Quote:
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Originally Posted by ComradeRob
If we really wanted to tackle stagnation, we could:
* Remove the ships/resources component from value entirely (or significantly reduce it)
* Make producing ships give XP, equivalent to the amount of score that would have been gained in value under the present system
* Double the damage (or halve the armour) on all ships
I'll see if people get why this would work before posting a fuller explanation; I rather suspect that most people won't  |
OK, time to elaborate, I guess.
Stagnation is, in part, caused by the simple human factor - people get bored of PA after a certain period of time. This is why we have resets. But, frustratingly, stagnation can also set in
before everyone has got bored. The last two weeks of a round are generally boring regardless of how much effort players might feel like making.
The reasons are twofold, and relate to the balance of risk and reward.
Risk
Risk is higher later in the round. Your fleet is, typically, larger and so are the fleets of your enemies. If your fleet dies, you will lose a lot of score, and will not have much time left to rebuild it. As each day passes, this equation gets worse. Your ability to tolerate losses in combat decreases, and this reduce the incentive to bother with attacking. Often, experienced players have simple rules of thumb about how much of a loss is tolerable, but there are calculators available for this which produce results similar to:
'Capping 100 roids at 100k value will repay in 400 ticks (16 days)'. This makes the game quite mechanical and boring, as there's no human judgement here, just the judgement of a calculator.
Because value tends to increase proportionally to roid count over the course of the round, you are also generally attacking targets with more ships-per-roid later in the round. They, in turn, have access to greater defensive resources (from their alliance/galaxy) and so the risk of defence is greater.
There is also the risk of fleet-catch, something which only really works later in the round. Ziks can profit considerably from catching fleets, although sometimes fleets will be caught by Xans in order to kill them. This is more likely late in the round because more people tend to have idle fleets (there's less attacking going on, so there are more fleets looking for something interesting to do). A fleet-catch late in the round is crippling; there is no recovery from it (I learned this the
hard way).
Reward
Not only is risk higher, but reward is often lower. XP does offset this problem somewhat, but the simple fact is that it's a lot cheaper to capture roids at the start of the round than at the end. This is for the reasons outlined above: there are generally more and better defensive ships around later in the round, and this increases the amount of ships you must lose in order to cap roids.
Roids captured late in the round also produce fewer resources, because there is less time for them to be productive. A roid capture with 1000 ticks to go will produce 250 x 1000 resources; with 50 ticks to go, it's only 50 x 250. This is less likely to pay for the cost (in lost ships) of capturing the roid.
Solutions
Given these problems, what can we do about them?
Firstly, stop punishing people directly for losing ships in combat. The
present size of your fleet should not determine your score. I've revised my original idea slightly; I now think that XP should be awarded for every unit of resources produced, at the moment of production, regardless of what those resources are later spent on, and ships/resources should be removed from the value component of your score. This greatly reduces the 'risk' element, because it becomes tolerable to sacrifice ships for some other gain. This would eliminate the calculators from working out whether an attack is profitable; the question would be not 'how long before the roids give me a score profit?' but 'how many ships can I lose before I compromise my defensive ability to hold the roids?'.
The current 'profit' question is bad because it's seriously unbalanced. The 'profit' question takes consideration of the size of your fleet, which is almost always smaller early in the round, so it's always going to favour early attacking. And at the beginning of the round, almost any loss is tolerable because you have the rest of the round to make your losses back. After the mid-point, the 'profit' question yields progressively worse answers, until it is no longer worth attacking (or until finding suitable targets becomes non-trivial). The profit question amplifies the existing bias in favour of early roid-capping (there's longer for the roids to be productive).
The 'defence' question, in contrast, works
against the bias. Early on, you might figure that losing 40% of your fleet is going to hurt you defensively. And it most certainly will. But you balance that against the possibility that maybe you might just hold those roids. Later in the round, 'defence' matters progressively less, because the roids you have are less productive. They've already given you lots of XP (as per the suggestion above), so you might not be too worried about leaving yourself exposed. The question is then 'if I lose 40% of my fleet for 400 roids, will the benefit of those 400 roids outweigh the probable roid loss incurred by having a weaker fleet?'. A much more interesting question than asking a bot '!roidcost 400 2500000'
Wouldn't this just encourage suicidal behaviour though? Well, no. You could lose your entire fleet for one roid, and yes, you would come out of that attack with a (marginally) higher score (the XP and the value from gaining one roid). But you'd have no ability to defend your roids, and you'd lose them pretty fast. Roids lost means less XP produced (as per the XP-for-res-production suggestion), so you'd lose out pretty quickly if you kept on suiciding.
Note: I have made no attempt to figure out precise numbers here, or how it might be necessary to change the XP-for-combat system. I'm hoping someone else might do that bit of thinking for me
In my initial suggestion above, I suggested increasing damage. This was to ensure that more ships died, thus lowering the amount of ships-per-roid in the universe (since ships can die, but roids can't, so more ships dying means fewer ships-per-roid). On reflection, this may not be necessary (and it may be counter-productive due to the
Tullock effect) - though I think combat might be made more interesting by incorporating something of the kind suggested in
this thread.
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