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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 15:36   #1
Tietäjä
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Of score (and game mentality)

Of incentive mechanisms and their significance

We can all agree that the purpose of score is to define the winner. How score is calculated is the mechanism that signals how the game is essentially "supposed" to be played. I'll argue for this. Regardless of different rankings (galaxy, planet, alliance) it's the same thing. The current trend in this game is that the optimal tactic to win a round is to have highest defining planet value of all. XP is a secondary sidekick that will hardly win you anything, but that simply dwells in midst. It's, if you look at rankings (again, any) essentially white noise. Some have more, some have less, it's not correlated with score, it's more correlated with planet activity. But it's of no significance. Value is how you win right now. It's been so for most of the time. It can be more rewarding not to attack, to create pacts that reduce incomings, and to simply collect. In this fashion, the game is more a planet and politics management game than a war game.

Some will remember round 16 which was essentially different. Value wasn't necessarily the optimal path to play - in fact winners didn't play for value. That round, XP wasn't a sidekick but a defining factor. Playing the game the "conventional" way didn't yield best results - it perhaps still was a Nash equilibrium strategy. But winners played it different - fleet was a tool to gain score, not an end and means. Of course, this round was an extreme. But it shows how essential the score calculation is in defining how the game is (to be) played. This should elaborate that the score calculation formula provides an incentive mechanics: if you reward crashing your fleet for high XP gains, people will use that tactic to success. If you reward containing your fleet, playing low and passive, gathering and growing resources slow and safe, people will fence.


Why removing alliance rankings will not make a difference

As a blunt footnote here, my argument leans on the now called presumption that we want Planetarion to be more a war game than a management game. This is why removing alliance rankings will not change anything - certainly, it will and can change the focus from alliance rankings to planet and galaxy rankings, but "optimal strategies" remain. To win, possessing highest value will remain crucial. To possess highest value in the end, you need to play passive, avoid excessive combat, and contain your value. Alliances or galaxies or planet scoreboards, whichever. The game mentality will remain the same. If your aim is to reduce the focus of alliances, yes, surely, removing alliance rankings will gain this goal. I don't personally believe it's all that interesting, though, I think a more radical change needs to be implemented that actually gives people different incentives.


What can be done, and how to create incentives

Consider following. Game mechanics remain same: asteroids are gathered to collect resources, resources are collected to build fleet. But fleet itself is of not so much value in your rankings. Fleet will be used to gather score instead of being a heavy weight source of score itself. To give a few examples, attacking a planet with larger fleet and stealing asteroids from such would yield score (in an XP fashion). Fighting a combat would yield score (again, XP fashion): little to none if you're crushed and your fleet is devastated, a lot if you defeat a stronger opponent and damage him more than you damage yourself. The incentive mechanics of "value" would remain: you need to have a bigger fleet to generate more score, since numbers will matter here, but it's not optimal to consistently sit the fleet home in safety and avoid combat.

Let's consider again. Multiple smaller fleet value planets unite their resources and fleet catch a fleet of large value. They succeed, and are awarded large amount of XP for overcoming a superior force in battle. A larger fleet attacking a planet with smaller value would yield less. Bashing small fleets with large fleets would yield less. To emphasize, success in the scoreboards would encourage collecting fleet and using it in combat, using it to destroy other fleets and steal asteroids, which would encourage tactical maneuvers (like fleet trapping).

It's still a sketchy concept, but it should incorporate fleet value in much less impact of the score itself and much more impact of in gathering score. Score should not be obtained mainly through having a large value, but through participating in combat. The red herring is to change the game mentality from accumulating score through management into actively gathering score through engaging in combat. I'm aware this favors heavily active players, but more or less everything will. I'll refine the concept and formula if I'm arsed at some point (and have the spare time to do so).



edit. I'm aware people will have the first thought that I'm suggesting driving the game towards what it was round 16 - suiciding fleet for XP to obtain score. I'd like to point that this is not the case - the mechanism would involve a system (I'll elaborate it further at some point) that would essentially cause suiciding hamper your score growth potential: having no fleet would obviously make you small in fleet size, which would seem exploitable in a scenario where everyone has tiny fleets and everyone goes for nitpicking asteroids to obtain high scores from people with relatively larger fleets (speaking of a 100 ships against 200). This can be prevented by implementing possibly an exponential scale (dangerous I know) that means that the larger combats you participate in with larger fleets causes more XP thus score: consider following.

