Make attacking more interesting
 

I'd like to propose (hopefully by giving an entire round for something to be coded these might actually have a chance of getting in!) that we expand on the ways in which we can attack in PA. I'm basically stealing round 8 overburn attacking to propose two additional ways of attacking.


1) Stealth-attacking. This attack can be launched and will not appear on the gal status/lead to a notification whatever. It raises the eta of your fleet by 1/2/3 ticks* and becomes visible on the gal status at eta 4. By launching this sort of attack you lose between 0 and 10% of your sent fleet (I'd also stick in a minimum value of ships lost to reduce the advantages xan have by faking here). The planet being attacked would see this fleet and could report it to this alliance. I haven't really decided yet if this fleet should be shown on jgps, I'd lean towards no.

2) Overburn attacking. This type of attack decreases the overall ETA of your attack fleet by 1/2/3 ticks. It also will cost you a certain % of your attack fleet. Slightly more complicated due to the value of -2 ticks off fi/co. I'd propose nothing can appear lower than eta 5 and that the costs be relative to the "final ETA", not the original one. So moving cr/bs to fr/de eta costs 0-5%, cr/bs or fr/de to fi/co eta costs 10-15, anything to eta 6 costs 15-25 and anything to eta 5 costs 25-50. Numbers are just rough examples. Overburn defence, for roughly equal or slightly "cheaper" costs, would also be possible. This attack would appear with overburn ETAs on the jgp.


*Possibly you could have some interplay between the raised eta and the % of ships lost.


Just to clarify obviously I mean % lost as in value, not ships and you would lose these ships straight after your attack launches.





Edit: Why this would be a good addition to the game.

1) It provides more variety in the ways in which people can attack, variety is, almost by definition, a good thing for a game to have.
2) It includes the mid-ranking players more. Rank 2-600 players will be more willing to risk taking the chance of losing a chunk of their fleet to roid a big planet.
3) It'll increase the roid flow in the universe. Roids will change hands more often.
4) Although it makes the game more interesting for the mid-ranking players it also rewards activity. If you're online you'll be able to cope with stealth attacking fairly easily.
5) It introduces an element of randomness to the game which has been sadly lacking for a long time. This has been asked for quite a bit by people and I think this suggestion adds this without leading to some sort of really annoying point where you can't actually calc anything and by default people just newbie bash.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Could you do anything similar for defense?

Edit: I'm specifically considering the possibilities of ETA 5/6 FCs.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Apologies, added overburn defence as a possibility. I first thought of this last night and my thought processes must have been lagging today so I left out a few things I'd already considered originally.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Would the ships lost on overburn be included in salvage ?

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

I hadn't considered that at all to be honest. If it made defending really gay I'd say yes, if not, no. It's not really something I'd like to predict without even testing it though.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Would the attacker lose ships just by launching this attack, or only if he lands?
I have to say i don't like this suggestion, because i fear it will rewards active / organized players much more than inactive ones.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Launching. And in fairness how this is "rewarding the active players" is beyond me. If anything, as I outlined, it helps the mid-ranked player. Do you seriously think t20 players are going to risk significant portions of their fleet? Maybe so but in that case well done to them, it'll make the game more interesting. If by "active" you mean active enough to get online and attack well I'm pretty sure that's the type of player we need to make the game appealing to. In case you haven't noticed we're still below 1000 planets right now. I don't think we really need to worry about how various features impact on joe newbie given the fact the game looks like such a piece of shit I can't imagine how anyone is bothered starting up. You need to make it appealing to the core of the game in order to prevent it from dying and give some time to whoever is responsible for turning it into something that doesn't so closely resemble a dried turd.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Isn't the point of any game to reward activity? Otherwise why just not have bots run the game? Pick your bot, let it go and come back in 7 weeks and see who wins!

Anyway regarding the initial suggestion, it is interesting. If implemented there would be a ton of complaints that it is unfair I suspect. One word of caution, while I agree having a variety of attach options is essential to having an interesting game, they need to be balanced. Otherwise one option is determined by the players to be the optimal, and no other paths are used. Adding the factor of loosing ships is one interesting way to do this. I might even suggest it would be worth facing the possibility of loosing 100% of your ships as part of the stealth attack due to the defender noticing it. It would obviously have to be a rather low probability to make stealth attacks worth considering, but having it as an option would be interesting in my opinion.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

If the attacker loses ships every time he launches then it could be interesting. But then you have to worry that this gameplay style would probably encourage XP whoring. (Also a matter of taste, but i dislike it very much).
Also, I consider myself the average PA player and "core" of the game. I have been playing this game for over 9 years now, on and off, and I no longer have the time / desire to log in nights to check if someone is overburning / stealth hitting me, or wake up in the morning to see that someone is already eta1 or landed on my planet bc he used overburn.
In that sense, active players are less prone to fall victim of these attacks, because they can cover themselves more easily than those who are not that active.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

May i suggest another funny tactic that would be awesome to implement. Launching your fleet on a similar stealth mission in order to hide somewhere in the universe.
Lets say you launch your fleet using stealth technology with high eta, you then have the option to hide your fleet on a certain ETA, like 5 or 6 perhaps. Each tick you stay there you need to pay a % of your income which can be compared to wages in real life. Waring costs money after all. What this tactic can be used for is to sneak in on a gal with fleets out after hiding for a few ticks, the planet you THEN decide to attack would have to get ridiculous expensive overburn def or organize def ingal.
It is also possible to include clusters or paralells in this tactic, by perhaps giving the ability to appear ETA5 on planets in your paralell, while it is eta6 everywhere else.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

As interesting as that would be I'd really like to limit suggestions to things that have a non-zero chance of getting implemented :(

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

they would definitly risk it, if the value cap wasnt big enough, another top20 player with entire fleet out, send a tiny fleet at him wich he cant get back in time for loose 25% of what you sent and get sexeh roids.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Not to say that I don't like the idea - variety is top - I don't see how this could not really screw someone's round up near the end. Overburn def with a ship loss would be a bad idea, what about resending/recalling?

