the game in under 5 years, they acted to bandage the symptom (shallow exploitative play) rather than address the underlying problem (the game systems weren't interacting very well).
What evidence do we have that Arcen planned for a much longer game experience? 1. Technology tree, which I have never seen anywhere near completed, even in Observer mode running for 50+ years.
2. Comments from Arcen about the worth of Raiding for Resources and how they were impressed that players were doing things that beta testers never considered. If you do a cost/benefit analysis of the actions available, raiding for resources was several orders of magnitude better than any other choice. Not seeing that is suggests, that they were heavily influenced by prior versions of the game, which apparently drastically changed from the original vision, which lead to blind spots. There was not sufficient time and testers to discover this, which also suggests they weren't able to explore in sufficient depth, many other things (like how long it takes to complete the game under a wide variety of circumstances).
3. The Reaction to Raiding Pirates was to effectively remove it, making it just as rare as the Hydra Tech Discovery in the belt missions. If this pattern holds, the next thing to be removed/modified is the Credit from doing AFA missions or the Credit gains from intercepting individual fleets (+$800 for killing 1 flagship, -1 Influence with the owning Race). Arcen wants to slow down Credit and Influence growth.
4. Standard gains from Deployment are +0.1 to +0.3 Influence per month, to get to 100 Influence that way you'll need 333 months per Race.
5. Standard gains that grant Influence but you have to pay Credits for it are +1 Influence for 116 to 15,000 credits.
6. Credit gains from standard Deployments top out at ~$100 Credits per month. To afford the $50,000 to get some Races to join the Federation, you are going to be here a long time.
7. A combat losses makes you lose up to 1 year of game time. This was designed to be a penalty, but not a horrendous one. If we assume that you are to lose 2% of your total game length, that would suggest they were looking at 50+ years for a game.
8. RCS increases from buildings +.02 Economy per month isn't going to accomplish anything very quickly. Many years would be necessary for this to have an impact.
9. Technology research starts at 5 months and goes up to infinity months. If you want to keep up and only choose to research technology with other races (prior to the 2/3 discount from technologies the races already know) you'll be spending the entire game researching (or destroying other races research capacity).
Game Systems that aren't quite workingRCS - Have minimal impact of production. The player cannot effectively compete against event swings. Seeing -500 Medical is a common occurrence. Likewise, RCS Trends and Building bonuses are too small to do anything either.
Credit Income - Most actions provide very little income (if any). Deployment actions grant up to $100 per month, which means you need 50 months to buy the cheapest Hydra technology from the Black Market. The most profitable actions are being steadily removed as options, suggesting that the deployment actions are close to the baseline.
Race AI - As far as I can tell, Race interactions are limited to the following Rule: Wait until I dislike another Race, then attack them with everything, leaving nothing to protect myself or to intercept raiders. This leads to constant Racial suicide attacks. (Some other rules also against, per Evuck: I'm threatened by something, somewhere, time to blow up the planet, but they provide minimal deviance).
Race Influence Growth - As noted in several threads trading provides a massive per month influence gain in Racial Relationships, whereas direct player intervention grants +0.1 per month. Additionally, once the Races dislike each other past -50? the only solution is either genocide or Boarine influence.
Research and Building Upgrades - As the game progresses the growth of many stats seem too extreme. When the Burlusts have a research capacity of 8 and the Skylaxians 30,000, either something is broken in how research gains are calculated or the numbers have no impact on actual game play. Either way, this isn't working.
Combat Stats - Ships are able to fire 2.2 million damage shots. Either there is a logic flaw in ship stat calculations, or late game combat isn't supposed to happen.
End Game Challenges: Other Federations - They sound impressive, but then they turn out to be simple to deal with.
Fear Empire - When a non-Federated Race controls 4 planets. You have to kill the Race. To prevent it, stop genocide.
Independent Union of States. Boarines, Burlusts, and Acutians (or any subset) can form it when there are 4 Races in the Federation. When only 1 race is left alive, it ends. To prevent it, make sure 2/3 of the Races are either in your Federation when you add the 4th Race or they are still planet bound.
Pirate Empire - Haven't seen one yet. I'm guessing, it ends when you kill the race. To prevent it, kill pirates?
Pre-Solution CommentsI like The Last Federation and I don't have a grudge against Arcen. I understand that they are a small company, but so what? Do we want to encourage the idea that: The Last Federation is a good game, for an indie developer. This suggests that Indie developers are just playing around and don't have to develop good products, unlike"real" companies. The Last Federation reminds me a lot of Endless Space by Amplitude. Amplitude is a small company that developed Endless Space (another space empire game). The game had a lot of promise, but the devs didn't address the relationships between the underlying mechanics in the game and develop interesting systems that the player could interact with. Endless Space was pretty enough, but once you got past that, it was too shallow and trivial. It resulted in a dead game in spite of the contributions and passion of many dedicated fans. The devs did respond to fan comments, but it was also stopgap knee-jerk reactions and only made things worse.
Solution CommentsI think that if the game was made to be more like Asimov's Foundation Series, it would be more fun and have a better game progression. The Race AI and interactions need to be developed more so that they will progress without the players direction intervention. Once that is done, then the player can come in and change the balances to be what they want as to what is "naturally" occurring. Arcen should step back and think about how they want the game systems to interact. They have the design docs and the plans, and most importantly the mathematics behind everything. Listening to players only gets you so far, and much of what the players say is the result of too few sample sizes and a lack of awareness of the bigger picture. In general, there are tons of bugs left to be fixed, and getting player reports to fix this is great. However, adding mechanics like Federation Points to stop a symptom of a larger problem is not time well spent. You lose the time on thinking of the mechanic, programming the mechanic, and then removing the mechanic at a later stage once you address the problem that is the underlying cause.