(Note: the below is a revised, extended and streamlined version of a text I have posted earlier on the old BP forum.
Some bad ideas are dropped, several new ideas added and some suggestions from other players incorporated.)
First of all, let me state that Beyond Protocol is/was a wonderful game in which a lot of things were done right.
Despite the fact that it had no real competitor (except the older and much more primitive Mankind) it failed to retain
enough active players to be commercially viable, while Mankind still has several hundred (?) active players and recently stated that it has no plans to shut down.
But in my opinion, BP had a few serious design flaws. Whether or not these flaws were fatal to the game I cannot say but I`ll
try to identify them and offer an alternative design. The below ideas will be quite useful to considerably improve the
quality and viability of the game.
A re-design of the rules should follow these basic guidelines:
1) in order to gain the biggest player base, the game must be equally interesting for veterans, casuals and newbies.
2) the game must incorporate various viable play styles - combat, empire building, trade etc. Freedom to decide your playstyle is one of the
strengths of BP. The focus must be on long-term viability of those play styles.
3) any changes must be relatively easy to program. Reviving a tweaked BP is a lot faster and easier than making a whole new game loosely inspired by BP.
4) The rules should solve late-game stagnation where people don't dare go to war because they are afraid to lose their empire.
5) where possible, undesired player behaviour should be remedied by rewarding "good" behaviour, not punishing "bad" behaviour.
Some people say punishing players (warpoints, sudden introduction of homeworld tax) chased away the player base. They are probably right.
6) the game should have rules and maths that are as transparent as possible. Hidden or obscure game rules only benefit veteran players.
Any and all number values relevant to designing (including component noise and exact mineral stats) should be clearly visible in the designer,
with explanation. The motto should be: easy to learn, hard to master.
7) empires should be able to survive when the player is offline. People have jobs or may want to spend their time on other things than BP, too.
offline shield helps but is cheesy and also shuts down your entire empire, giving fulltime players even more advantages over part-time players.
SUBJECT: MINERAL PROPERTIES AND ALLOYS
One flaw is that BP had an interesting and complex system of 100+ different minerals with lots of different properties, but failed to make
that really relevant for the game.
By making alloys, alloys of alloys and alloys of alloys of alloys, you could make materials with just about any property you need.
Technically, you only needed 2 different minerals to make everything, and beside those, you could alloy the 16 materials you had the most
of in stock into 4 alloys, and re-alloy those 4 alloys into one alloy called "bulk armor".
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but after that the game wouldn't have been much different if you had to mine
just 1 type of metal (enochine?). This is a missed opportunity to add depth into the game.
I found it way too easy to strip-mine large amounts of minerals. For example, near the beginning of the game I was the supreme ruler of T3 Docchu
for a week by virtue of being the only one present there with units, and all wormholes being closed.
I chose three big planets, put a high-tech mine on every mineral deposit I could find, and made 100K storage room per planet.
I did three such planets in one evening. After 2 days, the storage would be full. I would delete the empty mines, build factories and spaceports,
and had three large production facilities for corvettes with more minerals than I had a use for. So there was no real mineral scarcity.
Another flaw in the game was that the properties of minerals often did not matter much. A bad "match" in mineral properties could simply be
compensated for by adding more material. Again making the diversity of minerals irrelevant to the game.
Another flaw was that if you play long enough and experiment enough, you end up with thousands of different alloys, cluttering up
your interface.
Another missed opportunity was the fact that there was an even distribution of mineral types. Every mineral type could be found on any planet.
This is a missed opportunity to give locations strategic value.
EVALUATION: ALLOWING ALLOYS WAS BAD GAME DESIGN.
I came to the conclusion that including alloying into the game was a big design mistake.
A strategy game depends on various forms of scarcity. Strategic playing must then be used by the player to overcome this scarcity.
Alloying decreases the differences between materials, until you can use any group of material for anything. It destroys scarcity.
Assuming that the properties of materials actually matter (right now they don't matter much for design, except armor)
and if you want certain materials with certain properties that you don't have right now, you have 2 options:
(A) trade for them, go scout uncharted territory for them or conquer a territory where they can be mined.
(B) go sit in your lab and play a mathematics solo game using whatever materials you already happen to have in excess.
Both work but option (A) is what an MMO RTS is all about and option (B) isn't. And because (B) is the easiest way
to do it, (A) gets neglected and thus alloying damages the RTS character of the game.
Conclusion: although alloying can be a fun mini-game in itself, the rest of BP would be a better game without alloying.
The result will be more trade, more scouting and more fighting.
SOLUTIONS FOR THE MINERALS ISSUES:
1) drop the whole alloying business. Only directly-mined materials can be used. Refineries must be removed from the game,
possibly replaced by foundries for making armor.
2) make minerals more relevant for design. The philosophy of the designer is to allow people to exchange values between component stats.
for example: an engine can have either high speed or high manu for the same price, but if you want both the price goes up.
When you use better materials, your components should have an overall better quality, regardless of the balance chosen.
Anxcon submitted the following idea:
currently it is easy to see designer comes in 2 parts, cost and payment
stats = cost = speed * manu * thrust * power, regardless of the balance chosen
payment = value minerals + time + money + hull + power
the minerals only have an effect on the payment, but not the cost, allowing any crap to always get same stats
better way, apply the minerals values directly to the individual costs
cost = (speed) * (manu) * (thrust) * (power)
(thrust) = stat value * mineral property, say low melting point in drive alloys raise cost of thrust, high melting point lowers cost per point
projectiles, low combustiveness means costly / impossible aoe, high combustiveness is low cost per point of aoe
this makes component limits directly based on material chosen, almost like armor is
speaking of armor, remove the points, armor (aside from hp which is basicly thickness) should have resists entirely based on material
Additionally, you can set hard caps on various component stats based on the quality of the components. For example:
an engine made from extremely bad-matching materials can never go faster than 60.
Bigger ships and space stations require even better materials, to handle the stress inherent in such structures.
You can make it a soft cap: a bad property match makes construction time considerably higher, increasingly so for bigger components and units.
and/or make a hard cap: there is a minimum strength or hardness for any given size of capital ship or space station.
Of course, the various caps and penalties should be clearly visible in the designer, in actual numbers, in line with the philosophy of no
hidden or obscure game rules.
3) do more geographic distribution of minerals. See ideas "extreme environments" and "leagues" below.
IDEA: EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS
Space is a dangerous place, and extreme environments exist. Aside from the habitable, earth-like planets there should be extreme planets, e.g.
-extremely hot planets
-planets with a toxic/acidic/corrosive atmosphere
-planets with high radioactivity
-planets with high gravity.
The purpose of extreme environment is to make compartmentalization possible (see below for explanation)
To colonize such an extreme planet you need to research a special. Buildings will need to be able to resist the environment and
the colonist must sometimes be genetically re-engineered to withstand e.g. high gravity.
Also there will be consequences for the construction materials of your buildings and units. For example: a ship hull needs to be made
of heat-resistant materials if you want to enter a hot planet (otherwise it would melt). And planets with high gravity will need more
powerful engines (thrust).
Most of the planet graphics are already in the game (like lava-planets) but at this moment the only differences are visual.
In the designer, there should be checkmark boxes for extreme environments. If you e.g. checkmark "hot planet", hull construction materials that
are not heat-resistant enough should be filtered out of the list. The resulting ship must be marked heat-resistant. All armor should be
checkmarked by the player and extreme-environment ships can only use the appropriately checkmarked armor.
High-gravity units should be made with high-strength materials, corrosive-resist materials should be chemically inert and high radiation units
should be made from radiation-resistant materials and/or possibly have special shields. High-gravity ships should have engines with triple the normal
thrust. Units capable of entering more than one type of extreme environment are possible but that requires some pretty good materials.
NEW MATERIAL: SYNTHETICS. Produced from a new building called "algae farm". The purpose of this material is to boost new players
and enable Leagues (see below).
On earth-like planets, algae extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning it into organic compounds
with which the algae build themselves.
Algae can be grown in special tanks, then broken down into an oil-like substance. And oil can be turned into all kinds of
synthetic materials by the petrochemical industry, like plastics.
In game, you can make algae growing tanks (buildings called algae farms) which continually produce synthetics material
(speed perhaps modified by the carbon dioxide concentration in the local atmosphere).
This should be fast and easy, much faster than the rest of the materials, making it the ideal beginner material to make your starter
buildings from.
A starting player gets a builder with a big cargo-space full of Synthetics, which which he can make his plastic starter buildings.
For game balance, the properties of Synthetic must suck however, so while Synthetic is okay to make starter buildings and small units,
making bigger stuff with Synthetic is still possible but gives rapidly increasing amounts of production time, per the idea above that
badly matching materials give considerable penalties to the bigger components, especially construction time.
So, engines made from synthetic should e.g. have a max engine speed of 60.
It is better to start mining other materials with more useful properties if you want to make a real military in an acceptable amount of time.
Also, algae farms built in the ocean will produce algae (and thus Synthetic) much faster, perhaps 3 times faster. This is to give water buildings
and sea warfare an actual use (unlike now).
Algae can only be grown on earth-like planets.
About starter buildings: make two tiers of starter buildings.
keep some of the current paper starter building for convenience but make them even crappier than they are now.
Also make a bunch of pre-designed buildings and units that are half-decent but cost Synthetics to build. This should give newbies the opportunity
to quickly slap down a somewhat effective defense, making them at least a speed bump against veterans who chain-bash multiple newbies.
This however means that starter facilities should have an increased view and weapon range, or they will be taken out from a distance
by any enemy who researched his first weapon range special.
However, starter buildings and units, and any other unit made from Synthetics can only be used in league 1 environments (see leagues below)
One draw-back of adding another source of materials is that materials will be even more plentyful. This should be compensated for
by reducing the current speed of gathering materials through mining. For example: make the mineral deposits half as big in size,
and cut the speed of mining in half.
Newbies should be unaffected as they should be making their units from synthetics anyway, but veterans who make high-tech ships
are penalized.
WAR VS PEACE: MAKING A WAR ENVIRONMENT
Right now, you have either all-out war to the death, or peace. later in game, players complained about being bored because there is no war,
but didn't dare start a war for fear of losing everything.
The solution is to make limited war possible. Divide the universe into two types of star systems: core star systems and
Deep-space star systems.
Core systems have the same rules as they are now. Your relation has to be 40 or lower to start shooting. Players spawn in core systems
and most planets are earth-like. However the minerals that can be mined in earth-like core system planets are not that good.
Deep-space systems: your relation has to be 60 or lower to start shooting (perhaps 59 for guild members).
Which means that you will automatically be at war with any player you have not deliberately set to friend.
The best, most useful materials will be found on extreme environment planets in deep-space star systems.
However, getting there will put you in much more danger. Accidental battles will occur as people go scouting.
The result of this is that players can choose the level of war they want. Casual players can stay in the relatively safe core
systems, that do not have very good materials, while hardcore players can move entirely to Deep Space and mine the best materials but
will be in constant danger. Casual players can still get some amount of good materials via trade.
