[Discuss] Universal Aid & Taxation

[Seth Mace]

This system is based on (&inspired) by SOME of Dr_Ricks thread here, however i thought it would be better to make a fresh post as there are a few additions to his original suggestion.

(if a mod thinks its best to just keep it on 1 page, feel free to copy it over & delete this thread!)

Dr_Ricks basic idea was to allow the inactive/ n00b planets to still produce adequate resources so they could continue to create good fleets to attack. The problem imo (and others), was the idea of EVERY planet (regardless of their size) getting 1 roid every other tick, this wouldnt have any real effect in decreasing the void between small and large.

So how can we allow new players to continually get decent amounts of resources that can give them fresh chances to fight back and help their dedication to climb the rankings ladder? Here are 2 suggestions "Universal Aid" & "Taxation", each can work seperately or at the same time.

Universal Aid

The idea of this system is to give "aid" to planets that NEED it. So planets in the top100 wont receive such charity (not that they need it) and the planets that do, will receive much needed aid and can build ships to kick-start their planetary empire post-bashing.

The idea is to use a "Ghost Asteroid Resource" (GAR) system, where in planets who have less then "?"% roids of the Universal roid average (called the Aid Level Requirement - ALR), will receive resource bonuses that pushes their total income, to that of a planets size at the Aid level Requirement.

i.e if ALR = 500 roids, and "n00b planet" only has 300, they will receive a bonus of 200 Ghost Asteroids to fill the gap.

So as soon as a planet is roided below the ALR, this system will kick in and allow them to continue producing Ships at a more "competitive" rate. The key point being that these Ghost Asteroids CANNOT be captured by others.

At the same time, Dr_Ricks idea of planets getting 1 roid bonus every other tick (or whatever amount/ time period is thought best) will apply to these planets ONLY. So as their planet gradually increases in roid count (up towards the ALR), their GAR aid will decrease, finally stopping once they reach the Aid Level Requirement.

What does this mean for the Universe?

It should hopefully allow the lower tiers of PA (the fresh blood) to continue playing the game. Even if they loose all their roids, the Aid system will drastically reduce the impact of their losses by speeding up the recovery period. Think of it as a Hospital Drip, each planet in need will receive treatement in the form of realtime resources (GAR) & longterm growth through roid donations.

Also, because of PAs current Bash limits, the bigger planets wont be able to directly benifit from the lower tiers Aid. Of course not until such planets grow bigger or middle tiers knock them down again.

The differences introduced to Dr_Ricks idea by the Aid Level Requirement, are that "true" new players can come out of treatement with greater levels of protection. Of course inactive planets will still become easy farms but this doesn't have to be a bad thing? As Dr_Rick said;

Stop the deletion of inactive planets. Let them be ownerless farms. They can provide a host of bountiful targets for the second tier players who currently have no targets. Now they can engorge themselves silly on easy targets. In the process they become nice targets for the tier 3 players and the effect carries on up to the tier 4. And now that the bottom planets have such a constant amount of roids even if their owner hasn't played in a while, they will stockpile tons of resources. More then enough that a person could come back to a planet after two weeks of not playing and build a nice fleet and begin to have some fun roiding the other bottom planets who arent active, and easily become a tier 2 player, and maybe even a tier 3. Instead of deleting a planet after a week, having the owner come back and discovering the planet is gone, and never playing planetarion again[..]

Taking Things Further... Taxation

Remove the exponential roid grow cap and Flip the "Aid Level Requirement" on its head and name it "Taxation Point" (TP). The Taxation Point will relate again to the Universal Roid Average and any planets who have more roids then this will be Taxed. Ofc the greater your roidcount, the greater the taxation.

Im sure many players will cringe at this idea but aslong as the right formula's are introduced, it should create a scenario where the planet with most roids still produces the most resources BUT also, looses most to taxation. The #1 roid planet will still be producing the most resources, that should never be in question (ofc this doesnt happen with current system), taxation just means their growth is handicapped to allow tighter competition and hopefully a longer campaign?

