DrDread

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6/30/2017 Topic: What should we work on next? 06/29 Doctor Dread Administrator	What I would prefer from my short time in the game is a substantial improvement to the trade UI. - Movement in a straight line (per turn) is unexpected and not logical/realistic - on Assets screen: The direction of the move is much less interesting than the target and time to target (at least in case of transports) - it would be nice to have some additional options for sales (more types of goods per turn), and maybe a warehouse option. The movement in straight line is half mechanical and half gameplay issue.. There is no "chase down" or intercept mechanic but you can easily calculate where a unit is going to to stop and turn to raid it. The distance/time to target, on the assets screen, is something I'm looking at but I'm leary because that poor screen already has too many calculations and information in the notes field that slows down the query and the whole page. Having a time to complete on the ORDERS page pr order wouldn't have that problem. I'm not sure what you mean by more goods per turn. Like your ship can sell 4 different things at once? I'm looking at that. We also have Distribution centers as a structure which can sell 10 things at once, is that what y ou mean by a warehouse?
6/30/2017 Topic: Fulfill contracts with present stacks Doctor Dread Administrator	You want the Repeating trade thing to happen without any transport unit IF the stacks are in the same location? Or are you saying I want to sell a stack of product, but not the whole stack, a set amount from it.
6/30/2017 Topic: Piracy research/mode Doctor Dread Administrator	Aywanez wrote: Reparations were kind of a tangent here. The idea was raised inside a discussion on reparations and piracy, so I included it here. The main point is to support a different mode of play on the military branch: player perpetrated piracy! In order for that to work, however, a player needs some way of hiding his units (otherwise they will be immediately killed by, well, everyone- from victims to their senior guild-mates, to system governors.) RP-wise this means scrubbing all markings from your ships and turning off the transponder. The simplest way to do this mecahnics-wise is to just not say who the attack was by (even though, as you point out, all assets are seen, not all players are online at all times, so you might simply miss the attack and still be none the wiser.) A more complicated way is to have either pirate ships, that are always removed from the ledger, or allow ships to go into pirate mode (and be removed temporarily) If you want to do stealth piracy, as in identity is hidden, Its something I can look into when the pirate factions come into the game. You can bribe them to attack, or maybe even raid(?) for money but no one needs to know who paid them. Another option is that you actually gain control to issue orders, but not ownership, of a faction unit or group to go attack with. No one knows who's issuing its orders. Come to think of it that might work out really well. You pay to get "command" of a unit or entire group from a pirate faction for certain number of turns. With deposit if the unit is destroyed. Then do whatever you like with it. Go attack a city, raid a player, escort your own ships, whatever you like. You can pay billions and take command of a huge group. No one knows who took command, you can even attack yourself because its not your corp units =)
6/30/2017 Topic: What should we work on next? 06/29 Doctor Dread Administrator	Seems we're tied with Custom voting and Strategic orbits. We'll see what happens by tomorrow =)
7/1/2017 Topic: Can't load/unload a single category of goods Doctor Dread Administrator	Everything does mean everything, even if you pick a category. Although there is some merit in filtering to a category if you selected that. I dont know how popular that is but on the back burner list
7/1/2017 Topic: Piracy research/mode Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: I'm going to risk stirring up a sh*t storm here and suggest that the controversial practice of creating an second account is a stealth mechanic, and a working mechanic at that. This is why I like the policy of letting the community self regulate the multiple account issue and have pushed back against the calls for black and white rules with strict enforcement. Setting wise, it makes perfect sense to me that a game about Corporations with private armies would have those corporations setting up dummy corporations to do their dirty work. You just have to catch them doing it. My take on this might be colored by my own professional experience. I'm a Fraud Investigator for a local goverment agency. And that is exactly what corporations do. They set up LLC's that own other LLC's. You have to subpoena the bank records to figure out who ultimately owns what. And maybe it's just me, but studying the contracts to figure out the relationships between different in game corporations is my favorite part of Barons of The Galaxy. We can always allow you to see all the contracts a corporations has done also, in addition to the assets screen you can already see. If you suspect alt account and military/money moving between them you will be able to take a look. Transparency is is the best counter to stealthing your alts and I while I can police them when presented I can't realistically find them all. It's the equivalent of putting a "Kill Cam" in first person shooters so you can easily tell if someone is cheating
7/2/2017 Topic: Feature Request: Map Pins for Bookmarks Doctor Dread Administrator	Hammish wrote: It would be nice if we just had a button that showed our current list of bookmarks as dots in the viewer, much like resource-type pips are displayed. To be extra-fancy, could even color the dots/pins according to the color set in the bookmarks manager. In the upper rigth on the viewscreen , the 3 icons one for bookmarks one for the list, the last one is a toggle to display the bookmarks on the viewscreen
