DrDread

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2/12/2017 Topic: Incoming BIG TURN un the game Doctor Dread Administrator	Danny Mayer wrote: turn number 30000 is not really close by but its gona be coming fast Are you planning to make it something big?? Im just curious .... you mean like the huge even that happens once in 10,000 turns thats a 12 part universal quest that ends in either an entire planet being destroyed or new one forming? No, but that does sound kind of cool =) I cant really do "big rewards" in the game because of the way the system works I can't just make magical one-off items, Its not like you have an inventory of unique one-off items. The best I can do is perhaps make "Mysterious": artifacts with truly random effects and some of the effects can be "rare". I can however make various Military Units but in the end the military units are just a collection of 6 stats and there's not much room for creativity. In a fantasy MMO I can make a flaming sword that has a variety of flame spells and occasionally hits for a fireball 10% of the time when fighting Ice Demons but goes dormant when within 10 feet of Ghosts with a cool backstory explaining that. In this game, there's only so much I can do with ship weapons and effects. And also, this isn't a "fighting game" so much as fighting is a part of the game. Even though I can make multi part story quests with a Sci Fi theme, I don't have many game mechanics to work with when it comes to rewards. For example, it would be great to do some kind of princess rescue mission which involves some decryption, some "mini-game" when it comes to finding a location and then a "chase" and some combat which can lead to a series of different heroic characters, represented by unique scout units or something, depending on how you played out your quest. But unless I put int he mechanics for these "heroic untis" to do anything special in game like give boosts to production or boost your entire fleets military I can really implement any quests like that,. This game was made to revolve around "politics" so most of the "effects" or rewards should revolve around things like "Faction Reputation" or "Laws" that affect entire planets. Perhaps a system where you can earn more "pull" in votes because you have X amount of reputation with the Dark Star Empire and there is an event involving them.
2/13/2017 Topic: Incoming BIG TURN un the game Doctor Dread Administrator	Scripted stories are not that easy to make and still sound interesting but that does sound pretty bad =) Isn't Eve online out of Europe or Germany or something? Maybe they aren't translating it correctly. The stories on here would have to be a little more abstract and wider scope. Like political events that go through a few different stages with 100-200 turns in between. Could be voting for choices of political leaders but then an "Action" combat stage with the of which might kill off or add another character to the mix to vote for. Then an opportunity to assassinate or destroy the building or ship the particular leader is in
2/13/2017 Topic: Pirate bounties are terribly flawed Doctor Dread Administrator	Orexis wrote: Event ID:17499 Damage Taken Orexis Industries:72% Hackzkie:27% This payout exemplifies the issues I've previously brought up with the payouts being based on damage taken. The other Corp sent in a single scout to intentionally die knowing at minimum they get 20 million in payout if Noone destroyed the pirates. In this case they got 54 million of a 200 million payout, which after repairs and fleet upkeep costs is a significant impact to the one fielding a fleet strong enough to to take it down in addition to the time investment of sending a fleet to another system I know you've said tracking damage dealt is very difficult but the current system promotes sending in hp bonuses cheap units to take damage and steal bounties from those actually bothering to fight. Even in the case of someone sending in a large fleet of bombers against fighters, payouts shouldnt reward fighting dumb and should reward someone fighting smart and bringing in something effective at taking out fighters. And please remove the 10% payout for not killing the pirate, the alien motherships pay 100+ mil for sending any unit in to die. Another issue is payouts for high level ground based "hostile raiders" do not scale at all. A level 9 military base is extremely tough to crack even with a good fleet and pays only 30 mil - my repair costs were ~70 million. While a much easier level 6 "pirate raiders" pays 200 mil. If we can't use damage dealt easily for now, what about using unit Power instead? All the Unit power used in every round of combat as the attacker. That would give a lot more swing to large ground units in the fight who are attacking because they can get to huge power levels even though they may not be doing much damage at all. Ground units will be absorbing a huge percentage of the fire most likely however. This would prevent anyone sending in small worthless ships, like freighters, to "Tank" with as they wouldn't add up to much percentage of the total power used. Ships, like pirates, are more difficult to deal with because you kind of have to go with ships to fight them effectively. You can bring a monster ground force but that sounds expensive. Also, fleets don't do that much damage to ground targets but they take very little. only artillery and air force really do anything to ships from the ground, besides defenses. When attacking the shipyard you should bring some commandos, even a handful will probably do more damage than your fleet to the structures. If you ignore the ships you can bring in a big commando force and simply take out the shipyard. You don't have to even kill the ships.