Again, like the ALR, the TP is dynamic and represents the universe at its particular point in the round. So from the start, the top roid planets will find their lead being smaller then before and hence, their slower growth should allow for a closer and more balanced universe?

Aha, well, discuss

This long post in dedicated to Mistwraith and her hatred of all things long \o/

[Kal]

interesting...

[noah02]

Originally Posted by Kal

interesting...

Very....

[Neferti]

It's an interesting idea, this 'Ghost Asteroid' thing, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to keep all small planets at the same level of production. Also, wouldn't it induce some degree of laziness in smaller planets, if they don't have to (re)cap roids to get back to their former level of production?

I do admit I haven't fully thought this through, these are just first impressions...

[CrazySpoon]

I have to think these things trough, but there are some things that popped up in my mind. I just wanted to post em so I wouldnt forget them

1. Yoru idea should start at a certain tick time. because if people @ the start gain free roids because they are below the avarage, then its free rocks for them, and they can use their resources on other things.

2. ALR and GAR should only work for a period of time. Because, the avarage will change, and it might bet higher. So people with ALR and GAR can keep benefitting on this.

3. TP is a nice idea, tho it shouldnt be to high. Cus people that roid play the game like it should be played. Attack and attack. So why tax em if they play the game. And have people that dont attack to much have the benefit of free stuff. As I said. Tax is nice, but not to high.

I'm at work and in a few secs off to my other job., so dont flame me if I have read over some lines. Will have a closer look @ this post 2night

[Seth Mace]

Originally Posted by CrazySpoon

1. Yoru idea should start at a certain tick time. because if people @ the start gain free roids because they are below the avarage, then its free rocks for them, and they can use their resources on other things.

Aye, this may be the case however, the Aid is dynamic, so if the average is 100 rocks and you say, have to be below the universal average by 70% to meet ALR? (this number needs a lot of testing/ thought) then you would have to have less then 30 roids, in order to receive any benifit.

Just to clear this again, you would NOT get ALR if you are just below the "Universal Average of Roids" >> I think the ALR limit should be lower then the average. However, if testing shows ALR is best at the Universe Roid Avg, then so be it:P

2. ALR and GAR should only work for a period of time. Because, the avarage will change, and it might bet higher. So people with ALR and GAR can keep benefitting on this.

Aye, (these parts you possible missed when you quickly read:P), everything is based on averages at any given moment throughout the round.

I also agree that any Taxation of the top percent of PA should not be so harsh that it persuades them from attacking. The tax is just to help balance gameplay over time, its not to punish the 1337. Some1 at the bottom end of the Tax wouldnt even notice it but as you go up the roid ladder, the tax loss should be more noticeable.

Nerfiti: It could very well make some planets lazy but for others it could instil some optimisim about growing to a decent size. Its a safety net to boost n00bie/ post-bash growth but not one that any1 could seriously command & conquer from.

All these ideas are the easy part though, the difficulty will be formulating.

[Orion Treet]

Well, I must say it's interesting, but what you're saying is no-one can ever drop under the universe average roids? I think this would lead to larger planets gaining roids faster than slower, sincer there are more targets, and the inactives will form 'legal' farms. This will just cause the larger to grow faster I think cause there are always good targets availeble (since also the universe roid average would rise)
Even with taxation I think they'd still be profiting. Ofc there will be a roid number where it will no longer be profitable (and even cost you) to get more roids. Once that point is reached ofc fleet catches and bashings will be the standerd method of growing further, which would be interesting I gues, but that happens a lot now as well so would only remove the necesity for roidcap at the end of the round.
It is ofc cool for the people at the bottem of the ranks do keep getting new roids/recourses, but since everyone has them it doesn't make that huge a dif (taking away the fact you could build no ships till say last quarter of the round and you have a few hundredmillion at least of each recource, spend it all on BS and roid some top planets with them not being able to retal, as we've seen in speedgames/havoc)

[Seth Mace]

Thats indeed an issue, a planets Value included in the formulas could maybe help prevent abuse in regards to ALR?

