"Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

First of all I d like to say that I personally use this feature, to add 100 ships to my order a good 50 times to get my production 50 ticks further away.
You can keep doing this forever, and just do it the tick before you land your attacks, which makes it V hard if not impossible to completely be able to see how much a planet got in hidden.

Also, the only way to actually check this is through sandmans... Do we really expect new players to check an external site to see if their target got ships -hidden- in production? If we do, then there should be a link on overview, and a guide to tell them how to do it in the manual.

As I said, I use this feature, I like it. But I know there are so many which ruins their rounds by twats like me which got more value in hidden than they got ingame. ( I actually do :/ )
Do we really hope that these players will continue to play after loosing all their ships, even after doing "everything" correct? They might have Planetscanned us first, checked for res, then AUd us, to see if they can attack us. Then they JGP us and see no defence. how should they know people can have this hidden? Even experienced players burn themselves on this quite often, and it might make them quit.

How should it be?

Well, there have been two ways afaik of how production has worked quite well in PA.

r1- r9.5
r10 - rx.

Dont really remember when they changed from the racial and government based system to the current one.

Both of these worked perfectly fine! ( I prefered the r1 - r9.5 )
Why was it changed?

Are there any good arguments, cept from it being fun to **** people with ur hidden production, as to why we use the current setup?

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

The argument is presumably because it more accurately reflects reality. This is a shit argument.

Just make ships in production count toward final value as much as actual ships do, and you'll've gone a long way toward balancing prod hiding.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Personally i dislike hidden production, works really well for ziks dont get me wrong but like you said losing everything can **** people over, especially if they are new and have planned it all out.

I have used hidden prod before anyone mentions that, i had like 4.2mill hidden one rd...

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

What the man said!

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

agreed... although then we're back to long complicated maths again :(

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Well, that just means that the value of the production wont impact on your final score... this means there isnt really an XP or etc benefit from having vast quantities of ships hidden in production.

But tactically, which is what you're talking about, those same ships will still be in production and you've no idea what else is in there and/or whether the ships in production are the ships that can kill you or not. So, in that respect, it changes almost nothing for the new player calcing everything then loosing their fleet.

Sure, it might happen less for the XP reasons, but after enough incs, then people will deliberately hide stuff in production just like now.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I do believe that something is in the pipeline to fix this "problem" for next round.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Care to enlighten me/us?

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

But people will know how much is in production, by comparing the value of actual ships/roids/cons with the value that shows ingame. For many races there's only a few types of ship for which hiding has any use, giving people a better insight in what they can expect.


This is not really directed at you, but what is the point of these forums if PA Team insist on being secretive about what they plan to do?

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Usually with such changes they overlook someting. If they tell us up front of what they plan to do, we could warn them, after which they would ignore us and we'd say: "I told you so" when it goes wrong. This prevents that from happening.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

There isn't anything "secret" about it...
production has had some minor "tweaks", one of em addresses exactly what is pointed out in the first post about repeatedly adding a very small amount of ships to "artificially" increase the prod time.
Change makes it so that 2 x 500 ships requires the same amount as 1 x 1000 ships, so you can't really increase it all that much any more.
You can technically still have ships hidden in prod, but it becomes harder to do it, and it will require a lot more resources being put in.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I'd have to see it in practice.

Personally, I think the old style of production was fine. Each class had a certain build time, EOD.

If you wanted to jack with it to make factories applicable, have them work like FC and SC do...you'd need say 10% Medium Facts to build Fr/De in 8 hours, otherwise it would take longer.

Government and Population settings would of course help to offset some of that for people who whore Dists and FC's.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

i agree, that the hidden production as it is, can ruin someones round, and imo shouldnt happen. apart from that i like the point ur able to let ships come out to a special tick (like when ur attacker land)

To prevent ppl having more ships in hidden production then actual fleetvalue, u could easily implement a feature that does only allow adding ships to a specific productionnumber for like 10 times as due to logistic reasons the shipyard guild isnt able to obtain any more additional orders.

Ofc it would still be possible to have a attacker die due to ur hidden ships, but it will take much more resources as it does now (as the orginal first order has to be real high to have a major impact)

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

So basically it becomes a tool for the big planets only?


Seems almost prophetic.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

will help to some extent, but why not remove the feature completely?

pre pax production times ftw ( along with everything else, but thats beside the point, this point anyway )

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I remember when Battleships used to take 24 ticks to produce, CR 20, DE 16, FR 12, CO 8 and FI was 4 iirc.

You could have x light factories take off 1 tick up to max 2 ticks off prod time, y medium factories to take max 4 ticks off prod time, z heavy factories to take max 10 ticks off prod time (returns to scale perhaps??).

That'd work. Would mean ETA 2 FI building, but still, you dont *have* to use the old numbers... make it 6 ticks or whatever.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I see no reason why x value worth of battleships should take longer to build than x value worth of fighters. An argument against it however would be that it'd completely unbalance the game, allowing Xan to produce out of incomings, while Ter is left hanging out to dry. And even if we'd instead opt for a 6 tick flat production time for all ships, I can't think of a convincing reason to spend valuable coding time on reverting to a scheme we haven't seen for 15 rounds, especially because it really doesn't make any meaningful changes to the game mechanics as a whole.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

It was more of an example than anything else...I think Sov got the point of it though.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I wasn't replying to your example. I was replying to the entire argument for returning to the pre-PAX production system.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

They are more complex than simple smal fighters which can be mass produced much easier?
PA DOESNT MAKE SENCE! stop trying to use that as an example as to how pa should be.
Thing is, current prod setup is shit, and the one pre pax was alot better.
I personally want all ships to have higher prod time than fleet eta.
Stockpiling isnt good for the game, hidden prod for sure isnt.


and has it been 15 rounds?!?!?! surely not more than 6-7 since they changed it to the current one. THAT was a waste of valuable coding time :p

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I don't give a crap about realism. What I meant was that I see no reason for changing to the pre-PAX system, game mechanics-wise.

