Reward for Disting
 

To make going distorters a more viable option, there should be some kind of reward associated with blocking scans. Getting to lol at blocked scans is great fun, but it would be nice to get some xp or the cost of the scan also.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

I am thinking either XP or cost of scan would be extremely simple to farm.

Have some dummy in a tag spam scan you - for free xp or funds :-D

Re: Reward for Disting
 

yup way too abuseable, and dists are useful for xp whores. Better to have unit scans not going through dists.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

There is already a reward for getting dists: it's dists. The problem is that the reward is too small. This is the dead horse I like to beat (off) on, so I'll just quote myself:


That's just a coincidence.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

While I agree with most of Mz's suggestions for making dists viable I am not sure about the landing scan. I thought they were brought in after several rounds in which there were planets who no one could scan and therefore would have to land completely blind.

L scans don't give much information; single ship defences are enough to force recalls from it. Having the L scan remain as they are would not be a major disadvantage to someone aiming to be unscannable all it would mean is that lolwaves could get through. Of course alliances would likely sooner or later resort to this but without l scans what would they be able to do?

Guards make it possible to be immune to the cov op option, if there is no way to scan SKs are not very viable as an option to kill someone's dists. Despite the hit you take from not being able to build mines/fcs/mcs with no l or u scan the option to be unscannable would be very attractive indeed - so attractive there would likely be a lot of them, which would be a nightmare for everyone not doing it.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

The last round I played PA I tried Xan dist whore and was unscannable for the most of the round ... I was bored with PA and decided to try it out.

+ side
1. Didn't get roided whilst I was ahead of the scanners and folk only landed fakes... any real attacks recalled.
2. if you got scanned around 6-9pm game time there was high % your galaxy is getting incs and great for grounding the galaxy.
3. Sending attacks and defence was fun.

-side
1.need very high security and this meant population on security where this could have done nicely on research.
2. You lose way too much value verus refineries and finance centres.

In conclusion you would need a heavy roid count to compensate for the loss in value. In my opinion distorters need tweaking.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

What about bringing back mill scans, and having dists blocks Millies on a better ratio than 1 dist for 1 amp?

Re: Reward for Disting
 

What I'd really like is an expansion on what Butcher suggested: for basic scans to be harder to block than advanced scans, say: 50% for landing and unit scans, 100% for planet and dev, 150% for news and incoming, and 200% for AU and JGP. That stops 1 amp from undoing all the work of every dister in the universe, and preserves the incentive for dedicated scanners to get the better scans.

That's a more work than the suggestions I made in this thread, though still not exactly weeks of work.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Inc scan should be doable for medium ampers.
thats the only advantage of disting now days, but its statsdependable if its worth it

Re: Reward for Disting
 

The numbers I used were just an example to illustrate the principle.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Can I chuck in this too....

The problem with disting and xpwhoring is that 99 times out of 100 they can't over a round beat valuewhoring.

So how about to start solving the disting issue we just remove fcs from the construction list.

Then to counter the amp/dist inbalance just set caps on both cons (say 180 amps and 200 dists). If you still think this is unbalanced in favour of dists then maybe set a research to unlock an extra 30 amps capicity (available once say gate/hull/core/covop/con research is complete.

Think this could solve the disting issue and the scan planet issue and the value issue that PA suffers from.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Kaiba... *applause*

Re: Reward for Disting
 

just reeks of sarcasme, not that i blame you

Re: Reward for Disting
 

How about .25% income increase for every dist built


Maybe something along the lines of no limit on them but structure defense doesn't work for them

Just totally off the cuff

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Putting additional bonuses on dists is silly. Just make having dists good enough.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

yes, make landing scan and unit scan affected by dist to amp ratio again.
should be enough to make disting viable to some extent.
The reward of having less people attack you at the cost of having a lower income than those who spam finance centres and refineries or xpwhores spamming military centres.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Sorry but whatever you do to 'make disting' more viable fails because currently value wins. Whilst you build 60 dists another guy builds 60 fcs and at equal roids and research is making 60% more income than you a tick. People with dists just get lolwaved and L scanned and land or not. You cannot compete with the value game so you will not compete in the ranks.

