7/22/2017
Topic:
Stacking dimensional artifacts?
Hutton
|
If you add Spatial Compression to a unit that already has a Mass Nullifier or Gravity Control, does that increase cargo capacity by the original base capacity of the unit or the new base capacity after the other artifact was was installed? |
7/24/2017
Topic:
Stacking dimensional artifacts?
Hutton
|
Okay. But just to avoid confusion I want to point out that you are giving the increases for movement and hangers on ships, not for cargo capacity. Cargo gets increased by 50% on ground units, 100% on ships, or 500% with an AX on either. So a ship with an A5 and an AX would be +600%, or (base cargo capacity)x7. Right? |
7/25/2017
Topic:
Custom Vote almost done, some tweaks
Hutton
|
Doctor Dread wrote:
The Mysterious event was tweaked. The result that gives 3 level 1 artifacts now gives 5.
I assume you mean level AX artifacts because they were the one you could get 3 of. Anyway, I just popped a Mysterios AX and the description says I found 5 AX Geotechnicals but only received 3. Also, "artifact is misspelled in the stage 2 title. Here is the full text:
Stage: 2 - Artiact Discovered (Qty: 5) - (AX) Geotechnical - Ends: 10129
Your signal has led you to a strange hidden structure that seems ancient yet intact, human yet alien. The front door seems aware as you approach and opens without any interaction. Inside there is only one room, what appears to be a vault. Only five items are presented here, identical spherical artifacts.
Artifacts Received (Qty:5): (AX) Geotechnical |
7/30/2017
Topic:
Europa?
Hutton
|
C'mon, doesn't anyone else think we need Europa? |
8/3/2017
Topic:
Defenses fix and Hangar increases
Hutton
|
Here's a bump to remind you that you were considering upping battleship hanger capacity to 25. |
8/10/2017
Topic:
Still working on Orbital Megastructures
Hutton
|
If you want to apply a realistic logic (as opposed to game logic) to ports, they should be doing something to facilitate trade with a planet, not production on a planet. A port, wether a seaport, airport or spaceport is a conduit to move goods through.
If the real world evolved to look something like the Barons of the Galaxy, the reason we would want to built an orbital port is so that freighters could offload and load their cargo at one point and then get back underway between planets while local planetbound infrastructure took care of distribution.
I would argue that Spaceports should serve some similar function, making it easier for large corps to trade with planets at a macro scale and giving smaller corps an opportunity to profit locally by distributing products from the port to the highest demand cities. Make the spaceport able to buy and sell in large volume based on an average of planetary demand, and let corps buy from it with a markup set by the owner instead of the double rate set by cities. |
8/10/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
I think trade should apply short term upward pressure on the population. Right now, the most effective way to encourage growth is to sell as much as you can to a city and never buy from it. That doesn't feel right. Buying products from a city should stimulate the economy and create jobs. I think you should take the amount of product both bought and sold in the past 50 turns and convert that into a subtle boost to population growth. |
8/11/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
The old mechanic you describe would do just the opposite of what is proposed. Commerce increases demand, therefore kills population.
It looks like the volume of goods sold bought and sold over the last 500 turns is already tracked under the demand tab in the viewscreen. Is that calculated in the turn flip or is that calculated in our browser when we load that screen? If those number are already getting generated during the flip it doesn't seem like it should take a lot of resources to add them up, divide them by 1000 and add that to growth. But I'll take your word for it if you think it is. |
8/11/2017
Topic:
Still working on Orbital Megastructures
Hutton
|
But I think there should be something called a spaceport that facilitates trading on a macro scale, even if this isn't it.
There are the spaceports on the ground yes, but the purpose of an orbital spaceport should be to provide a central hub to facilitate trade and distribution. Dropping stuff off at the hub would benefit the planet because it encourages imports which will help growth.
Okay, here's another way to do it that might be simpler because it is handled as trade with the owner. What if, inside the interface of the spaceport, the owner can set a stack size limit for products. If they set it at 1,000,000, they get treated as having an active buy contract with every player that is deliverable to the station as long as their stack on the station is less than 1,000,000. They can set the price to be within 10% points of the planets average demand. Attempts to sell over the stack list get resolved the same as units selling over city volume.
Ideally there would be an inverse mechanic where corps could order units to buy from stacks sitting the spaceport, but maybe that would be too complicated to pull off. You could also just give the spaceports the ability to let the owner put specifically sized stacks up for sale in the spaceport instead of requiring that all the product in the square be sold as a single stack, but that would preclude the possibility of setting a loop to buy products from the station.
This would create a dynamic where only corps with very deep pockets could operate a port to it's full potential, (because they will need the cash reserves to buy large amounts of product from all comers), which seems appropriate. A bonus that would be required to make this venture work would be reducing or eliminating storage costs on the station for the owner.
