How many races should their be?

[Jintao]

Hey all

This past round we only played with 4 races in the hopes it would improve the quality of shipstats by having less races.

In some threads i've been reading some comments about it like:

• Not enough diversity with 4 races
• 6 races would give every attack fleet a teamup partner
• The more races we have, how more diversity we have

I felt this discussion deserved it's own topic.

How many races would work best in terms of creating good shipstats, have enough diversity, playability, prevent stagnation, ... and why?

[Kaiba]

What happened to 1 2 and 3? Why gather them under 'Other' when they are as valid as the ones given their own slot

[fortran]

Is there in PA history other types of ships besides Normal, Emp, Cloak, Steal? I think if there was to be a 6th race, there should be a different kind of ship too.

[Mzyxptlk]

I think the number of pods in the stats (and by extension, the number of roiding fleets) is more important than the number of races.

I like the number of roiding fleets to be divisible by the number of classes (6). 6, 12 and 18 pods are all OK. However, 6 pods means that there's no overlap between the races, which makes teamups pointless and alliance fleet strategies much less interesting. 18... well, 18 is a lot of bloody pods, leaving very little room for actual combat ships. So I like 12.

Whether you achieve that by making 4 races (with 3 pods each), 5 races (some with 2 and some with 3 pods), or 6 races (with 2 pods each) is much less important to me.

Therefore, I voted 'other'.

[Kaiba]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I think the number of pods in the stats (and by extension, the number of roiding fleets) is more important than the number of races.

I like the number of roiding fleets to be divisible by the number of classes (6). 6, 12 and 18 pods are all OK. However, 6 pods means that there's no overlap between the races, which makes teamups pointless and alliance fleet strategies much less interesting. 18... well, 18 is a lot of bloody pods, leaving very little room for actual combat ships. So I like 12.

Whether you achieve that by making 4 races (with 3 pods each), 5 races (some with 2 and some with 3 pods), or 6 races (with 2 pods each) is much less important to me.

Therefore, I voted 'other'.

Or 3 races with 4 pods each?

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by BloodyButcher

U dont have to make each race symetric.

I explictly included that option.

Originally Posted by Kaiba

Or 3 races with 4 pods each?

I don't really like the idea, but I can't come up with a good argument against it.

[BloodyButcher]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I explictly included that option.

I wasnt aiming at you.
More of the requirments that Jintao has been setting up for stats the last rounds

[BloodyButcher]

U dont have to make each race symetric.
Ive said this a million times, as you base your stats on some "tiamata-esque" approach.
If cath/etd has 3 pods each, you can have more fleets with EMP attack ships, wich is good in this modern fast paced value PA.
Less "zero loss(def ships that fire before the attacker)" def ships is key, as no one in their right mind will land a dark red calc for 90% of the round anyways. The only ones landing red calcs is trolls, like Asc/HEROES, or alliance on a mission to destroy another alliance.

[Mzyxptlk]

OK.

Relatedly: People who voted for 6 races, what should the 6th race be? I think we can all agree that another mix-of-everything-else like Etd is not what we should aim for. But what then?

[Veil05]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

OK.

Relatedly: People who voted for 6 races, what should the 6th race be? I think we can all agree that another mix-of-everything-else like Etd is not what we should aim for. But what then?

Science (EMP/Cloak) / War (Normal/Steal)

3 variations on each.

[Veedeejem!]

Originally Posted by Veil05

Science (EMP/Cloak) / War (Normal/Steal)

3 variations on each.

I like this idea.
Also I don't think a 5th race or 6th race should necesarrily be a mix of different types of ships or introduce a new type of damage (**** subversion).
For me 2 races who only have NORMAL/STEAL/EMP/CLOAK ships but with a different focus/playstyle is perfectly acceptable.

[Cochese]

Not Subversion. Just don't.

[Jintao]

Lol i think we are moving a bit too far ahead of ourselves. At the moment it's just a question being asked.
If it's ever descided to add a 6th race, i'm guessing there will be a long discussion on what it should be then.