Value dependance for rank is more of an issue than fiddling with the amp to dist ratio atm

I think the best way to address this is to take the value option out of the constructions.

This leaves the options of dists, amps or xp, this is a more even choice than we have currently.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Currently, yes. Value wins because every other strategy has either been broken or is being actively nerfed to breakage. I'm a considerably sub-par planet manager, but one of the two times I made top 10 was when I was disting, and we had FCs back then too. There's no reason why dists can't be made competitive. Removing FCs is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Sorry but i have to disagree with you here. As every other 'strategic path' uses constructions at the expense of building FC's you will never find parity no matter how much you tweak cost or power of distorters. Currently we are forced to choose between value or disting or amping or xping. Value is not a strategic choice, it is just increased growth, the other three are strategies which actually affect the way you play the game. Spamming FC's just gives you a stranglehold over the other 3 as they cant compete with fleets that are twice their size in what is basically 'Maths in Space'.

I fail to remember when somebody won this game, without large support from their alliance (beyond the usual flagship defence) playing as one of those three, and if it did happen you can almost guarantee that 90% of the planets directly behind them (and all the planets that helped them attain victory) were value based.

Removing FC's affects everyone and doesnt hamper any individuals except that they might have to put a little more effort in. It would make disting more appealing as a strategic choice because currently it is by far the least benefical/profitable of the three but with the removal of 'the value game' stealth takes on a huge role when all things are equal.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

it does in no way change anything. same strat applies, but xp'ing is now a tiny bit more OP. Everyone will still basicly do the same shit, and you make it sound like spamming FC's is OP, but really spamming refs are.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

actually, last round almost none of the brazillians were valuebased, they just maximized the overpowered effects of military centers, but yes, out of the top 100 i would venture to guess at least 80% was value based

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Omg one round where some guys with favourable stats managed to get escorts for xp lands on an alliance who didn't def against them and suddenly xp is OP. Ridiculous. Xp is in no way OP it leaves you open to all sorts of roidings and value will always grow past you as your fleet stops landing.

Can you please explain to me how gaining 20k a tick from 20 metal refs (regardless of roids) is better than gaining 30% of say 1000 roids income please, I'm failing to grasp it

Re: Reward for Disting
 

It seems that way because value has always been the default approach to playing PA, ever since r1. But choosing the default is still a strategic choice.

Honestly, I don't believe disting or pure XP play should be a round-winning strategy. These two strategies are just so much easier that the cost/benefit analysis would be all out of whack. But it should be possible to do well, say top 50. It should be reasonable to expect that 10% or 20% of your alliance goes for dists.

Considering that dists give an advantage, amps give an advantage, mines give an advantage, MCs give an advantage, why shouldn't FCs give an advantage? I continue to see no real reason why the concept of FCs is so OP that it's impossible to bring into balance.

The first step towards doing that is ensuring that the central concept of other strategies is intact, if not necessarily perfectly balanced: that means being unscannable as a dist whore, and getting lots of XP when you're an XP whore. Tweaking the bonuses of the varying constructions is next.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

i dont see why FC's need to be capped at 60 and MC's uncapped, it surely disadvantages value play?

Re: Reward for Disting
 

First of all with corp(playing value you should) you get 32780 from 20 metal refs.

But yes its hard for 20 metal refs (15000 cu) to compete with
60 fcs (60k cu)

It's also hard for a 6 year old to kick the shit out of a proffesional MMA fighter.

if you compare 20 metal refs with 15 fcs on 1k roids refs is infact better.. You're math however is awful, so I'm guessing you have to take my word for it, as this a complex math problem with multiple numbers and multiplication.

