[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Haer

Nonetheless, I still think such measures are useful. The issue you mentioned - why do multiple target rounds feel more defensive - is the sort of thing this kind of analysis may give us some insight into. The main way these measures give us this insight is by allowing proper comparisons between stats. While these comparisons wont be 100% accurate, they will be better than the current system of guesswork and public opinion (I think).

I agree. But I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to start.

Originally Posted by Haer

It's interesting that you said the databases for prior rounds have been saved - any idea if/how the community could get access to them?

They have been used to create the history site. The data itself is not publicly accessible, but if you ask Appocomaster real nicely, maybe he'll put it up somewhere.

Originally Posted by Haer

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.

PA was originally inspired by StarCraft, actually. You can still see some of the remnants of that inspiration, but not much of it.

Originally Posted by Haer

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.

It was intentionally a radical sketch. Players and alliances already naturally change their fleet composition throughout the round, and introducing an artificial mechanism merely to replace something that has already evolved naturally is a waste of time. See also alliance relations. Supplementing it is fine, though, see the alliance rankings. An actual implementation would be subtle. We would be talking upgrades that improve ships in sub-10% increments.

Because you're right; unlike in StarCraft games, PA rounds take ages. You may want to be willing to wait for Ultralisk tech to finish before destroying your opponent, but no sane person would twiddle their thumbs for weeks before something interesting happens. Making the upgrades fairly low key ensures that even choosing a fleet that's relatively weak to start with does not immediately disqualify you from playing the first half of the round, and that choosing a fleet that has a relatively shallow pool of upgrades does not stop you from enjoying the second half of the round.

In any case, those are just the two extremes. Maybe fleets could upgrade in distinct steps: Cr gets its upgrades around tick 50, 300 and 700, while Fr gets its upgrades around tick 100, 400 and 600. Or maybe if you went Cat, you could get your Cr upgrades at tick 650 instead of 700, preventing Fr from smacking you in the face for too long. The possibilities are endless.

Originally Posted by Haer

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.

Oh, definitely. This is pure fantasy. It should be implicitly assumed that any suggestion on these forums is purely a theoretical exercise, not a proposal that's expected to be implemented (or even seriously looked at) by the powers that be. So it goes. In that light...

Originally Posted by Haer

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.

I like your idea to make the tech tree essentially unfinishable. That could work either by introducing hard branches (choose one branch and get excluded from the other) or just by providing too much research to finish in one round, even as Cat/Demo.

I don't think your approach is much simpler to implement than mine, though. You still have to add the research for a bunch of upgrades, some means of presenting the different versions of the ships in some sane way, the combat engine should take them into account... all of those things are hardcoded, so it's far from a small addition. Unfortunately, both of our ideas venture so far outside of the realm of practical possibilities (given the lack of developer time) that it's nearly pointless even taking cost into account.


In any case, while this is all fascinating, none of it has anything to do with your original question. Sorry for derailing you.
:P