Quote:
Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk
No. End of thread.
I'd like to see a wider range of possibilities on that last point, though this is not possible in the current framework for ship stats:
What I would like to make possible is a true evolution of ship strategies as the round progresses. Right now, almost all ships are available on the first night out of protection, and all of them are on the second night. You can pick a ship strategy at tick 0 and stick with it for the remainder of the round. That's pretty static (that's a euphemism for 'boring'). We could delay the research on certain ship classes until much later in the round. Release FR/DE at tick ~400 and CR/BS at tick ~700, making each advance significantly stronger than the previous classes. You can either save up resources, crippling your early round growth, then get a growth spurt near the end of the round to make up for it, or spend on Fr/De, grow slowly and steadily throughout the round, or go for Fi/Co, sprint to the front of the pack early on, then work the rest of the round to maintain your lead.
That's not the only way in which such evolution is possible. You could provide the ability to upgrade existing ships through research. I'd assign different limits to upgradability to each ship class. Make some classes strong with few upgrades, some weak with many upgrades, and some in between. Like the above, this allows you to choose a longer term strategy than is currently possible. This does lead to an explosion in the number of 'ships' (each base ship and each of its upgraded forms could be considered a ship in itself), and that the number of ships is already too high. Fortunately, there is no real reason why each race needs its own set of ships. We could combine them all into one big pool of, say, 18 combat ships (each with 1-3 upgrades), 6 pods and 2-3 SKs, instead of 40-50 combat ships, 10-15 pods and 5 SKs, split into 5 mutually exclusive sets.
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I have considered something like this before; I think you can make quite a good analogy between games like SC2, which have quite clear early/mid/late games and what I think you would be trying to achieve.
To some extent, I would argue PA has something like this naturally. Rather than being driven by ship stats, it is driven the the popular opinion about the ship stats. This round for example, I started off with quite a lot of Fr and was unsure whether I would get many BS or not. Pretty soon it became evident that Fr was not particularly effective and I switched pretty hard into a BS attack fleet. Now the round has reached the midway point, BS are becoming much harder to land, so I'm moving into Co class.
Nonetheless, I would agree that strengthening this aspect is probably a good thing; you would of course have to be careful to manage the complexity of such a system, and you'd also need to be careful not to make the early/mid game too limited for late game players. Not many people will sit through 850 ticks of being useless in my opinion.
I'm not sure I can get behind the specific plan you mention though. There's nothing wrong with it in principle, but I'm not sure the will/ability to make the required changes to the code exist. I think an easier to implement change which may lead to a similar effect is to expand both the tech tree and range of construction options. At the moment, most planets will finish the majority of the tech tree, and certainly finish all the 'must-have' techs. If the tech tree was expanded such that no planet could finish more than 70% of it, then people would have to make strategic choices about where to invest their research.
I haven't given much thought to what such a tech tree would look like, but you could for example extend the hull research branch beyond cruisers. If we allow branching, we could have research that improves the armor/damage/emp-efficiency of all ships. If each of these branches had 2-3 levels and each required say 14000 RP, people have serious choices to make and the landscape of the game would change as the universe finishes each branch at roughly the same time.