Gaining Federation Points

[I-KP]

I've not been at this game for long but I did get some time in before FPs were implemented.  The game has become far less engaging as now I'm mostly waiting for an arbitrary timer to run down before progress can be made, and in the interim I mostly find myself doing everything I can to keep the monsters from waking which is extremely hard, if not impossible, given that the Space, Science and Ground power multipliers rapidly scale completely out of control with such races inside of ten years.  In addition there are now even more actions that have become no-go areas, in addition to all of the previous no-go actions on account of their lack of game impact, because they negatively impacting upon FP progress.  I see where Chris was going with this idea but, alas, it's made the game less interactive as a direct result.

I think that there are a number of critical flaws in the simulation model that need to be addressed directly and not papered-over with awkward and arbitrary time-gating mechanics. 

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Trade has too great an impact on relations.  The bonus needs to be scaled back dramatically, or, more preferably, make the trade model significantly more dynamic with regard to what impacts upon its effectiveness.  For example, Trade was super-important in Sword of the Stars but you had to give it time to build up to maximum effectiveness and any kind of pirate activity in the area reset the counter and you had to build up momentum all over again.  Pirates are a hugely under-exploited element within TLF, and they're presently super-weak.  I'd be happy to leave trade as strong as it is now, but have it so that such maximum levels of effectiveness are only achieved if the trade conditions are perfect, i.e., no pirate or espionage activity within the realm of either trade partner.

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The whole concept of a race's receptiveness to the idea of forming a federation needs attention and FPs might still have a pace in such a mechanic.  Consider the Diplomacy Triangle that Paradox use in the Hearts Of Iron series.  (For those that don't know, nations are pulled in one of three directions across a triangular representation of three opposing ideologies: Allies, Comintern and the Axis.  Once a nation has 'drifted' far enough toward one of those three ideologies the faction leader can attempt to invite them into the fold.)

I think TLF would benefit from a similar mechanism, replacing the WW2 ideologies with 'Federation', 'Anti-Federation' and 'Isolationist'.  Each race would have its natural starting point within the triangle and it is then up to the player to start performing actions that influence each race's natural drift (toward which ideology that race is slowly moving).  Other events not performed by the player would also influence drift.  The closer a race gets toward the 'Federation' ideology, the easier/cheaper it becomes to pull them into a Federation; the closer a race is toward 'Anti-Federation' ideology the more receptive they would be to starting up their own rival alliance; and the closer a race moves toward 'Isolationist' the less likely they are to join any alliance of any sort. 

(Consider this scenario: the Burlusks are nowhere near Federalism but are equally placed between Anti-Federationism and Isolationism.  Through a variety of sneaky Hydral actions -- like diplomatic meddling and espionage, sowing fear, lies and mistrust about the idea of becoming part of an alliance -- you could instead influence that they drift toward Isolationism.  If you can't have them in your club then why not try to push them out of the race so that they're less of a threat whilst you deal with the committed Anti-Federationists.) 

With such a mechanism in place the devs then have the ability to control how fast alliances are formed,  or how quickly some races take themselves out of that race if they prefer or are nudged towards Isolationism, by varying where races start on the triangle, their natural drift and how much that can be influenced by the player.  A neat little chart could also be provided that shows the position of each race on the ideology triangle, their current direction of drift and a tooltip list of things that are presently influencing that drift.


Something along those lines anyway. 

[ptarth]

Federation Points
Federation 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 Points
This is the thread that inspired Federation Points.http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15396.msg170138.html
That 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 working
RCS - 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 Comments
I 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 Comments
I 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.

[benzidrine]

I believe that Arcen have planned the game to to last 50+ years

Definitely agree

The issue is that forcing the player to play the long game leads to my biggest issue with this game coming up.
The strategy screen does feel a bit like a paradox game which is good but the issue is in a Paradox game you control what you are producing. In this you have no direction at all and much of what you do will end up seeming like a waste due to AI mismanagement or events except for the current fast paced options available. Nerfing fast options at this point without fixing underlying mechanics first doesn't help.

I feel they need to revamp the way you interact with politicians of a planet and the jobs you do. At the moment the friendly actions is just one big job dump of slow options.

