DrDread

all messages by user

6/7/2017 Topic: Longer names for ships/units/facilities Doctor Dread Administrator	Schwaab wrote: At this moment it's only possible to use 15 characters, it would be nice to have at least 30 characters and also punctuation marks (.!:," etc) Schwaab I can't do that! The unit names are displayed in several grids . If the names are long it makes the grids impractical because I have to reserve so much space for the names. The same reason why your corp name is limited and every city or planet name is no longer than about 12 characters. Also I don't allow punctuation because we'll get Penis ASCII art ships everywhere =)
6/7/2017 Topic: Loop in saved orders don't work Doctor Dread Administrator	I cant track which order you are looping to when you load or append the list of orders, Its not attached by the order number on the list. Its seems easy when 90% of the time your loading a list and the loop is going back to the first order, but it isn't. I might be able to put it in red or give you the red warning that you have a loop order that isn't looped to anything
6/8/2017 Topic: Loop in saved orders don't work Doctor Dread Administrator	The best I can do is make the loop order remember the "Order #" from the list also, which is usually #1 but not always. So when you LOAD it not Append it, I can make the assumption that it is pointing to the same number on the list and update the loop order appropriately. However if you APPEND the order list, suddenly that loop back to order #1 could be Order number #26 for all I know and we'll be back to a broken loop order that needs to be updated. Also, maybe people have several loop orders in crazy patterns which I can still make work using the above assumption but on an Append they will all break. On second thought I think I could actually use the fact that this order is looping back to order #1 from this list and it just got appended to another order list where we started now starter at #12 so I can just "Shift" all those order numbers by 11 and figure out where they were looping to. Something I can look into
6/10/2017 Topic: In need of a DIFINITIVE answer on mult-accounting. Doctor Dread Administrator	Perhaps the other guilds will join forces and take out your structures when you're not looking? waves jedi hand Seriously though, You're only one of a handful of level 10 corps right now.. Give it some time. Maybe a "MAK Planetoid" will come to Houston one day =)
6/15/2017 Topic: Event tweaks, Kaiju, Geobooster, Supervirus, Doctor Dread Administrator	An artifact weapon to counter an artifact weapon gets complicated. Ya know if events like this were initiated by consuming a stack of product and then a counter would be to burn your own stack of product it might work. I already have this idea of blowing up stacks of product to initiate events. Like consuming a stack of contraband to start a riot in a city, which causes Infrastructure damage/demand or something, but then you can also burn a stack of something else to mitigate its effects. Be some kind of non military warfare through events. I would have to have at least one event type and counter for every product category set up first. Something I want to do. But to do this with artifacts, attack and counter, doesn't seem viable as only a handful of players have artifacts at all. Having some sort of defense against artifact attacks is legitimate though. I could perhaps link the over time effect to the Corp HQ so you can potentially down their HQ to stop whatever event or all the effects they launched
6/15/2017 Topic: Asset Load Time Reduction? Custom Queries Doctor Dread Administrator	Tahujoe wrote: The asset screen likes to take forever to load any of its lists, especially the overview page. I'd like to suggest a couple of pages to help cut down on overall loading time from the asset screen. First: An Asset "Home" screen that makes minimal queries into the corp's assets, if any at all, as a stopover from switching to Assets and picking your query. Simple little splash that shouldn't take forever to load. Second: A screen for constructing and viewing custom queries on a corp's assets. A few examples that I would find useful that can be expanded out to general case: * where on Jupiter * where type transport on Earth * where type freighter (on Sol) * where type not transport and not freighter and military * where type structure produces chemicals or lumber or contraband * where flagged "FruitTrade" Im trying to rework that Assets query but I have a feeling its something on the server at certain times of day. It loads in under 2 seconds for me. The other pages load instantly that make a lot of calls also. I don't know what the issue is with the assets page yet. The popular thing to do right now is load the assets page once, then right click on units and open them in a new tab. have 10 tabs open its fine. Holding shift while clicking anything on the assets page works too
6/16/2017 Topic: Changing "Tutorial" to "Game Guide" button Doctor Dread Administrator	Schwaab wrote: ... after you complete tutorial Just a small change but it would save me many clicks .. Schwaab Theres a game guide link in the upper right of the tutorial. That would save you one click =)
6/16/2017 Topic: Ship Unit Icons swapped in Viewscreen Doctor Dread Administrator	I think the icons might be correct, but the text labels are reversed
6/16/2017 Topic: (AX) Cybertronics Doctor Dread Administrator	The biggest worth of the special units is their power to logistics ratio. Its similar to why you might spend 20x as much of fighters then you would on Infantry. The Fighters pack a lot more punch for the logistics. I did make some special units cost more or less in upkeep to their equivalents but nothing world shaking. I could make sure there is a unit at each tier, new ones if needed, that have the special boost of being nearly free on upkeep. the special units are 3-4x as strong as their equivalents. They are much "cheaper" logistically.
