Making production last forever without cheating
 

I was thinking about posting this midround but never really remembered or had the time when i remembered.

how to make production last forever without much effort or cheating:

1) place your order. lets say its 100000 FI class and you use all your light factories. This will take you 10 ticks

2) after 9 ticks you ADD a fr/de or cr/bs class ship to the same production. add 1 ship! with ALL your factories of that type. You can also do this immediately but i prefer doing it as late as possible

3) after you have placed this order, and ALL your factories are being used on that 1 ship, you change the amount of factories being used to 1. This one factory will now be set to do produce all the other factories factorycosts including the 1 ship you ordered. This will add a LOT of ticks to your production (i usually added 18 ticks) every time this new order is finishing ETA1 or whenever you got time to re-add, simply cancel the 1 ship from the order and repeat this procedure.


tip: this means that your main production in theory is always ETA1 out and is deadly for your incs :)


also as an other tip i would like to notify all players about the factorycosts i just mentioned. if you at night around 2000 gmt or something make all your factories produce just 1 ship in every class you will have factorycost already done when your incs appears (if you get any) and this makes a SIGNIFICANT reduction to how many ships you can produce in time for your incs. usually you can spend your ENTIRE stockpile in time by using this trick :)


This is only exploiting the possibilities given to us by changes in the manual and is not cheating. all experienced players use this and its only fair that everyone knows about it :)

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

i would just like to say thank you as a returning player this round 27 i always wanted to know how people kept so much in production. so thank you very much.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

I've been petitioning Cin to close this loophole, it's really simple to do, simply only allow ships that use the same factory in the same orders. This is really a bug in the game in my opinion, though certainly legal to use.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Obviously this is a loophole and not an intended feature, as such it should be fixed.
Thanks HaNzI for bringing up the subject.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

This was an intended feature. Cin knew about it preround.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Its more likely that cin couldnt be arsed to fix it preround and just left it as an "intended feature" for now
Its an exploit of the production system imho. If orders were truely allowed to be 'paused' there would be a pause button to do it.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Quoted for truth.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

What do you mean by "fix" it?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

either by introducing a pause button to pause orders, or by removing the exploit which allows this to work

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

The problem exists because everyhting has been made complex, complexity adds problems, and beta testers aren't nec. trying to break things but more 'test to find the optimal performance' (NOT a good way to test for bugs really).

The fact the bug exists and has been known about for ages and hasn't been fixed yet isn't good - it may be a minor insignificant thing, but it should be fixed.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

How would either of these things improve the game for anyone?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

I disagree. Having things like this is cool. It rewards thinking about the game. Obviously if it was an instant win button it'd be pretty stupid but this way it just adds something to the game itself.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

how does leaving a bug/exploit in the code simply because " you cant be arsed" to fix it, or if you are using it as a test to see "how many others report it" improve the game?

Fact is, any bug should be either corrected or accepted as a feature, and a far more friendly way of implementing the functionality it introduced inserted.

If the production system is meant to allow for orders to be paused indefinitely, then a simple mechanism to pause an order is preferable to a method that forces you to jump through a few hoops, regularly to get it done.
If the production system is not meant to allow for orders to be paused indefinitely then removing the exploit is preferable to a broken production system that allows for very nasty surprises to be hidden from attackers.

Personally, i don't think functionality like this should remain, so i would prefer to see the bug corrected.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

well you don't have to do it that way. you allways just put the order on few factories(you have to have many) and still manage to keep it in prod fora long time(add other class shippies to the order or just extend the order with more of the same shippies) and yet manage to get them out for inc. But then you need to be online atleast a few ticks before they land and not eta 1. Not all are uber 1337.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Doesn't matter how you could do it.. its an exploitable bug and should therefor be closed up.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Watching people who don't play the game attempt to beat any originality or intelligence out of it really brightens up my day :up:

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

watching forum mods who should really know better, use ad hominem attacks instead of defeating an argument on its merits brightens up mine.

Go ahead JBG, justify why bugs make the game more original, or make people more intelligent. Remember that you need to be intelligent ( or lucky ) to find bugs. its not the case that finding them *makes* you intelligent

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

I may not play, but I was asked to help... I made suggestions... nothing happened and now I've had my access removed again. You may forget, but I used to have a LARGE involvement around these parts, so don't rant about those who don't play etc.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

What bug?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

in this instance it was very easy to spot, tho I have to admit that I feared that there might be some kind of cutoff built in so I never used it more than twice ;)

as the manual is now not particularly up to date I dont see it as a problem that there are features that are not in it. In this instance it simply needed looking at the production page and seeing how you could cancel each section of an order to work out how to use it, so it looked more like a feature than a bug to me.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Starting at the end:
I don't have an opinion either way. I've never bothered prod-hiding, because it's tedious.

Stepping back for a moment, people generally get hooked on games (not just games, any sorts of hobbies or tasks really) that have some sort of progression. Not just progression in game terms (more roids, more ships, more defense fleets), but also progression in terms of learning how to use tools.

