DrDread

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6/23/2017 Topic: Raiding Doctor Dread Administrator	Raiding for items in general is difficult to implement in a good way, I want to change artifacts into a product that is very slow to mine using the same system we do now except it makes 1 qty worth of artifact every x amount of turns and probably have an artifact product for every type of artifact (Cybertronics, Dimensional etc ). The artifact product can be taken to your Corp HQ or perhaps even the existing building that is mining them, to create the artifact items themselves using something like 100, 500 or 2000 qty worth of appropriate artifact (throwing out numbers there) . This would allow them to be raided just like any other product and would also make small amount of artifact available as quest rewards or event hand outs etc. All the while making Items un-raidable which is the way I want to keep it. Artifact as a product was actually what they were developed as originally and it actually went back and forth between making them a product or an item out of the research lab a couple of times.
6/23/2017 Topic: Grains Doctor Dread Administrator	Farms and meats used to have TEN different products EACH 6 months ago in Alpha =) It was reduced to 6. A lot of product type reduction was done. there used to be more like 180 products now its down to 150(?) There used to be an ACP item for every TYPE of structure in the game back then also (like 40?) as opposed to the single ACP Structure we have now that can be built into any structure. I ain't going back, you can't make me! =) edited by DrDread on 6/23/2017
6/25/2017 Topic: Raiding Doctor Dread Administrator	War Reparations should not engage if you are taking another players product? Not sure about that. War reparations is pretty "unfair" in a lot of ways but that's why there is a voting element. I'm not sure how to make it less draconian i do want to make you able to simply take the entire stack, or at least your cargo holds worth of product if there are no defenders. Upping your raid amount to equal your available cargo in that situation should be easy change We dont need a specific unit that is raiding specialized, we kind of already have them. the units with a lot of Power stat for their size like Mechanized and Frigates/Corvettes I think, Have a lot of Power stat for what they are and Power is used to determine how much you can raid for. Thats why you cant raid with a power 5 Tranports or Power 10 Freighter, its not worth it
6/25/2017 Topic: Message about a non-existant contract Doctor Dread Administrator	A fix for contracts just went in. I'm not 100% sure if this specific problem is affected by it . Let me know if you see something like this again
6/25/2017 Topic: (AX) Cybertronics Doctor Dread Administrator	Valhalla wrote: Also there needs to be an actual counter to variteks, currently they are the only unit in the game with no real counter whatsoever, and no corvettes and destroyers are not a counter, as variteks ANNHILATE armies of them by the droves at higher levels. There needs to be a unit that HARD counters them, as they counter everything very effectively, and make fighters totally useless as variteks kill bombers almost as easily as fighters, while also killing fighters with ease, and no other ground unit does anything to them. It's literally the only unit in the game with no counter. edited by Valhalla on 6/25/2017 Thats just it, Variteks transform and are NEARLY as effective as either a fighter/battlesuit depending on which value would be better. They don't have a hard counter. But they don't hit quite as hard as either. and don't have the Hit Points of batlesuits. They hard counter fighters and that's it. They take the same kind of damage from anti fighter defenses and units but they cost more. They are the most expensive ground unit in the game. I think Variteks should cost more then they do though, they are only 1.5x the cost of straight fighters, they should cost 2x. They are probably the overall "best unit" but they should have some type of cost that makes them impractical for normal use. BUT, I just made an update to Miltiary stats again, fighters got a slight buff vs capital ships that variteks didnt get. Now fighters hit big ships for nearly double what variteks do,. We'll see how it plays out. Destroyers seem to counter variteks, for the money for sure.