It also allows for one-system wars, where players fight over control of a specific
deep-space system while be at peace in the rest of the galaxy. All-out war will of course still be possible by dropping relations to 40
but less likely as there is plenty of opportunity for war in deep-space systems.
And if asteroid mining will be introduced, where players have to scout space for asteroids, there will be lots of skirmishes and small
battles in space.
It should be very easy to implement. At the beginning of the Live game, there was plenty of war. Only later when the universe
became bigger did wars die down.
So make the first T3 system and all its attached T2 and T1 systems Core universe. And mark the second and third T3 that spawns
and all their attached T2 and T1 systems Deep Space.
The only problem could be that if too many newbies join, the first T3 can become quite full.
In that case, make sure the fourth T3 will be core systems again, etc.
Optional: if a planet suffers from corruption (too many colonies there) it immediately (or with a certain delay) becomes
similar to a deep-space area temporarily, with units shooting at competing players of relations 60 or lower, until the corruption has vanished.
This too makes limited wars possible.
IDEA: LEAGUES
The various rule changes above converge towards the natural creation of leagues.
-League 1: for newbies. Earth-like planets in core systems. Here is where new players spawn. Synthetics buildings and units rule here simply by
the easy access to Synthetics. Superior quality can be overcome by superior quantity.
Most materials mined here are extremely crappy but some can be used to make units for extreme environments, or
medium-sized space ships and space stations. 2/3rds of planets in Core T1 systems should be earth-like, rest extreme planets.
-League 2: extreme planets in core systems. Synthetics units cannot be used or built here. Better materials can be mined here, aside from
more league 1 materials. Perhaps make an additional geographic distribution of minerals: decent engine materials spawn on radioactive planets,
decent radar materials spawn on hot planets, decent weapon materials spawn on corrosive planets and decent armor materials spawn on
high gravity planets. Core T2 and T3 systems should contain mostly extreme planets.
-League 3: planets in deep space systems. Most of these should be extreme. Quite good materials should spawn here, aside from
more league 1 and league 2 materials. Again: good engine materials spawn on radioactive planets,
good radar materials spawn on hot planets, good weapon materials spawn on corrosive planets and good armor materials spawn on
high gravity planets.
Players should naturally move towards the higher leagues as they progress, focusing less on league 1 planets (leaving them to newbies).
Of course they could use the materials from league 3 to make superior units with which to rule the league 1 planets, but as the competition
in league 3 will be so much harder, its more likely they will keep focusing on league 3 environments. Perhaps make league 3 colonies give more
tax income than league 1 cities, to promote people expanding in league 3 instead of league 1.
Don't include perfect materials in the game yet, save them for future updates (perhaps you should fight alien empires to get those).
The scarcity of various good materials should go a long way towards promoting trade between players.
!!! However, to make this work, it is very important that alloying gets removed from the game. Alloying reduces scarcity of good materials properties
and upsets this whole idea of leagues and the reward of playing in a higher league.
SUBJECT: GAME BALANCE
Balancing different players is the hardest thing to do in a long-term MMORTS. You have players that play an hour a day, and players that play 12
hours a day. As the game ages, new people will join (hopefully) but they will start far behind on the older players.
Having all these players play together in the same universe and let all of them have a meaningful game, is one of the hardest challenges
in MMO game design.
Many PvP MMO's fail because of newbie-bashing veterans. Newbie signs up, goes onto the playing field, gets crushed by
a veteran; newbie respawns, gets crushed again. Newbie respawns again, gets crushed again and quits. Soon only the veterans remain.
In BP, a new player has to do a lot before he can make a decent military. He needs to learn the rules, colonize, mine materials,
figure out the designer and make production facilities before he can make his first useful military unit.
The first three weeks, a newbie is as helpless as a mouse in a snake cage, with a similar survival chance if war breaks out.
Imagine you have 2 new players, A and B, both equally talented, but A plays 1 hour a day and B plays 2 hours a day.
After a month player B will not have just twice as many ships as A, but probably 10 times as many ships as player A. So if war breaks
out, the fleet of player A gets defeated and player B will have fun killing all the soft targets (economic infrastructure like labs,
factories, mines, housing) of player A while he retains his own economic infrastructure.
After that, player A has to rebuild his economic infrastructure, while B can build even more ships and wipe out player A again.
In a game like multiplayer Starcraft or Warcraft, you start equally, are both online during the whole game (I trust) and after
one side wins, the game gets reset again. In this MMO players do not reset after they win, but keep growing while the loser
has to restart. Therefore the rules should not favor player annihilation since that imbalances the game further and chases players away.
It happened over 2 years ago, at the beginning of Live. All the veterans from beta started in the same area, but as the guilds TC and QSC
got defeated by the guild tBH, some of them spawned in an area with new players. Since TC and QSC were experienced players, they
quickly built up and massacred all the newbies who were still trying to figure out the designers, driving a lot of them
out of the game permanently.
This had cost Dark Sky Entertainment a lot of new customers, and made DSE developers really angry.
There are three ways to balance such difference in players:
1) make starter units more relevant in combat. Right now, starter units are a joke when it comes to combat. Give new players some
pre-designed Synthetics units and especially armed facilities that will do half-decent damage so he has a chance at surviving while
he is figuring out the game. Starter armed facilities must have decent radar and weapon range or they will simply be taken out from
a distance.
2) making defense a lot stronger than offense. This means boosting static defenses considerably, both in firepower and in range. It seems
that some of this has indeed been done after I had to leave the game 2 years ago. Create a new facility called "bunker complex" that has
+100 view range and +100 weapon range, and make sure to include one as a starter predesigned Synthetics facility.
3) compartmentalization. This means that a military victory in one environment will not automatically spill over into another environment.
Lets focus on compartmentalization. The first way to do compartmentalization is to make sure that units that can operate in more
environments are weaker than units that can operate in just one environment.
Frigates can fight in both space and on planets, while tanks can only fight on planets. Therefore, tanks
should be able to eat frigates for breakfast or tanks will be irrelevant. Same for naval ships or space-only spaceships.
Concrete proposal: Make the strongest tanks (land units) at least 5 times as strong as frigates and other atmosphere-capable flyers.
That means flyers are useful for their mobility and their ability to quickly take out weak targets of opportunity, even on other planets,
(like paper cash colonies) but will lose against a concentrated tank force or group of armed colony buildings.
Heavy tanks should be the weapon of choice to take down planetary fortresses.
The same for extreme environments. Ships that are designed for one type of extreme planet will either not be able to enter another
type of extreme environment or be at a relative disadvantage in other environments, since the player invested in specs that are not needed
in those environments. A hardcore player will have military for all extreme environments while casual players can choose to specialize in
one type of extreme environment.
Another way would be to make wormhole travel impossible for bigger ships. Making battlegroup movement of big ships mandatory
will slow down blitzkrieg style wars in which whole guilds are crushed in just a few hours. Atmosphere-capable transport ships should be the
biggest ships capable of using a worm hole.
By far the biggest sinner against compartmentalization is orbital bombardment. That means that if a player wins in space, he gets an automatic
victory in the nearby planet environments too. Worse, he can bomb without risk. It makes warfare on the planet pointless if
an attacker is smart enough to bring bombers.
Orbital bombardment is basically an "I win" button and that is terribly unbalancing.
Orbital bombardment cuts a lot of different war tactics out of the game. Right now, tanks are pointless, ships are pointless, and
armoring your buildings will just slow the attacker down but won't stop him.
In fact, orbital bombardment is probably the most important reason (together with war points) I haven't returned to this game earlier
after being forced to quit a while due to real-life reasons.
And judging from remarks from other players, several people feel the same.
So either remove planetary bombardment from the game or make defense against it really easy, right from the start (not just after researching
some obscure rare special you won't see for 3 years).
One possible way to defend would be plasma batteries: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWhrGGrs3Ow (plasma batteries can be seen 1:30 minutes
into the movie clip)
Plasma batteries should be able to eat frigates for breakfast (like in the clip) but smaller ships should be able to avoid them.
Simply using in some way the current rule that high damage weapons have a hard time hitting a small target should do the trick.
Attacking a defended colony with orbital bombardment should be much more painful for the attacker than for the defender.
Using it against planetary fortresses should be a gamble, not a "it can't do any harm and it may do some good" for the attacker.
NB. Programming a defense against orbital bombardment does not have to be done before starting a new BP universe.
Orbital bombardment can simply be turned off (and bombs as a weapon disabled in the designer) and re-enabled later when a surface-to-orbit
defense is finished.
NO CAPTURING PLEASE
From time to time, some players propose allowing capturing units and buildings as a new game rule.
The developers should strongly turn down any and all requests in that direction, as it imbalances the game against weaker players and newbies.
In practice, it will be the stronger player who captures stuff from the weaker player, not the other way around,
benefiting only the stronger player.
Without capturing, weaker players are still competition. With capturing, weaker players effectively become lunch.
It will drive newbies and casuals out of the game faster than anything else. Right now, destroyed units drop minerals that can be harvested by
the winner. In the current version of BP, minerals don't matter much since you can strip-mine as much as you want. However if all the
proposals of this text are implemented, minerals will become much more valuable, and repeat-bashing newbies for their minerals will
become commonplace, driving newbies out of the game.
Solution: remove the rule that destroyed ships drop mineral caches. I`m sure it will be protested by players who want to play pirate but it
is necessary for game balance. And turn down any proposal in the direction of capturing stuff.
ONLINE VS. OFFLINE.
If a BP like game wants to have any appeal to casual players, it must have a credible offline defense. Static defense weapons should have
a much higher shooting range than mobile units or they will just be taken out one by one from a distance.
Give facility radars and weapons higher view range and weapon range (I`m thinking of +100 view and +100 weaponrange),
or make a new facility called "bunker complex" with those view and weapon range bonuses.
Having a rock-paper-scissor system of weapon damage types versus armor is nice if both players are online, but when the defender is offline,
it only gives the attacker the opportunity to kill with minimal losses.
Solution: drop the guaranteed 100% resists. Make resists depend on the properties of the armor material.
Again, the worst thing here is planetary bombardment. Paper bases deserve to die of course, but what if I do make a decent base, go to work,
and when I come back all my bases have been destroyed by planetary bombardment without even scratching the attacker? What is the point
in playing then? Again, planetary bombardment is probably the most important reason I haven't come back earlier.
Of course you can raise full invulnerability as a preventive measure but that shuts down all production in your entire empire,
which means a casual player who has to go to work will never catch up with a player that can at least be online even when he is doing
something else.
Best,
Desertfox.
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in the area of designers, aside from perhaps a&e who originally designed them, i likely have the deepest knowledge and experience as well as understanding complex math, over the past few days i have read through the designers and plan on the following changes (adding here or another sourcesafe location to be determined).