What I would propose is that instead of an always available "build armada option" as an example. You go to the politicians and use influence to convince them to build a planetary defense force, an outpost patrol armada or an invasion armada. Then the build armada option becomes available and you know in a general sense what you are building. In this sense you could strategize what you are doing far better and know what change you are making. Obviously the other options would be the same, convince the politicians to work on bettering the environment and then work with them.

Connecting the political system to the dispatch missions in a real way would make the game more sensible and a lot more fun to play as a long game. And the needed systems are all already in place they just need to be better connected.

[Winge]

Lot of good stuff in this thread.

I think that the federation point system could work as a "we are willing to join the Federation."  However, it needs a lot of changes as of right now--as many have indicated, it might be better to do without Federation Points, and fix the underlying problems.

If Federation Points are kept, it should not be a slow build-up over time.  Rather, it should be a 'score' based on how the race perceives the other Federation race(s),  how they perceive you (or your Federation negotiator, eg Skylaxians), what deals they currently have with the other race (trade will be here, but there needs to be more--maybe research or construction pacts, treaties of various sorts, ...donation of moons to launch at other races?), and some outside factors (allies in battle, fear empires, pirates, opposing faction(s) pressure, etc).  RCI trends should also have some benefit/penalty, and would be where the over-time component lies (if time is ever a factor).  Lastly, the player needs a little bit more influence on Federation Points--both positive and negative.  Positive actions towards allied races should have point benefits for both (even if slight).  Also, negative actions against enemies should have point benefits towards their enemies (factoring in things like what that race approves/disapproves of, to be sure).

Then, rather than being a 'I need to wait x years to add a race, spamming Pacify AFA ever solar year' deal, Federation points become a one-stop shop to see the overall attitude based on all of the underlying factors.

Thoughts?

[casualsax]

Then, rather than being a 'I need to wait x years to add a race, spamming Pacify AFA ever solar year' deal, Federation points become a one-stop shop to see the overall attitude based on all of the underlying factors.

Thoughts?

I agree, but I'm on the side that we just don't need federation points.  Having a number that represents a race's relationship with the player/another race makes sense because it is derived from the player's experience with the game.  Federation points, by contrast, are arbitrary and do not fit in with the player's narrative.  If they worked more like relationship points do, as you describe, that would be fine, but unlike relationships federations are just not that complicated.  The following situations exist:

-"I don't want to join your alliance because I don't like you/one of your federation's members."

-"I don't want to join your alliance because it is not beneficial for me economically/militarily."

...That's it.  It is a lot easier to explain why someone does not want to join than it is to introduce a new abstracted mechanic to a new player.

[kasnavada]

Influence toward you IS how much they like and listen to you, therefore how much convinced they are that a federation is good.

Federation points are therefore useless, as this mechanic attempts to do something which is already done. Anything that can be done with them, even with rework, should go into the current mechanics instead.

Complete reasoning below:

Submitted a mantis for this:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14743
Submitted another thread for this:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15450.0.html

[lifehole]

So much good feedback in just the span of a weekend. Remember guys, that they've been off work on the weekend, and he explicitly stated in the patch notes that federation points had not been balanced/checked at all.

The more relevant and bigger problem I see is that fact that there is so much wonkiness and inaccuracy, and imbalance in the mathematics behind the simulation, e.g one race has 10 tech points and the other has 60,000. Race 1 has 1 million fleet power fleet but the fleet just instagibs on contact. This has been discussed and studied more in depth by people with more time than me just in the short time span of the last week or so. Of course, balancing out federation points probably takes priority, or just removing it and focusing on simulation flaws first. I don't dislike the IDEA of federation points, but if they're going to add a timed-gate type thing they need to give it situational awareness based on the results of the simulation, which, of course, has it's wonkiness that needs fixing first.

On an unrelated note, I see so much potential in this game but also so many problems. Of course it's only been a couple of weeks since release, and this is all moot point if the devs keep up the development rate they have right now, but... If this game's sales/support eventually dies out, it'd be great to have the source code or some type of modding tools so the community can tweak this game, it seems viable.