Salvage for stealing

[Mzyxptlk]

Please change the mechanism for salvage from stealing. Instead of awarding salvage for the abandoned ships, award salvage for the stolen ships. I know it doesn't make sense from an in-context perspective, since the stolen ships aren't the ones that are lost, but it fixes a rather large balancing issue with EMP. Salvage for lost ships is not shared between fleets. When a Cath hugs an entire fleet for a Zik to steal, the Cath gets nothing and the Zik gets value from ships and all of the salvage. Fairly dumb.


P.S. Anyone planning to suggest EMP salvage, please do so in another thread, so I can mock you there, rather than risk derailing this thread.

[Benneh]

Agreed.

Why should a cath(or other emp'r) have to do all the work, eg emp it all for a stealer to get EVERYTHING for it.

Currently a cath can fully ground to defend someone, at most if the def is stealers what you will get is a share of 300 XP.

Great...

[Paisley]

Worth testing In my opinion

[Monroe]

Seems reasonable

[Killeah]

or maybe there should be a reasonable downside by being cath for once - i.e want salvage - don´t go cath

[Influence]

Originally Posted by Killeah

or maybe there should be a reasonable downside by being cath for once - i.e want salvage - don´t go cath

EMP isn't enough of a reasonable downside allready?

[Killeah]

by far balanced out by general race bonusses and above average shipstats.

I could be inclined to agree, if remove 40% salv bonus - reduce overall emp eff.

[Monroe]

Originally Posted by Influence

EMP isn't enough of a reasonable downside allready?

No I don't think so, EMP can be both a blessing and a curse, it really comes down to the efficiency levels in any given round.

[Mzyxptlk]

Cathaaaargh.

[Appocomaster]

Bump
Honestly looking at this as it does help Cath to some extent. I'm sure all the Ziks will whine but they can't have everything. Will mean extensive tweaking of the combat engine though (which ships died during stealing, which were killed normally etc so some thought required
Edit:
Also renders the recent def cap pretty meaningless. Should probably have done this first instead. Sorry

[tokath]

I disagree with the sharing idea. Zik (and etd to some extent) have a hard enough time already recovering with the recent (stupid) cap and having even less salvage and worse ratios of m/c/e (assuming salvage based on attackers fleet) just make it that much harder to continue to be useful to your gal/alliance/etc.

However a small additional salvage based on the attackers fleet and awarded to emp when ship are stolen is a pretty decent idea.

[Mzyxptlk]

Trading has almost no impact. Say you steal a bunch of Wyverns and get 1.11m metal, 1m crystal and 1m eonium. You want to convert that back into Pirates. If the ratios in which you got salvage were perfect, you could afford 3141 Pirate: 3.11m resources / 990 resources per pirate. Alas, alack, you need to trade, because there's too much metal and not enough eonium.

If you trade 102737 metal for eonium and 3706 metal for crystal using the gal or ally funds, you can afford exactly 3136 Pirate, with 37 metal to spare. Those trades cost a 5323 resources, a whopping 0.17% of the original salvage.

Even if you used the universal fund, you can get 3111 Pirates after trading, which would cost you 29617 resources, 0.95% of the orginal salvage.

So, no.

[Tiamat101]

Why not just have stealing go back to the way it was, and limit value gains for people inside the t100. Zik is hard enough anyone, unless your cheating like 90% of the t50 ziks do, but thats another issue entirely.

One of the things you can do now to really mess up a zik player if to build a fleet of ships that no zik can ever use and suicide them onto a top zik and he'll lose most of this ships and steal something that he doesnt need, and his salvage from the steal will be almost zero, and he'll only be able to rebuild about 1/10 of what he just lost stealing ship.

This is stupid if you can get away with a "free steal" that isn't a donation or farming why wouldnt you. Value steals have always been around but if they happen on defense you should get the salvage that you derserve. Besides with the exception of the past 2 rounds in which zik have had very good attacking stats zik never have a good fleet in which to attack with unless they a) have large team ups b) get real early steals of large amounts of emp or high init kill.

[tokath]

Trading has an additional negative impact that adds up along with all the other negatives already placed on stealing as of this round.