1) remove alloying alloys, while this is in real world and the current exploits/flaws with this can be fixed, this change is both easier and simplifies things short term, and can always be re enabled at a later date with no issues to an already running galaxy
2) remove control points on alloys, the only inputs should be minerals (possibly the order of such will continue to influence result) and give a flat average to easily see result, the point of alloying in the first place is to provide diversity, and give a minor 5-10% bonus to researching players
2b) remove techs (gradient/cutting/revol/epic/empire) which apply a global result to all properties
2c) possibly replace the alloying level techs with processes that effect specific things, ie fast cooling steel results in a harder but more brittle material
2d) possibly keep the slight randomness in decimal result, but a more obvious +/- 5 to the result
2e) keep the decimals hidden, but explain the effects, the 5% bonus not being given to all is not a game killing imbalance
3) reroll minerals, keep the 100+, but ensure values exist for perfect mixes, previously not all slots had perfect fits
4) refit designers, stat cost should be effected by mineral properties, ie low combust on proj payload makes pricey aoe, easily set in GetTheBill
5) remove resist choices for armor, leaving only size and hp, resist result will be directly based on minerals chosen, removing most imunity armors except in high quality material choises, this one is a bit harder for me to do alone
6) add more noises to the designers, the point of noises is to add diversity, currently it is possible to remove 100%, it should be a forced choice of which to remove, forcing compromise
6b) some noises will be documented publicly, and clearly show the effects, while some are kept hidden for others to find, since noises give minor 5% changes this does not cause imbalance
aside from section 5, i can do all the above in an hr or so, some additional time for testing, my goal is to simplify the designers, add a strong value to minerals/alloying, and still maintain some hidden (but known to exist) depth without compromising game balance, people can review the above changes until i get time to code em, and point out any remaining possible flaws, any suggestions for properties effected by sections 4 and 6 feel free to list
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personally, i dislike few of desert foxes suggestions. but i suppose alot of people dislike what i have on the black edition too so… your milage may vary.
stop and think for a minute. what was BPs goal?
as far as i could tell, it was supposed to be an RTS scaled up to an MMO with plenty of unique unit design options. plenty of stuff got in the way of that. ill write up on my counter arguments to DF later. just dont have the time right now
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I think the root of the problem is the fear of being completely wiped out.
What if every player started in a copy of a base system. That base system would be connected to the real universe via a 1 way WH. Those 1 way WH's would drop you into what are currently the spawn/respawn systems. These base systems would not show up on the universe map at all. The base system would have the same planets, terrain, etc.. Level playing field for building. I would probably seed the initial mineral setup the same but any respawn would be random.
Everyone would have a "safe" base of operations.. And the universe could be the bloodbath of war everyone wants.
Probably make it so certain types of research can't be done in the safe system. Limit the mineral types, etc.
But it would allow for that risky war that would only push you back to your home system.
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because people would exploit it just as they did with transports, everyone used 1mil cargo ships, untouchable, to store mass banks, no risk of loss, and what happens when people finally bottle up that wormhole out and trap the guy inside? hes forced to sd anyways - change CP penalty to punish declaring based on score not rank, that effectively is a 'level' based system, which many games use, and has proven itself, side effect is people will make better use of their score and not spam countless ships, which works as a plus
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i tryed to write something up on this, but because my computer is messed up, i went backspace. so lemme just rewirte the TL;dr version
alloys allowed us who didnt have the time to dick around searching for minerals a way to roll thru quick like, i used 4 minerals to make my empire. made my life alot easyer. didnt have to run all over the place. also players need to have some reason for combat. capturing, scrap and tech points are all fair means for that. there are balances already in place, i dont want some noobs ships. they would suck anyway. warpoints where the complete opposite of rewards. tech points would be better: bout page five https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cKAS4WdWteZ10w7hurw0Lf0O5OSrmF5atUo3ct6ITgg/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIya8dEB&pli=1#
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> 6b) some noises will be documented publicly, and clearly show the effects, while some are kept hidden for others to find, since noises give minor 5% changes this does not cause imbalance
Why on earth do you want to make hidden game rules when the software is open source? That is ridiculous.
People will be studying the sourcecode to find these hidden rules and document them for themselves and their close friends. It will lead to an unfair ineqality between players: some players and their friends who will know the rules and some players who will not.
The whole idea of hidden game rules is something that should be dumped fast. People should be playing the game not chasing hidden game rules. The learning curve is steep enough as it is.
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totally agree with Df on that one anxcon. i supported open rules for all from day one of beta - there is enough inequality built into the genre with offline attacks, unemployed players and greifing exploits which are borderline unavoidable. I told Aurelius to assume his audience was dumb and work from there. Not from any belief that all are actually dumb but many miss small things, work while playing and play sporadically etc and a good way to accomodate and not frustrate all these requires a LDC (lowest common denominator).
Dont worry folks, Adam and I are watching, fiddling and biding our time. This baby took over a decade to evolve - a few months are well worth investing in our opinion :)
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RTS has a tactical and a strategic part. Strategy means setting up your situation so that when tactical combat breaks out, you have the most advantages. You use those advantages to win (or at least not lose) those battles, which in turn should give you additional strategic advantages. In most strategy games, economy is usually the most important strategic factor.
All economy is based on scarcity, and a player must choose how to use his limited resources.
If you introduce an economic factor but not make it scarce, you might als well drop it from the game because it does not lead to more choices, only to more tediousness and complexity.
In the strategy part of game design, there is good complexity and bad complexity.
Complexity that enables more (relevant) choice is good. Complexity that does not enable more choice is just tedious and should be eliminated.
About: quality of the choice:
If you have a variety of options, these options should have a somewhat similar cost/benefit ratio. If one option is always much better than the other options in any and all situations, then there is not really a choice (example: planetary bombardment).
And if all options lead to nearly the same outcome (example: minerals that can be alloyed), then that is not a real choice either. In that case. the designer of the game should either increase the difference in outcome of the options, or just remove the choice.
Good game design means that the player has the most possible choice with the least possible amount of complexity.
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exactly, its open source, and if you look all the noises are listed in prototype.vb in componentdesigned, which you can read with windows notepad, any "dumb" person can open a text file, so its even ground, my goal is to provide a list clearly detailing how some noises work, and examples, then others that arent listed (clearly stating others exist, which along with examples of the first makes quick to find), players who want some element of suprise/puzzle may leave it as is, while those who want the list may look at the answers in the back of the book so to speak - just because a new star trek movie is coming, doesnt mean everyone should be forced to see the spoilers
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When you want to make the specific material that is used for components relevant in the designer, there are two possible options:
1) higher property is better. E.g.: a higher combust in projectile payload leads to larger/cheaper AOE damage. The best components are those that use materials with the highest combust.
2) require the player to match a specific number. If you are higher or lower than this number the quality of the component will be less, and worsen as you deviate more from the required number. For example: if you need malleability 5 then a material with malleability 5 will give the best component. A material with malleability 4 or 6 will lead to a lower quality component and it gets worse if you use malleability 3 or 7.
Option (2) is where alloying comes in. Suppose you are in need of a material with 5 hardness and 5 malleability but don't have such material. Looking over your warehouses you find a material with 9 hardness and 1 malleability. That is about as bad a match as you can get, right? Wrong. If you have another material that has 1 hardness and 9 malleability, and mix them to a straight average as Anxcon proposed above, you get a material that is 5 hardness and 5 malleability. And that is exactly what you need.
That means that if you use alloying, there is no such thing anymore as a good material or a bad material. Any material can potentially be used to make anything, with the exception of the extremes of the scale since averages tend to go towards the middle.
But if you use option (1) above then alloying is usually pointless. As averages tend to go to the middle, it is better to use the unalloyed material with the highest of the wanted stat. Unless you need something that is high in more than one stat, in that case some alloying can be beneficial, sacrificing a high number in one stat for an improvement in another stat.
As the example above showed, any material can potentially be used for a matching alloy, even those that differ a lot from the required stats. That means that if you have 117 different materials, and 4 alloy slots to put mined materials in, there are 117 * 116 * 115 * 114 = 177,928,920 different combinations.
Now the next subject is game balance. 177+ million combinations cannot realistically be tested by he game developers. Remember: every material can potentially be used to make the required alloy.
So the devs have to balance the designers around the certainty that sooner or later players WILL find an exact match, even with decimals. And that there is no real difference between the mined materials as any material can potentally be used for that exact match.
And with the source code and thus the formulas publicly available, and materials being more relevant to designing, I expect somebody who has some skill in programming and mathematics, will write an application that does the calculating for him: fill in the required number and available resources, and the application will calculate the best possible alloy.
Hiding the decimals will ultimately not work either: When knowing the exact formulas used in the source code you can write a program where you can enter the public stats of the materials, and the outcome of alloying tests, and given enough results of alloying attempts it will calculate the decimals with a very small reliability interval.
Now suppose that alloying is removed from the game. It has many many advantages.
1) it removes a whole layer of complexity from the designing part of the game, without limiting the variety of units that can be designed. That alone would make BP a better game and more accessible for average players.
2) the properties of materials can actually mean something. Different unique materials are good or bad matches in the various slots of the component designer. It creates a demand for specific materials for specific purposes.
3) 117 different materials, while still a large number, is small enough to be realistically testable in the designer. Actually you only have to test a bad match, a mediocre match and the best match and see how they check out. Since players have no control over the decimals, other than replacing the material with another, there will be no unbalancing surprises.
4) since materials now have fixed value, scarcity can be created by making specific materials harder to get. And this will go a long way towards reviving trade between players.
5) and most importantly, as individual materials now have individual value, it gives the game developers some powerful tools to influence the behaviour of players by controlling access to those materials.
Examples: valuable materials can be used to reward desired gameplay. The devs could give out better materials as a reward for riskier gameplay. Restricting access to certain materials could be used for gamebalancing. Valuable materials could be used to separate high-powered players from less powerful players by luring them away. If you create free-fire zones (like deep space areas in my original writeup) and place the more valuable materials there, you can promote war.
In my writeup at the beginning of this thread, I have posted several ideas on how to use materials to steer player behaviour and improve game balance after removing alloying, but other ideas are of course possible.
Best,
Desertfox.
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Anxcon, I think you are mixing up things. The purpose of an RTS is to win. Why would any RTS player deliberately refuse to know some game rules? The only possible result of that is that his units will be weaker which reduces his chance to win.
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Cyrus, I have read your writeup. Although I have various disagreements, my most important objection is that you want to change too much. Some of the changes you propose require months of programming, debugging and testing.
Most of the changes I proposed are simple parameter changes, adding or changing some values to the database, or adding some more if/then checks into the software. That takes hours, days or at most weeks. Not months.
Plus the current BP has had years of beta testing. We know what works, what doesn't work and what could be exploited. The code has had considerable debugging. If you want to turn BP into a different game, you will be throwing all that away.
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not really. all games are merely a modification of what came before. modify, evolve grow. im not saying all my ideas should be thrown into BP, ive named that page, Black edition, for a reason. alot of its thought spam, take what you want, leave what you dont. what i wrote up there, is what i honestly feel will help add a jolt to the game and bring people in. which is what a busness is supposed to do.
