Beta testers Wanted.
 

Hi folks just to give an open invite to be a beta tester.
Appocomaster was kind enough to allow this beta testing to happen so thanks to Him and the PA team.

There will be a beta test on thursday 12th november on the beta server.
http://beta.planetarion.com
Sign ups are availabe now and 1 min ticks start at 5pm till 11pm GMT (allows 360 ticks of testing/play)
Distorters are disabled.
1 Amp on startup
all scan tech given to each planet on start up
2mill of each start up resources and 70x base construction and 80x base research as you would get from the race you play as per usual and the paid bonus to use as you see fit.
Free choice in government (no changes to current round)
Galaxy size and alliance size will be determined by how many folk attend.

http://beta.planetarion.com/manual.pl?page=stats
http://beta.planetarion.com/statsanalysis.pl?race=5

The Xan ship fireblade is steal and cloaked at the same time.

What will be tested is the feature that stealers don't die on capping ships but die through combat and testing for bugs in combat
Also testing of the stats and input/feedback will be welcomed and pasting of calcs and battle reports on forums will be most welcomed.

If you have comments on the stats or would like to tender your interest in coming along please reply to the thread.

Join /j #beta channel on netgamers server for IRC for chat etc.

Hope to see you there :)

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Cloaked stealers?

That's clearly what we need in this game.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

The stats aren't final and is a draft so any input is welcomed.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

This is pointless. 3 people playing a speeder with 1 minute ticks is in no way representative of 600 people playing a full fledged round with 1 hour ticks. Please don't try to draw any conclusions from this beta.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

It depends on what the goal of the beta is.

If it is to test the combat engine to see if it can handle the stats (i.e. steal ships not dying; steal ships firing after pods; cloaked steal ships?) then a conclusion can be drawn from it.

If it is to fully test the stats and then drawing a conclusion from it might be wrong (which seems unlikely to be a goal since the stats were stated to be a draft).

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Think there will be more than 3 folk showing up Mz you are welcome to come along.

The PRIMARY aim as bram put it was to test the combat engine for stealers not dying after capping ships, steals after pods and cloaked steal ship.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

I'd assume the ticker and bcalc share the same combat engine.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

It is to test to see if there is anything unusual I.E. make sure the combat engine does what it is suppose to do.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

I'll sign up and fiddle around with it a bit.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

I'm sorry to be so negative but I really think we need to stop this before "someone" takes it seriously and puts it into the game.

Stealers not dying is bad enough (see comments from me and others in another thread) but allowing pods to get roids before being stolen is just a cheater's charter (or at least a farmer's charter which is much the same thing).

Add to these (previously demonstrated) mistakes the idea of cloaked stealers and we have a recipe for disaster.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

can i make a suggestion: can we make everything star wars themed, let's be honest we wouldn't be playing this game if it wasn't for star wars

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Nice one hope to see ya there :)

link me up with the threads I would like some background reading.
thanks in advance.

Lets take stock of the whole senario...

What makes a good attack fleet?
My answer is a fleet that can land you roids and has a high defence tolerance and is worthwhile to land the attack.

to cater for this you have fire before defence ships weather it is emp or kill ship.

todays steal ships are only really effective in Defence due to salvage being paid out. in attacks if the defence ships fire before the steal ships it usually means losing value and hence the attack isnt worth landing this is what I call a low defence tolerance.

Unless you incorporate a mechanism like a bounty/salvage/pillage on capping ships IN ATTACK to compensate for losses and buy back lost ships then the next best thing is to incorporate stealers dont die when capping back. XP whoring with zik isnt really viable in comparision with value playing.

There is a historical precidence to show that stealer attack fleets had a higher defence tolerance even when defence killed some of the ships in the attack but to compensate capped ships on the defence side and made the attack more landable.

I have found most of the rounds stats boring and its only been key rounds where there has been exceptions (weather it is good stats and/or major wars between alliances) to the rule but I have always used R14 stats as the benchmark for fun stats
http://beta.planetarion.com/history/...?id=4&round=14
luckly that round there was major wars between alliances that added to the fun.

With the current game mechanics its not possible to recreate similar calibre or better stats than R14. Imo this should be the aim of every stat maker

The last time I considered zik was a good race was R42 http://beta.planetarion.com/history/...?id=4&round=42

The reason for it was it had 2 ace kill ships in the roiding fleets and you could easily fake zik de as cr on xan and there was 1-2 xan only alliances that round, and I managed to excel on that basis (think I got t30 and top gal and alliance won that round but that is not important)

but if you got any sort of ter bs def on cruiser or locust def on destroyer fleet attacks it was a recall due to the mechanisms... you could cap ships but you would lose too much value and the attack was not worthwhile to land.

I also played zik in r40
http://beta.planetarion.com/history/...?id=4&round=40
which was 3 ship spam (full MT round) and was only made good because CT and APPRIME were at war 24/7 that round (had they not it would have been a boring round imo)

But to roid I needed to either hit a target with their fleet out (I recall JGPing top APPRIME players on a regular basis who def leeched and attack a defender on the JGP scan with their fleet out) join the nearly daily fleetcatch attempts / or FC defence or needed a cath co buddy to go roiding. quite rare to get those types of conditions in the game that is joked as NAPtarion.

I also played zik in r18 where Im 90% + that was the last round stealers didnt die apon capping ships.

I remember heading the ziks of my alliance (Subh) at that time and the main aim was to fleetcatch alliance incoming for "fear factor" as we were at best a mid tier alliance and this worked upto tick 500-600 ish... and made it clear to our members to tell their gal mates if they hit a subh target there was a good% of being fleetcaught. and capping value via ship stealing and a few caths joined to add defence tolerance on the fleetcatches.

Which for me was a different way of playing planetarion that I hadn't considered before in previous rounds.