7/3/2017 Topic: Regarding demand in cities Doctor Dread Administrator	Aywanez wrote: I would like the demand system in general to be more 2 sided: currently it only increases on it's own in (what seems like) a linear progression. That's not how real world demand works. What I'd like to see is a 2-force system: demand for each product increases by, say, 1 percentage point each turn, but then also falls by. for example, 0.1% if it's current value. (Demand is, of course tracked as a float in this scenario) that way demand rises much faster when it's low and slower when it's high. Indeed a city where demand is below 15% requires a near-constant stream of supplies to keep there, whereas one with demand> 800% will almost never get any more demand. This will also resolve the proposed problem, as the severely decreased growth of demand for higher-tier goods will drive demand down on it's own, even if the city doesn't get supplied by players. The Demand moves up at the same rate, but the as the population falls, the VOLUME falls and it makes it much easier to lower the demand. If a city is completely un-supplied it has to eventually die out Also, when the population goes below 5 mil, the end products start actually fall in Demand back to 200, then at 3, 2 its the infastructure, components. I have a big issue right now with all the systems opening up because someone is actually going around and force spawning cities. It breaks the game because there aren't enough players to make any one system work. I might up the city count to 20 instead. Its difficult to get 20 forced because there usually aren't that many planets and moons
7/3/2017 Topic: *Loading everything* doesn't respect quantity Doctor Dread** Administrator	I think hes right. The "Everything" was made to pick up a bunch of loose products not actually be a normal way to do transporting but a lot of people are using it that way. There is some debat on how the quantity should work on "everything"
7/6/2017 Topic: A bipartisan movement? Doctor Dread Administrator	Hollister wrote: The comms message says: Vote FOR or AGAINST the conservative agenda. The event says: Liberal Agenda - Chicago A liberal political movement is occurring in the city of Chicago. If successful this movement will enact policies that will immediately shift approximately 20% of the population from rich groups to the poor groups but at a total increase of 2% of the total population. You can vote FOR this policy to take place or AGAINST this policy to cancel it. Your voting power is based on your industry at this location. Stage 1 says: Stage: 1 - Vote FOR or AGAINST the conservative agenda. - Ends: 7755 I'm not sure if you're asking a question? =) Its an event happening in a city somewhere, It probably has a location listed that you can click on. Only paid accounts can vote though. But you can watch the outcome and see all the voters.
7/6/2017 Topic: Regarding demand in cities Doctor Dread Administrator	TimurThunder wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve You might also want this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand (Not going into details, those articles. My apprenticeship used linear functions (albeit far from parallel to x), my controlling spec at university went in the other direction.^^) edited by TimurThunder on 7/6/2017 Let me stop you right there!.... It's a game, based on real economics =) Lets not get to crazy
7/7/2017 Topic: The official Orbital Megastructures thread Doctor Dread Administrator	I was starting to work out details on the Strategic Orbits and I think there is a problem with the way we have previously discussed them. I am not talking about the Megastructurews that will be placed there, that still seems to be on track, I'm talking about the idea of having fleets sit at a strategic orbit and be able to attack anything on the planet from there. I'm not sure if thats going to work as planned specifically the idea we had for Blockades. I don't think its works to make a fleet be able to attack all positions on the planet at once and end up in 20 battles in one turn while remaining in orbit. This was the ability we talked about so that a fleet can blockade a planet because it could attack any ships on the planet automatically. Instead we might be able to put in the "chase Down" mechanic and allow attack orders to be set to either the Present location (how it works now), the entire planet or the entire system. This would make the ships with an attack order of (Attack Everyone - Planet) actually move to intersept any units that meet the criteria (everyone, single corp, guild) and attack as normal. Being in a strategic orbit wouldn't mean anything, those would just be the spots where you can place megastructures. This is how the Escort mechanic works right now when shadowing your escort group. Extending this kind of attack order modification wouldn't be too difficult and I think might slide right into one place in the code. The question I have to ask though is what would take priority on a Attack Everyone - Planet Order? Would you go after the biggest power location or the smallest? Does it filter out units moving faster than the group is? If we don't make any AI options then it becomes easy to trick your blockade by flying fast scouts across the surface to draw the blockade and then have your real force do whatever it needs to do. On the flip side I can't add too many options without bogging the UI and system down. We can't get too much into programming AI into orders because it costs too much turn flip time especially with the type of order this would be, one were a lot of ships sit there and have to be checked every turn against entire planet populations of other units. Ideas are welcome.