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dessertfox - And with the source code and thus the formulas publicly available, and materials being more relevant to designing, I expect somebody who has some skill in programming and mathematics, will write an application that does the calculating for him: fill in the required number and available resources, and the application will calculate the best possible alloy.
you mean like i already did a bit over a year ago? i fully mapped the decimals, created an alloy scanner, and was able to scan for options i wanted, and i can tell you that while some super common mineral say flophoron being used as half an alloy might seem like it 'makes less value in minerals', that alloy is unlikely to make a very close match when you add a 2nd mineral,close yes but not very close, and if you roll the values in a well planned way you can do something (complex for devs, no increase in difficulty for players) which is take 2 closest commons, you'll fit +/- 1 block from req, not the best but good for easy access, then rares are needed to fit the perfect decimal etc, thats some epic math that not even i want to program yet :P
as for your point, property high/low vs distance from req, currently designers are all distance from req, but take my example of proj payload, less then req combust is logically going to drive up cost of aoe, while higher than req combust would lower cost vs high combust raises cost, logical vs illogical, i prefer the first case as it follows logic, but payload is only 1 property type, consider armor using 10+ properties, easy enough to alloy stuff to avg 5 across the board, but when you apply higher is better, you give value to smart alloys, who knows some cases in designers might work better at distance from req too and i end up with both, dont know till i finish the list :) feel free to catch me on msn/aim and help
as for point of the game, half the people think war, why play if you dont like pew pew? yet throughout history rts such as bp and mk have supported trade, diplomacy, bp had research, no reason poeple should be denied the option explore things for themselves, if they wanna go look nothin stops them but themselves :)
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> if you roll the values in a well planned way you can do something which is take 2 closest commons, you'll fit +/- 1 block from req
Why take the two closest commons? If you want 5, you can average 4+6, 3+7, 2+8, 1+9 or 0+10. And that is with only 2 minerals.
Only if you come near the extremes of the scale you will have less options but in general you are not required to use close commons.
> then rares are needed to fit the perfect decimal etc, thats some epic math that not even i want to program yet :P
Easy. If you make all the commons have even numbers (in the decimals) then an average of 2 commons will also be an even number. So if the match is an uneven number you can never reach it by averaging two commons. Now if you use 3 or 4 minerals, you have to make sure the commons are multiples of 12 (in the decimals) and if you average those, you`ll always get an even number, no matter if you use 2,3 or 4 minerals to average. But the random +/- 5 you planned kinda messes this up.
> as for point of the game, half the people think war, why play if you dont like pew pew? yet throughout history rts such as bp and mk have supported trade, diplomacy, bp had research, no reason poeple should be denied the option explore things for themselves, if they wanna go look nothin stops them but themselves :)
BP is marketed as an mmorts. Trade and diplomacy are part of mmo. Tech trees and research are part of RTS. Complex Math games are not a natural part of the rts genre nor a natural part of mmo.
An mmorts is generally a niche game because it is time-demanding. On top of that, the complex unit design of BP makes the game a niche within a niche. E.g. Mankind is also an MMORTS. One Mankind player said about BP: "I quit BP because it took me hours to design just the simplest units".
Now if you also add math-games you get a niche within a niche within a niche. If you make a niche within a niche within a niche the number of players will be very low. People who like complex math games are not likely to be attracted to BP since math games are not a part of mmorts, and people who like RTS do not always like math games even if they do like complex unit design. On top of that, alloying makes the minerals interchangeable which means there is no point in geographic distribution and its potential strategic depth, so RTS fans will find BP a bit shallow as a strategy game.
Now there is a rule in engineering: to reach the perfect result you must not only add everything that should be added but also remove everything that should not be part of the result.
> feel free to catch me on msn/aim and help
programming goes along this path: functional design -> technical design -> writing code.
As you and I do not agree on the functional design I don't see how we can cooperate on the other two.
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I personally feel the mineral sets, and alloy mixes should be left as is.
1. Anyone can design a resonably cost ship with 'Any' mineral.
2. Anyone can learn the noises, and therefore craft suitable noise-free alloys, with ease.
3. The only changes should be that when you hit the INT/DEC wanted values this should reduce the mineral cost WAY more then it does.
3a. INT reduces it X%.
3b. DEC spot on hit reduces it Y%
The way it is, anyone can use any mineral, without the need of math. Anyone wanting to 'cut down' on loss can craft alloys to counter the noises, with ease. Anyone wanting to 'really cut costs' has to invest their time to really understand things, therefore the end result bonus is paid for in their time.
Just my thoughts.
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> Dont worry folks, Adam and I are watching, fiddling and biding our time. This baby took over a decade to evolve - a few months are well worth investing in our opinion :)
There is no guarantee it will only be a few months. The current version of BP failed despite a decent start, so there are some significant flaws in the game. If those flaws are not repaired then the next incarnation of BP is going to fail also.
In the writeup at the beginning of this thread I listed a large number of interconnected rule changes that, if implemented together, will solve a large number of flaws. The resulting game will probably not fit everybody's taste of course, but it will be much more balanced, both in gameplay and between types of players, have more strategic depth and is a bit less complex while retaining the freedom and tactical richness of current BP. In other words: the game will have much more long-term viability. So it will be good as a base-line for the game. And once you have a viable game, you can then continue to improve it further.
But I consider it possible that my whole writeup will be ignored by the devs. However the flaws that are addressed with my write-up will not go away and must therefore be solved in another way or the game is likely to fail again.
So far, the devs have made no public statement whatsoever on what direction they want the game to evolve in, in order to prevent another failure.
Enoch is working on improving the graphics. This is of course good but graphics is not the primary reason of why the game failed. Anxcon wants to add more secrets to the game. I have no idea what problem he wants to solve with that. I think it will reduce the viability of the game even more.
Until the flaws in the game are identified and fixed, the game will have a high chance of failing again and again. And with flaws I mean functional design flaws, not bugs.
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quote:
"In an RTS, as in other wargames, the participants position and maneuver units and structures under their control to secure areas of the map and/or destroy their opponents' assets. In a typical RTS, it is possible to create additional units and structures during the course of a game. This is generally limited by a requirement to expend accumulated resources. These resources are in turn garnered by controlling special points on the map and/or possessing certain types of units and structures devoted to this purpose. More specifically, the typical game of the RTS genre features resource gathering, base building, in-game technological development and indirect control of units.
(snip)
Though some game genres share conceptual and gameplay similarities with the RTS template, recognized genres are generally not subsumed as RTS games. For instance, city-building games, construction and management simulations, and games of the real-time tactics variety are generally not considered to be "real-time strategy"."
So in a typical RTS, resources are garnered by controlling specific locations on the map.
So to increase the strategic depth of an RTS, you have to increase the variety of locations involved in garnering resources.
This confirms my analysis that the two biggest flaws in BP are 1) orbital bombardment 2) alloys.
Orbital bombardment ensures that per planet there is only one point worth controlling and that is the space area directly above the planet. The many locations on the planet are irrelevant from a strategic point of view. Tanks and naval ships are just introduced into the game for nostalgic reasons or so.
Alloying and random distribution of minerals means any piece of land is equivalent to any other piece of land.
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how is it more secrets? first off its open source, by definition secrets cannot exist, worst case someone is going to go and read code, then like me goto forums and post a full how-to a few days later, i had to learn decimals without having code,
second knowledge spreads, even IF there is some super secret plot to hide aliens, guess what? it gets out! majority of noises and decimals were widely known aside from the lazy peeps who didnt care to goto forums but instead merely complain
third every change i proposed above simplifies designers, mineral properties clearly drive the costs of components fixing the flaw of valueless minerals, math removed from alloying to straight avg that even 1st graders can understand, fixing both flaws of 1) picking any 2 minerals, brute force into anything 2) brute force an alloy equals bypassing all noises by default as properties drop to 0
fourth, again its open source, likely 50 people will be running their own servers, and my changes i highly doubt would be in the core copy everyone runs, unless they chose to add it themselves, so your paranoia that what i change will somehow cause the downfall of another galactic civilization is a moot point - and fact is, until the above is accually coded and tested with a few peeps, neither you nor i will know if it really 'helps things' as dare i say some people will fail at adding 2+2 on a calculator
and finally, your mentality that bp is an rts game is your biggest flaw, i myself, vimes, para, to name a few have played nearly every (if not definatively every) mmorts game in existence, many marketed under 3x or 4x which is still basicly the same thing, and is wildly different from a standard RTS, and while the flaws in alloying hid this fact, minerals were based on planet class, commons were everywhere (potterine), but the rares (lithous was needed in nearly any armor, even after considering the alloying flaws) were very picky, so specific planets did have value - should the value of a planet be broken down further into parts of a map (hills, craters, etc)? imo it was already, but as said OB nearly made that a moot point, it was possible to be imune to OB though but only with full armor and shield tech, i do agree OB needs a nerf, but many disagree with that as well, and since no senate prop was even atempted to be made, i guess not enough agreed a nerf was needed
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"Orbital bombardment ensures that per planet there is only one point worth controlling and that is the space area directly above the planet. The many locations on the planet are irrelevant from a strategic point of view. Tanks and naval ships are just introduced into the game for nostalgic reasons or so."
This statement is very true given the end-game techs to counter this tactic were never released.
1. Planet shields, prevent all forms of orbital bombing. You must go down to the surface and find the generator and destroy it.
2. Better per-single-structure defense like Lightning Shields might be added to the PShield generator to give some kickback to attackers.
3. Mass Drivers, set to assist orbit, will take a selected raw mineral or alloy, and fire that blindly into space. If any collision occurs it then uses the mineral properties to determine damage type, and amount. Explosive properties lead to AOE explosions.
4. Late in live game idea to add 'Assist Orbit' and the inverse. This was not completed but the idea was any ariel units on a planet, or a spacedock, can be set to assist orbit. They will quite simply undock, goto space, fight off agressors in range, and return to dock. The inverse is also true. If a unit is in space it will follow or go down to the planet to attack, and return to its position. These two were part of a larger AI change with the goal to increase the 'Rally to help' from 'self unit wpn range' to 'radar detection range', and adding AndPlanetorOrbit.
I feel with the addition of key end-game techs, and a tweeking of the AI this made Orbital Bombing very counterable, and forced players down to the planet. Forcing them there. Keeping them there, as assist will trigger my defense forces to follow you back and forth so no more running. You have to truly leave the planet far behind and my units will stop. etc.. etc..
Thoughts?
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The problem is that those are end-game techs. From what I remember, you could use orbital bombardment extremely early. Balancing the game exclusively around the end-game leads to stalemates and boring, stagnant universes, imo.
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Re-designing BP
(Note: the below is a revised, extended and streamlined version of a text I have posted earlier on the old BP forum.
Some bad ideas are dropped, several new ideas added and some suggestions from other players incorporated.)