So let's not have it now and focus on the original question: Do we even need a 6th race?

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Jintao

Lol i think we are moving a bit too far ahead of ourselves. At the moment it's just a question being asked.
If it's ever descided to add a 6th race, i'm guessing there will be a long discussion on what it should be then.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that with 5 whole votes, the 6th race is now a fact. But if we all vote for 6th race, and then it turns out no one has any good suggestions for what that may be, then our votes are kind of useless. I'm just trying to explore the possibility space.

I've tried to come up with ideas for new ship types in the past, and quite frankly, didn't get much farther than a turtle race with very high armor, mediocre damage and very slow init, pretty much Terran-squared... I think we can do better than that.

[fortran]

What if we start with a sketch that the "ability" is a drawback. Awesome ships in terms of stats but with abilities that hinder them.

I just thought something like:

Phasing: each combat a random part of the ships with this ability doesn't take part in combat

[Clouds]

Please learn the difference between their and there.

[Veil05]

Originally Posted by Clouds

Please learn the difference between their and there.

Great input.

[eksero]

Originally Posted by Clouds

Please learn the difference between their and there.

Maybe you could teach him pal!

[Caj]

6 races please
2 pods per race
= 12 roiding fleets
2 FI roiding fleets
2 CO roiding fleets
2 FR roiding fleets
2 DE roiding fleets
2 CR roiding fleets
2 BS roiding fleets

NICE BALANCE CHEERS

[Damakles]

Originally Posted by Caj

6 races please
2 pods per race
= 12 roiding fleets
2 FI roiding fleets
2 CO roiding fleets
2 FR roiding fleets
2 DE roiding fleets
2 CR roiding fleets
2 BS roiding fleets

NICE BALANCE CHEERS

Would love to see, cant see it happening

[berten]

newRace is driven by instant profits. They thrive on pillaging, looting and salvaging.
Their swift attack boats allow them to move in and out of combat very quickly. Give them 4 fleetslots.
Their people are mostly on the move, scouting for new targets. They don't need an infrastructure on their planet, all they need is Speed and ships. (Max 50 constructions, slow construction, slow research. Basicly - their research is half-way finished with startup bonus)

This race really profits from combat trough Attacking Salvage.
They have very weak but insanely expensive astropods. They don't attack your planet for the asteroids, they attack it for the raw RESOURCES they can harvest from yours. (Cargo ships style here, but maybe not limited to amount of resources earned / tick).

There is only x amount of resources that can be gathered from a planet when hitting it. Since the gains newRace gets are not sustainable (they don't have roids, they need to profit from the actual harvesting of resources) teaming up for huge battles really isn't profitable, certainly not at earlier stages of the round.


Needs to be fleshed out, but think most of this is already in the game in some way.

Additional Idea 1:
Bonus salvage for defending planets that manage to 'win' a battle at their planet. (Because the attackers would be carrying resources etc)

Additional Idea 2: (this is probably harder to implement)
Red defence could be a thing again. let the newRace actually combat both attacking and defending fleets at a planet.

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by berten

newRace

Interesting idea, but I'm not really feeling it. I see 2 main problems: 1) How can the means of income you list (attacking salvage, cargo ships) ever compete with your standard 1k roids, core4, 60 FCs, 50 refs top 100 tot planet that's gaining 153k value a day? 2) You say the race doesn't have roids, why would planets choose to defend against them, if they can just spend their stocks adn hide their ships instead?

[Caj]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

Interesting idea, but I'm not really feeling it. I see 2 main problems: 1) How can the means of income you list (attacking salvage, cargo ships) ever compete with your standard 1k roids, core4, 60 FCs, 50 refs top 100 tot planet that's gaining 153k value a day? 2) You say the race doesn't have roids, why would planets choose to defend against them, if they can just spend their stocks adn hide their ships instead?

because new race steals structures and gets the effect of the structures x5 to make up for no roids
and new race has OP covoping. In that the success ratio is the same, but new race gets x5 bonus when completing a covop

[berten]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

Interesting idea, but I'm not really feeling it. I see 2 main problems: 1) How can the means of income you list (attacking salvage, cargo ships) ever compete with your standard 1k roids, core4, 60 FCs, 50 refs top 100 tot planet that's gaining 153k value a day? 2) You say the race doesn't have roids, why would planets choose to defend against them, if they can just spend their stocks adn hide their ships instead?