Also remember that the actives will reach a point when the Bash limit will prevent them from farming the planets below ALR.

While these systems may not change how much people are bashed or roided, they may give certain players a better fighting chance and more importantly, give n00bies some decent funding for their military.

In regards to small planets stockpiling resources, well such planets benifiting from ALR wont be producing anywhere near as much as the top planets. Im sure PA team would remove any suspicious "en mass noobs towards #1" attacks anyway;P

[Goafer LX]

i think the aid of weaker planets is a really good thing, but why make the PA system just 1 big UN??
how about Taxation applies only to a galaxy, and the taxed money goes into the galactic fund? then this solves the problem of some people been too greedy and not donating, then the MoD can distribute the fund?(as thats what its there for)
you get the same required effect, weaker planets having money, but this way, your tax doesnt go to random planets in the universe, who u might actually be attacking....
and as for GAR-nice, only thing i would say is... if the roids are there, they should be stealable......just the planet gets given some more at the end of a set time period- say every 12/24 hours??

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Neferti

It's an interesting idea, this 'Ghost Asteroid' thing, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to keep all small planets at the same level of production. Also, wouldn't it induce some degree of laziness in smaller planets, if they don't have to (re)cap roids to get back to their former level of production?

This is basically correct. Without incentive to attack, what is the incentive to play?

This would also hurt the upflow of roids.

[Kal]

talk more about this!

[Doorsdown]

i would say if the average is 500 roids and they got 250...i don't think they should get 250 in GAR.. maybe like 20 to 50 % that way it helps them get closer but will make them work for it a bit more. also the GAR roids should NOT show up on the gal screen bur rather only on the overview and the minning screen

[Think]

Originally Posted by Goafer LX#

i think the aid of weaker planets is a really good thing, but why make the PA system just 1 big UN??
how about Taxation applies only to a galaxy, and the taxed money goes into the galactic fund? then this solves the problem of some people been too greedy and not donating, then the MoD can distribute the fund?(as thats what its there for)
you get the same required effect, weaker planets having money, but this way, your tax doesnt go to random planets in the universe, who u might actually be attacking....
and as for GAR-nice, only thing i would say is... if the roids are there, they should be stealable......just the planet gets given some more at the end of a set time period- say every 12/24 hours??

As I was reading this an Idea just pop up in my head. What if the MoD was able to set a tax on all the planets in gal in % of income and it would goto the fund automaticly. He shouldnt be abel to set different % on the planets tho as it could be abused by alliances( maybe those below a certain % of the gal average could get lower tax).
Another Idea is the possibility to donate inside alliances and/or trade resources some way.

[Alessio]

Blehhhhhh... bad ideas
Keep the game competitive plz..

About taxation:

Originally Posted by Seth Mace

So from the start, the top roid planets will find their lead being smaller then before and hence, their slower growth should allow for a closer and more balanced universe?

I dont think the universe should be more balanced then it is now,
and it wouldn't make the game more fun for anyone except maybe like 10 players that already had a shot at the top place..

btw its never the planet itself that makes those planets great.. so taxing them is kinda pointless..
but still annoying for them

Their not that much big planets...
and its a nice/fun achievement to take them down or to become one of them, I dont want to lessen those experiences..

About that Universal Aid:

Altho I dislike it it cud be usefull for the smallest of the small planets
(not 4 below average planets or something.. but really for planets that only have 130 roids left or something)
As long as they can still be really hurt by other small planets, and dont get as much cash as smaller planets that r bigger then them
The attacker should still have a nice effect and able 2 hurt their enemies..

