Quote:
Originally Posted by wades209
Its purely to think which bonus improves their start the most.. so at current you flick research to max until you have that branch done and then flick onto something new cons sec etc. This proposal means that if you want a quick start you can go for the research bonus straight away or pick another route.. so as you listed below with all the various playing styles (Dists, scanning, value etc..) You set up the bonus' which suit your style but the decisions you make are final. Therefore you have to think long and short term.
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No, I mean, I actually don't understand what you're proposing. What happens 20 ticks after you've changed your population? What happens after 100 ticks?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wades209
I can see what you mean about players figuring things out after 1 round but is that not the point that we need to keep things changing in someway rather than sit still which we are doing now? The biggest changes at the moment are Demo 40-30% decrease. I think this new style would give us a few rounds of playing around and then we would look to the next tweaks.
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I agree that the changes for next round are not exactly to write home about either. The MC change actively works to sabotage strategic depth, the cov op changes are pointless, and all the government tweaks do is put some more Tot players in the top 100. Your suggestions clearly have more impact than that, but I feel the same basic criticism applies.
Slight nudges to governments and new (but basically the same) ship stats every round are just tweaks. The problem I have with that is three-fold. One, they detract from efforts to genuinely solve the fundamental problem of the lack of variety in gameplay. Two, they disguise the problem of the lack of strategic choice.
But most importantly, what we have is one thing that everyone is forced to do (value play) and the tweaks change that one single thing a little bit every round. In this environment, if you don't like the one thing that PA encourages you to do, then there's no recourse for you. You could try doing something else, but you would get murdered because the entire game is geared towards doing something else (for some great examples of this, look at the dister rankings for the last few rounds) You could quit. Maybe you could just go out and troll people relentlessly, at least that's something that doesn't depend on the game mechanics much.
The job of a game designer is not forcing people into playing a certain way. It's to give as many players as possible
something they'll enjoy playing. So instead, what we should do is give people a choice between a bunch of different things, and ensuring all of those things are fun (each in their own way) and somewhat balanced (this is actually not so important!). This would allow those players who are tired of strategy A to change to strategy B or C or D, while allowing people who love strategy A to keep playing it.
And it wouldn't even take that much effort:
- Revert this round's nerf to MCs (but not last round's, probably).
- Remove the dist immunity of unit scans and landing scans and put them first in the scan tree.
- Make dists ~12-15% faster to build than amps, and about half their cost.
- Optionally: turn landing scans into JGPs that only show fleets that land at the same tick as you.
Done! You have now fixed disting and kept XP viable, increasing the number of ways you can play from 1 to 3. It's that simple.