Score gained: a * (fleet destroyed - fleet lost) * score factor.

here a is the factual total fleet value of your fleets and your enemy's fleets (ie. enemy fleet per your fleet) - it grows the larger the enemy is, and reduces the smaller you are, and is capped between certain numbers, [0.25,4] say to give an arbitrary example. The second batch would mean that the larger the combat is the more score will be involved. Score factor is an arbitrary weight factor (because you'd need to reward asteroids too, and asteroid play in a different ballpark in terms of nominal numbers).

Last edited by Tietäjä; 6 Dec 2009 at 15:54.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 16:38   #2
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

An excellent opening post, I'm curious to see where this will go!

One issue that springs to my mind is to have this XP system (or whatever you want to call it) not scaling up through the round, or perhaps it would be better to say it should scale with attacker/defender ratios. What I'm trying to say is that with the two current systems (value and XP), the rate of score gain grows, because of the increased roid amounts. You get more XP for landing a similar attack later on in the round because the bravery is multiplied by the number of roids, thus making the gains from a similar attack earlier in the round worth less.

With your proposed system, I'd like to see that actively score gathering in the early round is just as beneficial as in the later stages. If not, an alliance/player could avoid major activity and just passively manage (fence), growing bigger fleets without much effort that won't contribute much to score, but will be a big provider of score later on if they choose to get off their fence and join a war.

A good start to the round can be helpful, but is not hugely important at the moment. That's not to say I want to make it hard for people to catch up if they fall behind, but I want to try and put alliances off avoiding conflict until the latter stages of the round.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 16:49   #3
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

I do believe score gains have to scale with larger fleets to encourage actually building larger fleets rather than sticking to small ones as per round 16. How much weight should be put on this is obviously subject to debate.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 16:56   #4
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

I agree with both your posts and will reply further when I get home.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 17:00   #5
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

Certainly an interesting opening post, I agree with ellonweb. The system you propose could actually motivate people to make more combats happen, as the ROI won´t be solely determined by roid income for 90% of the round.
One thing I´d be interested in is the question of balancing between large and small players. We´ve seen a tendency to punish hitting downwards and reward hitting upwards in the past, what about the planets who can´t (or hardly can) hit upwards? I´m not quite sure how this could be adressed though, it´s something I´ve wondered about repeatedly. It´s more of a balancing issue than a conceptional issue though, so it might be able to be sorted in the score factor you proposed.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 17:15   #6
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by rUl3r View Post
One thing I´d be interested in is the question of balancing between large and small players. We´ve seen a tendency to punish hitting downwards and reward hitting upwards in the past, what about the planets who can´t (or hardly can) hit upwards?
I probably forgot to mention, or wait, I wasn't bothered, to discuss the drawbacks of the proposed system. As you say, there is a "winner's curse" sort of an problem in the suggestion: means, if you're really, really big, you'll find it tougher to hit people so that the arbitrary fleet/fleet factor would be "large": I don't necessarily perceive this as a problem though, as it makes catching up easier than pulling away. Best I can say to "defend" it beyond that scope is that when you're that big you'll have to compensate with military ability and activity.

Quote:
I´m not quite sure how this could be adressed though, it´s something I´ve wondered about repeatedly. It´s more of a balancing issue than a conceptional issue though, so it might be able to be sorted in the score factor you proposed.
What we should really be asking, if it's actually problem that needs to be addressed in the first place, or if it's just an inbuilt trait of the system that can be viewed as positive. I'm leaning towards the the positives. Obviously if it's a problem, you simply make it a factor of active attacking fleet and total defending fleet instead of total attacking fleet. This way, a large player attacking a small player but using a small fleet to do so (say, smaller than the defender's fleet) would gain good. This opens a question of heavily favoring large fleets (because you'll be able to do different variations and focused fleets easier for attack purposes, whilst the small defender will inevitably have his fleet value more spread than the focused attack fleet of a large fleet player), which can be a bigger a problem than the original one the fix was supposed to alleviate (I think it would).

