DrDread

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8/9/2017 Topic: Add Industrial effect on population Doctor Dread Administrator	I could make the industry scale the existing growth rate. The growth rate is based on the average demand against 200 being zero, at 100 demand its 0.1% a turn which is 100% in 1000 turns (1 week) doubling population every week. I could make the industry scale THAT percentage based on, say 10k industry is "normal" which means 1000 industry would make it 10% of normal and the city would grow by 10% not 100% every week. but if you had 50k industry happening, you would have a growth rate that's 5x normal and the city would grow 500% in a week. That might be too much. Wellington and Mexico city have like 60k industry apiece Or I could actually lower the existing growth rate default and then add in that kind of formula., Say cut normal growth rate in half to be 0.05% but for every 10k industry its another 0.1% so a new city with 5k Industry would grow as it normally did. However we do the math on it, industry gives a bonus to population growth. I think we would still make it only multiply the current positive number though. Meaning if the average demand is over 200, no amount of industry will make the growth positive. Otherwise high industry cities are going to have 600 demand average and still growing, that would break the games economy.
8/10/2017 Topic: Add Industrial effect on population Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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. There used to be a mechanic where the more that was bought and sold, the higher the demand would go for that product. You can literally buy and sell it into 1000. If you wanted Buy and sell to influence growth it could be something like a fraction of a percent of the amount of product bought or sold increases the growth rate. Something like every 100k qty is a 0.1 of a percent or something . It can happen every turn It sounds like an expensive calculation to make every turn against every city on every demand product though. The structure industry is a lot easier as its a set number that doesn't change much unless something is upgraded,
8/10/2017 Topic: Still working on Orbital Megastructures Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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. It has to be something easy and straightforward to implement. Dropping stuff off at the Port isn't easy to work out and doesn't really benefit the Planet at all, just the players visiting the port. Some kind of planet wide reduction in Demand when selling at the port seems like it would break the game or make half the game reduce to the spaceport. Making the spaceport act like a city, and has all its demand as an average but the volume is a total population? So you can bulk sell to the spaceport and not get the best price,literally the mean price but your volume is like 250k and you can essentially dump your cargo. I'm not sure why you would use the port over the extra turn to get to a better priced city unless you're seriously moving a lot of cargo. If its better in all ways to sell to the spaceport then no one would use the cities
8/11/2017 Topic: Still working on Orbital Megastructures Doctor Dread Administrator	So far the Spaceport is going to give a tech bonus to every structure on the planet in addition to giving the owner a small percentage of all the sells. The tech bonus is the level of the spaceport, which means 1 to 10% to everything for everyone on theplanet. Making 4 spaceports at lower level would give a bigger bonus cheaper if we do it this way,so I'm not sure about it. The Warp gate is working with costing 1k times size times the warp factor (1x to 100x depending on level) The move order allows you to select the ma warp you want. The orbital guns are going to be big Rail Guns that showup at all your fights. Not sure if its onthe attack yet, still playing with that. The Starbase thats a giant shipyard in space was missing an interesting useful combat oriented ability.. So I'm thinking of making the Starbase give all your units on the planet location an attack bonus based on Star base Level. That means from 1% to 100% (double) all your units firepower when fighting on the planet. Perhaps we don't use the military multiplier and instead make it 10% per level, That would make having 4 level 1 starbases more efficient then a single level 4 one, so not sure about that. The numbers we can play with, but I think the effects are starting to sound good. The warp gate and Spaceport are more like planet bonuses that benefit everyone. The guns and Starbase or more of a military unit for yourself. However I'm looking at making them possible to at least extend to your Guild automatically, or more probably, orbital guns shows up to any fight you are in, and the starbase bonus is extended to any other units fighting alongside yours in a fight..Having a Star-base kind makes you the "support" class for the Kaiju =)
8/13/2017 Topic: Still working on Orbital Megastructures Doctor Dread Administrator	Aywanez wrote: I like NYCs idea of having a place to trade resources to a player in a more streamlined fashion (even if it is just 1 player.) The obtuseness of the trade system has been bugging me since forever. Can you implement that too? Maybe in the next update? The only more streamlined trading system I can make is allowing you to dump 100k of product at a location, a spaceport or market, with a price and let anyone buy as much or as little of it at that price. They can even buy it without a ship just take ownership of it. The contract already does something like that but we can make more of a marketplace style where you can check off a dozen things at your base that you want to sell and anyone can go to the "Board" and see all these products people are selling and just check off the ones they want with a quantity and it instantly changes ownership