Taking prod-hiding as an example, there's nothing to says you need to use prod-hiding to play PA. Therefore, for a new player, the pause button is simply noise. It's a feature that they have to deal with that they don't actually need to play. By hiding it in the production system, PA gains a learning curve and new features that can be unlocked as they become necessary.

Visible isn't a synonym for friendly.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

But, its not an invisible 'feature' that should exist? Surely its a bug cos its something that shouldn't happen.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

It's not a bug in the sense of any of the vast number of bugs we've had over the rounds where you actually have to do something utterly bizzare and surreal which you wouldn't think had anything to do with the game at all for it to work. You can work out that this works just by thinking about the game.

What do you mean rant? I was just mocking phil's, and to a far lesser extent, your tendency to get involved in trying to change a game you don't play to conform to certain standards you prefer.

It's not a bug if it was intended to be there. I wasn't saying it makes people more intelligent, although the processes of lateral thinking involved would probably broaden your grasp of such a fair bit. Rather I was pointing out it rewards thinking logically about the game.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

By pure definition it cannot be a technical bug because the designer classed it as intentional. Of course, we could now go to the point where we talk about design bugs, but here it obviously boils down to "Cin wanted it to work that way". Tough luck, this is game design: Someone dictates how something should be, and then they decide what things inside the system are exploits and what are intended features.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Why do you think it shouldn't happen? You're just posting incoherent rambles about how bugs should be removed, but you're not presenting any argument why you think it it's a bug or undesirable feature.

[edit]It seems I was a little late pointing this out. Shit happens.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Planetarion in the early days was FAR less complicated with far less progression in the game, and yet people still got hooked.

Theres nothing which says you need to use scans, or covert ops, or ingame forums, or ingame messaging, or the message from commanders to play pa either. To new players these are also noise ( although it could be argued that the message from commanders section is noise for most people too )

The difference is that these are things which were actively developed, documented and announced as features - not something which was discovered by a third party, ignored by a developer and the knowledge kept within a small subset of people.
Its not a feature, its a byproduct of something else ( a flaw in the eta calculation algorithm or the implementation of it ), just as the exploit last round involving sending parameters to the page which were not included in it is a byproduct of a lack of range checking on fields.

Hidden and undocumented are not synonyms for 'feature' any more than visible is a synonym for friendly. By having a visible interface to this functionality however, it legitimises it as something which is intended and not something that happens due to a flaw.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Whether it's a bug or a feature is entirely a question of definition. Since PAteam have explicitely stated that it's a feature, it's a feature. If you think it's a bug, please explain to me how you define the bug/feature dichotomy in a way that allows PAteam to be wrong.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

People got hooked to Pong, Tetris and Breakout. What exactly is your point?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

The same one you've carried further to even more simplistic games; That its not the progression of learning a games tools which makes it addictive

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

No. You can actually work out that you can do this just by reading how the production system works.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

whilst i'm pro creativity and all, i'm rather skeptical to how 'intended' this really is

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Whoosh.

My point was that "back in the day" people weren't as spoiled as they are today. Games like Doom or Pong wouldn't last an hour in 2008, but were "the shit" (if you'll excuse the expression) back in the day. The same can be said about Planetarion.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Cin was using it himself to hide resources when the round started pretty much. To my knowledge he hadn't been informed by either gate or satyr, who had been the two who realised that this was possible early on (first I believe).

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Yeah it was quite the laugh when people got closed for making illegal never orders while it was totally doable to do legally.. Whole prod system ended up more flawed than it was before the changes and you could play the whole round with 5 factories and still have insane speed on orders, I remember Satyr getting like 70k corsairs out in 3 ticks in the middle of the round, heh.
Whole system would need a revamp imo but I doubt anyone will bother doing it so things will stay the same for next round..

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

I respectfully disagree.


Actually to play the game at all you do need to use scans and some form of comunication. I agree that covert operations and to an extent the message from your commander are noise.

Are you saying that good things shouldn't be allowed to happen by accident? If PA was rife with hidden features I'd be willing to consider this argument, but it's not so I'm not.

You're right, it's completely orthogonal. I'm glad we agree :)

Not really. Rocket jumping was a widely used feature in all the quake games that was never (and afaik still isn't) documented.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

All this fuss over a little feature, which real benefit got completely slaughtered by another feature introduced in the same round (the new planetscan system).

I wonder what ppl will think or do when they find out it's possible to steal twice the amount of ships your enemy sent. Ideally, that's more ships from another race and a bigger value gain through salvage in one go. \o/
That's what i call a bug, it hasn't been announced on portal as a feature in the combat engine, nor is pa team able to fix it. The bug has been around for several rounds now, that i know of, yet nobody ever made fuss over that one.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

That bug would be pretty easy to nail as a cheat under the farming system to be fair. I don't think it's ever happened in the massively beneficial way though so far. Presumably once it has there'll be an utterly hilarious uproar over it all.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

http://game.planetarion.com/show_news.pl?id=7483
http://game.planetarion.com/show_news.pl?id=7484

This is one from last round, admittedly in havoc, but still..
It took a while before i realised what really happened there, coz i already forgot about the bug i encountered once while beta testing a few rounds ago.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

There was also an utterly horrifying bug with etd and zik stealers where they'd both die stealing the same ships which nobody ever figured out. Luckily we saved the day there by removing etd stealers!