To explain the score factor there, it's not really to "fix" this problem, but it is to address the issue of fleet sizes being not in scale with asteroid numbers, and construct numbers. Say, for destroying buildings in attacks, the factor would have to be immensely large: because even a very good attack will at best bash a dozen structures but may destroy thousands and thousands of fleet, these structures will need to have a higher weight in gain (same for asteroids).
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 21:57   #7
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

I agree somewhat with the thoughts behind the first post, but at the same time: what you want is difficult to balance and changing the way score is obtained could lead to unwanted side-effects: tactics you did not intend people to use that prove to be effective, such as was shown when PaX was first introduced. Changes of such magnitude have to be well thought-out and tested and I only see vague ideas atm.
It's worth discussing but I should warn against enthousiastic experiments.
I would propose a more gradual evolutionary way of changing the game one small step at a time and will below make a few suggestions which are only small changes on the game as it is now.

Salvage
People in this game avoid combat too much. Attackers have to recall attacks when defenders appear. Combat should be much more rewarding and there should be less incentives to avoid it. Perhaps it should be better to give salvage to attacking fleets as well (although never more than to compensate for the ships they lose).

Larger fleets obtain more score
The first post contained the idea to let value play a more important role in obtaining XP, while at the same time enabling people to gain more of their score through XP rather than value.
The XP formula tends to reward people for crashing for roids. The solution used for this is an all out cap on the XP gain. It might be worth changing the way the XP gain is capped so that it is more directly aimed at preventing crashing for roids by penalising loss of fleet value.
Examples are:
* a correction factor for the amount of value you lose in the attack:
XP = Max (roids capped * 10 * bravery factor - lost_ships_value/60 , 0))
This would have to coincide with a simultaneous reduction of the caps in the bravery factor.
* implementing a correction factor into the bravery factor formula:
bravery_factor = (min(2,target_planet_score/your_planet_score) - 0.2) * (min(2,(target_planet_value - lost_ships_value)/your_planet_value))
Replacing the -0.1 in this formula with -lost_ships_value/your_planet_value results in larger XP gains as long as you lose less than 10% of your value in the attack.

More emphasis can be put on fleet values for xp by basing the xp cap on the planet's value, for instance by capping the amount of XP you can gain to a % of your value:
XP = Min(attacker_value/1000 , roids capped * 10 * bravery factor)).
You can then completely remove or reduce the caps from the bravery factor formula.

Another idea would make xp for defence depend more on value. 10 xp/tick is nice early in the round, but doesn't make much difference if you have a large fleet. High value planets should gain more xp/tick for sending out def fleets: xp = defender_value/10,000.
In battles, the defender should gain more xp if the attacker lands a larger fleet (so no longer 300 xp regardless of what the attacker sent, but something like Min(attackfleet_value , defencefleets_value )/1000.

As Ellonweb comments, XP gains early on in the game will be less significant later on in the game, but I see no easy way to fix that. Note that planet rankings early on in the game are already very much determined by xp and I don't think we should increase that.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 22:53   #8
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

(This post is basically what I would've written if Keizari hadn't beaten me to it. I was on the train and was bored, so I figured I'd start rambling away and see where it'd lead me. I realise most of it has already been said, but felt it would be a waste if I just threw two hours worth of work away. )

The goal of this topic is to figure out a way to change the first half of the round, to reduce random gal raiding and newbie bashing and increase the number of wars being fought between top alliances.

In order to achieve this, we want to make combat not just something that can only end badly for most players (not counting Ziks here), but something that should be actively sought out in order to maximise score. In this context, only successful combat should ever be considered for rewards.

The question then becomes what the definition of `successful combat' is. In my opinion (and that is really all it is, an opinion), doing any kind of damage to your opponent (while preserving your own ships) should be rewarded. This will encourage alliances to take the fight to their opponents, rather than sit back, roid newbies and wait for the last half of the round, when the need to have a proper war becomes clear.

In the current game mechanics, we have XP, which adds irremovable score to a planet. This seems to me like the ideal way of rewarding players for the above mentioned actions.

Before we continue, let's list the actions which I feel players should be rewarded for:
Capping roids
Destroying (or stealing) ships
Destroying constructions

I intentionally did not list cov ops, scans, etc, because they're instant actions, which I feel should not be subject to the same formulae as actions that take a certain amount of time. I won't go into my reasons for that, unless someone really wants me to.


There are already no less than five(!) mechanisms by which capping roids is rewarded (namely, you gain income, value and XP, and cause your opponent to lose value and income). In that light, I don't feel it is necessary to change the aspect of score calculation as far as roid capping is concerned.