And atleast for the effort put in, Xp is in no way underpowered compared to value. And the timing for such a claim is ridiculous the round after a pure xp win and a pure xp third, with a current round(tho only 200 ticks in) with no1 in top 10 in top 100 value, the round end will show if it is still viable for round win, which I'm pretty sure it is (if you put in the same hours as value play require, and have a alliance around the strat like value play does). And if you're the average player like 95% of uni is XP is the clearly best way to go.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Make blocking 500 scans an acheivement that give 2k xp or something. Mini rewards like that keep people coming back for more, especially in regards to beginners.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Ok cheers Plaguu I was actually interested as to why refs were op as I had always been told after 100k income fcs were better.

One last question if someone has 1k roids and 60 fcs how many of each ref do you need to be equal to that person? I can't be arsed to find the formula and assume you have the mining page infront of you cos unlike me you have a planet.

Still stick to the fact that horrifically unbalanced stats and some woeful dcing are the cause for xp being on the rise atm. I don't believe in the previous 40+ rounds of PA it has been a winning strat has it??

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Obviously thinking that because refs have a static addition of 1k whereas fcs are percentage based as a round progresses and the avg roid count increases that the guy with 40? Of each ref will fall short of the guy with 60 fcs no?

Also is comparing 20 refs (x3 to equal 60 cons ofc) actually comparable to just 15 fcs. I appreciate that refs complete quicker than fcs but is it over 3 times quicker?? I thought it was only maybe 30% quicker at best

Re: Reward for Disting
 

It is more profitable to have an FC(compared to a ref) when 0.5% of a planets base income exceeds the income you get from a ref, which is 1100+(1100*bonus).

Let's assume you are comparing a corp planet that has 0 FC's (so with 49% bonus). Base income is direct income without any bonus from mining/refs/roids.

So 0.5% of your base income should exceed 1100 + (1100 *0.49) which is 1639. that meas your base income should exceed 1639/0.005 which is 327800.

Let's assume you are comparing a planet that has Magma done, which accounts for 75000 of the base income. That means you still have to get 252800 resources from roids and refs. A roid gives 250 resources in base income so you need 1011.2 roids for a FC to be more profitable than a ref. A refinery gives 1100 resources in base income which is 4.4 times that of a roid. That means for each refinery you allready have you can substract 4.4 roids.

That means in this situation a FC gives more income when you have at least 1011.2-(4.4*number_of_refs) roids.

The problem with determining the exact number of roids you need in which situation lies in the fact that each FC you have increases the income a ref gives by 5.5 resource which in turn means you need another 4.4 roids(or 1 ref) per FC you have for the next FC to yield more income than a ref.

P.S. i have a flue while writing this so my math may be off here and there.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

No its cool, it made sense sort of, basically say that every FC will increase the 'potency' of each refinary.

See i would have just assumed that the fact you needed to build 3 refs to have the same across the board effect as say 2 fcs would have made refinaries a very long term way of getting income, something that would rely on you making up the difference of people who spam FC's with extra roids to compensate the short term income difference accrued from extended construction time to reach the same goal.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Not going to brain-melt this post with math and well-thought out strategy discussion....back to the "basic" OP.

There were a few good suggestions in the mix here, I just need a clearer mind to chew on it a bit.

As for "extra" bonuses to distorters--I would be hesitant to agree to anything that provided resources in any way. Building them to be "un-scannable" is extreme. The basic idea is to at least stop INC scans late-game. Scanners gonna scan. More power to you if you get crazy with it and go full bore distorters.

Assuming most people get 60 FC's and 2 res labs. Add to that 4-6 of each factory. There's 80 constructions that "most" planets could theoretically have late-round. Refineries to taste. Structure Defense and Military Centres to taste. How many amps/distorters will you end up having based on your race after all those structures are taken into consideration....especially based upon value play. Even good fakes can be covered for all classes if you have shit value...

Dedicated scanners should be able to get a 100% AU on dist-whores. Slap-dick value-whores should not be able to get anything out of an incoming scan other than pod-count, provided the amps : dists difference is nominal (10% seems to be a theme). Otherwise it should be "innacurate" like Unit scans; scans will always yeild different results in the "total ships" column...unless your amps are over 10% greater than the attackers distorters. (insert maths here, etc).

