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 Balancing building vs. hunting 
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Quote:
Nobody will ever seriously play an edit where 10000 figs
is impossible to afford, not with the way people want to
play today


But I'm not limiting my analysis to only what people want to play today. There are a lot of people who don't want to play what people play today as well. And there aren't a lot of people playing today. So why limit ourselves to just that game style?

Gridding doesn't have to be part of the game.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 5:06 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Mongoose wrote:
If turns spent gridding approaches 100%, then how do people make money?

The cost of one grid fighter is not the cost of the fighter. It's the cost of the fighter plus the money you could have made in the turns you used to emplace it.


He meant the people on the corp who grid use 100% of their turns gridding. Others build and cash

H

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 5:07 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Mongoose wrote:
If turns spent gridding approaches 100%, then how do people make money?


You have 3 ppl cashing for a day or 2, then you start gridding... nobody defends. What do you do? Wait for the enemy to get its stuff together and start defending, wait for their stuff to be entrenched? No. You switch gears and grid them out, make do with the cash you have.

Why bother cashing if everyone else is dead?

So you go for broke, you grid them out, limit their ability to cash, take their planets. Then if you need money you can switch back to cashing some, confident in the huge advantage you now have over them.

Worst case scenerio... you find them, torp them, kill a lot of them, but can't take out a few of their bigger planets. Fine, you take what you can, blockade what you can, get a rider on those planets, then spend the next day cashing and chasing the rider around the universe. Eventually the enemy has to det their own planets to get you off, and you're up however much time they've lost in their planet development, plus all the grid, plus all the cash you'll make that they can't.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 5:23 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
John Pritchett wrote:
But I'm not limiting my analysis to only what people want to play today. There are a lot of people who don't want to play what people play today as well. And there aren't a lot of people playing today. So why limit ourselves to just that game style?

Gridding doesn't have to be part of the game.


Yes, I know. I'm not an idiot, lol. But sysops are only going to bang games that people play, and people want games to be fun. Balanced and analytical is not all that fun. Fast-paced and action driven... that is fun. As I've said a dozen times before, the fundamentals have changed. You can't rewind time.

If there were so many people that don't want to play the game the way it's played, then where are they? Why don't they play classic time-limited stock small-turn small-universe games? I see them banged all the time, 2 corps show up, one stops playing, the game bores everyone to death and ppl leave. These ppl don't play on public servers, that's why we don't see them. That's fine, let them play on their own server, you added that feature. But this will not be the group of people we design games for.

You can eliminate gridding all you want, but you cannot eliminate the core fundamentals. You need to think about the underlying causes here, it's not just about technical tit for tat. As soon as you eliminate gridding, you just make another tactic even more powerful. W/o grid, finding a base is 100x easier and cheaper. Okay, so make probes more expensive, great, but now it takes forever to find people and there's no action in the game.

Yeh, that's going to be a real player draw there. You might as well just tell people to go play another game, for all that's worth. Sysops, of course, aren't going to bang those games. So now, again, all the big games on all the servers are competitive and fun... but nothing has changed. If you really want to change the way the game is played you need to find a way to make the games competitive and fun for the mass of public players, but also balanced. That's why I like the idea of a time-restricted turny. People will still grid, will still defend, but they'll have to do it while everyone else is at keys.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 5:36 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
This state of affairs makes me want to completely eliminate twarp.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 6:31 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Ooh, here's an idea for you, JP:

Make it so that deploying fighters in a sector requires the presence of a friendly planet, ship, or fighter control station. Make the control stations cheap, like the price of a probe or two, but still quite expensive in relation to the price of a single fighter. If fighters are left alone without something to control them, they turn rogue.

With this change, people could still set up twarp destinations in strategic locations around the universe. It would kill gridding without screwing up anything else.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 6:55 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Mongoose has a very good point. If you think about it in real life terms, no one is going to sit in their fighter all alone for eternity without some sort of support system.