However, both destroying ships and destroying constructions has only two mechanisms of reward (your opponent loses value and loses the means by which to accelerate his income increases), and both of those are indirect; harming other players doesn't absolutely improve your score, just relatively.

It is this distinction that has led us into our present situation, in which the first half of the round is spent in building up a value base in preparation for the last half of the round, during which wars are generally fought. In order to avoid early wars, people tend to stay away from targeting powerful alliances, instead preferring to pick on smaller alliances or newbies.


In order to reward destroying ships, the issue of bashing should be examined. Max roid cap is directly determined by the ratio of value between attacker and defender. To ensure that people on the bottom of the food chain don't become food for farmers, score gained by ship and structure destruction should be subject to the same value ratio.


A different issue is how to ensure that the score gained from destroying structures doesn't get snowed under by the score gained from destroying ships. It is never possible to destroy more than 15 structures per wave, so if we want one's ability to destroy structures to have a reasonable impact on one's score, the formula we come up with should reflect this limitation. Nevertheless, I would warn against overly emphasising SK'ing, if only for the fact that it tends to piss a lot of people off.


All of the above seems quite clear-cut to me. An issue I haven't not quite decided upon yet is the one ellonweb brought up. Should early round victories count towards one's score as much as late round victories? I think it would be nice if the balance shifted somewhat to the early round, but like Gerbie, I can't think of an easy way to achieve that.
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Unread 6 Dec 2009, 23:10   #9
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk View Post
The question then becomes what the definition of `successful combat' is. In my opinion (and that is really all it is, an opinion), doing any kind of damage to your opponent (while preserving your own ships) should be rewarded. This will encourage alliances to take the fight to their opponents, rather than sit back, roid newbies and wait for the last half of the round, when the need to have a proper war becomes clear.
I haven't read your post properly but I really wanted to pick this up. What if you are an alliance (say, NewDawn) that crashes a lot? Where is the incentive to do anything then?
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 00:34   #10
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

The only thing I don't like is when you reward bashing of a big planet by a horde of smaller ones. The system should be based on total fleet values. What needs to be done better is the set of stats (latest playable one was JBG's), something that make possible to attack alone planets of your value (not only for caths).
I remember r16 and also the beta before that when XP wasn't nerfed down... PA had been a value game all along and god how those players were pissed to see swarms of xan FI crashing on them and gaining massive score.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 01:33   #11
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

Quote:
Originally Posted by lokken View Post
I haven't read your post properly but I really wanted to pick this up. What if you are an alliance (say, NewDawn) that crashes a lot? Where is the incentive to do anything then?
Where, indeed.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Makhil View Post
The only thing I don't like is when you reward bashing of a big planet by a horde of smaller ones.
That is in fact something I like very much. Rewards cooperation. And it's not as if big planers are the helpless baby seals you make them out to be.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Makhil View Post
I remember r16 and also the beta before that when XP wasn't nerfed down... PA had been a value game all along and god how those players were pissed to see swarms of xan FI crashing on them and gaining massive score.
Our suggestions don't make the game any less value-based. We're just proposing a change in which actions are rewarded ingame and which aren't. Crashing is not. Using your fleet wisely is. In a very narrow sense, we're fixing XP. I appreciate the trauma a lot of people (apparently) still have of r16, but it just doesn't apply here.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 02:49   #12
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

A very excellent post you made mz, I'm curious and slightly excited to see where this discussion will go!

To me this seems that you are essentially wanting to make this an XP game again (or some balance of XP and value) but with XP completely reworked into what it probably should have been in the first place?

Another thing that springs to my mind: mz spoke of only rewarding successful combat. Does this include successful defence? Obviously we don't want to make it sim-planet or over power defending such that people are put off attacking because of the rewards of defending, but equally if an alliance is on the back-foot (e.g. outnumbered in a block war) they should still have some form of reward for good defence I think. If your enemy doesn't crash on good defence, then obviously there is no reward either way, but if they do crash, in a game where value will not be predominant, is salvage and the loss of enemy ships reward enough?
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 10:13   #13
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

As an initial remark to those going the path of calling the idea sketchy: it is, and the original intent was simply to open a discussion on how score calculation affects how the game is played (and why it's crucial there). What we want to do here, and what we're it seems doing, is to discuss if we could change the system the score is calculated with into something that rewards engaging in combat more and sitting down less - to make it a war game a lot of people will speak of.