Originally Posted by Caj

because new race steals structures and gets the effect of the structures x5 to make up for no roids
and new race has OP covoping. In that the success ratio is the same, but new race gets x5 bonus when completing a covop

1) The entire point is they don't need to keep up. The race is ment to be a thorn in the side of these top planets. They can focus solely on attacking, don't need defships and can actually steal ALOT of res from these top planets

The goal is to spread the fleets over multiple targets where they can deal considerable losses (think: 5-6 ticks of income for each wave landing?) rather then grabbing 500 roids from 1 2k planet. This way with enough effort you could actually still cause said top planet to gain no income for 24hours straight, but he atleast has a chance to cover some of your waves, even if the first one manages to land.

2) Hiding ships takes 8 ticks - what if my alliance sends a wave 2?

3) Having ships in prod means there is half-finished ships and stocks of resources in these factories. Those could be mine, if I only tried to actually get them!

[Caj]

RACE BREAKDOWN

Terran (100% heavy kill)
Cathaar (100% EMP, 1 kill maybe)
Xan (100% cloak)
Zik (100% Steal, 1 kill maybe)
Etd (Terran base, with steal ships & some cloak)
Pilgrims (Cathaar base, with kill ships & some EMP)

[lince]

Although this might seem very abusable, i like this idea.
It gives a new setup and strat for a new way of playing.

[Appocomaster]

I don't personally have an issue with new styles of play (or even taking back a form of subversion) but I agree that having a race which it's not possible to win with is not really a viable solution.

A slightly different idea which I saw - related to attacker salvage - is that instead of getting any salvage, they get direct salvage in ships either of their own or of others, even when attacking (potentially). It'd be more of a unique race ability.

[Damakles]

Lets just completely re-run round 3 stats, research and construction

[coolkat]

6 races

terran= high armor
xan= cloaked high dmg
cath= emp
zik=steal
etd= steal + high armor
new race= Emp + cloak

just a suggestion, on new race... make it a Mashup of our top 4 sorta like what you did with etd. or if u want to implement some salvage ships that could be interesting but again will need to run through testing to make sure no abusable... but it will make fc tags alot stronger which can be interesting

for pod ships... I suggest more pods tbh... alot of people are using covert ops to get certain pod classes to play a class anyway... so just let the people build the pods to begin with so everyone isn't playing the same setups...I'm not saying 6 pod classes per race... but 2 is not enough...3-4 sounds alot more reasonable....

[coolkat]

also.... full tag should contribute to score to remove effectiveness of support planets..... allies with top40 avg 7mil and bottom 20 avg 3mil.... and all bottom 20 on 1-2 ship builds???

somewhere it shows your system is broken and being abused

this only hurts the game and it's community tbh... if u want to keep large tags and try and reduce blocking.... I suggest full score contribution and remove defence from out of tag +1

[august]

Since multipple races was included in planetarion it has Always been 4 ones. When i saw that zik was back and Etd was removed, my first reaction was to piety that they didnt also kept Etd so there was atleast 5 races in the game. I do belive that the crew whould implement up to 6-8 races, it makes this game even more interesting

August the crazy Sweden

[M0RPH3US]

i think appoco was working on reimplementing subversive ships, no idea how far that is or if it can be implemented at all in the current battle engine!?

subversive race would for sure be an interesting additional option

other then that i was thinking about cloaked ships that have emp weapons only
this would be a rather easy implementation i would think and could be the sixth race we are looking for

overall (yes i voted 6 races) i think making stats with an even number of races is easier, escpecially as we are facing a even number of shipclasses
while saying this, i dont think rounds with just 4 races do any good - the game turns even more predictable then it allready was imo

