Killing ships for XP

[x-dANGEr]

Edit (Appocomaster): split from JBG's thread

The way I see it, there is a problem at the core of the game engine, which requires a more radical change than "ETAs", I do realize what you said earlier, JPG:

As interesting as that would be I'd really like to limit suggestions to things that have a non-zero chance of getting implemented

I'll state where I think the problem lies. The game doesn't encourage "fighting" in anyway.

What I mean by fighting, is having a battle actually occur. Fights are never efficient to any side (attack or defense), because when they are, they don't take place. (Attack recalls, or defense steps back)

I think more fighting means more excitement. That's just me of course, and a lot of people might disagree with me. Anyhow, I find their are a couple of issues connected with that:

-Game offers too much information to both parties; through unit scans, fleet analysis, etc. There should be a sense of unpredictability, and risk in fighting. Not as much risk as about enough "unpredictability" to make a lot more fighting cases in the "grey" area. Not a sharp "recall", or "land".

-As it is right now, the main way of development is the possession of roids through attacking. You don't get any bonus what so ever for "killing" ships, even when you steal ships, you're losing the same amount of value you're "stealing", so you're practically on level grounds, score-wise.

-To help encourage fighting, which would make the game more interesting, I suppose. Another way to develop your planet should be introduced through killing ships, and taking part in fights. That somehow exists in the form of salvage, for the defending parties. But since the attackers have no motivation/incentive to actually fight with losses, they probably won't.

-I have a few suggestions on how it may be introduced. Maybe, rewarding killing ships with XP. Or, and I lean to this option, giving value revenue through killing ships; either through salvage from what your ships kill, or even roids, in the sense that the debris somehow collide and form them.

Of course, balance needs to be in the midst of all. But I'd opt for an engine that rewards "fighting" more than "roids" anytime.

I've never been what you'd call a pro at this game, and you might as well argue that I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't claim to be more knowledgeable than most of you, so feel free to bash on me. I just see things this way, and I'm trying to contribute to the "greater good" of Planetarion by offering one more point of view.

// I'm very sorry, JPG, if in any sense you consider this an abrupt hijack of your thread/the subject

[Light]

Originally Posted by x-dANGEr

-I have a few suggestions on how it may be introduced. Maybe, rewarding killing ships with XP. Or, and I lean to this option, giving value revenue through killing ships; either through salvage from what your ships kill, or even roids, in the sense that the debris somehow collide and form them.

The inherent problem with this system (although this is the one i would implement) is that at the moment with the way stats are devised (even more so this time).. the majority of attacks are calced so that there is zero value loss to the attacking side (or very little). So while you would give incentive to the attacker to actually kill ships, the defender will still flee if he does not get defence.

If you were to implement an XP from ship kills round, you'd also have to back it up with stats that reflect this.. i.e. multiple ships with the same init and no hard counters.

I'd actually like to see an XP through ship kills instead of roids captured round, as you could give XP to the defending planet as well (using the same formula).. So it would not only become a choice of weither the attacker should recall/land but also weither the defender should sacrifice some ships for the XP.

It also has the added benefit of giving the newbies something else when they're hit while offline. As now they will have to rebuild there fleet as usually but they might of actually gained score and rank through it (due to the attacker having alot more score).

[x-dANGEr]

the majority of attacks are calced so that there is zero value loss to the attacking side (or very little).

Well, part of the suggestion is to make battles less predictable enough to be in the gray area for both parties. Would it introduce luck in the game? I don't think so. Calculated risks is the answer. The better skilled will win eventually, but having gone through more fights, and lost some ships on the way. Not an easy sail of some sort.

How to achieve that? I'm not sure. Maybe limit scans to News/Planet/Development, etc.

I agree, stats should be balanced accordingly.

It also has the added benefit of giving the newbies something else when they're hit while offline. As now they will have to rebuild there fleet as usually but they might of actually gained score and rank through it (due to the attacker having alot more score).

It also has another benefit of making newbies a lot less "juicy" in some way. They tend to have small value, which translates to a lot less ships to kill, and thus less score to gain.

It would also spice things by making fleet catches more often.

[Appocomaster]

I disagee with less information available on planets; but I agree that combat is generally an all-or nothing thing, where no one wants to lose asteroids. This is helped this round by stats, but in general no one wants to lose ships as it's not worth it.

My main concern is that if someone loses all their ships their round is surely then over? Would this not still be the case if they lose most of their ships? They'd have more to show for it but in reality, especially without stats like these, it's hard with most of your fleet gone to have enough of a fleet to attack, and your only option is to play for xp. I think that some fraction of xp might be interesting though.

[Gio2k]

Encouraging fights is not an easy problem to solve. People don't like loosing ingame assets (ships / roids / etc). Even so, the conventional wisdom is "roids can be won back, but fleet can not be rebuilt easily".
If you want to encourage fighting you have to address that part. Ships should be easily expendable. How should we address that? A dramatical solution would be to remove value from the score formula for example, leaving only the XP bit. But that would not be enough, because losing ships also limits you ability to get more XP.
I once suggested using XP as a sort of currency to get some extra benefits, which could counter the fact that you are losing value. Maybe it's an idea worth investigating. At any rate, i would welcome running a parallel speedgame to test any crazy ideas to make the game more fun for the average player.

[Appocomaster]

Originally Posted by Gio2k

Encouraging fights is not an easy problem to solve. People don't like loosing ingame assets (ships / roids / etc). Even so, the conventional wisdom is "roids can be won back, but fleet can not be rebuilt easily".
If you want to encourage fighting you have to address that part. Ships should be easily expendable. How should we address that? A dramatical solution would be to remove value from the score formula for example, leaving only the XP bit. But that would not be enough, because losing ships also limits you ability to get more XP.
I once suggested using XP as a sort of currency to get some extra benefits, which could counter the fact that you are losing value. Maybe it's an idea worth investigating. At any rate, i would welcome running a parallel speedgame to test any crazy ideas to make the game more fun for the average player.