First of all, let me state that Beyond Protocol is/was a wonderful game in which a lot of things were done right.
Despite the fact that it had no real competitor (except the older and much more primitive Mankind) it failed to retain
enough active players to be commercially viable, while Mankind still has several hundred (?) active players and recently stated that it has no plans to shut down.
But in my opinion, BP had a few serious design flaws. Whether or not these flaws were fatal to the game I cannot say but I`ll
try to identify them and offer an alternative design. The below ideas will be quite useful to considerably improve the
quality and viability of the game.
A re-design of the rules should follow these basic guidelines:
1) in order to gain the biggest player base, the game must be equally interesting for veterans, casuals and newbies.
2) the game must incorporate various viable play styles - combat, empire building, trade etc. Freedom to decide your playstyle is one of the
strengths of BP. The focus must be on long-term viability of those play styles.
3) any changes must be relatively easy to program. Reviving a tweaked BP is a lot faster and easier than making a whole new game loosely inspired by BP.
4) The rules should solve late-game stagnation where people don't dare go to war because they are afraid to lose their empire.
5) where possible, undesired player behaviour should be remedied by rewarding "good" behaviour, not punishing "bad" behaviour.
Some people say punishing players (warpoints, sudden introduction of homeworld tax) chased away the player base. They are probably right.
6) the game should have rules and maths that are as transparent as possible. Hidden or obscure game rules only benefit veteran players.
Any and all number values relevant to designing (including component noise and exact mineral stats) should be clearly visible in the designer,
with explanation. The motto should be: easy to learn, hard to master.
7) empires should be able to survive when the player is offline. People have jobs or may want to spend their time on other things than BP, too.
offline shield helps but is cheesy and also shuts down your entire empire, giving fulltime players even more advantages over part-time players.
SUBJECT: MINERAL PROPERTIES AND ALLOYS
One flaw is that BP had an interesting and complex system of 100+ different minerals with lots of different properties, but failed to make
that really relevant for the game.
By making alloys, alloys of alloys and alloys of alloys of alloys, you could make materials with just about any property you need.
Technically, you only needed 2 different minerals to make everything, and beside those, you could alloy the 16 materials you had the most
of in stock into 4 alloys, and re-alloy those 4 alloys into one alloy called "bulk armor".
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but after that the game wouldn't have been much different if you had to mine
just 1 type of metal (enochine?). This is a missed opportunity to add depth into the game.
I found it way too easy to strip-mine large amounts of minerals. For example, near the beginning of the game I was the supreme ruler of T3 Docchu
for a week by virtue of being the only one present there with units, and all wormholes being closed.
I chose three big planets, put a high-tech mine on every mineral deposit I could find, and made 100K storage room per planet.
I did three such planets in one evening. After 2 days, the storage would be full. I would delete the empty mines, build factories and spaceports,
and had three large production facilities for corvettes with more minerals than I had a use for. So there was no real mineral scarcity.
Another flaw in the game was that the properties of minerals often did not matter much. A bad "match" in mineral properties could simply be
compensated for by adding more material. Again making the diversity of minerals irrelevant to the game.
Another flaw was that if you play long enough and experiment enough, you end up with thousands of different alloys, cluttering up
your interface.
Another missed opportunity was the fact that there was an even distribution of mineral types. Every mineral type could be found on any planet.
This is a missed opportunity to give locations strategic value.
EVALUATION: ALLOWING ALLOYS WAS BAD GAME DESIGN.
I came to the conclusion that including alloying into the game was a big design mistake.
A strategy game depends on various forms of scarcity. Strategic playing must then be used by the player to overcome this scarcity.
Alloying decreases the differences between materials, until you can use any group of material for anything. It destroys scarcity.
Assuming that the properties of materials actually matter (right now they don't matter much for design, except armor)
and if you want certain materials with certain properties that you don't have right now, you have 2 options:
(A) trade for them, go scout uncharted territory for them or conquer a territory where they can be mined.
(B) go sit in your lab and play a mathematics solo game using whatever materials you already happen to have in excess.
Both work but option (A) is what an MMO RTS is all about and option (B) isn't. And because (B) is the easiest way
to do it, (A) gets neglected and thus alloying damages the RTS character of the game.
Conclusion: although alloying can be a fun mini-game in itself, the rest of BP would be a better game without alloying.
The result will be more trade, more scouting and more fighting.
SOLUTIONS FOR THE MINERALS ISSUES:
1) drop the whole alloying business. Only directly-mined materials can be used. Refineries must be removed from the game,
possibly replaced by foundries for making armor.
2) make minerals more relevant for design. The philosophy of the designer is to allow people to exchange values between component stats.
for example: an engine can have either high speed or high manu for the same price, but if you want both the price goes up.
When you use better materials, your components should have an overall better quality, regardless of the balance chosen.
Anxcon submitted the following idea:
currently it is easy to see designer comes in 2 parts, cost and payment
stats = cost = speed * manu * thrust * power, regardless of the balance chosen
payment = value minerals + time + money + hull + power
the minerals only have an effect on the payment, but not the cost, allowing any crap to always get same stats
better way, apply the minerals values directly to the individual costs
cost = (speed) * (manu) * (thrust) * (power)
(thrust) = stat value * mineral property, say low melting point in drive alloys raise cost of thrust, high melting point lowers cost per point
projectiles, low combustiveness means costly / impossible aoe, high combustiveness is low cost per point of aoe
this makes component limits directly based on material chosen, almost like armor is
speaking of armor, remove the points, armor (aside from hp which is basicly thickness) should have resists entirely based on material
Additionally, you can set hard caps on various component stats based on the quality of the components. For example:
an engine made from extremely bad-matching materials can never go faster than 60.
Bigger ships and space stations require even better materials, to handle the stress inherent in such structures.
You can make it a soft cap: a bad property match makes construction time considerably higher, increasingly so for bigger components and units.
and/or make a hard cap: there is a minimum strength or hardness for any given size of capital ship or space station.
Of course, the various caps and penalties should be clearly visible in the designer, in actual numbers, in line with the philosophy of no
hidden or obscure game rules.
3) do more geographic distribution of minerals. See ideas "extreme environments" and "leagues" below.
IDEA: EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS
Space is a dangerous place, and extreme environments exist. Aside from the habitable, earth-like planets there should be extreme planets, e.g.
-extremely hot planets
-planets with a toxic/acidic/corrosive atmosphere
-planets with high radioactivity
-planets with high gravity.
The purpose of extreme environment is to make compartmentalization possible (see below for explanation)
To colonize such an extreme planet you need to research a special. Buildings will need to be able to resist the environment and
the colonist must sometimes be genetically re-engineered to withstand e.g. high gravity.
Also there will be consequences for the construction materials of your buildings and units. For example: a ship hull needs to be made
of heat-resistant materials if you want to enter a hot planet (otherwise it would melt). And planets with high gravity will need more
powerful engines (thrust).
Most of the planet graphics are already in the game (like lava-planets) but at this moment the only differences are visual.
In the designer, there should be checkmark boxes for extreme environments. If you e.g. checkmark "hot planet", hull construction materials that
are not heat-resistant enough should be filtered out of the list. The resulting ship must be marked heat-resistant. All armor should be
checkmarked by the player and extreme-environment ships can only use the appropriately checkmarked armor.
High-gravity units should be made with high-strength materials, corrosive-resist materials should be chemically inert and high radiation units
should be made from radiation-resistant materials and/or possibly have special shields. High-gravity ships should have engines with triple the normal
thrust. Units capable of entering more than one type of extreme environment are possible but that requires some pretty good materials.
NEW MATERIAL: SYNTHETICS. Produced from a new building called "algae farm". The purpose of this material is to boost new players
and enable Leagues (see below).
On earth-like planets, algae extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning it into organic compounds
with which the algae build themselves.
Algae can be grown in special tanks, then broken down into an oil-like substance. And oil can be turned into all kinds of
synthetic materials by the petrochemical industry, like plastics.
In game, you can make algae growing tanks (buildings called algae farms) which continually produce synthetics material
(speed perhaps modified by the carbon dioxide concentration in the local atmosphere).
This should be fast and easy, much faster than the rest of the materials, making it the ideal beginner material to make your starter
buildings from.
A starting player gets a builder with a big cargo-space full of Synthetics, which which he can make his plastic starter buildings.
For game balance, the properties of Synthetic must suck however, so while Synthetic is okay to make starter buildings and small units,
making bigger stuff with Synthetic is still possible but gives rapidly increasing amounts of production time, per the idea above that
badly matching materials give considerable penalties to the bigger components, especially construction time.
So, engines made from synthetic should e.g. have a max engine speed of 60.
It is better to start mining other materials with more useful properties if you want to make a real military in an acceptable amount of time.
Also, algae farms built in the ocean will produce algae (and thus Synthetic) much faster, perhaps 3 times faster. This is to give water buildings
and sea warfare an actual use (unlike now).
Algae can only be grown on earth-like planets.
About starter buildings: make two tiers of starter buildings.
keep some of the current paper starter building for convenience but make them even crappier than they are now.
Also make a bunch of pre-designed buildings and units that are half-decent but cost Synthetics to build. This should give newbies the opportunity
to quickly slap down a somewhat effective defense, making them at least a speed bump against veterans who chain-bash multiple newbies.
This however means that starter facilities should have an increased view and weapon range, or they will be taken out from a distance
by any enemy who researched his first weapon range special.
However, starter buildings and units, and any other unit made from Synthetics can only be used in league 1 environments (see leagues below)
One draw-back of adding another source of materials is that materials will be even more plentyful. This should be compensated for
by reducing the current speed of gathering materials through mining. For example: make the mineral deposits half as big in size,
and cut the speed of mining in half.
Newbies should be unaffected as they should be making their units from synthetics anyway, but veterans who make high-tech ships
are penalized.
WAR VS PEACE: MAKING A WAR ENVIRONMENT
Right now, you have either all-out war to the death, or peace. later in game, players complained about being bored because there is no war,
but didn't dare start a war for fear of losing everything.
The solution is to make limited war possible. Divide the universe into two types of star systems: core star systems and
Deep-space star systems.
Core systems have the same rules as they are now. Your relation has to be 40 or lower to start shooting. Players spawn in core systems
and most planets are earth-like. However the minerals that can be mined in earth-like core system planets are not that good.
Deep-space systems: your relation has to be 60 or lower to start shooting (perhaps 59 for guild members).
Which means that you will automatically be at war with any player you have not deliberately set to friend.
The best, most useful materials will be found on extreme environment planets in deep-space star systems.
However, getting there will put you in much more danger. Accidental battles will occur as people go scouting.
The result of this is that players can choose the level of war they want. Casual players can stay in the relatively safe core
systems, that do not have very good materials, while hardcore players can move entirely to Deep Space and mine the best materials but
will be in constant danger. Casual players can still get some amount of good materials via trade.
