Extra population 'area'
 

I propose another focus for your population - in addition to research, production, construction etc:

Asteroid Discovery

The idea is that you can use pop to find roids - my (rough) suggestion is to allow between 0 and 50% pop to be allocated, providing a scale of

0 to 20% chance of discovering an asteroid each tick.

This depends entirely on the demand of players - it seems that by reducing roid cost to 150 people want more roids.

So it could be 0-100% chance of finding a roid - full pop would gain you 24 roids a day.

An alternative could be that each member of the population (the actual number of people, currently unused) has a chance (based on % allocation) to discover an asteroid. Later in the game obviously you would have a higher pop and discover more roids.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

nice idea

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Not a bad idea, but I would have it on a sliding scale such that the more astroids you have the less chance of actually discovering a new roids (call it interferance). This way really big people arn't getting lots of free roids, but little people can help themselves along.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Why exactly should big planets be stopped from gaining "lots" of free roids? I personally don't really see the reason for "victim of your own success" implementations like that, apart from a form of bash limits to a certain extent. With a 0-20% chance of finding a new asteroid each tick, i doubt its worth the effort anyway for big planets (depending on how the other population settings balance out).

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Exponential growth; if you set up a system whereby top planets can more easily accumulate roids or value (or score etc), then it makes it more difficult for those of lower ranks to catch them. It results in the top players racing away with the game and eventually becoming unassailable.

This is generally a bad thing.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

But that's not what Monroe's suggestion was trying to prevent. He was arguing that planets with lots of roids should find fewer roids than planets with less roids, even though equal gains would already represent a smaller proportional gain.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Whilst that's true, having a formula that reduces as opposed to one that stays constant means that there is less time for benefit for the topish planets. Whether this is good or not is a different issue.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

It's also worth pointing out that for most of the round, the very top planets can't mine their roids. Giving them extra roids merely inflates their value (bad for them) and makes them better targets (also bad).

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

As a matter of principle I am always in favor of rewards being based on a scale of diminishing returns. This is how the real world works, any production gains introduced by certain methods eventually lead to marginal returns on investment as the methods are scaled up. In this case roid discovery would get harder and harder the more 'interferance' from exisiting astroids there is.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

What I would do is as follows:

Use population to find uninitiated roids.
Have the current system to pay for the roids.

I believe that prevents the exponential growth issues, and allows for some interesting strategies.

What I'd also do (when this basic idea gets implemented across res/con/prod) is to bring the actual number of people into play. e.g. 10,000 people find 10 roids per tick, 100,000 people find 20 roids per tick and so on. We could also introduce an asteroid detectiong structure - so if you had multiple structures your people get split across them so you gain greater efficiency.

e.g. one asteroid detector finds 10 roids with 10,000 people, 20 with 100,000.

So if you have 20,000 and one detector you find (say 11 per tick), but with two detectors you find say 20 per tick.

In general I'm in favour of ideas that link the different management aspects of the game together. It allows for a greater range of tactics.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Are you proposing a return to a time where we had uninitiated roids in the universe and that astroids are only found at random? I certainly hope not, the entire universe cheered when we went to a non random method for finding roids.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Absolutely agree with Monroe here, no way should uninitiated roids come back.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

uninitiated yes, but not random is what I have described.

In essence - your population word to discover X roids per tick. You then initiate them when you feel like it.

NOTE: The uninitated roids wouldn;t have to physically exist - imagine the following in game message:

"Your population discovered 15 roids this tick, this means you now know the location of 35 roids that you have yet to initiate."

Roids would therefore only be added to your roid count when you initiate them.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Do you mean giving people free roids to initate? This strikes me as a bad idea from a gameplay point of view since people could store up roids to initiate at a later date (post-incoming), unless you set them to expire after 24 hours or whatever.


Not convinced about the original idea anyway. Every time a suggestion like this comes up, I just end up thinking "Why should we make this change?".

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I'm surprised that no one has said "oh no, random roid discovery! what happens if people discover 3 more roids at the beginning of the round, they get a huge advantage" and so on and so forth. Whilst I like the idea in principe, I didn't think there was that big a group of "pro random" peope out there? (e.g. random events backlash in beta).

If it's related to the number of asteroids you have already, I'd increase it to say a 40% chance as the higher limit, dropping to 20% by about 200 roids, 10% by 400, 5% by 800, etc.
However, a constant rate would, as has been mentioned, be a relatively smaller % gain of asteroids and would help to keep the value/roid lower, increasing the incentive to attack. This might have to be compensated for elsewhere to avoid becoming tooooo offensive.


I can't see how allowing unititated roids to be found randomly and "hiding" them until they are initiated would make any sense unless you had some way of finding other initiated roids (by, say, scanning...), so this saved you the task of scanning for them, even if they don't "exist" as such in terms of combat. I'm not sure this would be great.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I'm against random events, I couldn't be bothered to rant when threads of such a nature pop up about once a fortnight. Perhaps I should write out some rants and just copy/paste them into the relevant threads.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I think everyone is still misunderstanding me.

Currently finding and inititating roids is a single step. You can find and initate roids at any time, and there is a cost.

My take on the idea in the OP was to separate out the finding and the initating.

Finding does not need to be random. You could either have population linking to the probability of finding a roid or you could have a fixed number of roids being found per tick. The random approach requires pre-pax roid initation system.

My solution is to have the population (and posisbly constructions) linked to a fixed discovery of roids.

So my current con+pop settings could mean I find 10 roids per tick (you may need to loose them if you don;t initaite them withing a fixed period of time, but I'm unconvinced.)

So lets say I currently know the location of 50 roids. I can then choose to initate them - this would work exactly how it is now, with the cost of initating scaling in exactly the same way.

I am in no way suggesting giving people free roids, I am suggesting adding in an additional layer of tactics before initiating takes place - i.e. you cannot initate a roid unless you have found its location through you planet's people looking for roids.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Did you not read my post? ;-)

I'm with furball on this one, unless you can show a compelling reason why this is worth adding I don't think it adds anything to the game, and the negatives I think are fairly obvious.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Can anyone tell me what the benefits of random roid discovery are? Because I'm thinking, if there aren't any (which is kind of what I'm thinking at the moment), why bother implementing it?

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I fail to understand why we'd want to seperate between uninitiated and initiated roids again. I really do.
However, the original suggestion is sounding rather nice, especially when the type of roid you discover is randomly chosen, for example: "Your pioneers have found 26 new asteroids. 5 of those are mining eonium, 9 are mining metal and the rest are crystal asteroids."

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I kind of suggested two ideas - random amount of discovery, and not random.

Based on feedback I scanned in this thread it looks like it should be fixed and not random.

Might I suggest that the number discovered is not linear but exponential based on the population employed.

As for unitiated roids, this is just a piece of legacy that should never come back.
---
It is just an alternative to investing your population in construction, mining or security (etc.) The idea is that it might bring more variance, and more roids which seems to be the desire of pa team and the players.

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Random discovery ftw, slider just increases/decreases the chance

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

Any final word on this Kal ? Possibility for r22 ?

Re: Extra population 'area'
 

I like my version of the idea :p

Nothing like this is going to go into r22, r23 might be possible, but only as an added thing beyond the other population based plans we have.