I have fleetcaught many a player and in r35 I also got my cruiser fleet "fleetkilled" which basically ended my round at that time so I have been on both sides of a fleetcatch. But tbh players who end up in t100 should be big enough to handle stuff like and not emo quit the game.

Now to cover the cheating aspect of stealers not dying apon capping.

Good % of the Multihunters having an increased workload if this was implimented. However if the multihunters apply a CUI BONO? (who benefits) approach to questionable lands then I have every confidence.

early Game it is possible to POD a zik target for roids like a xan could send 1000 fi pods to cap 75-100 roids on a zik target it is possible to get a roid advantage by podding zik farms but you will be lucky to get a few turns before a trend is noticed and MHs acting accordingly.

If I was to play zik in a real round with these conditions/stats I would make sure I had an alliance/gal strategy to counter this.

Also the main reason I proposed beta stats that stealers fire after pods was to stop farms launching 1 way fleets at farmers planets to steal ships without major roid loss (again CUI BONO?) and major use of this tactic should get them closed by MHs etc.

Not saying that farming will be an issue at the beta more like a what if senario for a real round or xmas round etc.

I do think fleetcatches will be more fun and will more likely provoke a war between 2 alliances if one of their members was fleetcaught and that would be welcomed in the game known as NAPtarion.

As the star trek fans would say in their best Picard voice and the finger point.... make it so :P

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

cheers for having a go and comments and im glad you have brought subversion to the table as an idea.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

You yourself started the last one; http://pirate.planetarion.com/showthread.php?t=201068
But to get a real feel for the importance of some sort of continuity in this game (and of the downside of making random changes) you might try this thread from 8 years ago; http://pirate.planetarion.com/showthread.php?t=196818

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Quite frankly, the claim that giving races a steal ship changes their fundamental identity is ludicrous. Such an identity can only be expressed in terms of how they impact the way the races are played, yet all races are played the same way. You launch, calc, land or recall, then repeat. You pick targets in the same way, you calc in the same way. Yeah, the combat works out a little differently

This lack of differentiation is reflected in the way people pick races. 340 people who have played more than 20 rounds under the same nick since Etd was introduced, up to r61. Of those 340 people, 83 play the same race at least 50% of the time, and 28 at least 75% of the time. Imperial is the champion of diversity, playing 4 races 22% of the time each and Ter 13%.

Of the 11 people who play the same race at least 90% of the time, we have 3 Ters (MD, SpaceLegend, MarkB), 4 Cats (Evil_Dooms, Kallysandra, Spritfire, DigitalZero), 1 Xan (Epcylon), 3 Ziks (Ace, Dunkelgraf, bird) and 0 Etds. All of them picked another race at most twice.

This indicates that the vast majority of people feel that the differences between the races are superficial and/or unimportant, and use other metrics to decide what race to pick from round to round, such as ally strat.

I'd also argue that the races are not really that different with 1 steal ship. Cat non-EMP ships are historically underbuilt. Ter is the race most like Zik. Etd always has steal ships, as does Zik, obviously. That leaves Xan, which apparently few people are a diehard fan of anyway, which is weird, considering it usually outperforms all other races.

As for that old thread, it was hilarious, thanks for the link. I was kind of angry at/all the time!

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Cheers for replying .... I was struggling to find a thread from circa 2006 (I remember r18 ended on sept 2006, just that the 2nd thread quoted was 2008 that could have been round 20ish I remember Gate ex ND player I think he did the stats on a few occasions back then.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

I would like to thank all those who took part in the beta (there was about 25 testers I was aiming for 30 but better than 3 lol) and it was a success, me and Jintao thought there was an issue with the salvage when there was both kill and steal ships in defence but appoco says there is no fault and everything else was ok nothing out of the ordinary.

What does this mean?
It means that there SCOPE to have steal ships that don't die after capping
It means that the Stat makers in the community can now break the mold for the last ~30 rounds.

<Bastet> are planned for 65?
<Paisley> I wouldnt say so im hoping someone can come up with better thats than me
<Paisley> but I would say this ... the beta stats are more entertaining that certain previous rounds

I also said to appoco that him and the MHs would also would need to have a conversation aswell.

Cheers for your Input Mz ... Question, have you had a shot at making the stats?

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

I'm not sure what you're asking. I made the r50 stats, and modified the r31 stats for r51, but I have no interest in making stats for this round.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Ive havent played in about 10-15 rounds so I was none the wiser about r50 and r51

If you hadn't had a shot Just saying that I would think you would have been due up so to speak.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Stats making isn't really about giving everyone a turn, in my opinion. Yes, everyone should get a shot, because more sets is better. However, when it comes to picking the final set, it's more important to ensure that 600 people will enjoy the round, than it is to tip-toe around the feelings of the handful of people who make stats. If, for example, that required using the same person's stats 5 rounds in a row, then so be it.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. Like I said, I'm not really interested in getting involved in the stats making process for the foreseeable future, neither to make my own nor to comment on anything but the fundamental concepts of other people's sets. Maybe some other round!

As to that, I have no comments on your set. It'll be interesting to see how the lossless stealing will work out, but I have no strong feelings one way or the other. Giving more races steal ships is fine, in my book, if that wasn't clear yet.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

600 still play? impressive.

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Sorry for the late feedback, I really enjoyed playing most of the beta game, would never consider Zik as a race but would if the changes came in to live, really enjoyed playing but didn't seem to be imba?

Re: Beta testers Wanted.
 

Bump.

I got to thinking about this after the Thanksgiving holiday, and plugging back in after a nice online absence...why not use these stats for the 'Winter Round', since it's usually a shorter and more informal round?

We didn't have enough participation in the "beta test" to draw any meaningful conclusions, but I thought Paisley's stats were actually pretty interesting.