Why?

I said it has been 15 (and more) rounds since they switched from the pre-PAX system, not 15 rounds since they switched to the current one.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Why not just have a system like it is now, except each factory has a maximum production capacity. You can only fit X resources of materials and finished product into a factory.

So you can still prod hide with more factory (also helping make the fact tyou can built multiple factories usefull beyond the 5 to get decent build times etc.)

You can also scan for it. 'Hmm, this guy has 20 factories, he must have built them to hide prod'. You can also fake having hidden prod by having lots of facts and not using them, so people are more cautious.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

The entire point I am making is:

Something is flawed and shit when you have to rely on an external site to find out if someone have something hidden or not.
Either sort it, or make the datadumps secret so that no one got access to it.
Then its fair. We cant expect paying costumers to check other sites when there is no mention of them ingame.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

That makes sense. I refer to my first post in the thread for the solution.

The datadumps were introduced because people used a planet to retrieve information from the game to put it on tool sites, resulting in a great many page loads at the start of every tick, creating a high load on the server. Removing the data dumps is just going to force people to do that again, solving nothing.

Further, if my suggestion were to be implemented, the tool sites become a lot less vital. Then they would return to the way they were before, and people wil use them not to get more information than what's available ingame, but simply to get the same information in a more orderly fashion. You could then do perfectly well without using them, the only thing they'd do is save people time.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Imo thats not the best solution. It would remove some of the problems, but not all. I dont see why people should be hiding productions at all.

I doubt very much that it would take alot of coding to get back the production they had from pax - r20ish?

The current system is not only ruining rounds for people, its also hard to calculate, and easy to fk with a slight change in population / add or removed factory. It makes no sence.
Make it simple.
That could be a closeable offence surely? Not that I want the sites gone, I want a new production solution. Or the return of an old and better one.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Before this new production system was added we had the simple option to scan before attacking to see available resources and scanning before landing to see if any resources had been spent.

Why not just add some details of how much resources is stored in production in one of the existing scan types? It's been suggested before and seems like an easy thing to implement. You could easily add some vagueness to it to show how much is in production but not what ship type etc.

Being able to hide ships in production is a great tactic, but being able to store insane amounts of ships in production without attackers being able to judge if they want to take the risk is a bit stupid.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

i can only agree on this, nice solution idd

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Then that's where we disagree. I see prod hiding as a valid, but overpowered tactic. The only problem I have with it is that it can 1) be undectectable, and 2) you need external tools to find out about the ones that are detectable. Both problems are solved if my solution is implemented.

I have to admit I don't in fact remember the first PAX system. :(

All of which is solved by my solution. If you want to use prod hiding, yes, you need to look at the numbers a little. But no one is making you use it. You can do perfectly fine without it.

That's retarded. It doesn't give an unfair benefit.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Mz and/or GReaper have the best solutions IMO. Not only are the solutions about as good as any of the other suggestions, but they're simple.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

So a unit scan would should the ships they had, plus the ones in production? (obv. both with the 20% margin of error), then the adv. unit scan would show exactly what ships the person has, what's in production, and how long it's expected before said ships come out of production?

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I'm not particularly bothered at exactly how it gets implemented, just as long as there is a decent way of finding out. Personally I'd put it as extra information in the planet scan - the usefulness of this scan has dropped badly since people hide their resources in production instead of being visible on the planet scan.

Other threads which discuss the same issues as this thread are Hidden production and value and Cov-op: Production espionage. I'm still slightly bothered at the fact you can manipulate your value by leaving days worth of resources in production - I hope this issue eventually gets addressed as well.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Another input to this would be that (as discussed in other threads) unit scans are available to all planets immediately. They'd be modified to show cloaked ships, but not ships in production.

Advanced Units would still be the last tech to be researched and would display ships in production to exact numbers.

Overall I think I prefer just having ships in production count towards value, or their res cost appear in planetscans.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

I think it's a mistake to combine the scan idea and this one.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

planet scans died partially when they lost there online/offline status

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Just go back to how we had it before the change to this, it was much better then.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

my point exactly.

why fk with something which works.

But, all changes are better than none, and the worst change is the one suggested by PA admins. sigh

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Agreed, I was simply asking if the scan feature I described was the kinda thing GReaper had in mind.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

For once in my life I completly agree with furball!

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

At this moment more time is spend on checking on HIDDEN production then on actually selecting the target... Which is not much fun to do.. You tend up scanning for news to figure out what is happening with his value if you see something funny..

So, we can remove partially this feature, i would be very happy... and ofcourse ZIKS seems to have the most benefit from it..

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

Only found 1 big flaw in your suggestion. I don't wanna have to calc on what ppl might have in production. Most of us aren't as good as math as the geek in Numb3rs anyway. After all there's a reason why bcalcs are so popular:D

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

IMO ability or skill should be rewarded in PA. PA is a maths based game after all.

Provided there's some way to work out what's likely to be in hidden production (planet scans are a sensible idea. Possibly AU scans. Possibly having the value count), then I think that's acceptable.

Skilful risk management can overcome this problem. Unlike the current system where unreasonable amounts of effort are required.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

What the **** are you talking about. We're not demanding you to be able to perform advanced math on a routine basis. If you can't do simple subtraction and addition, you shouldn't be playing this game.

Re: "Hidden" production issue, and general change of Production
 

YOU CAN DO THAT? WHAT!? HOW COME NO ONE TELL ME BEFORE?