6/18/2017 Topic: (AX) Cybertronics Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: The relative performance of corvettes and destroyers vs bombers are applicable to any situation where a fleet faces bombers. Bombers are very very common units to encounter. As you mention other units will cause grief to the corvettes (fighters or variteks) and against them yes destroyers are much much better than corvettes. Single ship fleets are generally a bad idea but assessing ships on their own gives you a good idea of how they will perform as part of a larger fleet. And yes - ships in general are vastly underpowered when compared to land units - but there are situations (as you well know) where mobility trumps power. Ground units were just updated to be half as effective vs ships as they were before.
6/18/2017 Topic: (AX) Cybertronics Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: Well I disagree and this is why. A destroyer does 100 base damage to a bomber and has 800 base hps. A destroyer is size 4 A corvette does 80 base damage to a bomber and has 200 base hps. A corvette is size 3 So first interesting fact - A corvette does more damage per logistics point to a bomber than a destroyer (26.66 vs 25). Not a huge difference but we are not yet done. Lets take two fleets each of the same size - so we have three destroyers and four corvettes - fighting a lvl 10 bomber. Lets also asume a fairly standard 5 hps / 5 attack setup for all our ships. The destroyer fleet has 4800 hps and does 600 damage to a bomber.. The corvette fleet has 1600 hps and does 640 damage to a bomber... Lets look at what the bomber does. at 100x base stats the bomber has: 12000 hps. It also does 5000 damage to destroyers and 800 damage to corvettes. The destroyer fleet is blown away in one round - and has caused a grand total of 600 damage to the bomber. The corvette fleet will survive two rounds and go down in the third (the damage of the bomber is reduced after the first round) causing far more damage to the bomber (somewhat less than 1800 but close). You notice in both cases the fleets go down - but bear in mind that if these ships are escorting a bigger fleet (say something like my fleet with three dreadnoughts) the fight will last much much longer and the corvettes continue to dole out higher damage than then destroyers AND have much better survivability. It's a no contest. The strength of the corvettes against the bombers is not too obvious - but it lies in the fact that bombers struggle to hit corvettes while they blow away destroyers. Destroyers don't counter bomber mind you, they counter fighters. Corvette is probably a better investment vs bombers. Destroyers also sort of counter corvettes. They counter small close in craft, but bombers attack from farther away. I think corvettes attack ground units at a WAY better efficiency then destroyers. Destroyers have more HP but I think corvettes throw out a lot more damage for the money. If you have them outnumbered, corvettes are usually better because they are more firepower than hit points
6/18/2017 Topic: Longer names for ships/units/facilities Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: Vulpex wrote: NYC he made it very clear. Doctor Dread wrote: I can't do that! He said he can't make them longer, and that he won't allow "@#$%^&*'/<>" to prevent penis art. And I am pointing out that apostraphes should be categorized with ",.?!" as essential punctuation that is necessary to right unambiguous sentences rather than optional punctuation that lends itself to obscene art. Not only do i not want penis art, its just ugly and hard to read. When people are attacking you or you want to know which ship is carrying a certain product from an enemy factory it helps that the military name is easily readable. Even when I'm trying to debug problems it helps that the ships names aren't a bunch of crazy characters
6/18/2017 Topic: Price Limits for Buy/Sell Orders Doctor Dread Administrator	I think I saw this request before, it's not too difficult to add one more condition like this and yes it's borderline "botty" but it might happen, It would just skip the order if the price is too high. It might happen n the future