6/25/2017 Topic: Europa? Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: I just noticed that Europa is missing from Sol. Is that an oversite, or was it left out for a reason? A lot of moons arent' there, Jupiter has 14 of them. hey all can't make the list. I think I went by moon size when I picked them
6/25/2017 Topic: Escort Orders, Contracts and Military fix Doctor Dread Administrator	We added "Escort" orders to the game this week. It is an option of the Guard Order. There is another option on the Guard order for "Escort a Group". this allows you to search for a the Name of the Group you want to escort, as opposed to a corporation you wanted to guard. Only actual Groups or Fleets can be escorted, not individual units unless they put that unit by itself in its own group. When escorting another group, your unit will shadow that units movements, moving with them when they move and to the location they move to. If you are at a distance, your unit will move full speed to try to get onto their escorts location or to the spot they are moving to that turn. In addition to shadowing their movement the escorts will "guard" that unit when attacked and will also join the attack in whatever combats that escorted units attack in. You can not automatically escort any group in the game. The only Groups that will show up in that search are ones that have been flagged as "Allow other units to escort this group" from their own Group manage page. You have to essentially grant permission to allow anyone to escort your group. It is a new checkbox under your groups manage tab. All you have to to do is check it and it will allow others to escort that group. When unchecked again, any units escorting you previously will have their orders "competed" on the turn flip. This feature was tricky so please report any bugs you find when employing it. Contracts had some problems for a long time when it came to allowing single corporations or guilds only accept your contract, guild only contracts was never actually implemented.. I think I straightened this all out now. i also fixed a few other bugs with contracts I found such as seeing the entire group in the contract. There were some strange comms messages firing off when the wrong people tried to accept a contract that wasn't for them. Please let me know if you see problems like this again. Military Tweaks. I've been making small changes on military units combat stats the last couple of weeks. I don't like making drastic changes so I'm keeping them small and gradual. We've made commandos a little less effective at attacking other things besides structures, just to put them underneath Infantry in just about everything. Commandos are the anti structures unit, but they also pretty effective at attacking large capital ships en masse (not much different than structures). Their attacks vs aircraft and small ships have gone down but they are still a third higher than infantry when it comes to the capital ships. Since other ground units are all very low against capital ships it makes commandos the cheap effective unit to attack them with ... HOWEVER the damage they do towards things like Infantry and aircraft has been reduced so while commandos can effectively mass attack an empty capital ship, you can counter it very effectively just by having some infantry on board. In a fight, Infantry hit commandos 5x harder then commandos hit infantry now. I don't plan to mess with commandos anymore, we'll see how well it plays out. Artillery was reduced against ships last week but as people pointed out, it makes them useless compared to something like battle suits unless you're going up against straight infantry. Also artillery is supposed to be the anti capital ship ground unit. SO, artillery attack was upped vs capital ships while its attack vs fighters was actually reduced some (hits bombers for 3x of any other ground unit though). Artillery is now effective vs soft ground units, bombers (relatively) and moderate against capital ships. They are just below fighters for the money when attacking capital ships. You might say that commandos hits big ships for 30% what artillery hits for but cost nearly 1/10nth the price which makes them much more effective, while this is true, artillery actually COUNTERS the infantry that would counter the commandos. For ships to counter the ground artillery they needs to send in bigger units like fighters or armored, to counter commandos you only need cheap infantry. That seems fair. Fighters hit ships and some ground units harder then before now (including commandos). And bombers do also by a slight amount. Variteks were not changed. This makes Variteks now pretty weak against capital ships compared to fighters, nearly half. Variteks don't have a direct counter because they are essentially using the combat value of a fighter or Battlesuit (slightly reduced) depending on which one is better. Thier only weakness is that they are more expensive than fighters but take the same damage from anti fighter defenses like Destroyers and missiles. They now also seem to be pretty weak against large ships. We'll see how it plays out. Assuming no problems with Escorting, I want to move on to The two big pirate factions or Strategic orbits next.
6/25/2017 Topic: Raiding Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: Mechanized are kind of raiding specialized units already. I have previously suggested that raiding units should not damage civilian structures if there are no military defending them. If I'm going pirate, I don't actually want to blow up someone's industry because I want them to make more products to raid later. Civilian structures are naturally going to take collateral damage while militia army units are defending the area, but once the defenders are routed the raiders should just roll up the the loading dock and take what they want without anymore shooting. I also wanted to suggest that storage fees be taken away for products floating in space. (Usually on asteroid mining sites). Players will be able to potentially exploit this by parking their surplus in orbit, but that will also give pirate corps more hit and run opportunities because you cant use Military Structures or most ground units to defend them. (It might also create another service for military focused corps. Guarding a place in orbit with a fleet and charging their corps a fee to store their products there). Storage cost mechanics is more about nudging players to clean up thier own mess so the system doesn't get bogged down. Its also a financial incentive to be more efficient.If I was to make it cost a little less to park your units instead of moving them it would also be more about less stress on the system and not so much the in game dynamic of it.