8/13/2017 Topic: Game is going to be disabled for a little while Doctor Dread Administrator	We're going to be disabling the game for a little while today hopefully 20 mins or so while we push a lot of stuff for Megastructures. Orbital Megastructures won't be available to create yet but we're going to put some up to test them
8/13/2017 Topic: We pushed Orbital Megastructures for Testing Doctor Dread Administrator	Orbital Megastructures are not available to be created yet, but they are in the game now for testing. I will put some up in Luyten II because that's where my Serendipity Corp is. I also handed 1 of each to Machina Morituri who is in Gulyaev (Hes a top founder). As players you will be able to use the Warp Gates, but the other ones are more for us to play with to work out the bugs and see if they need to be adjusted Warp Gate - When making a move order you cannot set to use a warp gate if available. Your unit needs to already be on the warp gate location for this to work so you need to move to the warp gate first, then make another move order and declare you want to use the gate at any warp available at the gate. The gate will boost your movement speed by 1x - 100x depending on its level and what warp you asked for. Your unit keeps that boost of speed until its move order is completed, the boost if for that one move order, however you should be able to edit your destination mid-move and you will still be ok.. Using the gate costs credits that goes to the owner and it costs more if you use a higher warp. The cost is currently 1k credits per unit size multiplied by the warp factor (1-100). Warp 1 on a freighter (size 5) will cost 5k credits and the freighter will be moving double speed (+1x). Warping 10x (level 3 gate) on that same freighter will cost 50k credits and the freighter will be moving 11x normal speed. Starbase - The starbase acts as a giant Shipyard in space that builds 2x normal in addition to another 2x normal at level 10 like a normal shipyard does.It also gives an attack bonus to all your units on the planet depending on the starbases level multiplier (1% - 100% increase). A level 10 star base will literally double all the firepower of all your units on the entire planet Itr also would cost 25 billion credits and a equally scary upkeep. This bonus shows up on the top of battle reports now. This bonus actually is applied to ALL units in YOUR SIDE of a battle. If you show up with a scout to an attack with 12 other corps, your starbase will boost everyone on the attacking side and vice versa. Orbital Guns - Similar to the starbase the Orbital guns will show up in ANY fight your units are apart of, attack or defense, they cannot be damaged in these fights (their "size" is zero) but they cannot attack or defend alone. Your units needs be present at the fight. Like all orbitals, they can be attacked at their location above the planet and they will defend and take damage as normal in that situation,. They hit as giant Rail Gun defenses at x10 firepower. Spaceport -- The spaceport is purely a commerce orbital. It gives the owner a small percentage of all sells on the planet. (from 0.1% to 10% depending on their level multiplier. It also gives a small structure cost bonus to every structure on the planet of 1 to 10% (like tech does) depending on the spaceports actual level (1 to 10). This shows up as "other" in your tech bonuses when looking at a structure. These effects are subject to change, that's why we are testing them in a limited way for now. If all goes well we will release them for everyone next week. We're looking for bugs, please report any
8/13/2017 Topic: Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts Doctor Dread Administrator	You can't raid items. I almost allowed it but it seems unfair and devastating to take someones pricey item or artifact because there is no raid defense and there isn't even a good way to get it back from the unit that took it. So I would like to discuss some ideas on how to make raiding artifacts or items workable if at all. One idea was for raid defense where you have to have more Military Power then your target to raid anything. and you need 2x tier power to raid whatever you can carry, scaling in between. We can also allow you to select an item you want to raid just like we do with products, but if we do that then we need an easy way to get it back, such as making ships that are destroyed drop off what they were carrying. We can also make whatever they were carrying automatically switch to the attackers corp when they are destroyed, so anytime you destroy the entire opposition, all the items and product at location switch your side, no raid necessary. This would make "raiding" (the option on the attack order) something you do for specific things and use small forces to steal small amounts but if you can get everything to switch to your corp entirely if you destroy the entire corp at location, then that makes attacking for profit a viable thing. If someone is sitting on a stack of 1mil product, you can attack him until hes destroyed and it automatically switches to you, then salvage if you want. You could attack a research site that has several artifacts built up and then load them all and run. We can even make transfers not work while in combat, so the defenders can't transfer out and run, but i don't like that idea. Those are some ideas that might work. I think the switch everything to the attacking corps on annihilation is relatively easy to implement. The raid scaling to military power and attacking items is a lot trickier