7/8/2017 Topic: Title overlaps title crest Doctor Dread Administrator	LunaMoth wrote: edited by LunaMoth on 7/8/2017 Crap man, its like 2 characters to long! =) I need to have short version of the names for titles, or perhaps make the text smaller at a certainlength
7/9/2017 Topic: Regarding demand in cities Doctor Dread Administrator	Ranged wrote: I suggest giving much higher weights on pop growth/decline on the food and water products. A city should die out because it couldn't be supplied with music holoreels and personal aircraft, it should die out because the people starve (or can't maintain their houses, maybe add some of the construction material components to this idea). If a city is fully supplied with food and water (maybe <150 demand) there should be no pop loss, or maybe no pop loss lower than 1 million. Planet Dune had like 1000 Demand for water, but they had some wicked Rare plants !
7/9/2017 Topic: A few requests Doctor Dread Administrator	Tunguska wrote: Having played the game for just over a week, here are a few suggestions.... On the "Move to Location" order, is there any chance of putting the time required in turns once you've added a destination. My freighter sets off for Saturn and I can't be bothered to log how long it takes. I haven't gone that in depth. All I know is it gets there. Giving a time would help me and others work out how much benefit would be gained from upgrading movement. Any chance of recording how much a transport/freighter sells each turn under the display logs....perhaps include a locations volume and price too. This would help having to search out under accounting. Finally, when building a ship, how about including ALL data about it. Surely if I'm building it I should know the HP's, Cargo etc. One last suggestion that is probably more controversial......when a location buys, how about it buys 1500 units from everybody first before going to the %age formula currently used. This would help newbies without really hindering experienced players e.g. Lets suppose a location will buy 100k units and Player A turns up with 198500 and Player B has 1500. At present Player B will sell very little. Under my suggestion he will sell everything whilst Player A will barely notice a drop. As I said, I'm fairly new and perhaps some of these things are available, I just haven't found them. 1) something I'm working on 2) Under Corproate > Accounting > BuySell Detail. Its hows you exactly what unit sold what, where and for how much/demand etc 3) Also something I need to work on =) 4) I can't set a minimum like that. It has to go by Buy Sell Power. There was a lot of conversation on this early on. If you want to sell more under competition, bring more "power". Bring more transport cargo to buy, or bring more of the product to sell... Or attack the other guy! A newbie player is not going to get equal ground with a veteran when selling at a location. And this situation typical happens wen the price moves drastically because of an event and everyone shows up.
7/9/2017 Topic: Custom Vote almost done, some tweaks Doctor Dread Administrator	Still working on Custom Votes, it didn't make it in this week. Accelerated Start 3 is now available War Reparation Events was turned off for now. It has problems and I want to fix it. You can now cancel guild invites from the same screen where you view your own guild invites. you can also boot members when you are editing them. The Mysterious event was tweaked. The result that gives 3 level 1 artifacts now gives 5. The first level upgrade on units from artifacts were modified to be more appropriate. Reapercraft gets Attack, Space train gets Cargo on its first upgrade for example. Reapercraft bug where it starts with no level upgrade was corrected. i still need to fix existing ones. Galaxy expansion, New System expansion city threshold was lifted from 10 cities to 25. It now takes 25 cities in a system for it to activate the next nearest system. I realize its fun going around to each new system,planting 500 industry in 10 places immediately, waiting for a new system to spawn then salvaging everything and moving on. BUT we only want to pen up new systems when the previous oens are populated with players. Spawning a bunch of systems has thinned out the players across them. That was the problem that made us change Sol System to only be Planet Earth as the newbie zone. To aggregate players enough to make it work. Force spawning new systems is a little abusive, especially since its done mostly for artifact resources. At 25 cities threshold, you will probably need at least a second city spawning on each planet which is much more difficult to do with a hit and run of industry. edited by DrDread on 7/9/2017
7/10/2017 Topic: Custom Vote almost done, some tweaks Doctor Dread Administrator	We could go by a total population instead, but that means you'll geo boost a single city until its 50 mil then move on =)
7/14/2017 Topic: New Star Lord requirements Doctor Dread Administrator	All you need is 3 planet emperors. It wouldn't be a problem if someone didn't open up 5 new systems and spread out all the players. You don't get a Star Lord just because one planet is pumped up. you need to get the System pumped up.