It also allows for one-system wars, where players fight over control of a specific
deep-space system while be at peace in the rest of the galaxy. All-out war will of course still be possible by dropping relations to 40
but less likely as there is plenty of opportunity for war in deep-space systems.
And if asteroid mining will be introduced, where players have to scout space for asteroids, there will be lots of skirmishes and small
battles in space.
It should be very easy to implement. At the beginning of the Live game, there was plenty of war. Only later when the universe
became bigger did wars die down.
So make the first T3 system and all its attached T2 and T1 systems Core universe. And mark the second and third T3 that spawns
and all their attached T2 and T1 systems Deep Space.
The only problem could be that if too many newbies join, the first T3 can become quite full.
In that case, make sure the fourth T3 will be core systems again, etc.
Optional: if a planet suffers from corruption (too many colonies there) it immediately (or with a certain delay) becomes
similar to a deep-space area temporarily, with units shooting at competing players of relations 60 or lower, until the corruption has vanished.
This too makes limited wars possible.
IDEA: LEAGUES
The various rule changes above converge towards the natural creation of leagues.
-League 1: for newbies. Earth-like planets in core systems. Here is where new players spawn. Synthetics buildings and units rule here simply by
the easy access to Synthetics. Superior quality can be overcome by superior quantity.
Most materials mined here are extremely crappy but some can be used to make units for extreme environments, or
medium-sized space ships and space stations. 2/3rds of planets in Core T1 systems should be earth-like, rest extreme planets.
-League 2: extreme planets in core systems. Synthetics units cannot be used or built here. Better materials can be mined here, aside from
more league 1 materials. Perhaps make an additional geographic distribution of minerals: decent engine materials spawn on radioactive planets,
decent radar materials spawn on hot planets, decent weapon materials spawn on corrosive planets and decent armor materials spawn on
high gravity planets. Core T2 and T3 systems should contain mostly extreme planets.
-League 3: planets in deep space systems. Most of these should be extreme. Quite good materials should spawn here, aside from
more league 1 and league 2 materials. Again: good engine materials spawn on radioactive planets,
good radar materials spawn on hot planets, good weapon materials spawn on corrosive planets and good armor materials spawn on
high gravity planets.
Players should naturally move towards the higher leagues as they progress, focusing less on league 1 planets (leaving them to newbies).
Of course they could use the materials from league 3 to make superior units with which to rule the league 1 planets, but as the competition
in league 3 will be so much harder, its more likely they will keep focusing on league 3 environments. Perhaps make league 3 colonies give more
tax income than league 1 cities, to promote people expanding in league 3 instead of league 1.
Don't include perfect materials in the game yet, save them for future updates (perhaps you should fight alien empires to get those).
The scarcity of various good materials should go a long way towards promoting trade between players.
!!! However, to make this work, it is very important that alloying gets removed from the game. Alloying reduces scarcity of good materials properties
and upsets this whole idea of leagues and the reward of playing in a higher league.
SUBJECT: GAME BALANCE
Balancing different players is the hardest thing to do in a long-term MMORTS. You have players that play an hour a day, and players that play 12
hours a day. As the game ages, new people will join (hopefully) but they will start far behind on the older players.
Having all these players play together in the same universe and let all of them have a meaningful game, is one of the hardest challenges
in MMO game design.
Many PvP MMO's fail because of newbie-bashing veterans. Newbie signs up, goes onto the playing field, gets crushed by
a veteran; newbie respawns, gets crushed again. Newbie respawns again, gets crushed again and quits. Soon only the veterans remain.
In BP, a new player has to do a lot before he can make a decent military. He needs to learn the rules, colonize, mine materials,
figure out the designer and make production facilities before he can make his first useful military unit.
The first three weeks, a newbie is as helpless as a mouse in a snake cage, with a similar survival chance if war breaks out.
Imagine you have 2 new players, A and B, both equally talented, but A plays 1 hour a day and B plays 2 hours a day.
After a month player B will not have just twice as many ships as A, but probably 10 times as many ships as player A. So if war breaks
out, the fleet of player A gets defeated and player B will have fun killing all the soft targets (economic infrastructure like labs,
factories, mines, housing) of player A while he retains his own economic infrastructure.
After that, player A has to rebuild his economic infrastructure, while B can build even more ships and wipe out player A again.
In a game like multiplayer Starcraft or Warcraft, you start equally, are both online during the whole game (I trust) and after
one side wins, the game gets reset again. In this MMO players do not reset after they win, but keep growing while the loser
has to restart. Therefore the rules should not favor player annihilation since that imbalances the game further and chases players away.
It happened over 2 years ago, at the beginning of Live. All the veterans from beta started in the same area, but as the guilds TC and QSC
got defeated by the guild tBH, some of them spawned in an area with new players. Since TC and QSC were experienced players, they
quickly built up and massacred all the newbies who were still trying to figure out the designers, driving a lot of them
out of the game permanently.
This had cost Dark Sky Entertainment a lot of new customers, and made DSE developers really angry.
There are three ways to balance such difference in players:
1) make starter units more relevant in combat. Right now, starter units are a joke when it comes to combat. Give new players some
pre-designed Synthetics units and especially armed facilities that will do half-decent damage so he has a chance at surviving while
he is figuring out the game. Starter armed facilities must have decent radar and weapon range or they will simply be taken out from
a distance.
2) making defense a lot stronger than offense. This means boosting static defenses considerably, both in firepower and in range. It seems
that some of this has indeed been done after I had to leave the game 2 years ago. Create a new facility called "bunker complex" that has
+100 view range and +100 weapon range, and make sure to include one as a starter predesigned Synthetics facility.
3) compartmentalization. This means that a military victory in one environment will not automatically spill over into another environment.
Lets focus on compartmentalization. The first way to do compartmentalization is to make sure that units that can operate in more
environments are weaker than units that can operate in just one environment.
Frigates can fight in both space and on planets, while tanks can only fight on planets. Therefore, tanks
should be able to eat frigates for breakfast or tanks will be irrelevant. Same for naval ships or space-only spaceships.
Concrete proposal: Make the strongest tanks (land units) at least 5 times as strong as frigates and other atmosphere-capable flyers.
That means flyers are useful for their mobility and their ability to quickly take out weak targets of opportunity, even on other planets,
(like paper cash colonies) but will lose against a concentrated tank force or group of armed colony buildings.
Heavy tanks should be the weapon of choice to take down planetary fortresses.
The same for extreme environments. Ships that are designed for one type of extreme planet will either not be able to enter another
type of extreme environment or be at a relative disadvantage in other environments, since the player invested in specs that are not needed
in those environments. A hardcore player will have military for all extreme environments while casual players can choose to specialize in
one type of extreme environment.
Another way would be to make wormhole travel impossible for bigger ships. Making battlegroup movement of big ships mandatory
will slow down blitzkrieg style wars in which whole guilds are crushed in just a few hours. Atmosphere-capable transport ships should be the
biggest ships capable of using a worm hole.
By far the biggest sinner against compartmentalization is orbital bombardment. That means that if a player wins in space, he gets an automatic
victory in the nearby planet environments too. Worse, he can bomb without risk. It makes warfare on the planet pointless if
an attacker is smart enough to bring bombers.
Orbital bombardment is basically an "I win" button and that is terribly unbalancing.
Orbital bombardment cuts a lot of different war tactics out of the game. Right now, tanks are pointless, ships are pointless, and
armoring your buildings will just slow the attacker down but won't stop him.
In fact, orbital bombardment is probably the most important reason (together with war points) I haven't returned to this game earlier
after being forced to quit a while due to real-life reasons.
And judging from remarks from other players, several people feel the same.
So either remove planetary bombardment from the game or make defense against it really easy, right from the start (not just after researching
some obscure rare special you won't see for 3 years).
One possible way to defend would be plasma batteries: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWhrGGrs3Ow (plasma batteries can be seen 1:30 minutes
into the movie clip)
Plasma batteries should be able to eat frigates for breakfast (like in the clip) but smaller ships should be able to avoid them.
Simply using in some way the current rule that high damage weapons have a hard time hitting a small target should do the trick.
Attacking a defended colony with orbital bombardment should be much more painful for the attacker than for the defender.
Using it against planetary fortresses should be a gamble, not a "it can't do any harm and it may do some good" for the attacker.
NB. Programming a defense against orbital bombardment does not have to be done before starting a new BP universe.
Orbital bombardment can simply be turned off (and bombs as a weapon disabled in the designer) and re-enabled later when a surface-to-orbit
defense is finished.
NO CAPTURING PLEASE
From time to time, some players propose allowing capturing units and buildings as a new game rule.
The developers should strongly turn down any and all requests in that direction, as it imbalances the game against weaker players and newbies.
In practice, it will be the stronger player who captures stuff from the weaker player, not the other way around,
benefiting only the stronger player.
Without capturing, weaker players are still competition. With capturing, weaker players effectively become lunch.
It will drive newbies and casuals out of the game faster than anything else. Right now, destroyed units drop minerals that can be harvested by
the winner. In the current version of BP, minerals don't matter much since you can strip-mine as much as you want. However if all the
proposals of this text are implemented, minerals will become much more valuable, and repeat-bashing newbies for their minerals will
become commonplace, driving newbies out of the game.
Solution: remove the rule that destroyed ships drop mineral caches. I`m sure it will be protested by players who want to play pirate but it
is necessary for game balance. And turn down any proposal in the direction of capturing stuff.
ONLINE VS. OFFLINE.
If a BP like game wants to have any appeal to casual players, it must have a credible offline defense. Static defense weapons should have
a much higher shooting range than mobile units or they will just be taken out one by one from a distance.
Give facility radars and weapons higher view range and weapon range (I`m thinking of +100 view and +100 weaponrange),
or make a new facility called "bunker complex" with those view and weapon range bonuses.
Having a rock-paper-scissor system of weapon damage types versus armor is nice if both players are online, but when the defender is offline,
it only gives the attacker the opportunity to kill with minimal losses.
Solution: drop the guaranteed 100% resists. Make resists depend on the properties of the armor material.
Again, the worst thing here is planetary bombardment. Paper bases deserve to die of course, but what if I do make a decent base, go to work,
and when I come back all my bases have been destroyed by planetary bombardment without even scratching the attacker? What is the point
in playing then? Again, planetary bombardment is probably the most important reason I haven't come back earlier.
Of course you can raise full invulnerability as a preventive measure but that shuts down all production in your entire empire,
which means a casual player who has to go to work will never catch up with a player that can at least be online even when he is doing
something else.
Best,
Desertfox.
in the area of designers, aside from perhaps a&e who originally designed them, i likely have the deepest knowledge and experience as well as understanding complex math, over the past few days i have read through the designers and plan on the following changes (adding here or another sourcesafe location to be determined).
