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Captured Ship Value Adjustment
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Author:  Triumviron [ Sat Feb 11, 2012 9:57 pm ]
Post subject:  Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Presently, based on the number of times the ship has ported, a ship depreciates in value when resold to Star Dock. While I don't have an issue with this in and of itself, when combined with Gold Aliens that trade nonstop, it means that almost any ship captured from them is rendered worthless. This makes it difficult to run a game where capturing ships is the primary means of gaining income quickly, or even a viable path to getting ahead, even with grossly inflated ship prices as even at ten times normal cost, the price of fighters can outstrip the returns for selling the captured vessel.

I would like the ability to turn off this depreciation and/or modify the formula it uses to make it more feasible to add combat as a way to gain wealth.

Thoughts?

Author:  Vid Kid [ Sat Feb 11, 2012 10:53 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Ok , you might look at the setting : Fusion drive system
This is how you overcome the ship porting depreciation rule.

Also do some work in the alien spawn matrix to have them spawn with
more corbomite to increase the ship value.

I hope this helps.

Vid Kid

Author:  Mongoose [ Sat Feb 11, 2012 11:20 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Triumviron wrote:
This makes it difficult to run a game where capturing ships is the primary means of gaining income quickly


Was that ever possible?

Gold aliens trading at ports is an option that can be disabled.

Author:  Triumviron [ Sat Feb 11, 2012 11:51 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Thank you both for your feedback.

Vid Kid wrote:
Ok , you might look at the setting : Fusion drive system
This is how you overcome the ship porting depreciation rule.

Also do some work in the alien spawn matrix to have them spawn with
more corbomite to increase the ship value.

I hope this helps.

Vid Kid


More corbomite might help slightly, but at only 100 creds per point not too much I fear, as I have limited it pretty heavily on most ships, already have played with the fusion drive system. More than that, though, as I said, a lot of ships in my game start with all prices adjusted to ten times the game recommended or more. Let me give an example:

Minbari Shargoti Dreadnaught from my B5 TWA:

Base Price is 8,535,000, 15.47 times game recommended..

With full holds, 50, and full corbomite, 350, and nothing else with 5k ports, it sells for 1,449,242. With fighter prices at 171 creds per, that is enough to buy me 8475 figs. Actually bringing one of these down assuming it is carrying even half complement with no shields at even odds, it would take 25k.

The only thing that can really be done would be to multiply ship prices five fold again, but that would start to limit the high end ships towards all having the same value as the game has a hard coded cap of almost 400M and even then a lot of those ships are already at a loss. Alternatively, I could reduce by an order of magnitude the number of fighters a ship can carry, but that would make things like planetary assault essentially impossible as Q cannons, sector fighters, and shields would be severely overpowered.

Example 2, Vorlon Dreadnought.

Base price, 167,200,000, 104.97 times game recommended.

Selling with full holds, 60, and full corbomite, 10000, it sells for 22,201,040
after 5000 ports. Again, bringing one down with half capacity and even odds (impossible) would require 162,500 figs, but only fetches enough to buy 129,830.

Even adjusted more than 100 times the base price, it is still insufficient to make a profit on them. With the above considerations, I don't think an "assertive salvage" game is feasible right now using aliens that maintain a home sector, unless aliens either stop porting a bazillion times or we can change the way the game handles depreciation.

Quote:
Was that ever possible?
Given your below suggestion, I would say so. It would just require eliminating any alien planets.

Quote:
Gold aliens trading at ports is an option that can be disabled.
Only if they do not maintain a home sector, believe me, I tried. If you want them to have a homeworld, your options in this regard are limited as the game locks the option in the on position.

Author:  Mongoose [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 12:00 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Hrm, didn't realize that would be locked on if they have a planet.

I see you can still turn off the option to trade down pairs. Between that, their move chance, and their exploration chance, maybe you can significantly reduce their number of times ported. IIRC, there's also an option somewhere to stop processing alien activity when there are no players online.

Author:  Triumviron [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 12:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Mongoose wrote:
Hrm, didn't realize that would be locked on if they have a planet.

I see you can still turn off the option to trade down pairs. Between that, their move chance, and their exploration chance, maybe you can significantly reduce their number of times ported. IIRC, there's also an option somewhere to stop processing alien activity when there are no players online.


Good catches, thank you. That may slow it down enough to turn the tide, but on the flip side, that also means it slows down the development of the aliens, which I would prefer not to do either. Pritchett willing, I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. :)

Author:  Promethius [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:24 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Alien ship capping is a primary blue method to make cash in the Sub Zero edit. You might want to take a look at it. The alien ships are very valuable.

Author:  Promethius [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Are you using a ship with a defender bonus to cap ships with? The Enterra is the ship used in the Sub Zero to cap the aliens with. The Enterra is an alien ship that must be capped first.

Author:  John Pritchett [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:34 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

The tracking of alien port counts is relatively new. I would like it to have an effect, but not completely deflate the value of ships under normal use. I'd like a situation where there's a broader range of ship values, where some are more "new" and still worth a lot, while others have been in the game for a very long time and their value is decreased. To achieve this, the port depreciation and also kill count depreciation should be diminished. If, for example, we decide that depreciation of alien ships should be 1/10th of a player's ship, given the fact that aliens are active 24/7, then whenever a ship is captured by a player, I'd simply divide the port and kill counts by 10. And of course that could be a setting. But the question is, what's the best default?

