This is the traditional "what we lost" thread. In other words - what did we lose from previous Planetarion rounds (in terms of gameplay, not features).
First let me say that I feel many of the features in new PA are good and hold potential for improved gameplay. On the other hand, many were painfully broken in beta, and some are still broken.
I think that many agree that the most significant transition was from known ('given in manual') to unknown ('not given in the manual') formulas. First of all, adding unknown factors to combat causes many undesired effects:
-Not knowing how combat works people are forced to 'take it safe'. Attackers are forced to bash, defenders are forced to overkill. At least slightly, though both will slowly refine as the formulas unravel. In faster-paced games this is usually not important, as you can iterate and try to find out what works. Attacking once to thrice per day doesn't give you much basis for iteration and experience.
-Not knowing how score is gained, people are mostly flailing about blindly. If score is supposed to be a representation of smart attacks, good defences (and possibly clever covert operations) then it's highly discouraging not to know what a "smart attack" or a "good defence" is. If you do know in principle, you still do not have any numbers, which can only be found out by testing.
-Not being able to advice your mates. Used to be that one could draw fairly good conclusions by looking at the stats. One could learn the game from the manual (even though it did have some errors and discrepancies). Not so this round. Many of the old PA players were put to face the decision if they wanted to spend one month of the round learning PA again (instead of spending two days before it as it used to).
Two of my mates chose not to, after asking me "How should I start?" "What should I build?" "What race is good?"
Rounds hone I'd answer: "depends", "depends" and "depends" and then go on explaining about about various possibilities. For this round, my explanation was triple "I've no clue".
-Probably the most devastating aspect of the changes is what it does to new players of the game. They are left virtually blind. Experienced players have experience, alliance sources for statistics, access to starting plans, analysis on fleet compositions etc. This information - which is often kept secret from anyone outside one's own group of contacts - seldom gets to the new players. Planetarion is even less friendly to new people than it used to be.
We also lost the 'invisible negotiations' between attacker and the defender. Most planetarion players remember thinking that "their target should run". This round, it's possible to know that the target 'should run', but it's highly questionable that the player you are attacking would know it. When you do not know if running your fleet will increase your asteroid losses, you are likely not to run and just see out the attacker's hand. Used to be that you could fine-tune your fleet to take minimal losses for maximal asteroid capture (occasionally choose a compromise in between) AND attempt to construct your fleet such that the defender would have most initiative to run (sending a 13% capture fleet occasionally gave defender initiative to run, as killing portions of the attacking fleet would actually have increased the capture percentage). The metagame was largely destroyed.
Planetarion added a lot of valuable strategical options and carefully hid the information of how to use them from players.
These I feel were the most significant things we lost. I'm sure there are others (post your opinions here
). hopefullu the content of the post justified that it be posted in strategy forums instead of general discussion. For me, PA was always a strategy game (with political twist, of course) and I've approached the topic mostly from that perspective.
What we lost
Still too lazy to update though
Linear Mode