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Originally Posted by Gerbie2 View Post
I agree somewhat with the thoughts behind the first post, but at the same time: what you want is difficult to balance and changing the way score is obtained could lead to unwanted side-effects
Rounds are short. Unwanted side-effects can be very hard to predict and even thorough talk on theory might not point some obvious problems out. Definitely, you need to look into comparative statics well when write down a formula, but I don't think the possibility of something awkward happening is so "bad" in the end.


Quote:
Salvage
People in this game avoid combat too much. Attackers have to recall attacks when defenders appear. Combat should be much more rewarding and there should be less incentives to avoid it. Perhaps it should be better to give salvage to attacking fleets as well (although never more than to compensate for the ships they lose).
Salvage is an excellent point to make. I'll perhaps talk about it later once I have some thoughts collected on it. Regarding to the relation between fleet sizes and crashing for asteroids: if a considerable source of score gain is obtaining asteroids, destroying enemy fleet, and destroying structures in combat, demolishing your fleet through a crash is a very bad plan on the long run. Initially, you gain score (although if you look at the formula I wrote up the mid section means destroying more fleet will in fact turn the formula negative, well, which is my oversight), but you're destroying your score growth potential: because score potential scales with having a larger fleet rather than simply capping (round 16) it's not optimal to abolish your fleet for short term gains.

The reason why combat is avoided like a plague is because it's often perceived as a no-go road. Even alliances that have played very aggressively have done so to ultimately avoid combat: eXilition is perhaps the best example of this. They signaled out that they're willing to go into extents to make sure anyone attacking them suffers, and they proved this with military power, fleet catches, and sometimes rash-looking attack play. The ultimate goal of this tactic wasn't to fight more fights, but to scare people away from fighting them. This was a great, great success for them.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Mahkil
The only thing I don't like is when you reward bashing of a big planet by a horde of smaller ones. The system should be based on total fleet values. What needs to be done better is the set of stats (latest playable one was JBG's), something that make possible to attack alone planets of your value (not only for caths).
Simply collecting a bunch of fleets and stealing asteroids off a big fleet boy won't do you much good - fleet catching him, then again, might pay off with very significant score gains. Is this bad? In my view, not. Basing the system on total fleet values removes a lot of incentives to cooperate, which is in my opinion a bad thing: I'd like to encourage cooperative play, because the social and team aspect has always been a driving force for the game and should not be neglected. Ship stats are something that do play a crucial role in game play development, but that's a whole different a story to talk about.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk
In that light, I don't feel it is necessary to change the aspect of score calculation as far as roid capping is concerned.
I do disagree with this but only on algebraic level: in terms of defining the proportional value of capturing asteroids in compared with the other sources.


Quote:
In order to reward destroying ships, the issue of bashing should be examined. Max roid cap is directly determined by the ratio of value between attacker and defender. To ensure that people on the bottom of the food chain don't become food for farmers, score gained by ship and structure destruction should be subject to the same value ratio.
This is close knit with salvage. I'll just throw a quick thought out here: if you allow attackers to gain salvages too, and tweak the salvage numbers a bit - this, in conjunction to dramatically reducing the relative weight of value in your total score board could result in a situation which would somewhat alleviate the bashing issue: fleets would be less inclined to blow up into nothingness, and even taking some solid fleet casualties while attacking might be a beneficial for the attacker - and even so not SUCH a dramatic loss for the defender. It has to do a lot with the salvage amounts, and score gain formula. The obvious downside of ramping up attacker salvage is that it rewards reckless crashing which is undesirable.


Quote:
All of the above seems quite clear-cut to me. An issue I haven't not quite decided upon yet is the one ellonweb brought up. Should early round victories count towards one's score as much as late round victories? I think it would be nice if the balance shifted somewhat to the early round, but like Gerbie, I can't think of an easy way to achieve that.
This is a problem but it has to do with the part of the game which essentially defines accumulating big fleets and such fun. There's no easy way out of it in that fashion, apart from the round 16 route which denies the advantage of accumulation in the first place. It's a tough choice but one probably inevitable: accumulation and ramping score gains or no accumulation and steady score gains.