Author:  John Pritchett [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:54 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Ok, I'm going to add a setting for "Alien Depreciation Factor" which allows you to set the depreciation from 0% to 100% of normal depreciation for port and kill counts. I guess for consistency, the default should be 0%, since earlier versions did not carry port and kill counts from an alien ship to a player ship when captured. But personally, I'd like to see SOME depreciation by default, even if it's much less than is currently seen.

Also, I would like to suggest one other option to make alien killing a better way to make a living. There's a setting to enable alien bounties. This actually offsets the kill count, because the higher the kill count, the higher the bounty. And considering kill count is 5x more of a factor in depreciation than port count, that can be significant. A limitation here is that the player must have an alignment that's opposed to the average alignment of the alien race. Alien Traders, for example, are generally good, so you'd need to be evil to get a bounty by killing them.

Author:  Vid Kid [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 4:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

To correct a setting : you were saying Corbomite is set to 100 crs.
The value ranges from 250 cr. to 4k cr.

So if you were looking for a higher return on a captured ship.
turn up the spawn rate on the alien races corbomite setting to generate high amounts and set the sell price high as well.

Then the return for a ship can out way the fighters used.

Also setting the aliens to sleep when not active will not effect their generating
or anything except there amount of ports , unless you have players camping online.

So what I'm saying is the fixes are already there , its just the settings you have chosen to use is what is making it hard to see.

Btw post the address of your server so we may also come see the edit ourselves. That might help to see some other settings that may be of benefit to the game play.

Just a thought.

Author:  Triumviron [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:59 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

John Pritchett wrote:
Ok, I'm going to add a setting for "Alien Depreciation Factor" which allows you to set the depreciation from 0% to 100% of normal depreciation for port and kill counts. I guess for consistency, the default should be 0%, since earlier versions did not carry port and kill counts from an alien ship to a player ship when captured. But personally, I'd like to see SOME depreciation by default, even if it's much less than is currently seen.
Thank you.
Quote:
Also, I would like to suggest one other option to make alien killing a better way to make a living. There's a setting to enable alien bounties. This actually offsets the kill count, because the higher the kill count, the higher the bounty. And considering kill count is 5x more of a factor in depreciation than port count, that can be significant. A limitation here is that the player must have an alignment that's opposed to the average alignment of the alien race. Alien Traders, for example, are generally good, so you'd need to be evil to get a bounty by killing them.
I do use them, however, the issue at least with my situation is that even a high bounty only pays hundreds of thousands of credits, not the millions it often takes to actually bring down a warship. Also, you get paid the bounty regardless of whether you capture the ship and so if it got too high it could defeat the purpose of making them spend the time and effort to capture the vessel. Still, its a good point and I'll poke around see what more can be done with it.

Quote:
To correct a setting : you were saying Corbomite is set to 100 crs.
The value ranges from 250 cr. to 4k cr.

So if you were looking for a higher return on a captured ship.
turn up the spawn rate on the alien races corbomite setting to generate high amounts and set the sell price high as well.

Then the return for a ship can out way the fighters used.
I didn't explain very well, sorry. The actual base price for Corbomite is 1000, however, when selling a "Ferrengi Target Practice" level ship at the very least, the game only pays you 1/10th that per point.
EDIT: To test I created a new Vorlon Dreadnought to sell, with zero ports the Corbomite value is 8,999,999, with 5000, the corb value is 1M. The corbomite depreciates just like everything else on the ship.

Quote:
Also setting the aliens to sleep when not active will not effect their generating
or anything except there amount of ports , unless you have players camping online.

So what I'm saying is the fixes are already there , its just the settings you have chosen to use is what is making it hard to see.
At least in theory, per the in game tags, the ports the aliens make are used to acquire credits to purchase the fighters that go into defending their sectors. If this is so, suspending their activity when a player is not online would slow their capacity to acquire defenses.

Quote:
Btw post the address of your server so we may also come see the edit ourselves. That might help to see some other settings that may be of benefit to the game play.

Just a thought.
Unfortunately, right now I don't have it set up on an outward facing server, just a test server.

Author:  Scrat [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 3:00 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

John Pritchett wrote:
Ok, I'm going to add a setting for "Alien Depreciation Factor" which allows you to set the depreciation from 0% to 100% of normal depreciation for port and kill counts. I guess for consistency, the default should be 0%, since earlier versions did not carry port and kill counts from an alien ship to a player ship when captured. But personally, I'd like to see SOME depreciation by default, even if it's much less than is currently seen.


While you are at it you may want to also look at the depreciation factor on player ships. I'm guessing that the formula was devised back in the days when 250 turns/day was the norm. Now days in a moderate turn game a ship can become completely depreciated in only a few days of trading. Maybe turns/day should be factored into the equation as well?

Author:  John Pritchett [ Sun Feb 12, 2012 4:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Captured Ship Value Adjustment

Good point. Might be another good setting to allow it to evolve with game styles.

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