6/18/2017 Topic: Assets Page, City expansion, unit balance Doctor Dread Administrator	I have improved the assets page query and load time by a significant margin. I had to make some changes to way data is being stored for military units so if you see something funny (like it showing all structures were halted production this morning) let me know.. I still think the page loads slower than it should. The query itself in the database loads in half a second now as opposed to 2-3 it was before. The page itself should really load in a second, I'll be looking for a bottleneck in the future. I changed the restriction for a new city to form on the same planet from 10 million population per city to 5 million population per city. It seems its easier to spawn a new star system then it is to get a second city happening on the same planet. That's not right! We don't even have a star lord in the game yet because it will take 3 cities on another planet to get 3 planet lords. The restriction seemed a little ruff considering the populations on Earth cities are barely at 10 million. The expansion checks every 100 turns so you might see new cities pop up in Sol by tomorrow. Any planet with over 5 million population outside of earth will probably spawn another city There has been a lot of talk about ground forces being superior in every way to ships and most of it is legitimate. There used to b a time when ground units were more expensive and ships were a lot cheaper. That gap has widened considerably but the damage hasn't changed much. So currently you can make a very cheap mass of ground units that can down capital fleets. Its not an unbalanced fight Logistically mind you but for straight money the ground forces have an incredible advantage. We always wanted ships, especially capital ships to be more of a support unit in a ground fight, something that didn't do too much damage but barely took any from the ground unless they were certain unit types . the "Barely took any" part wasn't a reality once you scaled up both sides. So almost all the ground units have had their damage vs CAPITAL SHIPS cut in half. Aircraft weren't affected but everything below them was and the reduction come against freighters and frigates on up. There were also some other tweaks such as Mechanized not doing anymore than infantry does to ships. Also Artillery had its damaged reduced vs fighters and structures. Artillery was strong against EVERYTHING and at a magnitude stronger it countered its low hit points. Artillery is best against soft ground targets by a wide margin and does hit aircraft as better than any other ground unit but it shouldn't be magnitudes better. It does hit bombers better than any other ground unit outside an actual missile defense. But it shouldn't be hitting structures and defenses better than things like battle suits. We are also considering upping the damage ships do to ground forces but that will wait to see how the damage taken from ground forces plays out. We may up the Monoliths HPs or ground damage to widen the gap from it and the other ships when it comes to ground pounding which is what its primary role is supposed to be. Right now the cruiser is actually the best bang for the money second to the monolith when it comes to capital ships attacking the ground but the margin isn't that wide.
6/19/2017 Topic: Assets Page, City expansion, unit balance Doctor Dread Administrator	I think if you're trying to defend a city against a mass ground attack with Duranium Warbirds, you are doing it wrong =) The only thing that changed is ground units attack vs big ships was lowered. Ships already take a long time to pound ground units into dust. You're talking about a cruiser hitting a ground infantry for 100-120 a turn. Thats the equivalent of a single level 3 mechanized or something. Its quite small. It would take a battleship several turns to knock out a single level 3 10x stack of infantry as it is. For the money using Corvettes would be a lot cheaper. right now after the changes , a 250 mil 20 logistics monolith can kill 2 lvl10 200x of infantry in 10 turns. The infantry can kill the monolith in 62 turns. But that 10 million in infantry vs about 250 mil in Monolith. If you take 250 mil in infantry thats 5000x stack or 50 level 10 infantry units (500 logistics also) Which could kill a monolith in 2.5 turns doing 10k damage a turn. The monolith would take 250 turns to do 500k damage to all that infantry. 250 mil of artillery would be 625x stack which would do 100k a turn and kill the equivalent infantry in 5 turns, Thats also 62 logistics vs monoliths 20. The monolith probably needs a damage boost vs ground if thats its role.