6/25/2017 Topic: Escort Orders, Contracts and Military fix Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: Sounds good. I like that commandos are effective against capital ships because I think of capital ships as space fortresses. If you were going to tweak it further I would suggest that commandos should be dialed up more against larger capital ships compared to smaller capital ships. They already are, Well, scout and corvette are smaller and everything else is large . I can't play with their stats because we're down to 1,2, and 3 attack values already =)
6/26/2017 Topic: Policy on deleting unpaid inactive accounts Doctor Dread Administrator	Teluna wrote: Does this extend to accounts that were once paid, but let their subscription lapse and took a break? If so, could the inactive time before deletion on these once-paid accounts maybe increase depending on how many months that account previously subscribed to? Pretty niche request, but that's the boat I am finding myself in right now =p If you haven't logged into your account for a month, I don't think you're playing anymore and I have to liquidate/remove your corp after a while because unlike other games like this you'r afk corp is probably affecting the game in some significant way. If its one of your several alt accounts thats feeding your main or something, I don't have sympathy for you if you cant even log into it occasionally =) If you are legitimately taking a vacation for a MONTH on your free account and cant even log in, theirs not much I can do. There is no practical way to make your account dormant then bring it back to life. I mean I CAN but nothing would stop your from getting attacked and also it can be abused.
6/26/2017 Topic: Escort Orders, Contracts and Military fix Doctor Dread Administrator	-The Obsidian Church- wrote: While I still think variteks need an actual counter, the buff to fighters (Previously the most worthless aircraft.) versus ships make it at least closer to where it should be balance wise. Overall this seems to be a good balance pass. Looking forward to both the major pve content addition (Us combat focused players really need this. As combat events are really rare right now. And quite easy.) and the mega-structures addition will be great for everyone, give us all something to band together to create. (Or destroy, whatever.) Plus I get my "Doom Cannons" you promised in beta. :P I promise that "Doom Cannon" will t least be the title of an event involving one in honor of the the #1 military player in the game =) I'm imagining an event where we have to build a doom cannon to fire at some MAK Planetoid or something BUT you can choose to fire it at anything and its determined by vote with the weight being the military force you have at the doom cannons location. So.... if you really want to decide to fire it on Houston you just need to wipe out the military fleets there and take control of the vote. Sounds politically delicious! =) edited by DrDread on 6/26/2017
6/27/2017 Topic: Reapercraft - no lvl 1 upgrade Doctor Dread Administrator	A distinct possibility, I will look at it tonight
6/27/2017 Topic: Alt Optimization Doctor Dread Administrator	I can't enforce alts to players. I mean if you were smart you could have 10 and I wouldn't be able to put them together as one person. The rules are on abuse and we all know what the abuse is but unless the player is obviously being an ass like noob stomping Earth with 3 accounts at once or causing demand crashes with his other 3 accounts for the hell of itI can't really intervene. Honestly if someone just wants to play 10 corps scattered around the galaxy as separate atomic units for fun, its not a "problem", if you make it a problem, like have 8 that all feed one and everyone sees it then that is a problem. But in those situations instead of me intervening as an Admin I rather have the player politics have a go at it first. And if it turns violent in game and the abuser is now stomping people with 8 accounts that you didn't know were even his then I can intervene. In the end if players call you out on multi abuse, You should try to comply because if you go to war with with multiple accounts I have to step in and slap everyone.
6/27/2017 Topic: Comms : Preserving scrubbed characters with swaps Doctor Dread Administrator	Aywanez wrote: Just use escape characters, jeez. Aren't there standard libraries that do that in ASP? Actually you just wrap it in one ASP function that converts whatever you put in into the HTML version of it. BUT that means no one, even I can't use formatting in any comms messages or events
6/27/2017 Topic: Grains Doctor Dread Administrator	Aywanez wrote: It would be nice to have grains/wool as source products for something (like cotton is.) Other than that- no real point. I got an Excel sheet with 12 tabs and a mile long sideways for product types balancing, i couldn't get it to all work perfectly =) Cotton made it into Fabrics because Fabrics was an entire category that fed into clothing and without cotton it didn't make any sense, so cotton became a slightly more useful crop.
6/27/2017 Topic: Policy on deleting unpaid inactive accounts Doctor Dread Administrator	Teluna wrote: I have no issue auto liquidating after a month. You don't see someone getting really into this game and playing as a sub for several months, maybe lose some big war or something and decide to step away for more than a month before getting that itch again? Having their previous HQ level and a bunch of liquid capital would make it a lot easier to get back into it rather than starting completely from scratch. Realistically, once you are liquidated, I can hold onto your corporation for a while, its very little strain on the system. In fact now that you are mentioin it perhaps I can stamp your net worth credits and level onto your User record and delete your corp so if y DID want to play again and came back you would have to recreate your corp again but you would get handed your net worth and level. I figured that after month, no one comes back but if you're talking about it I guess it happens enough to warrant a fix.