2/15/2017 Topic: Transporters with cargo into Hangar. Doctor Dread Administrator	No you cannot load , transports with cargo on them that is by design. Loading a group of units? Like it loads all the "loadable" units from that group if it can?
2/15/2017 Topic: what does it mean? Doctor Dread Administrator	Logistics is the "maximum" amount of structures or military before you start paying a penalty. It goes up when your Corp Level goes up. Its actually the "Levels" of all your structures and the "levels" of military you have, except for ships which go by their size not their level. You can exceed your limits but for every point over your maximum, all your units or structures will cost another 1% in upkeep. If you doubled your military logistics you would be paying double upkeep for all your military.
2/15/2017 Topic: what do tittle do Doctor Dread Administrator	Danny Mayer wrote: i am the ranching prince of sol does it mean anything other then i i have te most ranch? At the moment, they are just titles. I think King is highest for sol. A list of all the players by titles is something I need to add =)
2/15/2017 Topic: Grouping assets Doctor Dread Administrator	Hang in there, I'm going to try to re-work the assets page this week or next. I'm surprised you're taking that long to load., I know others have complained also, I occasionaly see the website grind slowly also but I think its something else on the server. Its not the only website
2/16/2017 Topic: Transporters with cargo into Hangar. Doctor Dread Administrator	JasonDinAlt wrote: That's OK. Yes, that will be perfect scenario. But I think it will also work if only "right" group is loaded. Right I mean no cargo and no updates. Then it will be nice it it will keep group after unloading too. I do have few fighters I'm keeping in fleet, as well as ground units in groups for easy movement. When I was in need to move it to another planet I must disassemble my groups/fleets and then add them to cargo, then on other planet unload and group it again and move. It was painful process to set orders for every single unit. ... I haven't checked but you can't "Load" fighters onto aa group that has hangar capacity? Once a carrier is in a group , the Group has hangar capacity and al fighters are actually part of the group not the carriers anymore. Flleet, not group actually edited by DrDread on 2/16/2017
2/16/2017 Topic: City Links from Reports Doctor Dread Administrator	I can make a report that is just a big grid with several columns on it. Could show whatever you like. Perhaps pick a product and it shows you the top 10 lowest or highest demand cities, next to 5 lowest demand for that same product with distances or something.
2/16/2017 Topic: Production Bonus ? Doctor Dread Administrator	It the listed cost per turn is what you are paying in the end. the bonuses are just there so youcan see where you're bonuses are coming from
2/16/2017 Topic: Salvage Hurts the Game? Doctor Dread Administrator	To be honest I don't like the salvage option too much because it doesn't affect demand. It might need to be less than 50% return or it actually affect demand on whole planet. not sure
2/17/2017 Topic: Transporters with cargo into Hangar. Doctor Dread Administrator	JasonDinAlt wrote: Doctor Dread wrote: ... I haven't checked but you can't "Load" fighters onto aa group that has hangar capacity? Once a carrier is in a group , the Group has hangar capacity and al fighters are actually part of the group not the carriers anymore. Flleet, not group actually edited by DrDread on 2/16/2017 I think I overcomplicated it I do want to load Fighters fleet into Carrier hangar. Then unload it on it's destination still as a group. For now I need to dissemble fleet load all fighters onto Carrier, unload it and then recreate fleet. I see what you're saying. You want to keep the fighters attached to the carrier even though it goes into and then out of a fleet. It might be possible for the fleet to "try" to keep the same fighters on the same carriers when the carriers leave fleet, or at least its the default units you pick when the carrier leaves the fleet. It still asks you which fighters to take with you when you have a carrier leave a fleet doesn't it?
2/17/2017 Topic: apc structure in one turn Doctor Dread Administrator	Danny Mayer wrote: Sadly i dont have any proof but for some reason yesterday i was able to build an apc structure in one turn. You can do that in the tutorial, did you not run through the tutorial? You might actually be at the stage of the tutorial where you can build an ACP in 1 turn and just never did it? =)
2/18/2017 Topic: Turns to execute order list Doctor Dread Administrator	Vagabond820 wrote: Can we get a number added that lets the user know how long it will take to execute a single run of an order list? Yes this is a popular request. We're moving towards focusing on UI improvement now and this one might show up soon.
