[Appocomaster]

Firstly, thank you for the feedback. I know there have been some posts on this suggestions forum and I do read them and am trying to implement bits and pieces of many of them as I can.

Multi-Tick combat
I would like to say that, contrary to what has been posted here, we haven't spent rounds slaving on this - what we have done was done several rounds ago and used in a speedgame. I'm tempted to make some additional minor changes (around alliance defence display and scans) but, based on the strong feedback, I think that there aren't enough changes which can be made to satsify a large volume of posters.

For reference my obviously uneducated view of combat is that things are black and white - either you land with little/ no risk or you don't - and multi tick may allow you a partial land for smaller roids for one tick before pulling (or similar). My main concern was over managing the waves, and I did have an initial productive session with some people in #beta to see how we could make multi waves clearer and Cin and I got useful feedback, but we'll shelve most of that as we don't want to waste time on something which would seemingly currently only be tolerated on a speedgame.

Alliance Sizes
These are staying for reasons which have been previously covered around the pool of people who is able to run an alliance vs those willing to be in an alliance but not actually willing to run it; also the available infrastructure for alliances based out of the in-game system.

Galaxy Sizes
This is always a difficult point between those who want to play with their friends and prefer private galaxies and like the slightly bigger private galaxies, and those who point out that bigger galaxies tend to make it harder for alliances to attack (and sometimes result in major waving to break defence blocks).

Ultimately, the top galaxies will always do better than the bottom galaxies. Either the top galaxies mostly self-cover, and the middle/bottom galaxies struggle to do so (but galaxies may foster slightly more in the way of cooperation and spirit), or the top galaxies don't self cover but the middle/bottom galaxies become totally reliant on alliances. I'm not sure there's a right answer, which is why there has been movement back and forth on buddy pack sizes over the rounds. I still haven't really heard of a better mechanism than buddy packs - if the main issue is targets then maybe it's something we have to build in the way of non-player-planets. To get them really viable, we'd have to probably refactor large chunks of the code (or cheat drastically in how the planets are run, but even then, getting them involved in combat would be hard).


I will still be looking at other changes for R61 as I can, including on this forum and even IRC PMs (though posts on this forum with comments often help).