6/20/2017 Topic: Reaching 10 mil pop should open 2 new star systems Doctor Dread Administrator	It used to take 10 million population on a single planet before allowing another city to spawn on that planet. Now it takes 5 mil to do that. The closest System spawns once 10 cities are spawned in the current one. System spawns are not determined by population. The game expand systems to make sure you're not overcrowded, it is not the goal of the game to explore the map. Spread to thin all the cities will simply collapse. It s already bad that there are 3 systems open and the current player base cant even supply earth. If anything we DO need a population restriction before expanding the systems . Decent population is only attainable when the city is doing well,threes no easy way to cheat it. Spawning 10 cities in a system however is done in 2 days by a single corp for the hell of it =) Once warp gates and even worm holes show up in game, you will be able to jump across vast distances. We never intend to fill up the map. But we can make far off locations where quests or events can happen, big monsters lurk ect.
6/20/2017 Topic: Assets Page, City expansion, unit balance Doctor Dread Administrator	Transports became a problem when the numbers against ships cant go below 1, and infantry is down to 2. it CAN bit I don't want 0 damage units but might have to make exception in tranports case. Transports are too cheap, so are infantry. They used to be 50k and 100k not 20k and 50k. Its like we're splitting hairs with such small numbers. The only other way I can make ships do a lot of damage to ground without making them simply all around better would be to make ship damage do less and less damage to ground units the more hurt they are. SO you can soften p but not destroy with ships. Thats a complicated new combat mechanic I don't want to get into though. I have a feeling once straegic orbits gets into the game, ships will be a lot more powerful in seiging ground forces and "space superiority" will come into play which has to be fought as space fights.
6/21/2017 Topic: Assets Page, City expansion, unit balance Doctor Dread Administrator	The logistical matchup is difficult to make assertions about because there is so much scaling on ground units level. You compare a level 10 commando vs a level 10 Battleship at equal logistics and got that result. but if it was 2 level 5 commandos or even worse, 5 level 2 commandos, they would get obliterated. Also 2 level 10 commandos against a size 20 monolith should be a different outcome than battleship matchup. There is a huge logistical savings on higher level ground units that ships don't enjoy which I guess plays into the strategy. In HUGE fights with several level 10 ground units, the small number of large ships will get overwhelmed and you really have to use ground forces in addition. But in smaller engagements, where the levels are lower, level 5 raider units, you can actually go in there with half a dozen corvettes and be much more effective than bringing a battleship. Corvettes hit for half as much as capital chips but at like 5% of the cost. However because they are more firepower than hit points, you have to have the other side greatly out numbered to be very effective and survive There is no easy way to outnumber huge ground forces with ships alone. Huge ground defenses have to be fought with huge ground forces. Another thing about logistics vs cost. If you want to get "more logistics", you use the bigger more expensive units, they always pack a lot more punch for the same logistics. 10 logistics of commandos vs 10 logistics of fighters is no contest for example. And if you made a 500 logistics worth of commando artillery army, I can probably make a 200 logistics army of armored and bombers or something and obliterate you. An all varitek force of 2000x aboard a fleet of 20 monoliths is probably going to obliterate anything you have on the ground but it costs 10 billion dollars
6/21/2017 Topic: (AX) Cybertronics Doctor Dread Administrator	Valhalla wrote: While I think you were a little heavy handed with the nerf on some ground units. (Artillery are literally described as anti-large ship units, but now do nothing to ships.) I admit it was a needed change, as there was no good reason to build spaceships before cause ground units eclipsed them. At least you didn't nerf aircraft vs ships so they are still the counter to ships they are supposed to be. Sadly this change means I need to get rid of "standard" artillery, as they no longer serve a purpose for their non-existant hp levels. By the way Hutton (New york) I'd swap you heroic infantry, xenos, and commandos for those Battlemechs if you want. I got a bunch to spare atm. They may be useless in my fleet, but I can still find a use for them defensively or something. Details Smaller version of Ion Cannons that defend vs ships but with homing abilities. Very effective against ground targets and large ships but very vulnerable. It lies! edited by Valhalla on 6/18/2017 Ya know you may have a point about artillery vs ships. I'm trying to place artillery as high firepower and low hits and the best "ground unit" against ships and soft targets like mass infantry but it didn't turn out that way because the Battlesuit does about the same to ships now and have twice the HPs and cost less. I might need to reduce battlesuits to like 3-4 vs capital ships and make artillery do 8-10. We're playing with small numbers now so its tricky. I need to make them more effective than Commandos vs ships but commandos are so much cheaper. What might need to happen is that transports go to 0, infantry goes down to 1, commandos goes down to 2, Battlesuits go to 3 and artillery goes to 8 or 10. That makes artillery slightly less effective than fighters against capital ships for the money but still makes commandos cheaper than artillery vs ships. Might have to reduce the cost of artillery, and make them more efficient at fighters and small craft where commandos suck at, but commandos are more efficient at capital ships than artillery. Still iffy ...
