Quote:
Originally Posted by Light
Surely you come sum up your suggestion in less than 990 lines..
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Yes.
Basically, what Heartless and me want is to get rid of the idea of galaxies altogether, as per this topic, because
(1) having two instances of cooperation (galaxy and alliance) that cause conflicts between them is a Bad Idea.
(2) It's a limit on cooperation (10-14 people, no more, rarely less). It would be better if there were no such thing; cooperation, after all, is PA's life blood.
(3) When there are limitations on and rankings for galaxy cooperation, it pays off for veterans to exile newbies and generally badly performing planets (like scanners, cov oppers, inactives, etc), pushing them out of the "real" game.
The second and third issues are solved by any change that removes galaxies. The first, only when alliances can share a territory. These simple statement contains the seed of the sphere universe; without geography, there is no territory. In our opinion, the best way to approach this is to convert the universe into one giant sphere, instead of x clusters with y galaxies in each, with z planets in each. Planets could be located either on the outer shell alone (2D), or anywhere inside of the sphere (3D).
Furthermore, it requires that the distribution of alliance planets is not (entirely) random. Of course, giving people total control over where they end up is not a good idea, because of reason 3 (see above). If every alliance player chooses to be in the vicinity of their own alliance only, all the newbies will end up in no mans land. So a balance should be sought in which alliance players can be near each other, but not so much so that the newbies are shut out.
In our opinion, this is best achieved by dividing the universe into 4 signup zones. When new players sign up, they can choose to either go random, or to be put in a certain zone. Alliances can therefore gather most or all of their planets in a certain quadrant, without
total assurance that they will all be clumped together.
If a lot of planets choose the same quadrant, the size of the quadrant will simply increase accordingly. In this context, the term 'quadrant' does not mean '25% of the universe', but 'one of four pieces'. That said, you
could (for example) prevent planets from signing up to the biggest quadrant, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
With the removal of galaxies, we also remove one layer of complexity from the game, namely galaxy control. We replace this with another layer, namely local domination. This leads us to the next point on the agenda: fleet ETA. If we look at the current situation, there is no difference in ETA between going from 1:1:1 to 1:2:1 and from 1:1:1 to 9:9:9. In a universe with geography, this makes no sense, not without resorting to exotic theories about warp gates, collapsars or hyper drives.
Instead, what we want to use is the euclidian distance between two planets; the further two planets are away from each other, the longer it takes to get there. This has a number of effects, primarily:
(1) Roiding faraway planets is hard, because there's a lot of time for the target (or their alliance) to organise defence, protecting "bad" alliances from a large part of the universe
(2) Roiding faraway planets is not cost effective, because it takes forever to get there, protecting newbies from a large part of the universe.
A note before I continue. In the current setup, coordinates like x:y:z stand for cluster:galaxy:planet. In a universe with geography, x:y:z simply stand for distance from origin on the x, y and z axis.
An added bonus is that when two alliances (inevitably) pick the same quadrant, they will first have to make sure they take control of their local surroundings (either by making peace or going to war), before taking on the rest of the universe. This creates the opportunity for local leaders to arise, because the further away alliances try to wage war, the less effective they'll become. An alliance like Orbit could very well be able to resist an alliance like Ascendancy, if all their incomings were eta15 or more. Of course, you want to continue to make sure people can't get bashed in their sleep, so a certain minimum should be kept (7-8 ticks should do).
One of the issues we haven't resolved yet is local newbie farming. The planet at 9:9:9 will not get incomings from a planet at 1:1:1, but the planet at 1:1:2 might. it's nearby, newbies don't generally get defence, and not rarely they init to stupidly high levels. This issue is largely solved by introducing a
proper value based capping formula, not the piece of shit compromise we have now.
One of the few advantages of galaxies is that you can click "Galaxy" and see a small number of people that you're supposed to cooperate with. It clearly doesn't happen too often that a newbie actually does (or we would not have lost 2000 non-alliance players over the last 15 rounds), but the fact that galaxies are pre-defined is surely one of the few things that helps people get into the community.
On the other hand, the initiative is all too often placed with the newbie, there are few advantages for veterans to interact with newbies. This would be different if it's not just the 10-14 players in your galaxy that can defend you, but the x players that live less than 8 hours away from your planet. Furthermore, with the removal of galaxies, there is no longer a zone around your planet which only contains planets that can't attack you. This encourages making peace with them, because it'd suck if they decide to hit you just as your alliance runs out of defence fleets. It's the same mechanism as with low ETA in-cluster attacks: the threat of unfavorable combat encourages people to make peace.
Finally, a disclaimer. Though this may seem like a completely fleshed out suggestion, it's far from. There are many elements that so far seem optional (for example, introduction of a resource market, ability to move planets around the universe, allowing multiing) and many elements that so far seem set in stone but might, on closer examination, not be that beneficial after all.
(990 -> 108)