I know that sounds weird but when I think of this game and all it's possibilities, the thought always crosses my mind, "what would this scenario be like in a real universe?"

You could even add a curve to it that makes each 'fighter station' purchased a little more expensive than the last one.

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 9:14 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
To keep the real world concept from breaking this all the way down, I think of a "fighter" as a small unmanned ship with reasonably good navigation, defense, and intelligence systems. If the mothership gets destroyed, rather than the guy in the manned fighter thinking "Oh no, now we wait here forever, and I know we can't go back there because his orders were specific." the automated systems sit there, perhaps knowing what has happened, perhaps not. If it learns of the destruction of the mothership, it probably won't have the necessary equipment onboard to think about anything at all. It will just sit there, waiting for orders from its master, not knowing that those orders will never, ever come. And on it will go until eventually the power reserves of the fighter will have dwindled enough that some master control system decides to shut everything down. After that, they're just dead fighters, not thinking or feeling or doing anything. They don't know or care if they receive new orders, and they don't know or care that they can never receive any new orders, because they don't know or care about anything at all. They are... Space junk!


Fri Aug 26, 2011 10:00 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Mongoose wrote:
Make it so that deploying fighters in a sector requires the presence of a friendly planet, ship, or fighter control station. Make the control stations cheap, like the price of a probe or two, but still quite expensive in relation to the price of a single fighter. If fighters are left alone without something to control them, they turn rogue.


So why not just tow the control station with you when you grid in?

That aside, let me re-iterate: If you start making it more difficult to cover the uni w/ figs, you will make it easier for ppl to find and take your base(s).

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Fri Aug 26, 2011 10:47 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Master Blaster wrote:
Mongoose has a very good point. If you think about it in real life terms, no one is going to sit in their fighter all alone for eternity without some sort of support system.

I know that sounds weird but when I think of this game and all it's possibilities, the thought always crosses my mind, "what would this scenario be like in a real universe?"

You could even add a curve to it that makes each 'fighter station' purchased a little more expensive than the last one.


In the TW universe, it actually makes sense. Fighters are drones, not manned. But other than that, I'm with you on the gameplay aspects of this. If I do decide to provide a way to limit gridding, these are options to consider.

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Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:24 am
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Sing, I'm waiting to see if anyone takes advantage of the access-limited game mode. If people don't like gridding, that's one way to get away from it. No sense in gridding if you can't be online when someone is invading your base. You can't react to the fig report at all. All you can do is make your base as strong as possible and hope you hold out long enough to log back in, rebuild and/or move.

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Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:28 am
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
You could also do a customizable fig and limpet hit message delay. If the message was delayed by a little bit, it would make it difficult to defend. People could still grid, but it would be less powerful.

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Sat Aug 27, 2011 11:12 am
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Singularity wrote:
So why not just tow the control station with you when you grid in?


And then what? The minute you tow it out, your figs go rogue.

Singularity wrote:
If you start making it more difficult to cover the uni w/ figs, you will make it easier for ppl to find and take your base(s).


And then that can be balanced by limiting the turns. The point is to eliminate gridding as the be-all, end-all, game-winning strategy, and bring it back to building vs. hunting.

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Sat Aug 27, 2011 5:11 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
A little off handed but what's really needed is a new weapon. A weapon that can clear the figs from the sector you're in and all the surrounding sectors with one hit.

Then you could clear figs as well as make the scripts guess to which sector the attack was coming from. Change the linear fashion of the game

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Sat Aug 27, 2011 5:22 pm
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Unread post Re: Balancing building vs. hunting
Here you go. The G.O.D. I think it's exactly what we're looking for.

Earth Alliance "Global Orbital Defense-grid", better known as "G.O.D." is the primary planetary defense platform used by the Earth Alliance to protect their home world and major colonies. This latest version of the G.O.D. system was developed after the Earth/Minbari war, to act as a viable deterrent against possible invasion from alien forces

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