One of the big advantages this will provide to corps trading and producing on the planet below is that it will give them a place to buy and sell to a more stable demand that won't be spiking or crashing as hard when they are offline. |
8/11/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
The thing that makes it seem off is that the incentives feel off kilter from the consequences. If I wanted to make New York the biggest city on in the galaxy for vanity's sake and I didn't care about anything else, the most effective strategy would include attacking or threatening to attack any transports that attempted to buy anything from the city. That behavior should not contribute to long term population growth. |
8/11/2017
Topic:
Artifacts and ships
Hutton
|
I agree. The small ships will never get any love from artifacts because you just don't get enough bang for the mega-buck when you slap an AX Metaphysical on them |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
I didn't do it because it is a flaw in the game design and I'd rather see it fixed than exploited. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Still working on Orbital Megastructures
Hutton
|
Yeah, that would make it a port. It would also add a lot of badly needed liquidity to the economy. Why don't you let the owner take their percentage off of that.
I'm not sure I understand where you are saying the owner of the spaceport takes their profit from. Are you saying they get a percentage of all the sales on the planet? That means the station is a perpetual supervirus. Everyone who does bussiness on the planet will be trying to blow it up and exterminate the owner. The bonus will provide a small bonus to corps that live on the planet but it will just encourage importers to steer clear.
The tech bonus isn't a bad thing per se, but intuitively it doesn't seem clear to me how an orbital structure would reduce mainenance costs of planetwide buildings. Your suggestion for letting players dump product to be sold off the station justifies an orbital structure all by itself adding additional features. The question is how would level and capacity be handled? |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
Well, it would be costly to exploit on Earth so it hasn't been much of an issue. But it still feels wrong. When I look at my demand tab and resent players for buying from New York and undoing all my hard work to drive down demand... well, that just doesn't seem like the way I should be reacting if this is supposed to be an accurate, albeit highly abstract, representation of a working economy. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts
Hutton
|
The biggest impetus I see to implement a function for raiding items is to effectively counter the weaponized artifacts. Right now, even if you successfully manage to intercept a ship carrying a Supervirus you have to babysit that supervirus forever to prevent them from just picking it up and moving the ball forward.
I would propose a mechanic that protects artifacts stored at your HQ from raiding and that removes and re spawns them with your HQ if it gets destroyed.
I would suggest that you not make cargo automatically change hands when military forces are destroyed, but make the effectiveness of product raids dramatically scale up as the attackers to defender's power ration scales up. And artifacts should only be raidable when the defender has no military power at the location. If a pirate ship blows up a transport fleet, all the cargo floating in space shouldn't automatically become property of the pirate. The pirate only gets what he can fit in his hold. The transporting player should be able to send transports to recover any cargo that is left floating in space without needing to raid it back. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Product sorting
Hutton
|
I think the units within fleet are ordered by date of construction, but ordering of structures in the Asset Overview tab just got shuffled from hierarchy to alphabetical order, so I don't know if anything else got shuffled as well. (Please put that back the way it was, by the way). |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts
Hutton
|
I was interpreting the mechanism you described as requiring a unit to blow up to trigger the switch. Yes, you could just dial up the effectiveness of the raid so it only takes a couple of turns to pick up a lot of product. Those couple of turns won't make and difference in deep space but might give reinforcements time to arrive if the raid is on a planet that the raided party has a strong presence on. If it is up to me I would say artifacts still must be raided but the raid will only pick up one artifact at a time ad only while the coordinate is uncontested. After all, the raiders are presumably searching through the wreckage for the tiny artifacts. That should take some time. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Add Industrial effect on population
Hutton
|
Yes, of course they are going to buy it. It just felt wonky that that would have a directly inverse effect on population. A mechanic that applied short term upward pressure would make it feel right. That still leaves open the door for a hard crash in a large city if commerce suddenly stops because demand is out of control. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Still working on Orbital Megastructures
Hutton
|
I like the Idea you described above, which seems like the same as what I had first suggested but you thought wasn't simple to implement. If implementation isn't the obstacle than I think what will happen is that local corps will buy and sell from the station (if they are allowed to pay a lower markup than they do in the cities) and be able to make a profit while they equalize demand between the cities and take advantage of the higher volume at the station. Corps mining in the frontier will be able to make a better go of importing raw material to the core world because they will be able to dump that Raw Material in one turn without micromanaging what city they sell to and getting stuck there for turns and turns while they compete to sell in the cities with the best prices. The Port shouldn't give you an extreme price either way as long as the entire planet isn't having a big boom or bust, (in which case corps should start or stop shipping to that planet accordingly), but will be providing an advantage of large volume at a less volatile price point. It moves some players up a level where they are looking at planets like we used to look at cities, but leaves the players that are invested in their planets to keep playing the way they are now except with the added sale point of their Spaceport.
However, your other suggestion where players can dump product into a pool that is availible a la carte for a set price to all comers could work just as well or better. |
8/14/2017
Topic:
Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts
Hutton
|
Seperate but real related point: raids should not damage civilian structures if there is no military left. If I'm a pirate, I don't want to destroy industry. I want industry to produce more product to raid. Yes, there will be collateral damage in the fighting, but if there are no guards I should be able to roll in and take what I want without firing a shot. |