All it takes is a few people who don't care about planet ranks and they could really mess someone up.

I do think it would make alliance wars more fun. So while I think in principle its a good idea, it needs some balance I think because its abusable to a deadly level in this suggested form. And there needs to be some way to defend against it too. Or not, but that would really change things and I'm not sure for the better :P

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Any decrease in attack ETAs increases the possibility that a player can lose his whole fleet whilst sleeping or being AFK for any other reason (such as work). This is most likely to happen to the less active players but even we "addicts" could be caught in exceptional circumstances. Yes, there are steps one can take to keep ships safe but it's not always possible to wait for all fleets to get home before leaving the keyboard.

The idea of ETA 5/6 FCs is particularly worrying and might have the unfortunate effect of stopping almost all attacks on the top alliances. ATM it is possible to check for FCs just before landing - if you decide to land (or fail to check) then it's your own "fault".

The "stealth" attack proposal doesn't have those major drawbacks but it would share the characteristic of being more effective against the less active players - not necessarily a good move when we're trying desperately to attract (new) players rather than driving them away. (Although I agree with JBG that we're continuing to fail miserably in this area - for all kinds of reasons).

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

No, the point of any game is to reward decisions.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Making decisions requires activity....

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

I'm not seeing how this makes the game more interesting, it just makes the game quicker.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

To be honest that does make the game more interesting. One of the worst parts of PA is how long it actually takes for anything to happen.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

i think the overburn suggestion is abit too complicated in general but i like the stealth idea. ppl will moan if they are away and nobody has any chance whatsoever to help them so perhaps it shud just be eta 5 it shows. the stealth one definately has potential.

also have you thought of perhaps the "stealth jumpgate" and "overburn jumpgate" being additions to the time travel technology tree? making them researchable only, thus the higher rankin players roid racing may not have the time to do them and so as you stated the midranking players who have less roids and more research points to direct into a void tree like time travel will be gain the most benefit

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Why don't remove Cov Ops and use Stealth/Alert somekinda related to stealth attacks? Ofc there should be a technology to research for it, but would it be 1 tech or split by the Hulls?

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

This I really, really like.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Making a decision certainly is the result of an action taken, but a game should not reward you just because you take the same action over and over again.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

My advice would be to reintroduce geography and reduced in cluster ETA, with clusters that max out at 150 planets (this would be about 10 galaxies tops).

In this scenario you force alliances to add a territorial element to their strategy. You also enable groups of players to set up their own power bases by virtue of their location, rather than just their extended contacts. In my view this is a simple measure that makes the game no more difficult to play but gives lower ranked players a chance to do something for themselves, while demanding more from the best alliances.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Suppose:

A person is fleetcaught eta 5 by 6 planets.
Why would 5-10 of his alliancemates waste 20% of their fleet to defend this person?

I do understand they would like to save this person, but all of them loosing 20% is most likely more than the original fleetcatch loss of the person under attack.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Fair enough maybe they wouldn't defend it. But it's a huge risk from those 6 planets to send their attack and equally they might have lost more value launching that attack than they stand to kill off on their fleetcatch.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Although I am not a fan of JBG's suggestion... for the following reasons

1. It does Hinder the non uber active usually new players or folks with less time.
2. Another incentive for VNC use.

I still think it is worthy of testing

If I was to make a suggestion... These gaming concepts could be used for say a World Cup event (similar idea to the one we had in 2006) for something to add a bit of change.

(If memory serves correctly we had something that resembled old skool stats)

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Er Paisley literally every single possible way of gaining any advantage, or doing anything extra, whatsoever is another incentive for VNC use. And as I said it's likely to be more the mid-ranking players who benefit from this. They're the ones who are more likely to "gamble" their score. Testing out like that would be cool (although I wonder if we'd even have enough for a world cup event these days).

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

instead of paying for the overburn attacks with value / resources, I prefer another way to deal with the advantage.

The "Do or Die" mission. You send out your fleet at such a speed you will be unable to get back in contact with them before they have landed the attack. You get -1 eta on your attack ( or so ) but you cant recall it no matter what.

Will be hard to defend, but if you do manage to defend it.....

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

I'm going slightly off topic...

Astro Empires (AE) has a combat engine that is similar to the way it used to be in PA round 1 (no inits, everything fired at the same time).

The more I look at AE, the more I see from the old days of PA. Its almost as if they took the old style of PA and evolved slower but better than PA (the jump in gameplay from round 9 to PAX was huge).

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Would it be wanted or even possible to have settings for your fleets like in population? You could choose between.. let's say like 'ETA', 'Def', 'Att', 'Roiding'.. And the settings would add X% to armor, damage or roiding (or what ever the options are). But like, if you want increase armor, your roiding and damage are bit worse.. You get the idea.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

I am interested in this idea. I think that adding 2 new technologies to the ETA tree would be the best way forwards.

The concerns about overburn defence costs are pretty valid, so I think that the % would be much much lower for overburn defence than for overburn attack, or there'd have to be some other penalisation (requiring 2 fleet slots not 1, for example). I'm not as concerned as I once would have been about low eta fleets due to the ability to keep your home fleet safe now.

There's still a lot of scope for discussion on exactly how this idea would be implemented, and there's no promise that something like this would be implemented, but it has my attention.

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

I still can't belive why I havent gotten the Casino research so I can build casinos and spend all my resources there :(

Re: Make attacking more interesting
 

Don't forget about the FC implications.