Here's an example brep from this round, 30981 pirates "lost"

Metal Crystal Eonium
2,041,012 2,385,412 3,010,903

Report of Ships Stolen by the seriously i mean it fighting at x.x.x
Ship Stolen
Tycoon 6733
Guardian 13771
Baliff 316

I only received that much salvage because I bulked up the def fleet to get as close to the 20% max gain as I could and because I was not anywhere near a top planet (t300ish at the time). If you just send the anti-whatever required your salvage is significantly less than the max 20% possible value gain for almost every player.


That "traded" fleet made my def fleet mostly useless to my alliance for a few days.

The significant salvage given to steals is necessary if you want the stealing ships to die. If this was pre-pax rules would you still be complaining?

Note: I asked if that messed up m/c/e ratio, when compared to the the cost of pirates was correct and never received a response from support.


Tia's point of suicide is well warranted. Going back to the way it was (assuming still pax rules or even pre-pax) and limiting value gain within certain rankings is a much better way of handling donations.

[Mzyxptlk]

That has nothing to do with trading, though, which was the only point of your post that I took issue with. I realize trading costs you an additional 0.17-0.95% of any salvage gained, but it has always been that way, and compared to the impact of the changes made to the salvage allocation rules is hardly even worth the 15 minutes we've spent discussing it.

[Reincarnate]

the problem with the whole zik salvage thing is salvage donations. its extremely hard to prove someone is donating salvage and its extremely easy to do. sadly, as people will cheat to win this dying online game, game mechanics have to combat this for those that try and win honestly.

[Patrikc]

In any game where Player A can benefit from Player B, giving him and edge against player C, there will be cheating. That's not a problem with Zik; it's a problem with any race. You can farm roids, farm salvage, or have someone create a defense planet with no intent of really playing (though it's up for debate whether or not that doesn't constitute as 'really playing').

There is no easy fix to that, it's inherent to Planetarion's design. This change should be made to make it easier to balance the races. As with Cath, it is easier to make Zik too strong or too weak, this change should make it harder for Zik to be overpowered (and for value planets to 'snowball').

Though whether or not it should be priority, I don't think its effect will be that big.

[Reincarnate]

what you say is true patrikc however, with the former salvage + value gain from stealing, it gave an extremely easy way to gain a lot of value.

[Mzyxptlk]

Considering how much trouble it causes, I'd suggest a ceiling on salvage that ensures that you can't ever get more salvage than your losses. I think(?) this has already been implemented.

However, such a ceiling makes it redundant to reduce salvage in any other way, and such reductions may have undesirable consequences too.

Specifically, reducing salvage rates for big planets makes it very hard for top planets to defend their incs from lemming runs, because they'll almost always suffer some losses. I kept an eye on Benneh's incs this round and they were pretty ridiculous. He would've lost value even if the attacker lost twice or thrice times as much as he did.

[Zotnam]

I don't know what you did to salvage, but it is truly ****ed. You have bcalcs where it's 800k vs 3 mill value losses before salvage, and the def will still go down 500k.. It's beyond stupid and you're actually praying for people NOT to crash.

I can see "emp" salvage being useful, but you'd need stats that accommodate it. It wouldn't be a good thing if you could send out widows against BS inc or vipers against etd FR inc just for the salvage without ever risking getting shot at. I guess emp vs emp would be retarded then too. Yeah, actually let's not have salvage for emp'ing anything, let's just have proper ****ing salvage like in the late 20's early 30's.

[Mzyxptlk]

I'm still seeing salvage scaling by score/value. Compare:

1m/1m defender: http://beta.planetarion.com/bcalc.pl?id=lfx4j65u428497e
1k/1k defender: http://beta.planetarion.com/bcalc.pl?id=22kqchammxyecuk

It was my understanding this would be removed?

[Appocomaster]

Yeah; I forgot to remove it on the calc. The combat engine is fine.
I've had a fairly busy week but, as I hope to not be working the whole weekend, I will choose which of the 3-4 sets of stats has been submitted to go with, and get beta rolling.

[Mzyxptlk]

K. Thanks.

[DG]

20% is still a bit tight for zik. I suggest 30%.

[Appocomaster]

changed this in the combat engine; "just" need to change the bcalc to reflect this. will announce it shortly but you read it here first!

[Mzyxptlk]

They don't share the same code?

[Appocomaster]

Bcalc updated