The value game is a problem the way I see it: you talk about asteroids rewarding value and income, which is essentially value and value. The thing is, if you reward accumulating and protecting value too much you won't get rid of the problem that is that of avoiding combats. Ramping up attacker salvages can increase the ability to land attacks and thus face combats but it also increases the incentive to crash relentlessly and makes defending substantially harder (because defenses often calculate in terms of their losses and our losses). I won a round building fences and accumulating value, and it couldn't have been played any better (yet in terms of "how we want this game to be played" I played an outright atrocious round).

Defending needs to be plausible. Thus, attacker salvage can't be ramped up too much (this has to do with ship stats too yes I'm aware). At the same time, attacking needs to be attractive. The way out I see is rewarding attacks on a left-hand side more. Same obviously applies to defending too: if you defend and obliterate an enemy doing so, you will gain good score (and not just arbitrary 100 XP and salvage). It is shown on the original highly sketchy number too, you're just probably overlooking it.

a * Max[(fleet destroyed - fleet lost),0] * score factor.


Quote:
It is this distinction that has led us into our present situation, in which the first half of the round is spent in building up a value base in preparation for the last half of the round, during which wars are generally fought.
Yet it's very often decided by who caps asteroids best and who defends asteroids best. The outcome is not often decided on a military combat report not involving the other side's sheet full of binaries. I believe, I indirectly answered ellonweb's question already.


edit. EXTREMELY AWKWARD FORUM LAG KTHNXBAI
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 13:35   #14
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk View Post
That is in fact something I like very much. Rewards cooperation. And it's not as if big planers are the helpless baby seals you make them out to be.
That is however not the only effect this type of reward achieves.
We will all agree that it should be rewarding for many small planets to roid a big one.

However, this also rewards people that keep their value intentionally low and hit smallish to medium targets. The "returns on investment" from landing on a big active planet every once and again are not as high as landing on less active only just bigger than your planet regularly.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed to solve a big flaw in XP rewarding.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 13:59   #15
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

Incidentally, i don't think value in itself is bad.
There are two issues with value based rounds that i would like to address:
1. The exponential nature of value growth.
2. The effect that crashing your attack fleet has over your round. If you crash against 2x your value defencewise you can already forget about your round. All that is needed this round is a cath fleet that emps your xan fi at over 150% efficiency, and a zik fleet that steals them at around the same efficiency.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 17:23   #16
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by Tietäjä View Post
Ramping up attacker salvages can increase the ability to land attacks and thus face combats but it also increases the incentive to crash relentlessly and makes defending substantially harder (because defenses often calculate in terms of their losses and our losses).
This is just a matter of finding the right formula to represent what you want. A variant of your defence-XP formula could do this: Max[(fleet destroyed - fleet lost),0] * salvage factor
In this formula you'd only get salvage if you lose less than your target.

Giving XP for destroying enemy ships is bad imo. It requires safeguards to prevent large players from killing smaller ones. At the same time such safeguards promote keeping value low and reward crashers.

Note that one of the reasons people are so passive this round is because the stats are very defensive. People would have tried to roid top galaxies more early in the round if the stats had allowed it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gio2k View Post
The exponential nature of value growth.
Refineries and finance centers contribute to this exponential nature, add very little to the game and reward a defensive gameplay. Get rid of them.
Roid mining tech (HCT) should be more linear and less exponential. Eg. you should be able to mine 100 extra roids for every 1500 RP.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gio2k View Post
The effect that crashing your attack fleet has over your round. If you crash against 2x your value defencewise you can already forget about your round.
Crashing is bad, ok. There are already a lot of features that favor low valued players. We don't want another round 16, scan before you land. Don't just send blind.

Last edited by Gerbie2; 13 Dec 2009 at 22:17. Reason: Change to 1500 RP/100 roids
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 17:53   #17
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by Gerbie2 View Post
Note that one of the reasons people are so passive this round is because the stats are very defensive. People would have tried to roid top galaxies more early in the round if the stats had allowed it.
I didn't play the round so I wouldn't know, but in terms of your logic, the stats have been passive for years. The stats are only to blame for so much, but if you are going to argue that people's reluctancy to fight fleet combats is because the stats are defensive, you'll really have to do better than "well erm its very defensive this round". I won one of the more aggressive rounds of Planetarion X and I won it by playing extremely passive, extremely defensive, and extremely untouchable. And this was years ago.

