[Cooling]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I partly agree with you, Cooling, and partly I don't. Because replying "I agree" to half of what you said is boring, here's the things I disagree with you on.


First of all, I don't agree population is "something to do between ticks" any more than any of the things players can do in Planetarion, be it launching fleets, producing ships, enqueueing a structure or posting on the galaxy forums. It's the wrong approach to take precisely because it makes population indistinguishable to all the features of PA.

Secondly, I think the idea of specializing to pursue a certain strategy (on a planet level) is something PA needs to hold onto, because it keeps the game interesting to people for more than a few rounds of doing the same thing. I may be slightly biased here, because I enjoy doing new things more than anything in PA, but variation is the spice of life. Reducing PA to a game of "everyone pursuing the same strategy because that's the best one" is a bad idea, regardless of how deep you make the alliance level metagame.

Especially in the early stages of the round (a limit imposed by the short tech tree, more on this later), population plays a significant role in making your planet do what you want it to do. While what you say about governments can be said of population as well (that no one's round is ever ruined by their population assignment), population gives people the chance to pursue unorthodox strategies. Thus, while population and governments cannot ruin someone's playing experience, they can improve on it.

Beyond setting more sane defaults on population (25/50/25/0/0), I see absolutely no reason why we would remove it.

I don't see population as a useful or interesting feature of the game. First, I think it is simply something included in the game to adjust between ticks. It's an utterly uninteresting, trivial and pointless thing to do between ticks, and I'm ****ed if I know why its there. Players would be better off spending that time shoving steel rods up their own arses. I'm sure some of them do. It is indistinguishable from any of the other aspects of the game; its something you adjust once in a blue for little or no discernible advantage. It's never going to be more than that, it's just a shit half baked 'feature' that some retarded jackass came up with ages ago because 'it might be interesting'. It's not interesting, it never has been interesting, it never will be interesting. The wrong approach is to hold on like grim death to a half implemented, unnecessary and completely crap feature in the vain hope that in some future fantasy world, some ****ed up loon is going to 'improve it' in some ill defined fashion.

Secondly, I agree that we should preserve some strategy of specialization in the game. I like the idea of people having to specialize to compete, and I prefer game concepts that force people to make trade offs. But population is never going to add anything meaningful to this goal. It's plainly not a feature that allows you to do anything more than lock in changes at an extremely abstract and broad level. It can't possibly contribute in any meaningful way to your overall strategy for the round, it doesn't force you to make 'hard' or 'difficult' choices, and it doesn't let you pursue unique and interesting strategies at all. You seem to think it is worth preserving a feature that embodies a lot of virtues that it doesn't and can't possibly live up to. I think that's the wrong approach. I suggest you look for a better means of pursuing unorthodox and/or specialized strategies. Don't cling to half arsed quasi features that contribute jack all to the metagame.

Scanning is broken. No doubt about it. All of the useful, no, required scans are put at the end of the tree, making access to dedicated scanners an absolute requirement to not only playing PA well, but playing it in any meaningful sense of the word at all.

This is wrong.

Agreed. It's ****ing retarded.

I'm not going to comment on your particular idea regarding scanners. I'd hasten to add that I see the whole concept of dedicated scanners as an ill considered and retrograde aspect of the game. I don't think the virtue of encouraging alliance cooperation should be elevated above the ability for every player to play the game solo without penalty within the core game. Scanning is one zone of the game that is so fundamental to the player experience that I think it should be equal across the board. Alliances can work on providing defence, attacks, politics, social activities and wars. Not scans. I suspect the specifics of your proposal mean you're looking to achieve the middle ground, but this is an area that I disagree on. I'd also prefer that distorters reduced the accuracy of scans (within a 10-15% band, with perhaps 100% accurate scans late round). I don't like the idea of distorters being a 1:1 ratio with amps. Others might disagree.

I support changing the tech tree (or at least implementing a more easily modifiable tech tree, since it's currently hardcoded (and a million nerds cried out and were silenced)).

However, I've come to dislike the idea of a heavily branched and interlinked tech tree. Here, just like when I discussed population, the goal should be enabling choice. Forcing people to jump through hoops just to pursue the research path they desire because of the way you've set up the research tree is a bad thing. If I have to get a certain level of research in hulls before I can get hypergate, then I can no longer rush eta research.

Additionally, a branced and interlinked tree gets hopelessly complicated very quickly. One of the issues is that for a tree of sufficient size to last more than 400 ticks (unlike the one we currently have), it invariably ends up as too big to either fit on one reasonably sized display (made all the more pressing because of the emergence of smart phones) or into the short-term memory of any non-Einsteinian individual. Linear, unbranched and uninterlinked research trees are easy to understand (because easy to segment) and can be made just as deep as the other kind.

I agree that a heavily branched and interlinked tech tree would be horrendously shit. I think linear tech trees sound fine, but I would prefer to see something along the lines of a tech tree that forces players to choose, in an arbitrary way, between two or three equally beneficial but distinct choices at every level of a linear path. Something that at least forces players to make hard decisions in order to specialize based on an overall strategy. While this might be difficult to balance (hence please cut down the number of ships drastically), it would add a great deal more strategic depth.

When was the last time a feature of PA was removed?

Never, sadly. I hope the Jagex people take a damned hard look at several of them if they ever get around to fixing this utterly broken game.