I wonder what is a defense of 400u and 1M planet? And how much fighting back power does it have?
What happens when it is destroyed?
Will it become an attacker's property with all his colonies?
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I wonder what is a defense of 400u and 1M planet? And how much fighting back power does it have?
What happens when it is destroyed?
Will it become an attacker's property with all his colonies?
If you mean 1M population it will be pretty low.
When it's beaten, yes, it becomes property of the attacker. Depending on how long the fight lasted the population might be reduced to a quarter of what it was, or might not change much at all
Sorry, I meant 400Mu and 1000Mu. What would be defense and ATK points?
Were mining colony defenses removed? Someone just took out three of my bases with a destroyer.
The planet defenses are crazy strong, have you got any idea of many ships it takes now? I tried to kill a new colony and even it bested a lot of ships....
The ATK / DEF of a 400mu planet would be ATK 2800 / 7200. (basically 7/18 per 1 million u of population.)
So you need 63 dreadnaughts or 234 battleships. Seriously devs?
2745/7136
Seriously.
Edit: In beta people were slashing at each other with fleets of 800 cruisers.
Ok that's funny.. As you level up in skills you need a lot less ships. Home worlds are designed to eliminate grunt rushing, something which we saw a lot of in beta. If you have rank 8 skills you might need 15 dreads to take a regular home world size planet. If you get up to planet killers it's a whole other world of damage.
We saw fleets of 800 Cruisers taking out home worlds and capturing them. In the later game things start moving REALLY fast. The universe is young. Right now it's about building your empire to withstand the test of time.
These players will never recover IMHO particularly when a new orbital takes 24 h to build, their hw will remain starved a long time
So instead of warships the way to win is to spam indestructible colonies , all because that makes for better strategy??
When life gives you lemons...
Strongbad - the way to win is to expand like mad land grab style until you bump into your neighbors, build up economic wealth and talent points until you can pursue your victory condition. If that's Warlord, use Dreadnaughts and Planet Killers to take out other players. If that's Trader, hoard wealth. If that's Researcher, collapse stars.
Warfare is only the requirement of one skill tree - Warlord. Wars happen, but if you can avoid them, you're better off. Warfare in the endgame is where it gets interesting. Warfare prior to the endgame is frankly, just a waste of resources.
If you don't fight for the best planets early on, you loose, you won't see endgame!!
It depends on how you define "fight". If you define fight as racing to the unclaimed planets and taking control of them before other players get there, YES. If you mean warfare, then you're going to spend way too much time and resources early on fighting small wars that keep you small while other players who took the peaceful route, grow faster than you.
When I started, there was 3 players nearby, and 3 systems to take, I smashed them all and took their stuff and won...I don't see how trade would have really done anything here except make me loose those systems and the game. If you don't have any income I don't see how you can research your way out of that. Later on, I met another aggressive player, it turned into a slugfest and he won, the rest of the people in the sector are now toast in oh so many ways..
Trade your way out of that.
Strongbad - read my post here:
http://www.zarksoft.com/cms/showthre...of-the-Eclipse
That's a nice guide, I don't disagree with some of your points, but I think you underestimate the wargame, you will get seriously burned.
A couple other options for dealing with high population colonies - Equip your dreadnaughts with Biological Weapons, or use smuggling to sap their population then attack, or just use blockade running so you can trade with them while at war status and then crank up your counterfeiting skill and economically strangle them. Just a few thoughts anyhow.
Raven has a good point about waiting. Granted most of my skills to this point have been in advancing my riches through more ships(Advanced orbitals), defense, mineral collection, and getting cargo ships for long distance trading (Of course, i'm a trader so all valuable skills.) I've seen what he currently has, and lets just say I'm glad I haven't pissed him off yet. I've also seen another neighbor be aggressive, and while he's done some impressive things he's pretty much locked in a battle at someones home world and I'm not sure it's going to end pretty for him.
On a side note, Leedot, can you choose to use counterfeiting on certain people or once you've researched it, it's always active?