2/19/2017 Topic: Salvage Hurts the Game? Doctor Dread Administrator	Orexis wrote: Agree, Perhaps salvaging should affect demand at twice the rate selling does. You lose a lot of potential money salvaging lots, but at least you can help the city grow this way. Think of it as a gift to the people, you make half as much income, but the people get a lot of half priced stuff, which is great especially if they've also been paying the normal sky high demand rates for food, water, clothing, etc. If I wasn't focusing on UI I would incorporate selling "stacks" via contract. You may not have a use for 100k pork piled up by someone else might take the stack as is. No delivery just change the owner for money
2/19/2017 Topic: Pirate bounties are terribly flawed Doctor Dread Administrator	Orexis wrote: Unit power does make a lot more sense. And yeah I carry artillery and bombers with me for military bases, though I think bomber damage vs fortifications/bases should be higher personally. Would commandos or other units such as battlesuits and artillery participate in a battle in space or would the battle have to be over land? Doesn't really make sense to me for ground units to be able to fight in space but just curious (I know they do low damage to ships, it just doesn't make logical sense to me is all) Certain units fight in space. Fighters, bombers, variteks and even commandos and infantry (Assault shuttles) but certain units don't. like Transports, artillery, mechanized. Battlesuits DO fight in space. I'm not 100% sure that's implemented but that is what they are flagged for. There is no reason to have a space fight right now. Until We bring in things like warp gates or especially mining asteroids we won't see many "Space Fights". There are no places or structures of interest in "space" right now.
2/20/2017 Topic: Transporters with cargo into Hangar. Doctor Dread Administrator	You want to "Load" a "Group" of fighters onto a carrier and then Unload that Group. My heard hurts trying to think of how to handle that in the current code and UI. I don't think its going to happen anytime soon =)
2/20/2017 Topic: Salvage Hurts the Game? Doctor Dread Administrator	ArcherBullseye wrote: I think maybe just lowering the % of return for salvage would discourage its use to only extreme use cases. Like 10%-25% of the planet demand... ? Salvage just got lowered to 25% today
2/20/2017 Topic: City Export Tax Doctor Dread Administrator	ArcherBullseye wrote: Don't get me wrong. I think what you are doing us an ingenious way to push the game mechanics to their limits. I just think swooping in with a fleet of level 2 ships to buy and dump back on the planet is detrimental to the game as a whole. You mentioned real life, as and as such that's one of the reasons you have import/export taxes, to protect the host country. Right? Buying low in one city and selling to another city for profit is part of the game. The game is not "Nurture a city" which is what a lot of people want to do. If everyone buys low (because someone is dumping huge amounts there from production) and sells it across the planet to lower all its demand. That's is the natural way cities grow. The problem is there are too many cities in Sol. I plan to cut them in half at least. I am looking for a solution to the problem where the number of cities should be very tiny and that makes everyone "feed" that one city. As it grows more cities can pop up. That's a perfect mechanic . HOWEVER in Sol I have to keep a few cities always up and protected by Terran Fed so new players can start off somewhere.
2/20/2017 Topic: UI Performance Improvements Doctor Dread Administrator	We spend the week making a big pass on the UI looking till kill the bloat and implement some AJAX calls. We probably knocked at least a THIRD of the HTML page size off just about everywhere, especially most of the grids. We didn't change the underlying technology but we used a lot less of it. We implemented AJAX panels on many of the screens so the entire page doesn't refresh when you are manipulating orders or changing production. The assets page itself still loads every time you go to it or switch Modes but once you actually pick a unit or structure, the page uses Ajax from there. All the units tabs and there mini screens are lightning fast now. Battles can be flipped through with the "Next" button much faster now etc. Also the assets page now uses links directly to units so you can open up units in a new tab from the assets page for example. We tried to switch to "links" everywhere so can bring up any unit, battle, corp etc into a new window or save the URL and come back to it. We couldn't get the Industry/Demand tabs on the viewscreen page to isolate into an AJAX call because they affect just about the rest of the page including the viewscreen of the planet. , but we did reduce the overall page size significantly. We still have some changes we want to make to speed it up some more but for now this was a drastic improvement. There is also something that is slowing down the server. Its actually Yawning CPU/RAM/IO wise so we're going to look to see if something can be tuned differently to make it respond better. One actual change to the game that went in was that Salvaging a sack of Product now only offers 25% of the average planet demand instead of 50%. We want to try to implement structure downgrading, unit downgrading/upgrade rearranging next week. We were looking at the much request "How many turns is this order going to take" and maybe we'll have that next week also.

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