If you get xp for killing (or losing...?) ships then you'd be more likely to get involved. It'd reduce the losses for combat to an amazing degree.... and so combat would have fewer downfalls. This might change the balance of attack and defence though.

[Cowmando]

I do like the idea of encouraging people to actually fight, rather than the current run away or win out right system. However as both appoco and gio2k have already said; it is a question of sustainability. Implementing XP for kills (losses?) combat system to the game as is I believe would still lead to those who hold onto their ships doing far better than those who don't. This is because those ships will be back out the next night in another attempt to improve your situation. As opposed to spending the next week rebuilding with very few options open to you. Unless the XP is stupidly high for such actions, even then it is likely to reward the person who saves their fleet until the end of the round. The only real change I can see this making is in those "should I/Shouldn't I" situations it will make you lean more to the should.

Solutions to this have been suggested by both the original poster and gio2k. The suggestions being a resource/roid reward, or that xp can do more than give you score (I would assume this would lead to xp being turned into ships). The problem I can see with this is it takes away the effectiveness of killing enemy ships, potentially even reward people for fighting a losing battle.

I don't really have any solutions for these questions I have raised, I raise them in the hope that someone may think of some.

One way that may encourage more fighting could be actually go back to the old scoring system without any xp. However this would rely on alliance actually wanting to fight it out and be willing to lose ships in order to kill ships. Which would be difficult to encourage via game mechanics and is likely to lead to 3 boring roid race rounds for every 1 round where people actually get out there and fight.

On the other 2 points raised in this thread: I am in favour of more grey areas and less information being available. It rewards those who can piece together small bits of info to create a bigger picture. However I understand it makes it harder for new players and getting them involved is key to the game's survival. I do love the idea of a parallel speed game running to test some ideas and see where they end up and if they could be added to the main game. This could provide more variations between rounds and new challenges to overcome, leading to those who can adapt beating those that follow the format. However I realise this would require resources not available to the game such as people employed to code the different ideas.

[Kafir]

Imo changing the fighting should be related to income (and salvage) to get people motivated. How about mining bounus or somekind extra income by the XP from killing ships. Or how about changing salvage so that the side (ATT or DEF) which has made more damage to another gets the salvage. If there's more than one players fleet on the winning side, the salvage is devided by the 'Damage done' values.

Monday morning raw ideas...

[Ave]

Simply allow collected XP to be turned as funds, when your value wont drop from fighting. (NOTE: XP DOES COURAGE TO FIGHT, SPECIALLY VERSUS BIGGER PLANETS!) Also let attacker collect salvage, when the defender and attacker can fight on fair ground. -> battles might actually occur. Also ofc defenders should gain xp from landing their defences.

[JonnyBGood]

I somehow missed this thread for a long while or glazed over it or something. This is actually a really old problem that got a lot worse as how to play PAX well became more widely understood. It was always, even in the days when we had 150,000 planets, a bad idea to land attacks where you lost shitloads. Somewhat surprisingly though it was much more of a wargame during pre-pax times. Why? Because alliance rankings didn't exist and there was no out and out score ranking to pursue. If you could control the top planets and galaxies fair enough but it was also massively about military power and how much of it you could bring into play every night. Backing this up was the fact that the rounds were longer and thus skill/determination/activity or whatever would come into play towards the end more.

I'm going to pre-empt the rest of my reply by outlining the major problems with all this. A killing ships gives XP formula, if introduced, is likely to be horrifically unbalanced at first. The track record of implementation of these sorts of changes is nothing short of abysmal. We tried it in PAX and we ended up with someone having 3 times the score of the #2 planet and they had to recode it midround. More significantly you have to recognise the reality of the situation. The easiest way to kill ships is to bash/fleetcatch newbies. This is just how it is. You can attempt to rig your formula in such a way that this isn't true but then we'll have an even more complicated formula which will probably be even likelier to be "exploited".

I think more fighting means more excitement. That's just me of course, and a lot of people might disagree with me. Anyhow, I find their are a couple of issues connected with that:

-Game offers too much information to both parties; through unit scans, fleet analysis, etc. There should be a sense of unpredictability, and risk in fighting. Not as much risk as about enough "unpredictability" to make a lot more fighting cases in the "grey" area. Not a sharp "recall", or "land".

Actually that's what most of the "top" players actually want. A game that, at some points, is predictable. I don't really think this is necessarily a bad thing, it's always been this way and if anything there's less information available than there used to be (mil scans etc).

-I have a few suggestions on how it may be introduced. Maybe, rewarding killing ships with XP. Or, and I lean to this option, giving value revenue through killing ships; either through salvage from what your ships kill, or even roids, in the sense that the debris somehow collide and form them.

I'd lean much more towards Ave's suggestion above (I'm pretty sure I brought it up a few times in the past). Allow XP to be used for something, I don't think I'd go for a 1:1 equivalance in xp being turned into value, something like 50% and make it take some time (48 hours?) is significant enough for me. Attackers being able to collect salvage (or defenders being able to collect more salvage etc) are cool options also but sound, to me, like more coding work than a change this much xp into this much crystal.

[Alki]

converting xp into resources could be pretty ace

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by x-dANGEr

I think more fighting means more excitement. That's just me of course, and a lot of people might disagree with me.

I just noticed this in JBG's post and I am indeed going to disagree. Winning fights means more excitement. Losing fights just means that you lose interest and quit. Because for every winner there has to be a loser, the negative impact of losing a fight has to be outweighed by the positive impact of winning a fight. Then and only then can we look at rewarding fighting, or rather, rewarding the destruction of value.