[BeeKiller]

Not that i wish to throw a spanner in the works, however I believe there a several fundamental flaws in this idea of Universal Aid.

First off, average (mean) roid count is a flawed concept as far as the number of planets which fall above and below it as quite often the top planets will have maybe 5-10 times the average roid count, so the average may be top heavy (as in higher than it should be) and more people will be below average than technically should be. (it wont be a normal distribution basically). Hopefully anyone unfortunate enough to have done statistics at school or university will understand what I mean. So it would basically require slightly more complex thinking to come up with a fair level at which planets would recieve aid.

Also having your income boosted could well be exploited by scanners and covert ops planets, as it means they can afford to keep their value lower than they would have been able to and still get the income they need to do all the scans their alliance needs.

As for possibly giving planets extra roids everyother tick (or other time period) thats also slightly flawed as by giving them roids you increase the universal average and hence probably will keep them below the average for longer than they should have been, and also when the average increases in this way, it may make others who were on the borderline fall into category to get the aid as well (when they didn't really need/deserve it).

Perhaps adding an extra variable into the equation which take into account when the planet was last attacked or last lost ships, so the ghost asteroids only come into effect when the planet has suffered significant losses, and also the ghosts asteroids diminish during 'times of peace' (an insentive to go and roid). This still leave exploits, scanners etc may suicide small numbers of ships relatively continuously to keep their incoming levels high.

I guess this idea, which seemed quite simple at first is alot more complex than you had thought

As for taxation, I like the idea of removing the cap on exponential roid growth, I don't think there should be a roid limit tbh, however myself and probably most pa players wont like the idea of our resources being payed to an unknown random organisation, so I would suggest rather than taxing the resource, why not just say that "as roid numbers increase, it becomes much more dangerous for our mining teams to operate on these orbiting masses of rock and so we cannot sustain as high an income per roid as the numbers go beyond a certain limit". I'm not trying to belittle your ideas though it may sound like that so far, I just think in the context of how planetarion operates, the universal aid needs ALOT of thought to get a useful and non-exploitable (relatively) version of it, whereas the concept behind allowing greater roid growth again is a very good one, just calling it taxation doesn't suit the game (massive space war game) imho.

^ These are all meant to be constructive criticisms! ^

[demiGOD]

-player X and Y each have *200 roids and goes inactive

-player X goes active at tick 400 and gets +300 ghost asteroids to match the universal roid count average of **500

-at tick 800, player Y goes active and gets +700 ghost asteroids because the universal roid count average went up to **900

-assuming that player X keeps up activity, and from roiding and getting roided, realistically, will earn about *200 more roids with a total of 700 roids by tick 800, but player Y who's been inactive the whole time, but reactivates at tick 800, automatically gets +700 ghost asteroids to total to 900..

-player X = * **700 roids at tick 800 and has been active since reactivation at tick 400
-player Y = * **900 roids at tick 800 because universal roid count average is **900
-conclusion = player Y has been very inactive but still ended up with a more roid count because of increasing universal roid count average

*numbers are variables and can be of any amount
**universal roid count averages are random numbers but still follows an increasing trend because naturally, roid count averages will increase because of sporadic roid initiations by numerous players

---- are we suggesting that we should be rewarding very very inactive players?

[Kal]

the active people benefit from getting the resources from the roids earlier though

[demiGOD]

Originally Posted by Kal

the active people benefit from getting the resources from the roids earlier though

that's true, but resources and roid count go into up and down cycles because of production, construction, roiding, and getting roided and are not very constant, we just can't help this because activity requires us to do so - (assuming for the worst of course)

universal roid count average is on a constant increasing trend (specially if ghost asteroids are included in the universal roid count, if this is the case, then this idea is a definite bad) -

so if this is to be implemented, there are going to be a lot of cases where the player who just reactivated and gets awarded ghost roids, will have a more roid count (and more resourceable assets) than the player who got activated x # of ticks ago just because of the nature of activity of the game