Of course quietly amassing a huge empire of resources is the best the long term strategy, but is it the most fun?
The problem with that style of play, in my opinion, is that it's kind of boring. I am curious to see how the game pans out, but with 150+ players, I'm guessing the winner is going to be someone on the other side of the galaxy from me that I never even encounter over the course of 2 months. He'll blow up 15 planets or stars I've never seen, or use his vast network of harvesters to get the trade win without me having much to do with it. I know I'm not going to be the last man standing, so to spend two months shuffling harvesters around and trying not to piss anyone off feels like a pretty banal exercise. I'm not out to be an aggressive jerk, but if it means some interesting multiplayer interaction, I'd rather do that than play it like a singleplayer game.
But again, we'll see how it pans out. While I do like the idea of a single winner, the largely "individual" win conditions make me think the game can be won by ignoring everyone else in the game. That kind of defeats the point of an "MMO" game like this, doesn't it?
Everyone has a different play style I suppose. I am curious if you could think of different win conditions. Maybe even not really have "win" conditions per say, but maybe a score based system. Where each action effects your score.
Then at the end of 2 months scores are tallied and a ranking is displayed. I suppose if that was the case we could probably display in game details live rather than have a global score. Since if we had something like fighting gives you <x> points, trading gives you <x> points, discovering sectors gives you <x> points, holding artifacts every day gives you <x> points.
As always we are open to discussion on things and peoples thoughts. So then even people that do little skirmish type battles on a regular bases might end up with the same points as say someone with Ravens play style.
As a side note, while his guide is a good foundation if there were too many Ravens doing land grabs it might not be as easy for him in the long run. Since in reality you have major contention if everyone grabs their allotted 13 planets.
Agreed! Part of the reason I posted that was because I seemed to be the only player doing the land grab strategy and at 150+ planets on Aruru, I felt like I was getting too far ahead of everyone. I did run into one other land grabber, but he started the process later than I and has a lot less planets.
I've been thinking about alternative win conditions, but I don't have any bright ideas yet. I think the score based system is a good idea, possibly better than the current one. The problem, I think, is coming up with a system that both encourages player interaction, but also is not prone to "runaway wins," because those are annoying.
I very much like the idea of some kind of live statistics that indicate everyone's progression towards the end game, assuming you can influence the outcome as a result. Another aspect of the current system that feels less than ideal is the fact that the inevitable win is going to come out of nowhere. What I think would be really neat is if everyone received reports when a player reached certain milestones towards victory, so that they could react and maybe form alliances against that person to beat them back down, etc.
Another half-thought I had, although this would be tricky, is to give effectively defeated players some kind of "nuclear option" that would have a significant effect on the rest of the game. Again, I am trying to think of ways for all players, even the ones who aren't able or willing to be hardcore about their strategy, to have some agency in the outcome of the game. I'm not necessarily thinking they should be able to detonate their homeworld and take out half a sector, but maybe something like pledge their resources to another player or something, or allow themselves to be assimilated by the some AI Borg collective that gives them some interesting powers but removes them from victory contention.
Anyways, I think at the very least you need a scoreboard so that that everyone has some feeling of progress at the end. When only one guy can win, 149 people have to lose, and to lose a 2 month game with nothing to show for it is kind of sad. With a scoreboard, at the very least you can have micro-competitions between local players and that sort of thing. If I know I'm not going to be #1, I can at least focus my efforts on finishing ahead of my neighbors.
Yeah, this is the major issue with the current system. You have already won Aruru, so what is the point in continuing for another 7 weeks? Granted, you have played this game before and no one else has, but still, you have the runaway win, no one is going to catch up to that. Even if I played aggressively, I'm not devoted enough to this game to hunt down 150 of your outposts. I think that's probably true of a lot of players, who will all just get left in the dust.
Somehow the game needs to acknowledge "micro-competition" within the larger "there can be only one" format. Not totally sure how to do that, but live scoreboards are a good start.
Agreed, and I may not win because someone could win with one of the other victory conditions. I think FINbit has 50+ planets and that gives him enough of an economic base to do big things.
