A purpose for bot planets
 

I think Bot planets purpose should be to help new planets/players to familiarize with the combat system.
Before launching their fleet to conquer the universe, attacking the bots should be their first step in understanding the planet and unit scan importance, the proper use of a bcalc.
ATM bots are being used by PA Team as traps to steal/kill easy ships. That doesn't help the game and probably discourages the new players (if they can't even land on easy bots, why bother playing). Though I understand some PA team members must be bored... they should be allowed to attack outside their gal.
I understand Bots are being used as farms by scanners and lowbies, it's not their purpose either. So I propose:

- bots can only be attacked by a planet during a period of 72 ticks after the planet's protection ends.
- bots are moved to a separate cluster (c100?)

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

I believe the current plan is to try and code an AI for the bots so that they actually build reasonably intelligent fleets and defend each other. IF that is done (and it is a big if) your idea would make sense. The reason the bots are in 1:1 atm is so the PA Team can keep an eye on them and at least in theory keep them from being overly abused.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

The thing is, PA shouldnt put more restrictions on attacking ... You want the bot planets to be nice and simple, making it so that you can only attack them for a certain period makes them redundant as the majority of planets then wont be able to touch them and newbies might not notice the bot planets until till late.

Instead, simply making hiding prod value solves the problem of them being abused which PA should be fixing anyway. As they'd naturally grow too big for them over time, instead of hiding prod and constantly farming them.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

i think it's a bad idea to limit the time to attack bots. They're in 1:1 until they can defend themselves, and they are up to scratch. I've asked light to come up with some tech tree varietys for them as a starter, as the current ones are incomplete and suck. I do think they are worthwhile in providing additional targets for those hitting smaller planets as much as for learning from. Roids have to come from somewhere.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

You're assuming new people can attack before tick 144. This is a mistake. With the current state of the scanning tree, you need 110 ticks of research in order to be able to attack with fr/de, not counting TT, ignoring missed ticks.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

Yes I believe everybody is able to launch a fleet during the 72 ticks following their end of protection. Since when do people need to complete the Travel Branch in order to attack ? If it is not enough then make it the length you feel is needed. The basic idea remains:
The current problem is PA Team having fun destroying fleets attacking the planet bots. I'm not sure it should be the job of PA team and when it is fleets from new players/late signings being vaporized it achieves nothing good for the player base. The food chain is broken.

Now if PA Team doesn't like the planet bots to be attacked there is a simple solution: remove the planet bots.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

You're completely and utterly wrong, to such an extent that I am astonished by your ignorance, which is not something that comes easy to me. It's possible, no doubt, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of new signups managed the feat.

They don't, that's why I didn't count them in the 110 ticks.

PA Team make an effort to distinguish between veterans looking for easy roids and newbies attacking for the first time, though I must admit that this is based solely on the word of its members, rather than actual observation. Regardless, it might be worth investigating if a more objective criterion might not be found.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

As for me, I'm a cath so I dont destroy fleet!

But if you take a look at our gal banner, you clearly see that its not the newbies who hit us the most. Its certaint alliances

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

If i was low enough score, i'd be hitting the bot planets every day.. Its easy rounds. It only takes capping 50 roids a night to be #1 size :p

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

MY GOD!

Those Un-allied BASTARDS!

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

The bots already have a purpose; to be asc's roidfarms.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

rofl
I think you base your judgement on your old habit of looking everybody as if they were retarded. If it can make you feel smarter after all...

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

I'm impressed you went through the effort of actually removing capitalisation from my post, by the way.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

Back to the point, other solutions would be:
- PA team only use EMP ships
or
- PA Team has a button to auto recall the attack fleets they judge to be abusing the feature.

It's just the fact that they're trying their utmost to kill/steal noob fleets that disturbs me.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

PA Team cant auto-recall fleets, what happends if they auto-recall into hostiles?

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

I think PA Team should simply ignore this. If those bot planets are in an alliance player's bash, fair enough, that's a valid target then.

Also, if it is mainly alliance players hitting those planets, might it be that those new players which are supposed to attack the bot planets simply don't know about bot planets? Do bot planets actually have fleets? If they do, maybe new players have no fleet that could harm bot planets. And so on...

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

if as Heartless suggest Bot Planets are not attacked by new players:
- make new players aware of the existence of bot planets
or
- remove the bot planets

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

What happens to the bot planets happens to new players as well: they get bashed and farmed and they don't know what to do. The problem here is not that they're bots, nor that they're in 1:1. The problem here is that attacking near one's bash limit pays off so well. That's the real problem that should be fixed.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

Agreed, but this has a lot to do with the stats and very little to do with the suggestion in this thread. The real question is where do bots belong in the game. I think we all agree newbies are the intended roiders of the bots, the question remains what is the best way to maximize the newbies hitting them and minimize the better players roid farming them. At the end of the day we really can't distinguish between newbies and core PA players in any other way then score. So as already suggested in this thread, simply removing the hidden resources exploit is probably all that we need to do. After that designing stats that make it profitable to hit targets bigger then yourself will go a long way to remove the constant bashing that is occurring this round, but this is a topic for another thread.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

I am in favour of making resources count for the same amount of value no matter where it's located (ships, production, constructions, etc..), but if we want a game in which it pays off more to attack planets your own size than it does to bash newbies, then that doesn't do the trick.