[paolo]

Originally Posted by demiGOD

that's true, but resources and roid count go into up and down cycles because of production, construction, roiding, and getting roided and are not very constant, we just can't help this because activity requires us to do so - (assuming for the worst of course)

universal roid count average is on a constant increasing trend (specially if ghost asteroids are included in the universal roid count, if this is the case, then this idea is a definite bad) -

so if this is to be implemented, there are going to be a lot of cases where the player who just reactivated and gets awarded ghost roids, will have a more roid count (and more resourceable assets) than the player who got activated x # of ticks ago just because of the nature of activity of the game

Maybe i misunderstood, but when planet X gets to the point where planet Y starts and planet X will have say 400 roids, wouldn't planet X get 500 ghost roids to get to the 900 roid average?
The player will get constant "help" towards the average am i right?


Well my quick (and negative) view on the idea of sethmace:

The lower players will not gain anything by trying to get extra roids if their income won't increase because of it (if they remain under the average). So why lose ships if you won't gain anything by it?
This will result in fewer roids in the universe with more resources --> more ships.
The negative view on more ships is --> more ships --> more expensive to get extra roids --> less attacking --> early stagnation.

Another thing about giving the smaller players income boost.
If player Z starts towards the end of the round and starts playing around with cov op. A lot of inactive small players will have loads of resources lying around for player Z to grab. (I don't know if this is still the case with the res stealing in cov ops?) This will give player Z a big boost, maybe even big enough to reach top 10 if he keeps this up long enough?

So you could try and build some bonus system in getting roids (by attacking) if you're under the average. Say if you get 25 roids and still be 200 under the average, you will keep 5 ghost roids. This will make attacking a little extra attractive when you're small.

[Seth Mace]

Lol at people giving me negative rep for this ideas post.

You know its just an IDEA and if you start spreading negative points for every idea some1 comes up with, then this forum of ideas wont be active!

Anyway yeah, i really cannot be arsed discussing any new ideas for PA over the fear of Neg repping!!!

[Cochese]

Ignore them Seth, there's a handful of unintelligent kiddies running around neg repping people for no reason.

At any rate, getting a little negative reputation shouldn't dissuade you from posting, and especially not from posting interesting ideas--of which this is one.

I'll have to think about the specifics of it a little bit more, but the general idea of it (and intentions behind it) seem good.

[demiGOD]

any negrepping on Suggestions and AD are ignorable because all negrepping on these said forums are from ignorant ****s -

keep the negrepping on RP folks and away from people who actually pay and directly contribute to this game

[Alessio]

Lol I get a negrep everytime I disagree with some1.. what a coincidence..

[demiGOD]

Originally Posted by paolo

Maybe i misunderstood, but when planet X gets to the point where planet Y starts and planet X will have say 400 roids, wouldn't planet X get 500 ghost roids to get to the 900 roid average?
The player will get constant "help" towards the average am i right?

regarding the thread, it sounds like you only get awarded ghost roids to match the universal roid count average only at the tick when reactivated and will not get constant help through the duration of the planet's activity

regarding your question, it seems that if planet X has 400 roids (coming from your example) and planet Y have 700 roids, but both X and Y reactivates at the same time, then yes, they both get awarded ghost roids to match the roid average of 900 (assuming that planet X and Y do not get roided until reactivation)

I agree with the purpose of the idea, and the purpose is good - to give inactives that decide to go active again, to have some sort of 'still competetive' and 'still marketable' play - but there are some holes on how this idea is laid out, that I foresee that might be unfair to the somewhat-active players, 2nd-rate actives and the active noobs

[Iceman]

generally speaking a universial aid thing is a bad idea.

Originally Posted by Seth Mace

Just to clear this again, you would NOT get ALR if you are just below the "Universal Average of Roids" >> I think the ALR limit should be lower then the average.

i second that if a universial aid programme is introduced