6/28/2017 Topic: Contract Title doesn't work Doctor Dread Administrator	Once you accept a contract, the owner shouldn't be able to affect it in time before it goes through or it will cancel. If you accept a product stack contract and the owner salvages it before the turn flip, the contract should just cancel. But a contract that has been up for a while might have that stack gone or dramatically changed since 10 turns ago but the contract is still up for it.. Because you can't Chang the state of the product stack between turns theirs no way I have seen to bait and switch someone on it. If you accept a contract I think you'll get exactly that stack or it will cancel outright.
6/29/2017 Topic: Piracy research/mode Doctor Dread Administrator	You're talking stealth mechanic to evade War reparations? I think War Reparation simply needs to be put to a vote. If tow corps are warring in small scale then there should be no reparations. If ones beating up 12 noobs then there should. The players need to make that call. If we're talking about Piracy only , thats a gray area. Commit Piracy outside the Planet or system and you will never get a War Reparations. Or maybe we make that a feature? War Rep excludes any combats outside the planet surface or ONLY happens when you attack structures? Or maybe ONLY if you hit a population? Any other sort of actual stealth doesn't work in a game where we can all see all your assets
6/29/2017 Topic: What should we work on next? 06/29 Doctor Dread Administrator	There is some debate on what to work on next so I'm going to start making polls like this to hear the voice of the people. Hopefully one voice per main account and not 26 alts because you want to see Doom Cannons These are the next few things I plan on working on, vote to tell me which ones I should do first. In Game Ruler initiated Custom Voting (working name). The game has a lot of political voting but theres no way for the rulers to have their own voting outside of Discord or the Comms channel, So I plan to implement a mechanic where the Rulers (city/planet,system) will be able to post their own "poll" which will show up almost like an event with a linked comms thread. You can type in a title and a blurb description and probably up to 10 voting options. You can perhaps declare that voters will be using their Industry or Military or both for vote weight and the voter base will probably be anyone in your scope (your city / planet / system) It will run just like voting events do. Probably 100 turns and then stop. You can have one every 3 days or something. The vote doesn't actually DO anything but can be used as a tool to organize player opinions. I plan to have the Terran Federation (me) use this voting also for official players issues such as "This guy is accused of abusing game because of xyz, should we intervene and how" Dark Star / Commonwealth Prate factions . These two NPC factions will be semi-persistent and large pirate corporations. They will have large bases with dozens of units in a few places randomly in every system. They are usually passive but there will be events where they will send out a group of units to attack or raid somewhere or fight each other in a city somewhere which you an choose a side. But they can also be hired to attack another player or perhaps escort one of your groups in defense for large sums of money which scales with the size of the force they will bring. There bases can be destroyed but they will randomly respawn elsewhere in time. Their bases won't be easily destroyed, their size might scale to the population of the star system they are in but in something like Sol it's probably going to be something that would match the power of 3-4 level 10 corps pushing military. There might be a Reputation Rating system that goes in also where you can have good/bad reputation with the two factions depending on how much you pay them, attack them or attack things they like to attack etc. this might give you political currency when someone tries to make them attack you for example. Strategic Orbits/Orbital Structures. Strategic orbits and Megastructres are discussed in another thread (Search "megastructures" ) Strategic orbits will be 4 spots near the four corners of a planet just off surface in space (whenlooking at a planet like earth for example) from these locations a fleet can attack ANYWHERE (probably pick a location from the attack order) or EVERYWHERE on the planet at once from that location without actually moving. This allows your fleets to essentialy take air superiority over a planet and/or enforce an effective blockade by attacking "Everyone" who isn't in your guild. These Strategic Orbits are the precursor to Orbital Structures since they orbital structures will only be placed in these locations. Orbital Structures will be Starbases, Warp Gates and Orbital guns.
6/30/2017 Topic: Contract glitched Doctor Dread Administrator	Puzzlemaker wrote: I accepted a contract, and it took me to an error page. I accepted the contract again, and it seemed to work but the contract didn't show up in the dropdown. It also seems like I accepted a contract of ID 0 the first time around. What was the original contract number or is it gone now? It sounds like you accepted a contract that was already deleted or something. Is everything gone now or does this contract still show up somewhere?

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