I should add...I want a game where the player who plays 15 minutes a day (3 times, 5 minutes each, for instance) can hold his or her own against the land grabber strategy player who can jam out many more play sessions in the first week to sprint ahead. I think the land grabber strategy is actually a bad one for the game quality unless it's pursued by multiple players simultaneously to share the wealth. In the case of Aruru, being the first real game, people didn't think of that necessarily as an option.
Exactly. The vast majority of players are not going to be dedicated enough to pursue this strategy (this is an iPhone game after all), which means the guys that do are going to have a lock on the game. There is also a discrepancy between the way the mechanics are advertised (long form, play a few minutes a day) and the dominating land grab tactic that requires a significant investment in micromanagement. To me this is a problem.
Also, land grabbing is just another Zerg rush tactic in a different form. There are systems built in to the game to prevent homeworld zerging, so why is this form of rush sanctioned? The outcome is the same: zerging player who "knows what they're doing" shuts out other players before they have a chance to get their bearings.
A lot of talk about victory conditions but no mention of Neptune's Pride where the way to win was to be the most sociopathic diplomat (as long as you didn't fall too far behind militarily). The inclusion of such a fully featured chat system in EotE leads me to believe that the devs want us to go down this route.
In NP Raven's strategy would probably lead to him being the first player eliminated and coming in last place. But even in NP the last couple of days can become very hectic and often players will just surrender since they don't want put the time in and are happy with a podium finish.
EDIT: One thing NP has going for it is that every star you own automatically builds ships (it's a very simplified "4x" game) and there's of course a defender bonus. So if a player rarely logs in his homeworld is probably going to be better defended than a player who moves regularly and has their ships attacking. This means that attacking the homeworlds of even idle players will cost you a lot of ships which you don't want to waste in a war. So the final standings in NP are generally the winning alliance top, the idlers next, and the other players who lost wars last.
I think the strong colonies in EotE is aiming towards this but there probably needs to be a more complicated build queue for the same full effect.
In my sector a pretty big war erupted, but I think if there are too many passive or idle in a sector it's just too easy
Yeah G3.0 Aruru right. Destroyed 112 ships of cat swift at one of my systems. Hope he has learned ;)
Neptune's Pride is a great game and the backstabbing / intrigue are definitely some of the qualities that I'd like to see carried over to Empire. I think one of the big things that makes land grabbers a target in NP is that the player standings are always known so the front runners are obvious which makes the need to form alliances more clear to other players as well. We've recently been talking about implementing a more clearly defined scoring system in Empire as well so players would have more awareness of what's going on in the world around them without revealing exactly what they're doing.
Kyle - When you say a more complicated build que what do you mean? Longer build times? More steps in a tech tree to accomplish certain tasks, etc..
I feel like colonies scale up in strength too quickly. You get to 400 Mu population pretty much immediately, in the scope of the timeline of a game. It takes so long to produce ships and move them, that a colony will almost certainly be able to defend against any number of units at the early stage of a game. If someone lands a colony ship nearby, there's basically no way to get rid of it until much, much later. I feel like colony populations should grow slower and the defense strength should not be linear, to allow for early game technology to take out low population colonies. I feel like the reward to risk ratio of sending out a colony ship is pretty out of wack at the moment. I'm fine with a full population colony being able to defend itself against lots of stuff, but it's just way too easy to get to a point where the time, resource, and strategic investment required to pose a threat to that colony is really unreasonable.
By a nonlinear growth, I mean that it should basically stay at a 1Mu defense level until about 150Mu, then grow on a really strong power curve up to its current level. Like raise it to the 6th power and let it grow from there. I also think that populations should grow at a rate that is about 20% of what it is now. It should be a much bigger deal to grow a colony to full size. That would also make the population growth science projects worthwhile.
Spoon - We were actually talking about this just last night. I'm a big advocate of homeworlds being strong as someone being wiped from the game should be a big deal imo but regular colonies are very easy to establish considering their strength. (and that's without getting into the fact that colonies can have populations over 400mu)