1) remove alloying alloys, while this is in real world and the current exploits/flaws with this can be fixed, this change is both easier and simplifies things short term, and can always be re enabled at a later date with no issues to an already running galaxy
2) remove control points on alloys, the only inputs should be minerals (possibly the order of such will continue to influence result) and give a flat average to easily see result, the point of alloying in the first place is to provide diversity, and give a minor 5-10% bonus to researching players
2b) remove techs (gradient/cutting/revol/epic/empire) which apply a global result to all properties
2c) possibly replace the alloying level techs with processes that effect specific things, ie fast cooling steel results in a harder but more brittle material
2d) possibly keep the slight randomness in decimal result, but a more obvious +/- 5 to the result
2e) keep the decimals hidden, but explain the effects, the 5% bonus not being given to all is not a game killing imbalance
3) reroll minerals, keep the 100+, but ensure values exist for perfect mixes, previously not all slots had perfect fits
4) refit designers, stat cost should be effected by mineral properties, ie low combust on proj payload makes pricey aoe, easily set in GetTheBill
5) remove resist choices for armor, leaving only size and hp, resist result will be directly based on minerals chosen, removing most imunity armors except in high quality material choises, this one is a bit harder for me to do alone
6) add more noises to the designers, the point of noises is to add diversity, currently it is possible to remove 100%, it should be a forced choice of which to remove, forcing compromise
6b) some noises will be documented publicly, and clearly show the effects, while some are kept hidden for others to find, since noises give minor 5% changes this does not cause imbalance
aside from section 5, i can do all the above in an hr or so, some additional time for testing, my goal is to simplify the designers, add a strong value to minerals/alloying, and still maintain some hidden (but known to exist) depth without compromising game balance, people can review the above changes until i get time to code em, and point out any remaining possible flaws, any suggestions for properties effected by sections 4 and 6 feel free to list
personally, i dislike few of desert foxes suggestions. but i suppose alot of people dislike what i have on the black edition too so… your milage may vary.
stop and think for a minute. what was BPs goal?
as far as i could tell, it was supposed to be an RTS scaled up to an MMO with plenty of unique unit design options. plenty of stuff got in the way of that. ill write up on my counter arguments to DF later. just dont have the time right now
I think the root of the problem is the fear of being completely wiped out.
What if every player started in a copy of a base system. That base system would be connected to the real universe via a 1 way WH. Those 1 way WH's would drop you into what are currently the spawn/respawn systems. These base systems would not show up on the universe map at all. The base system would have the same planets, terrain, etc.. Level playing field for building. I would probably seed the initial mineral setup the same but any respawn would be random.
Everyone would have a "safe" base of operations.. And the universe could be the bloodbath of war everyone wants.
Probably make it so certain types of research can't be done in the safe system. Limit the mineral types, etc.
But it would allow for that risky war that would only push you back to your home system.
because people would exploit it just as they did with transports, everyone used 1mil cargo ships, untouchable, to store mass banks, no risk of loss, and what happens when people finally bottle up that wormhole out and trap the guy inside? hes forced to sd anyways - change CP penalty to punish declaring based on score not rank, that effectively is a 'level' based system, which many games use, and has proven itself, side effect is people will make better use of their score and not spam countless ships, which works as a plus
i tryed to write something up on this, but because my computer is messed up, i went backspace. so lemme just rewirte the TL;dr version
alloys allowed us who didnt have the time to dick around searching for minerals a way to roll thru quick like, i used 4 minerals to make my empire. made my life alot easyer. didnt have to run all over the place. also players need to have some reason for combat. capturing, scrap and tech points are all fair means for that. there are balances already in place, i dont want some noobs ships. they would suck anyway. warpoints where the complete opposite of rewards. tech points would be better: bout page five https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cKAS4WdWteZ10w7hurw0Lf0O5OSrmF5atUo3ct6ITgg/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIya8dEB&pli=1#
Anxcon wrote:
> 6b) some noises will be documented publicly, and clearly show the effects, while some are kept hidden for others to find, since noises give minor 5% changes this does not cause imbalance
Why on earth do you want to make hidden game rules when the software is open source? That is ridiculous.
People will be studying the sourcecode to find these hidden rules and document them for themselves and their close friends. It will lead to an unfair ineqality between players: some players and their friends who will know the rules and some players who will not.
The whole idea of hidden game rules is something that should be dumped fast. People should be playing the game not chasing hidden game rules. The learning curve is steep enough as it is.
totally agree with Df on that one anxcon. i supported open rules for all from day one of beta - there is enough inequality built into the genre with offline attacks, unemployed players and greifing exploits which are borderline unavoidable. I told Aurelius to assume his audience was dumb and work from there. Not from any belief that all are actually dumb but many miss small things, work while playing and play sporadically etc and a good way to accomodate and not frustrate all these requires a LDC (lowest common denominator).
Dont worry folks, Adam and I are watching, fiddling and biding our time. This baby took over a decade to evolve - a few months are well worth investing in our opinion :)
About: complexity in games.
RTS has a tactical and a strategic part. Strategy means setting up your situation so that when tactical combat breaks out, you have the most advantages. You use those advantages to win (or at least not lose) those battles, which in turn should give you additional strategic advantages. In most strategy games, economy is usually the most important strategic factor.
All economy is based on scarcity, and a player must choose how to use his limited resources.
If you introduce an economic factor but not make it scarce, you might als well drop it from the game because it does not lead to more choices, only to more tediousness and complexity.
In the strategy part of game design, there is good complexity and bad complexity.
Complexity that enables more (relevant) choice is good. Complexity that does not enable more choice is just tedious and should be eliminated.
About: quality of the choice:
If you have a variety of options, these options should have a somewhat similar cost/benefit ratio. If one option is always much better than the other options in any and all situations, then there is not really a choice (example: planetary bombardment).
And if all options lead to nearly the same outcome (example: minerals that can be alloyed), then that is not a real choice either. In that case. the designer of the game should either increase the difference in outcome of the options, or just remove the choice.
Good game design means that the player has the most possible choice with the least possible amount of complexity.
you may be watching vimes, but your not interacting. ive emailed you 3 different ways with no response. im feelin a bit stiffed
exactly, its open source, and if you look all the noises are listed in prototype.vb in componentdesigned, which you can read with windows notepad, any "dumb" person can open a text file, so its even ground, my goal is to provide a list clearly detailing how some noises work, and examples, then others that arent listed (clearly stating others exist, which along with examples of the first makes quick to find), players who want some element of suprise/puzzle may leave it as is, while those who want the list may look at the answers in the back of the book so to speak - just because a new star trek movie is coming, doesnt mean everyone should be forced to see the spoilers
Re-designing the designer.
When you want to make the specific material that is used for components relevant in the designer, there are two possible options:
1) higher property is better. E.g.: a higher combust in projectile payload leads to larger/cheaper AOE damage. The best components are those that use materials with the highest combust.
2) require the player to match a specific number. If you are higher or lower than this number the quality of the component will be less, and worsen as you deviate more from the required number. For example: if you need malleability 5 then a material with malleability 5 will give the best component. A material with malleability 4 or 6 will lead to a lower quality component and it gets worse if you use malleability 3 or 7.
Option (2) is where alloying comes in. Suppose you are in need of a material with 5 hardness and 5 malleability but don't have such material. Looking over your warehouses you find a material with 9 hardness and 1 malleability. That is about as bad a match as you can get, right? Wrong. If you have another material that has 1 hardness and 9 malleability, and mix them to a straight average as Anxcon proposed above, you get a material that is 5 hardness and 5 malleability. And that is exactly what you need.
That means that if you use alloying, there is no such thing anymore as a good material or a bad material. Any material can potentially be used to make anything, with the exception of the extremes of the scale since averages tend to go towards the middle.
But if you use option (1) above then alloying is usually pointless. As averages tend to go to the middle, it is better to use the unalloyed material with the highest of the wanted stat. Unless you need something that is high in more than one stat, in that case some alloying can be beneficial, sacrificing a high number in one stat for an improvement in another stat.
As the example above showed, any material can potentially be used for a matching alloy, even those that differ a lot from the required stats. That means that if you have 117 different materials, and 4 alloy slots to put mined materials in, there are 117 * 116 * 115 * 114 = 177,928,920 different combinations.
Now the next subject is game balance. 177+ million combinations cannot realistically be tested by he game developers. Remember: every material can potentially be used to make the required alloy.
So the devs have to balance the designers around the certainty that sooner or later players WILL find an exact match, even with decimals. And that there is no real difference between the mined materials as any material can potentally be used for that exact match.
And with the source code and thus the formulas publicly available, and materials being more relevant to designing, I expect somebody who has some skill in programming and mathematics, will write an application that does the calculating for him: fill in the required number and available resources, and the application will calculate the best possible alloy.
Hiding the decimals will ultimately not work either: When knowing the exact formulas used in the source code you can write a program where you can enter the public stats of the materials, and the outcome of alloying tests, and given enough results of alloying attempts it will calculate the decimals with a very small reliability interval.
Now suppose that alloying is removed from the game. It has many many advantages.
1) it removes a whole layer of complexity from the designing part of the game, without limiting the variety of units that can be designed. That alone would make BP a better game and more accessible for average players.
2) the properties of materials can actually mean something. Different unique materials are good or bad matches in the various slots of the component designer. It creates a demand for specific materials for specific purposes.
3) 117 different materials, while still a large number, is small enough to be realistically testable in the designer. Actually you only have to test a bad match, a mediocre match and the best match and see how they check out. Since players have no control over the decimals, other than replacing the material with another, there will be no unbalancing surprises.
4) since materials now have fixed value, scarcity can be created by making specific materials harder to get. And this will go a long way towards reviving trade between players.
5) and most importantly, as individual materials now have individual value, it gives the game developers some powerful tools to influence the behaviour of players by controlling access to those materials.
Examples: valuable materials can be used to reward desired gameplay. The devs could give out better materials as a reward for riskier gameplay. Restricting access to certain materials could be used for gamebalancing. Valuable materials could be used to separate high-powered players from less powerful players by luring them away. If you create free-fire zones (like deep space areas in my original writeup) and place the more valuable materials there, you can promote war.
In my writeup at the beginning of this thread, I have posted several ideas on how to use materials to steer player behaviour and improve game balance after removing alloying, but other ideas are of course possible.
Best,
Desertfox.
Anxcon, I think you are mixing up things. The purpose of an RTS is to win. Why would any RTS player deliberately refuse to know some game rules? The only possible result of that is that his units will be weaker which reduces his chance to win.
Cyrus, I have read your writeup. Although I have various disagreements, my most important objection is that you want to change too much. Some of the changes you propose require months of programming, debugging and testing.
Most of the changes I proposed are simple parameter changes, adding or changing some values to the database, or adding some more if/then checks into the software. That takes hours, days or at most weeks. Not months.