6/21/2017 Topic: Assets Page, City expansion, unit balance Doctor Dread Administrator	Leyic1 wrote: I don't see why it's difficult to make assertions, provided some caveats are understood. You provide the combat data, so I can run "simulations" in a spreadsheet to determine how many units are needed to beat another type of unit. But the caveats are, as I've said before, that this is idealized combat, meaning there are no random effects, no mixed compositions, and no intervention. Making determinations based on just a few of these data points would be a bad idea, but looking over the entire table, trends can be revealed, showing that some units have a wider range of dominance than others. By then considering logistical and financial costs, and how fast a combat would end, one can identify units that are generally better for their particular situation, and then consider a practical group composition over that smaller subset. Like you say, 20x monolith+varitek combos will annihilate pretty much everything, but will also cost almost 20 mil per turn if you have no other military and a level 10 HQ. You might win several battles, but I'll get the last laugh and win the war when you go bankrupt and auto-liquidate. Incidentally, it takes 5 level 10 commandos to bring down a level 10 max defense monolith, and possibly 9 level 10 commandos to bring down a level 10 max defense monolith with a level 10 varitek (this sim is even more iffy as I don't know how the damage reduction mechanic works exactly, so I ignored it). But anyhow, are commandos working as intended, being specialists at taking out fixed defenses while also being great for taking down spacecraft? I see what you're saying. Commandos are supposed to be the defenses and structure take down unit, and really should not be that great at anything else, especially attacking star ships cheaper than anything else. They already are doing almost 0 to ships but they are so cheap relative to the ships that you can mass so many it tips the scales. So I have another vector to try to fix the problem with. Instead of making then hit even less vs ships, perhaps I make Infantry hit them even harder and have them hit infantry even less. Or make some other unit like corvettes hit them harder. "How does that help capital ships?!" Well it can be looked at as a horribly unsupported situation where you have a lone capital ship because the other guy can go in with Commandos and destroy you NOT because they do a ton of damage but because capital ships are so shitty at hitting them back. What you should do is have Infantry in your ship hangars And/Or corvettes escorting because they hit commandos back so hard and commandos dont hit them back for squat. Its the basis for the "Size" mechanic in combat, get a larger mass of a counter unit to draw the fire away from the attacker that cant fight back well. Commandos attacking a battleship in your example the battleship eventually loses BUT if you put a 20x of Infantry in the hangar of a battleship it swings the fight dramatically. the 20x infantry will now take like 70% of the fire (Size 10 bship, size 20 infantry) and if commandos hit infantry for squat Then the commando attack is going to fail . The 20x infantry is going to hit commandos for 50x20 = 1000 damage a turn, like 5x what the bship is hitting for. I should run some numbers but I think the all commando vs battleship scenario where the bship loses is legitimate if you dont have ANY infantry to counter them on the ship (Or battlesuits/fighters for that matter). All capital ships have some hangar now, battleship has 20. When we talk about ground unit vs mass infantry we should consider a touch of counter infantry and how much it tips the scales back. edited by DrDread on 6/21/2017

Powered by Jitbit Forum 8.3.8.0 © 2006-2013 Jitbit Software