XP was introduced to make hitting big planets profitable in order to protect smaller planets, but has failed utterly. People have realised that value is more important than XP and thus it doesn't protect newbies in any way. Over the years it has been reduced to a niche strategy for stubbornly aggressive players who don't like defence and for end of round score boosts for small alliance players.

Instead, we should look for (part of) the solution in the area of a variable max cap formula.

As for the stats, the obsession of both PA Team and the community to get new stats every one or two rounds is nothing short of retarded. You don't need new stats to change the metagame, one only needs to look at Starcraft to see the evidence of this: the strategies in that game have shifted dramatically over the last 4 years, while patches only addressed exploits and bugs, while not influencing normal gameplay. The fact that it's percieved to be different for PA is because game development has for a long time been without direction or vision; the stats have been the one thing about PA that's been easy to change and as a result has become an (ineffectual) replacement for game design. There's nothing wrong with having the same stats for 5 rounds in a row with only minor balancing fixes, as long as they're fun to play with.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

I disagree, I like the current system where resources in a raw form are worth less then ones that have been committed. The current problem is that there is the ability to simply hide resources and this should be eliminated.

This is not true. XP does make it more profitable to hit bigger planets, and when the stats create the necessary holes to allow smaller planets to hit bigger planets (which this round, and the last couple of rounds, they did not) then it is far more profitable to hit big planets then small planets near your bash limit.
This is an interesting suggestion and should be considered.

No argument from me. I suggested this way back when I did the stats, that the stats from one round to the next should simply be tweaked rather then constantly overhauled. Creating a good set of stats is incredibly difficult and even the brightest minds in PA have trouble creating a balanced set. Unfortunately I was not smart enough to create a set that people could agree on and so the constant battle over the stats has continued.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

First of all, sorry for stepping into the middle of a discussion.

What would be the reason for making raw resources count less? I don't see any improved gameplay experience by making all resources count the same, nor do I see a worse gameplay experience. After some more tinkering it might actually also address this problem really nice as everyone gets the value he really is worth.

When was the last round you played? XP did shift from being useful, to being some nice little bonus on top of your fleet value. Of course, the shorter a round the more XP might pay off, but it really means trading "potentially score-increasing score" into "fixed score". XP is like the pension fund while your fleet is the hedgefond.
Regarding loopholes in stats: that's totally absurd. In round 16 Ascendancy has perfectly shown what the game will be like with such loopholes in stats.

Re-introduce value based capping. Problem solved.

Uhm, didn't I bring up that idea on PS at some point? That mainly because I was tired of re-learning shipnames with their class and what they target. Anyway, stats should stay pretty much "fix" between rounds.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

The problem is if you got very big you could then hide value in such a way that it could never be attacked. So if I got a big roid lead I could throw lots of resources into production and never let them out, thereby never having to worry about getting FCed or anything. You could basically hide resources to win the round. With the current system there is a value penalty in doing this which encourages anyone who wants to do well to let their value at, at least by the end of the round. Also having different values propositions for ships verses constructions verse agents allows the PA team to at least in theory better balance the game.

I've played every round of PA including the current one since r1 with the sole exception of r2. XP has not been utilized how it was originally intend in the game, there have been rounds where it has been abused (a covert op planet won or nearly won a round once I believe). There are ways to make XP a lot more useful then it is currently being used. If the ship stats go back to having "holes" (NOT loopholes, see below) in them then an XP strategy becomes a lot more viable again.
You misunderstand me, I don't mean loopholes, I mean holes in the defensive options of each race. For example making Xans basically unable to defend against BS incoming unless they flak like crazy was one of the "holes" I created in my stats. This allows smaller planets to hit bigger planets because they don't need a huge fleet to get through on the individual target. With the current stats unless you are cath it is very difficult to hit a target that is even close to your own value, much less has a greater value then your own. This is a major reason in my opinion why players are bashing at the bottom of their limits, it is simply the only viable attack option that doesn't require massive team ups.

This is being considered, but I don't think it would fully solve anything.

Re: A purpose for bot planets
 

Err, I'm not quite sure I understand your reasoning here. You say raw resources should cost less because otherwise you could simply create non-removable value with producing ships? That's non-sense. If you make those resources count fully, then the people trying to create non-removable value by "prod hiding" will fall behind anyway, since they lack military firepower to increase / defend their resource income, leading to other people taking over - and so on.
On the other hand, if those resources count fully, then your value raises faster, forcing you to utilise resources as ships in order to increase / defend your income since your bash limit is not that low anymore - so it protects newbies / bot planets from those players that harvest most resources anyway.

Attacking is always about return-on-investment. ROI is amazingly high for hitting small players for a large part of the round. So that issue must be addressed. I do agree that one way to do so would be to create holes in stats in the way you suggested. However, those holes are totally exploitable. So we should be very careful before choosing that option, if it should be considered an option at all. Arguably, given the asymmetry of PA's balance this might be also the best option available, but we should be careful since this has already been abused when tried before - even though I am not sure if round 16 had that zik hole intentionally.

It would solve a lot of issues, and would create another one - f.e. making war even more punishing for participating parties than it already is. That however is another issue that the game needs to solve.