That brep doesn't even make sense. Exactly twice as many rogues as should have been stolen were. However the % of everything else was slightly less than that. Based on armour?

I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say it was based on the old etd/zik problem with thieves and maras both firing in the same way as rangers and pirates in r23 odd or whenever it was I last saw it.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Yep, you're right.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

To everyone who thinks this should stop, you are all completly crazy. i suppose after u put a stop to long prodding stuff you will want a scan that will tell you exactly when and how much is in production when it will come out? A button on ur missions page called "bail out" where ur fleet can insta recall coz there were more ships than ur 100% accurate calc showed maybe?.

tbh leave it there its doing no harm, community knows about it big whoop. sure it might be dubious game design / programming but at least it adds an element to the game. Also i'd suggest a "bug" like this is the least of our worries right now and tbh there are more pressing issues, right?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

i miss the old fixed prodtimes.... but the nubs who are supposed to fix bugs sits and polish the @ in their admin channels and think they are the backbone of pa

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

1) place your order. lets say its 100000 FI class and you use all your light factories. This will take you 10 ticks

2) after 9 ticks you ADD a fr/de or cr/bs class ship to the same production. add 1 ship! with ALL your factories of that type. You can also do this immediately but i prefer doing it as late as possible

3) after you have placed this order, and ALL your factories are being used on that 1 ship, you change the amount of factories being used to 1 (do you change all the orders including the 100,000 FI in production to just one factory). This one factory will now be set to do produce all the other factories factorycosts including the 1 ship you ordered (what does he mean by product all the other factories factory costs? Does he mean all the production times are now the same? If so what, one or 18 ticks?) . This will add a LOT of ticks to your production (i usually added 18 ticks) every time this new order is finishing ETA1 or whenever you got time to re-add, simply cancel the 1 ship from the order and repeat this procedure ( Does he mean that when the original order gets down to eta 1 reorder the one ship with all factories then change it back to one factory after the order is entered? This would recalculate the delivery time to extend it out?).


tip: this means that your main production in theory is always ETA1 out and is deadly for your incs ( I’m not sure I understand how it keeps all production 1 tick out if it added 18 ticks to the order production time unless he means that if he cancels the order for one ship the 100,000 ships come out the next tick)


also as an other tip i would like to notify all players about the factory costs i just mentioned. if you at night around 2000 gmt or something make all your factories produce just 1 ship in every class you will have factory cost already done when your incs appears (does he mean production time has already been determined, if not what does he mean by factory cost here) (if you get any) and this makes a SIGNIFICANT reduction (reduction in time or reduction in ships) to how many ships you can produce in time for your incs. usually you can spend your ENTIRE stockpile (does he mean you can now spend all your resources to the production being built to get it out in just one tick?) in time by using this trick


Maybe I’m caught up in not understanding his intended terminology. The production costs might mean time etc. I think terminology does me in most times because I don’t think the way players think who have been playing for a long time. If you have the time could you please clarify what he meant in terms I might understand. I’m rather new to the current game terminology being used, or maybe just too dense to understand. I tend to be very dense and have trouble understanding what is obvious to everyone else.

Thanks

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

It doesn't matter if you change the number of factories on the main order or not, as it wont complete until all the separate parts of the production order are finished. You may want to keep it on 1 factory to increase the amount of separate orders you can have going though.

Every factory you now add to an order adds 10k Production units to it. Hence, if you add alot of factories to an order with a low eta to completion you can actually make it longer. In this case, adding the combined production units from 8/9 or however many factories to a small order of one ship, and then changing the number of factories working the order to 1 means you have a fair amount of production units with little production output.

http://game.planetarion.com/manual.php?page=31 scroll down to production time and you can see the formula and the terms explained.

He means cancelling the 1 ship and going through the above process again when the 1 ship is eta 1 or w/e. The 'real' order can be sitting at 100% complete but wont come out till all factories added to the order have completed.

He does. The cost of cancelling 1 ship is negligible so can be done at any time, and orders like this that become 100% complete come out at the next tick.

he's on about the 10k factory cost that is added to all orders per factory that i mentioned earlier. By adding a ship you can get rid of the 10k pu's per factory early so if you need to order ships later on the total pu's is lower and you can get more res out in a shorter time.

reduction in time it takes to get ships out.

not really, he's just exaggerating a bit in that you can get more out during the morning by working through the inherent factory costs in the evening.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Why do you write in yellow?

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

whats wrong with yellow? :/

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

It reminds me of your face.

(Nothing is wrong with yellow, I was just curious)

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

Pff. I thought they would fix it. Ah well. Fix it for rnd. 29 then plz. I'm not going to bother with this round.

Re: Making production last forever without cheating
 

this is relevant today aswell :)