7/14/2017 Topic: Distribution Center tweaks Doctor Dread Administrator	The minimum sell has been brought up before. Its something i want to add eventually.
7/14/2017 Topic: License Agreements, Corporate Services and Waste Doctor Dread Administrator	Rekk wrote: Three kinda neat ideas that may or may not fit well into this brilliant game, I'll leave that decision to people who know better. License Agreements - A more typical idea of 'research' provided by the Ruler of each city (or Emperor of a planet etc.). These would be researched by the ruler, taking a reasonable time (1-2 weeks) and costing a decent wad of cash/resources. The amount of co-active agreements each city or planet could have would depend on its population. In turn these could be bought by regular players by paying a royalty (again, cash/resources) thereby gating them. They would provide specific bonuses that could be selected based on that cities requirements. E.g. Molds - reduces the cost of all productions that use basic metals by 1. The Ruler of NY pays the fee (say $1,000,000,000 and 100,000,000 basic metal or whatever) and waits 1 week, that license agreement can now be bought by corporations with their HQ in NY for $50,000,000 and now that person gets a -1 to all productions that use basic metals (obviously not going less than 1). Some of that money could go back to the ruler too. Other ideas include - decreasing the logistics costs of things, increasing the base demand rate, increasing the volume, increasing defenses, increasing the production of the local resources, decreasing overcrowding, increasing the population effect of buildings, decreasing construction times, increasing nearby vehicle speed and making everyone spontaneously disco. Corporate Services - Like civilian services, but for corporations! These buildings could represent the tier above civilian services, and would act in a similar way, only the demand is set by the corporations using their services, and the service build could be voted upon by people who are in that city. The resource cost tokeep it running per turn could be military units, items (artifacts?) or just resources. These could work by charging corporations who want to use these services, and the more people using it, the more the demand increases. These could have similar effects to the above, increasing production, decreasing costs/time etc. Not totally sure how to prevent demand simply skyrocketing, but just thought it could be a neat 'people powered' alternative to the license agreements. Waste - Basically a 'negative' resource generated by increasing population. Essentially it would be 'sold' by the city, the supply set by the population level. This could then be converted at a very low ratio to resources at specific waste plants. Each civilian service would also increase it substantially. If supply is high, then negative effects could happen to the city, decreased growth etc etc. Anyway, just came up with these daydreaming. See you out in the stars, Rekk I don't think the license agreements would work as you presented it but you touch on a great idea that I think it would work better like this: Every City, Planet and even Star System has a set of "grants" or Contracts or maybe "titles" that the Ruler can assign to any corporation under his rulership. Lets say Cities have 3, One will decrease YOUR overcrowding penalty by half, another allows your military bases to operate cheaper and a third gives you a small share of the profits for all sells in that city. Call them whatever you want for flavor text. They show up as Titles under your corporation "Treasurer of New York" and you get the benefit as long as it is assigned to your corp. You can't assign them to the ruler and you can only have one of these titles or positions per corp. The rules can essentially assign titles which have perks. To touch on the other idea where the corporations pay to use some service in the city: We were talking about having "megastructures" in orbit such as Warp Portals that others will use and pay for but we also talked about having similar structures in cities. Something like "Cybernet Market" structure which is pretty expensive to maintain, but offers a profit bonus to anyone trading there but also costs to use. Perhaps a percentage of the profits goes to the owner, there can only be one of that type per city. There would be another one that would make the upkeep of your Structures cheaper, Something like "Android Workforce". CIties can have several different types of structures like this. On the planet (at location 12:12) there would be another set of larger structures you can make, something like Ringworld to increase the population growth of the planet. Then on a System wide scale you can put a Gigantic structure on the Systems Star like a Dyson Swarm.

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