Fix roid capping

[ComradeRob]

Originally Posted by The Manual

If there are other players attacking the same planet as you at the same time, then the available roids will be divided between ALL the fleets, by fleet value, regardless of if they have ships capable of capturing asteroids or not.

This is plainly absurd and...

Originally Posted by The Manual

If one fleet does not have enough ships to capture the 'roids' then their untapped share of the 'roids' is essentially lost, even if this fleet is from the same planet.

this appears to be factually incorrect.

How it should work:

Before roids are distributed between multiple attackers, the game engine should:

1. Calculate the total number of roids that could be captured by the combined attacking fleet(s) (after combat, of course). This is how many roids the target planet will lose.

2. Calculate how many roids each individual attacking fleet could capture.

3. Distribute roids according to fleet value shares. Any fleets which are not able to take their full cap (because their pods have been frozen or killed, or because they sent no pods) receive only what they are capable of stealing, and the roids which that fleet would have captured are distributed proportionally (by fleet value) to the other attackers (making sure that this redistribution does not lead to anyone capping more than they are able to).

If anyone is interested, here are two news reports which highlight the problems inherent in the current system (no, it's not my attack):

http://parser.visionhq.org/index.php...480002b3e9a9be

(what this report doesn't show is the roid distribution - the Xan got 6 roids, and the Terran got the rest)

As you can see, the Terran attacker's pods were all frozen - he should not have capped anything (even according to the manual his share of the capped roids would simply be 'lost'). But the Xan attacker got only 6 roids. According to the manual, this might actually be the correct behaviour, but it doesn't explain why the Terran got roids. And if it is correct, then it shouldn't be - in that situation the Xan has enough pods for full cap, and none of them are lost or frozen. There are no other attackers with live and unfrozen pods at the end of combat, so the Xan should, imo, get the full cap.

[Benneh]

My faking skills there were pretty awesome even if i do say so myself.



I dont see any reason why the terran should cap at all, as far as im concerned the terran is out of the action. Hew has nothing to fire.

Why would my CO pods, go oh shit lets take these roids back to another planet!

[wakey]

While theres clearly an error with that terran getting roids I like the outcome that the distribution model brings. It forces team work to be carfully planned so that the those attacking get the max roids and it doesnt allow one person to send a kill fleet with no pods, while a friend is escorted in on just pods

[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by wakey

While theres clearly an error with that terran getting roids I like the outcome that the distribution model brings. It forces team work to be carfully planned so that the those attacking get the max roids and it doesnt allow one person to send a kill fleet with no pods, while a friend is escorted in on just pods

Equally it does punish those who send intelligent fakes and have the bad luck to be piggied.

[ComradeRob]

The attack above looked pretty carefully planned to me - a near-perfectly-executed fake. We can't have a situation where any attack can be ruined by someone sending along a mass of useless ships to take a share of the cap. What's more important, having a logical, sensible system that rewards good play, or a system designed to prevent escorting? In my opinion, escorting is nowhere near prevalent enough to merit such a harsh system.

It also breaks the suspension of disbelief. We are supposed to be playing a game that involves imaginary space battles; when utterly weird and incomprehensible things happen, like our pilots simply voluntarily giving up roids to an uninvited co-attacker who happened to get his entire fleet frozen, it gets a lot harder to imagine that those are real spaceships. People want to play a game with spaceships, not a game with bits of data manipulated by abitrary rules. The challenge for any game is to convince the player that they are playing the former, not the latter.

[Zeke]

I agree that this system sucks, sometimes you want to send 2 fleets in case you have to recall one, because deffers only sending anti whatever you have in one fleet, but your other fleet is free. And then if you land with both fleets you dont get max cap. Thats crap, at least when youre the only one attacking you should get full cap...

[Monroe]

Originally Posted by ComradeRob

The attack above looked pretty carefully planned to me - a near-perfectly-executed fake. We can't have a situation where any attack can be ruined by someone sending along a mass of useless ships to take a share of the cap. What's more important, having a logical, sensible system that rewards good play, or a system designed to prevent escorting? In my opinion, escorting is nowhere near prevalent enough to merit such a harsh system.

Escorting used to be a big deal before the current combat system was set up. The current cap system is fair even if it doesn't make complete logical sense. No system is perfect but the current one has less possibility of abuse then the one you are suggesting, and 19 rounds of play have shown this to be true.

[Shyne]

I sincerely hope this isn't passed off as intentional result.

I believe it is a bug of the battle calculations within planetarion. The correct distribution method should work SIMILARLY to the current system, but with subtle changes:

While the roids should indeed be split in a ratio equal to the fleet value ratios for the attackers, if one attacker does not have enough pods to cap his share, the others should be able to steal them. It is important that roid caps are calculated based on the pods in place, not just fleet values.

[Appocomaster]

:bump:

I'm considering implementing at least a basic version of the suggestion at the beginning:

each fleet can cap a maximum of:
roid_type*0.25 * fleet_value/(total_attacking_value) of each roid type.

This is then limited by whatever pods the fleet has can capture.

A couple of variations:
simply take the actual amount the planet can lose and keep looping over the fleets allocating the extra roids until the extra roids are allocated // all fleets are 'full',

go back to a slightly more sensible way of capturing asteroids so that there's a random element involved and it's done by total number of asteroids, not by type, so capping 2.9 roids gets you 2 roids not 0 (due to divide by 3 issues).