Last but not least we could stick with 5 races and just add another shipclass - odd number of races with an odd number of shipclasses
Goliath Class slower and bigger then Battleships or a Drones Class if you wanna have it smaller and faster then your manned fighters

just some thoughts

[Patrikc]

Originally Posted by M0RPH3US

Last but not least we could stick with 5 races and just add another shipclass - odd number of races with an odd number of shipclasses
Goliath Class slower and bigger then Battleships or a Drones Class if you wanna have it smaller and faster then your manned fighters

just some thoughts

Or remove a shipclass/pod - 5 races with (for example) Fi only being a defense ship.

4 races definitely feels like dumbed down Planetarion. Yes it makes balance easier, but balance is no good if it comes at the cost of fun/creativity.

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by M0RPH3US

other then that i was thinking about cloaked ships that have emp weapons only

I'm not 100% on this, but I think cloak and EMP are already separate checkboxes in the engine.

Originally Posted by M0RPH3US

Goliath Class slower and bigger then Battleships or a Drones Class if you wanna have it smaller and faster then your manned fighters

Interesting, I hadn't thought about adjusting the other side of the equation. Sadly, I feel 5/7 is only slightly better than 4/6: in both cases you end up with 4 classes that only contain a single roiding fleet: 5 races, 10 pods, 7 classes, 3x2 + 4x1 vs. 4 races, 8 pods, 6 classes, 2x2 + 4x1.

Originally Posted by Patrikc

Or remove a shipclass/pod - 5 races with (for example) Fi only being a defense ship.

Weirdly, this I have thought about before. The main issue I see with it is that Fi (reasonable choice) gets this weird second class citizen status. I don't think it'll work out, but might be worth experimenting with in a beta set.

[Patrikc]

My preference has always been to give Fi/Co one pod, the rest get two, still making it ten pods for five races. Fi/Co is inherently stronger, so limiting teamup options for those two was my way of managing them.

And yes, you can already have cloaked EMP (or Steal!) ships.

[Jintao]

Patrikc and Mz are correct

The shiptype is split into 2 fields:
Cloack: yes/no (1/0)
Type: Normal, Emp, Steal, Pod, Sk, Resource

Any combination of these can technically be made. Only problem is that PA currently has no method to display what type of cloaked ship it is. It will just display cloaked in the shipstat overview.

[Papadoc]

One of the hardest parts of even attempting to make a stat set (standard 5 races) is figuring out what to do with ETD. It has no true identity. More often than not, It's very strong and highly represented or a weird combination of ships that no one uses.

I'm all for a 6th race but, What on earth would we do with a 6th race without changing the combat engine?

I suppose there is the option of making all 6 races have every ship type. good luck with that!

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

I suppose there is the option of making all 6 races have every ship type. good luck with that!

I think that's a serious option to consider. However, there is one big problem with it: the identity of the races is tied very closely to the type of ships they have. If you take that away, Zik will play exactly the same as Cat. To a large extent, that is already the case. At tick 300+ you do the exact same thing whether you're Ter or Xan. In my mind, there would have to be a big upside to compensate for turning the races a grey soup. I don't see one.

What might help Etd specifically is if we made it a little more focused. Not a bit of everything, but a mix of just two types, for example.

[Caj]

clear from poll community wants more racial diversity!

[Kaiba]

Originally Posted by Caj

clear from poll community wants more racial diversity!

No it's clear that of the 30 odd ppl who voted, of which 10 don't play or are PA team, that 20 of them want more races. They don't represent the community.

[Machado]

What about ships that use their hull as a weapon? Sorta suicide-y with salvage or something as reward :P

Or a matryoshka style ship that becomes another smaller ship once destroyed - just being crazy here :P

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Machado

just being crazy here :P

Crazy is good!

Originally Posted by Kaiba

No it's clear that of the 30 odd ppl who voted, of which 10 don't play or are PA team, that 20 of them want more races. They don't represent the community.