I wouldn't try to associate any sort of XP "bonus" with distorters either. The holes in that idea are fairly well apparent. If I'm giving up passive income with refineries and FC's so that you pull your hair out because you can't scan me, distorters are working "as intended" in my eyes. Smells like roids and XP.

Or ships die in fire...

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Coincidence, talking about dists yesturday.

Asc did a round where they went full dists and while it wasnt OP it caused enough announced the rest of the universe (and still won the round as they was the best alliance by far) so instead of trying to balance them, Appocomaster just nerfed them to be non-existant.

It'll be hard to convince the Pa team to do any sort of buff to them due to that even though they should be trying to constantly balance every type of strat; they'd prefer Dists stay a non-factor.

Planet and Unit and Landing (landing eta 4 onwards) should be available from tickstart (or unlock through quests showing them how to use those scans) and every other type of scan should be blockable and blockable as dists are ALOT quicker than amps to build. You can edit unit to only show classes or any kind of nerf you like, but without access to scans, the game is unplayable... so any new player, the game is unplayable. Been 20 rounds and it seems like appocomaster still doesnt care about that though, hence the steady decline in active players.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

I have never received a satisfactory answer to the following question: why should people who invested practically nothing in amps be able to scan people who invested a ton in dists?

Re: Reward for Disting
 

and think it's a bit silly Landing scan and Unit scan ignore distorters.

This seems to be their real weakness.

Remove that handicap, or maybe keep landing scan I guess. But theres no incentive to be unscannable for a Terran for example, as Unit scan can approximate fleet!

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Tbh true dist whoring would only suit xans or ziks with alot of capped ships

You only really need dists to block inc scans etc for faking or faking meta classes like r42 zik de/cr fleets on xans.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

I think Landing scans and Units scans should still work regardless of Distorters, BUT what if every Distorter the target has over the number of Amps the scanner has, the number of reported ships in the Unit scan is increased by 1%?

So if someone with 5 Amps Unit scans a planet with 10 Dists then all the ships numbers are increased by 5%. Keep the random 20% in though, the bonus is just added on to that. So if the target only has a 1 Dist advantage then the scan will still be fairly accurate, but the larger the gap between Amps and Dists become, the less accurate Unit scans become.

I suppose you could do the same with Landing Scans actually. Maybe one extra defending fleet reported for every full 10 Distorters over the scanners Amps? ;)

Re: Reward for Disting
 

If you use finite percentages then you just adjust your calc accordingly to compensate. It needs RNG to be feasible

Re: Reward for Disting
 

But if they have more Dists than you have Amps, you won't be able to Dev scan them to know the percentage you should adjust by. :)

But yes, additional randomness or whatever could be introduced, I just plucked those numbers out of the air to illustrate the idea of increased randomness in Unit scans. :)

Re: Reward for Disting
 

at least that would make 1amp planets less viable

Re: Reward for Disting
 

You Won't but as most alalliance bots keep track of high sisters the info will be available and then you can use it

Re: Reward for Disting
 

Keeping track of high sisters sounds rather ominous.

Re: Reward for Disting
 

My phones auto correct is horrifying!!! :)

*disters ofc

Re: Reward for Disting
 

I dont have much to add in terms of specific suggestions, but it does seem to me that the cost of information in general is -far- too cheap in PA. For me, strategic decision making is a big part of PA - some of it long term (FCs vs. Dists), some of if short term (Should I land/pull?). I feel that a lot of the most fun/interesting situations arise when that decision making has to be made under some kind of uncertainty, but PA doesnt really do that much to increase the frequency of these situations.

What this means is in general, I would like to see it made harder / more expensive for people to get information. I like the idea of more advanced scans being easier to block, and I like the idea of more scans being restricted to planets with some kind of interaction. I also would like to throw out the idea of other bits of info being affected by amps / dists. Perhaps PL fleets from planets with few dists could get noticed a tick earlier on JPG scans? Perhaps rather than making xan ships cloaked by default, cloaking could depend on the scan:amp ratio of the planets involved (for all races, perhaps with race specific base cloaking ability)?