The perverted fact that a war game disencourages participating in actual combat isn't really new. And it's not due to the ship stats.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 18:26   #18
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

I like the concept. Let's just say it's still a thought experiment for now...


The simplest method seems to be what you're discussing; giving XP for killing stuff.

A rough concept would be:
XP = bravery factor * (their losses/your losses) * value of their losses * scaling factor.

The bit in brackets would be limited to a maximum value.

'The value of their losses' bit ensures that throwing your fleet away will reduce your potential scoregain, but it would lead to future exponential growth unless you curbed it. A square root would do the trick.




One thing you need to think about is EMP. In principle a simple scaling factor (eg EMP/4 = value killed in expression) makes sense, but people fight a lot more EMP battles, leave ships at home since they're safe etc.

Getting the 'scaling factor' right sounds like a nightmare.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 18:29   #19
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

Damn, I hadn't thought about EMP at all yet. A simple solution to that problem (one I've advocated for a while now, though for different reasons) is to abolish the monopoly Cath and Etd have on EMP ships. Similar changes can be made to Zik's stealing and Xan's cloak. If everyone can choose (not) to build EMP ships, score does not need to be attributed to hugging. People have resisted this proposal in the past, I guess because it strikes people as quite a fundamental change, even though (imo) it isn't.
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Unread 7 Dec 2009, 18:44   #20
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

EMP is definitely a bugger I agree there, an obvious oversight from my side too.

But to be fair, I agree on Mzyxptlk's part - I don't think the cathaar monopoly to EMP has ever really resulted in anything extremely positive: the race has often been a double edged blade for this very reason, and moreso, a nightmare from stat balance point of view.
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Unread 9 Dec 2009, 05:22   #21
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Thumbs up Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by Tietäjä View Post
Of incentive mechanisms and their significance

We can all agree that the purpose of score is to define the winner. How score is calculated is the mechanism that signals how the game is essentially "supposed" to be played. I'll argue for this. Regardless of different rankings (galaxy, planet, alliance) it's the same thing. The current trend in this game is that the optimal tactic to win a round is to have highest defining planet value of all. XP is a secondary sidekick that will hardly win you anything, but that simply dwells in midst. It's, if you look at rankings (again, any) essentially white noise. Some have more, some have less, it's not correlated with score, it's more correlated with planet activity. But it's of no significance. Value is how you win right now. It's been so for most of the time. It can be more rewarding not to attack, to create pacts that reduce incomings, and to simply collect. In this fashion, the game is more a planet and politics management game than a war game.

Some will remember round 16 which was essentially different. Value wasn't necessarily the optimal path to play - in fact winners didn't play for value. That round, XP wasn't a sidekick but a defining factor. Playing the game the "conventional" way didn't yield best results - it perhaps still was a Nash equilibrium strategy. But winners played it different - fleet was a tool to gain score, not an end and means. Of course, this round was an extreme. But it shows how essential the score calculation is in defining how the game is (to be) played. This should elaborate that the score calculation formula provides an incentive mechanics: if you reward crashing your fleet for high XP gains, people will use that tactic to success. If you reward containing your fleet, playing low and passive, gathering and growing resources slow and safe, people will fence.


Why removing alliance rankings will not make a difference

As a blunt footnote here, my argument leans on the now called presumption that we want Planetarion to be more a war game than a management game. This is why removing alliance rankings will not change anything - certainly, it will and can change the focus from alliance rankings to planet and galaxy rankings, but "optimal strategies" remain. To win, possessing highest value will remain crucial. To possess highest value in the end, you need to play passive, avoid excessive combat, and contain your value. Alliances or galaxies or planet scoreboards, whichever. The game mentality will remain the same. If your aim is to reduce the focus of alliances, yes, surely, removing alliance rankings will gain this goal. I don't personally believe it's all that interesting, though, I think a more radical change needs to be implemented that actually gives people different incentives.


What can be done, and how to create incentives

Consider following. Game mechanics remain same: asteroids are gathered to collect resources, resources are collected to build fleet. But fleet itself is of not so much value in your rankings. Fleet will be used to gather score instead of being a heavy weight source of score itself. To give a few examples, attacking a planet with larger fleet and stealing asteroids from such would yield score (in an XP fashion). Fighting a combat would yield score (again, XP fashion): little to none if you're crushed and your fleet is devastated, a lot if you defeat a stronger opponent and damage him more than you damage yourself. The incentive mechanics of "value" would remain: you need to have a bigger fleet to generate more score, since numbers will matter here, but it's not optimal to consistently sit the fleet home in safety and avoid combat.