We cannot take into account the opinions of people who refuse to voice it.

[Kaiba]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

Crazy is good!


We cannot take into account the opinions of people who refuse to voice it.

We also can't make a sweeping statement about the opinions of the whole when 5% voted

[HeimdallR]

Lets discuss this again

[Cochese]

6th race: one pod in every class, one "cargo ship" in every class. High armor, high emp res for the flak ships. Pods should be weak and expensive.

Peaceful stealing, faking possible somewhat. Give them an inherent bonus to mining output and/or significant ship production cost. Immune to ship stealing covops.

Stupid/funny/funky "support" planets.

I'm about 50% serious here.

[HeimdallR]

Originally Posted by Cochese

6th race: one pod in every class, one "cargo ship" in every class. High armor, high emp res for the flak ships. Pods should be weak and expensive.

Peaceful stealing, faking possible somewhat. Give them an inherent bonus to mining output and/or significant ship production cost. Immune to ship stealing covops.

Stupid/funny/funky "support" planets.

I'm about 50% serious here.

Jesus, I'm a zik fan, and zik been nerfed badly since like 23, but yeah hell yeah

[Zeke]

1. Terran : High Init (fires later), high firepower, high armor
2. Cathaar: EMP Only, fires first always
3. Xandathrii: Cloaked and cheap high in numbers
4. Zik: Steal ships mainly, some die during steal, some heavvier Carrierships, steal smaller ships and survive
5. Eitraides: Trading race. Has cargo ships to steal enemy resources. Has detonator ships that use own planets eonium ressource to throw gas-bolts to blow up enemy ships, medium init. Has ships that swap with enemy ships. Means target planet gets my ships i get his, this goes with defending and attacking.
6. Psiony: Mind controls enemy ships to fire at their own friendly ships, low init like 2. Expensive ships. Doesn't steal ships after battle.
7. Baal'tazar: Suicidal race. Even higher numbers than xan, all ships init 3. Selfdestructs on successful attack to destroy enemy ships (wont selfdestruct if no enemy ship or frozen). Can lay mines around their own planet, that selfdestruct on successfull enemies landing. (replacing of structure defence though)
8. Illuminos: Prisma weapon class: Classes have synergy effects FI increase CO DMG and vice versa, Fr increases DE and CR increases BS DMG and vice versa
9. Zal'thos: Missile only ships that target ALL ship classes equaly. Fire right after EMP (init 2 around) fires at all enemy classes at once, but slightly lower DMG
10. Cyrus: Doesn't destroy enemy ships during battle. Very high armor. Late init. uploads a virus to enemy ships that slowly dissolves Enemy ships per tick (full destruction after 15-20 ticks). Ships need to be repaired 33% of original ressource cost. to not get destroyed.
11. Vem'drem: Morphing ships race. Can morph ship classes between each other. cost: 10% of original value. can morph any Class into any other Class in 10 ticks (faster with population of prod.) Medium init/armor/firepower though.

I know lots of interesting ideas, but a huge amount of time needed to code and balance, so probably won't make it into the game :/

[Illuvatar]

Originally Posted by Zeke

I know lots of interesting ideas, but a huge amount of time needed to code and balance, so probably won't make it into the game :/

Prior answering this quote - First of all ty for these ideas, I think some could be implemented.
The coding part is the easiest of all - it's a 10min code - just needs to being coded by a top chap.
On the other side - PA is lead by criminals atm so keep these ideas in mind till the right owner of Planetarion () will move this game forward.
We got some top alpha codes for pa - I think we could add some of Zekes ideas to the new code.

Best of luck to the remaining gamers - I'm one of these aswell

[Mzyxptlk]

I don't understand the mechanic of #8. #9 is both OP and boring. The rest are interesting!

[berten]

Thinking the mechanics of #8 are:
FI only attack = Weaker then normal FI only attack
CO only attack = Weaker then normal CO only attack
FI/CO attack = Stronger then normal Fi only attack and Stronger then normal CO only attack