Do you need any help with the calculations or spreadsheets?
I am sure we likely will once we hit to alpha, and I really appreciate the offer. We'll likely just open up our google docs so that people can look at them and make copies, rather than trying to recreate our documentation from scratch, etc. Tuning all that sort of thing is one of the major balance things to do during the alpha, of course. Then again, some degree of unbalanced-ness is actually good of course. But overall the main thing we are focusing on is making sure that if there is some sort of pit a race falls into, there is a way for them to climb out of that pit.
Crime becomes terrible? Well, bad things happen, and maybe something really bad. But if the race is so inclined, they also have a way to stop their other activities and focus on cleaning up crime, so they are not stuck in a crime-loop forevermore. Because that's one of the more frustrating things, is when numbers trend a certain way and you wind up with a situation that just gets "stuck" and nothing changes from then on. There are also ways for the player to influence these various things if the WANT the race to stay stuck in crime, or if the race isn't doing much about it and the player wants to solve the problem themselves. So in that regard, if something strange happens to get stuck in a crime loop, the player can either view that as a challenge to fix in that specific game, or an opportunity to exploit.
That's the theory, anyway. The reality is that a simulation like this is so complex that there are likely to be edge cases that come up with expanded numbers of players, no matter what. And in those cases either we tune numbers, add more racial actions, add more player contracts, or some mix of all three.
More on target, there is the whole issue of making the numbers "feel right." There may not objectively be anything wrong with some number from a gameplay standpoint, but it just doesn't feel realistic or it tends to cause certain events way too frequently or something. So then we have to come up with a better number, or a better formula for arriving at trends or changes for the number, etc. I expect there will be some of that as well, as the number of players grows and we start seeing more and more varied situations coming out of so many solar systems.
TLDR: Yes, we'll very much welcome that once we get to the point of alpha, but for now I think we're okay. Thanks very much!