Plus the current BP has had years of beta testing. We know what works, what doesn't work and what could be exploited. The code has had considerable debugging. If you want to turn BP into a different game, you will be throwing all that away.
not really. all games are merely a modification of what came before. modify, evolve grow. im not saying all my ideas should be thrown into BP, ive named that page, Black edition, for a reason. alot of its thought spam, take what you want, leave what you dont. what i wrote up there, is what i honestly feel will help add a jolt to the game and bring people in. which is what a busness is supposed to do.
dessertfox - And with the source code and thus the formulas publicly available, and materials being more relevant to designing, I expect somebody who has some skill in programming and mathematics, will write an application that does the calculating for him: fill in the required number and available resources, and the application will calculate the best possible alloy.
you mean like i already did a bit over a year ago? i fully mapped the decimals, created an alloy scanner, and was able to scan for options i wanted, and i can tell you that while some super common mineral say flophoron being used as half an alloy might seem like it 'makes less value in minerals', that alloy is unlikely to make a very close match when you add a 2nd mineral,close yes but not very close, and if you roll the values in a well planned way you can do something (complex for devs, no increase in difficulty for players) which is take 2 closest commons, you'll fit +/- 1 block from req, not the best but good for easy access, then rares are needed to fit the perfect decimal etc, thats some epic math that not even i want to program yet :P
as for your point, property high/low vs distance from req, currently designers are all distance from req, but take my example of proj payload, less then req combust is logically going to drive up cost of aoe, while higher than req combust would lower cost vs high combust raises cost, logical vs illogical, i prefer the first case as it follows logic, but payload is only 1 property type, consider armor using 10+ properties, easy enough to alloy stuff to avg 5 across the board, but when you apply higher is better, you give value to smart alloys, who knows some cases in designers might work better at distance from req too and i end up with both, dont know till i finish the list :) feel free to catch me on msn/aim and help
as for point of the game, half the people think war, why play if you dont like pew pew? yet throughout history rts such as bp and mk have supported trade, diplomacy, bp had research, no reason poeple should be denied the option explore things for themselves, if they wanna go look nothin stops them but themselves :)
Anxcon wrote:
> if you roll the values in a well planned way you can do something which is take 2 closest commons, you'll fit +/- 1 block from req
Why take the two closest commons? If you want 5, you can average 4+6, 3+7, 2+8, 1+9 or 0+10. And that is with only 2 minerals.
Only if you come near the extremes of the scale you will have less options but in general you are not required to use close commons.
> then rares are needed to fit the perfect decimal etc, thats some epic math that not even i want to program yet :P
Easy. If you make all the commons have even numbers (in the decimals) then an average of 2 commons will also be an even number. So if the match is an uneven number you can never reach it by averaging two commons. Now if you use 3 or 4 minerals, you have to make sure the commons are multiples of 12 (in the decimals) and if you average those, you`ll always get an even number, no matter if you use 2,3 or 4 minerals to average. But the random +/- 5 you planned kinda messes this up.
> as for point of the game, half the people think war, why play if you dont like pew pew? yet throughout history rts such as bp and mk have supported trade, diplomacy, bp had research, no reason poeple should be denied the option explore things for themselves, if they wanna go look nothin stops them but themselves :)
BP is marketed as an mmorts. Trade and diplomacy are part of mmo. Tech trees and research are part of RTS. Complex Math games are not a natural part of the rts genre nor a natural part of mmo.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy for a list of what are natural elements of an RTS.
An mmorts is generally a niche game because it is time-demanding. On top of that, the complex unit design of BP makes the game a niche within a niche. E.g. Mankind is also an MMORTS. One Mankind player said about BP: "I quit BP because it took me hours to design just the simplest units".
Now if you also add math-games you get a niche within a niche within a niche. If you make a niche within a niche within a niche the number of players will be very low. People who like complex math games are not likely to be attracted to BP since math games are not a part of mmorts, and people who like RTS do not always like math games even if they do like complex unit design. On top of that, alloying makes the minerals interchangeable which means there is no point in geographic distribution and its potential strategic depth, so RTS fans will find BP a bit shallow as a strategy game.
Now there is a rule in engineering: to reach the perfect result you must not only add everything that should be added but also remove everything that should not be part of the result.
> feel free to catch me on msn/aim and help
programming goes along this path: functional design -> technical design -> writing code.
As you and I do not agree on the functional design I don't see how we can cooperate on the other two.
I personally feel the mineral sets, and alloy mixes should be left as is.
1. Anyone can design a resonably cost ship with 'Any' mineral.
2. Anyone can learn the noises, and therefore craft suitable noise-free alloys, with ease.
3. The only changes should be that when you hit the INT/DEC wanted values this should reduce the mineral cost WAY more then it does.
3a. INT reduces it X%.
3b. DEC spot on hit reduces it Y%
The way it is, anyone can use any mineral, without the need of math. Anyone wanting to 'cut down' on loss can craft alloys to counter the noises, with ease. Anyone wanting to 'really cut costs' has to invest their time to really understand things, therefore the end result bonus is paid for in their time.
Just my thoughts.
Marc Letford wrote:
> Dont worry folks, Adam and I are watching, fiddling and biding our time. This baby took over a decade to evolve - a few months are well worth investing in our opinion :)
There is no guarantee it will only be a few months. The current version of BP failed despite a decent start, so there are some significant flaws in the game. If those flaws are not repaired then the next incarnation of BP is going to fail also.
In the writeup at the beginning of this thread I listed a large number of interconnected rule changes that, if implemented together, will solve a large number of flaws. The resulting game will probably not fit everybody's taste of course, but it will be much more balanced, both in gameplay and between types of players, have more strategic depth and is a bit less complex while retaining the freedom and tactical richness of current BP. In other words: the game will have much more long-term viability. So it will be good as a base-line for the game. And once you have a viable game, you can then continue to improve it further.
But I consider it possible that my whole writeup will be ignored by the devs. However the flaws that are addressed with my write-up will not go away and must therefore be solved in another way or the game is likely to fail again.
So far, the devs have made no public statement whatsoever on what direction they want the game to evolve in, in order to prevent another failure.
Enoch is working on improving the graphics. This is of course good but graphics is not the primary reason of why the game failed. Anxcon wants to add more secrets to the game. I have no idea what problem he wants to solve with that. I think it will reduce the viability of the game even more.
Until the flaws in the game are identified and fixed, the game will have a high chance of failing again and again. And with flaws I mean functional design flaws, not bugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy describes what makes a game an RTS.
quote:
"In an RTS, as in other wargames, the participants position and maneuver units and structures under their control to secure areas of the map and/or destroy their opponents' assets. In a typical RTS, it is possible to create additional units and structures during the course of a game. This is generally limited by a requirement to expend accumulated resources. These resources are in turn garnered by controlling special points on the map and/or possessing certain types of units and structures devoted to this purpose. More specifically, the typical game of the RTS genre features resource gathering, base building, in-game technological development and indirect control of units.
(snip)
Though some game genres share conceptual and gameplay similarities with the RTS template, recognized genres are generally not subsumed as RTS games. For instance, city-building games, construction and management simulations, and games of the real-time tactics variety are generally not considered to be "real-time strategy"."
So in a typical RTS, resources are garnered by controlling specific locations on the map.
So to increase the strategic depth of an RTS, you have to increase the variety of locations involved in garnering resources.
This confirms my analysis that the two biggest flaws in BP are 1) orbital bombardment 2) alloys.
Orbital bombardment ensures that per planet there is only one point worth controlling and that is the space area directly above the planet. The many locations on the planet are irrelevant from a strategic point of view. Tanks and naval ships are just introduced into the game for nostalgic reasons or so.
Alloying and random distribution of minerals means any piece of land is equivalent to any other piece of land.
how is it more secrets? first off its open source, by definition secrets cannot exist, worst case someone is going to go and read code, then like me goto forums and post a full how-to a few days later, i had to learn decimals without having code,
second knowledge spreads, even IF there is some super secret plot to hide aliens, guess what? it gets out! majority of noises and decimals were widely known aside from the lazy peeps who didnt care to goto forums but instead merely complain
third every change i proposed above simplifies designers, mineral properties clearly drive the costs of components fixing the flaw of valueless minerals, math removed from alloying to straight avg that even 1st graders can understand, fixing both flaws of 1) picking any 2 minerals, brute force into anything 2) brute force an alloy equals bypassing all noises by default as properties drop to 0
fourth, again its open source, likely 50 people will be running their own servers, and my changes i highly doubt would be in the core copy everyone runs, unless they chose to add it themselves, so your paranoia that what i change will somehow cause the downfall of another galactic civilization is a moot point - and fact is, until the above is accually coded and tested with a few peeps, neither you nor i will know if it really 'helps things' as dare i say some people will fail at adding 2+2 on a calculator
and finally, your mentality that bp is an rts game is your biggest flaw, i myself, vimes, para, to name a few have played nearly every (if not definatively every) mmorts game in existence, many marketed under 3x or 4x which is still basicly the same thing, and is wildly different from a standard RTS, and while the flaws in alloying hid this fact, minerals were based on planet class, commons were everywhere (potterine), but the rares (lithous was needed in nearly any armor, even after considering the alloying flaws) were very picky, so specific planets did have value - should the value of a planet be broken down further into parts of a map (hills, craters, etc)? imo it was already, but as said OB nearly made that a moot point, it was possible to be imune to OB though but only with full armor and shield tech, i do agree OB needs a nerf, but many disagree with that as well, and since no senate prop was even atempted to be made, i guess not enough agreed a nerf was needed
"Orbital bombardment ensures that per planet there is only one point worth controlling and that is the space area directly above the planet. The many locations on the planet are irrelevant from a strategic point of view. Tanks and naval ships are just introduced into the game for nostalgic reasons or so."
This statement is very true given the end-game techs to counter this tactic were never released.
1. Planet shields, prevent all forms of orbital bombing. You must go down to the surface and find the generator and destroy it.
2. Better per-single-structure defense like Lightning Shields might be added to the PShield generator to give some kickback to attackers.
3. Mass Drivers, set to assist orbit, will take a selected raw mineral or alloy, and fire that blindly into space. If any collision occurs it then uses the mineral properties to determine damage type, and amount. Explosive properties lead to AOE explosions.
4. Late in live game idea to add 'Assist Orbit' and the inverse. This was not completed but the idea was any ariel units on a planet, or a spacedock, can be set to assist orbit. They will quite simply undock, goto space, fight off agressors in range, and return to dock. The inverse is also true. If a unit is in space it will follow or go down to the planet to attack, and return to its position. These two were part of a larger AI change with the goal to increase the 'Rally to help' from 'self unit wpn range' to 'radar detection range', and adding AndPlanetorOrbit.
I feel with the addition of key end-game techs, and a tweeking of the AI this made Orbital Bombing very counterable, and forced players down to the planet. Forcing them there. Keeping them there, as assist will trigger my defense forces to follow you back and forth so no more running. You have to truly leave the planet far behind and my units will stop. etc.. etc..
Thoughts?
The problem is that those are end-game techs. From what I remember, you could use orbital bombardment extremely early. Balancing the game exclusively around the end-game leads to stalemates and boring, stagnant universes, imo.
They should be in both the Release/ and Debug/ dirs, unless I missed a few?
There is nothing at all in the /Release directory on the SVN for Operator, didn't check the other one.