Let's consider again. Multiple smaller fleet value planets unite their resources and fleet catch a fleet of large value. They succeed, and are awarded large amount of XP for overcoming a superior force in battle. A larger fleet attacking a planet with smaller value would yield less. Bashing small fleets with large fleets would yield less. To emphasize, success in the scoreboards would encourage collecting fleet and using it in combat, using it to destroy other fleets and steal asteroids, which would encourage tactical maneuvers (like fleet trapping).

It's still a sketchy concept, but it should incorporate fleet value in much less impact of the score itself and much more impact of in gathering score. Score should not be obtained mainly through having a large value, but through participating in combat. The red herring is to change the game mentality from accumulating score through management into actively gathering score through engaging in combat. I'm aware this favors heavily active players, but more or less everything will. I'll refine the concept and formula if I'm arsed at some point (and have the spare time to do so).



edit. I'm aware people will have the first thought that I'm suggesting driving the game towards what it was round 16 - suiciding fleet for XP to obtain score. I'd like to point that this is not the case - the mechanism would involve a system (I'll elaborate it further at some point) that would essentially cause suiciding hamper your score growth potential: having no fleet would obviously make you small in fleet size, which would seem exploitable in a scenario where everyone has tiny fleets and everyone goes for nitpicking asteroids to obtain high scores from people with relatively larger fleets (speaking of a 100 ships against 200). This can be prevented by implementing possibly an exponential scale (dangerous I know) that means that the larger combats you participate in with larger fleets causes more XP thus score: consider following.

Score gained: a * (fleet destroyed - fleet lost) * score factor.

here a is the factual total fleet value of your fleets and your enemy's fleets (ie. enemy fleet per your fleet) - it grows the larger the enemy is, and reduces the smaller you are, and is capped between certain numbers, [0.25,4] say to give an arbitrary example. The second batch would mean that the larger the combat is the more score will be involved. Score factor is an arbitrary weight factor (because you'd need to reward asteroids too, and asteroid play in a different ballpark in terms of nominal numbers).
By far the best post here for a while. What this game needs is more combat, reasons to land to damage your enemy without it destroying your game or handing advantage to alliances battling lighter. Reasons to stay and fight for your roids or to damage your enemy.

Yet again ATTACKERS SALVAGE come to my mind to reduce losses and allow combat. Also what has been state above.

Salvage aint suicide, if u lose too much, u will not gain, a tiny hit again feels nowhere with a roid gain.
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Unread 14 Dec 2009, 17:29   #22
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Damn, I hadn't thought about EMP at all yet. A simple solution to that problem (one I've advocated for a while now, though for different reasons) is to abolish the monopoly Cath and Etd have on EMP ships. Similar changes can be made to Zik's stealing and Xan's cloak. If everyone can choose (not) to build EMP ships, score does not need to be attributed to hugging. People have resisted this proposal in the past, I guess because it strikes people as quite a fundamental change, even though (imo) it isn't.
I have said the last couple of rounds that we need to go back to pre-r6 ways, give everyone a chance to build all type of ships. However that doesnt solve the fact you wouldnt get XP for killing fleet with these.

Perhaps its just based on value stopped+killed.

Also I do think that you should get equal XP for defending and attacking. However remove the fact you combine fleets when they land, so its all about each player, not about the blob.
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Unread 14 Dec 2009, 17:32   #23
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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However that doesnt solve the fact you wouldnt get XP for killing fleet with these.
With the proper stats, having a few EMP ships pays for itself, even if you don't get score by using them in combat.
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Unread 15 Dec 2009, 15:17   #24
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Re: Of score (and game mentality)

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Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk View Post
With the proper stats, having a few EMP ships pays for itself, even if you don't get score by using them in combat.

Yeah, as you said. All you really have to do is ramp the strength of these ships high enough so that there is a tactical aspect into building them (so that you can go for those combats where you use EMP ships to minimize your losses whilst using kill ships to gain score, maximizing score gains, it's simple lagrangian). It's "trivial".
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