8/14/2017 Topic: Product sorting Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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). I did tweak the sorting the other day. and I noticed that the structures are out of whack now, they are purely alphabetized which is not what I intended for structures, I'll try to correct that tonight. They are being sorted slightly differently depending on what they are. The products went to being alphabetized, the military units are going by type/AttackAsType and the structures are supposed to be going by a type also. , a display order actually. Keeping it simple! =) Military should be going by type now, then name in just about any grid that shows them, before they were kind of scrambled
8/14/2017 Topic: Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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. How do you want to handle the item/artifact situation with quantity? Do you want ALL your items or artifacts change hands if your military is wiped out but only a portion of the Product? We can scale how much changes hands based on military power, but, you can just attack the empty spot again if I wpe you at. Thats why we might as well change ownership on everything there. If you leave most of it there... the owner can just attack it and take it back
8/14/2017 Topic: Add Industrial effect on population Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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. If you sell down the price, of course other players are going to buy it =). If you want an increase in population growth based on how much trade is happening (a lot of buy and sell on the same product) in addition to the current demand that's a legitimate.mechanic. If people are buying ad selling millions on a city where all the prices are in the 300s, it should still increase in popualation. Theres a lot of subtle population factors I can work into the game
8/14/2017 Topic: Still working on Orbital Megastructures Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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? The spaceport doesn't take away from the sells, you just earn credits based on how much is being sold. Similar to rulership and population. Its just a "free money" structure, well not really, you need significant sells happening before it becomes profitable but once it is profitable leveling it up means more money. They even stack (you can put 4 in a planet) but I could make it "share" instead so you might want to blow up the other guys port so you can take a bigger share. I like that idea. I agree and I do want to spaceport to have some sort of utility, I just haven't found a good mechanic yet that can scale with level of the port. The best idea so far is to treat it like a city where you can buy and sell on "average" demand for the planet but in large quantities that scale with its level? Or perhaps you can dump 10 million qty on a level 1 port if you want, the scale of the port gives you a better deal on the average price you're getting, the demand across the planet goes down as if you sold it evenly. The port makes it so you dont have to "wait" to dump past volume of cities and instead can just drop off and run. But that kind of removes the cities from the game and aggregates all of them into "A planet" through the spaceport. Unless the port is never going to give you that great of an average price even at level 10. And what would multiple spaceports accomplish in this regard, if the higher level one is always better and at most 1 more turn away to get to? edited by DrDread on 8/14/2017
8/14/2017 Topic: Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts Doctor Dread Administrator	I'm still leaning towards wiping out the target moves all product and items, and you can always attack the empty spot and take it back. Since we're talking cRaZy what about taking over structures too if you get them below say 25% and no military is present. They all switch, I mean the guy was going to destroy them, now at least they are still in place. You didn't get your salvage though. You could of salvaged it while ts being attacked however, unless we prevent that from happening (don't like that idea). Or we can go with the idea of if you salvage or it is destroyed WHILE IN combat then the salvage is split between owner and attackers. Orbitals can be worth BILLIONS edited by DrDread on 8/14/2017
8/15/2017 Topic: Options for "Raiding" Items/Artifacts Doctor Dread Administrator	Hutton wrote: 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. So if you're set to raid, it won't hit the structure at all? but will take all the product once the military is gone? I could attack normally until the last round, or military is gone then raid it to take the products. That doesn't work well, I guess its if you attack normally and there are no MILITARY units remaining at the location, you take whatever items/products are there automatically. That seems to work well as you can stop your attack after the military is gone and youtook the product without destroying the structures. It can almost be another option. If you are set to raid it can ignore the structure(?) that seems clunky also. I know that you are usually not interested in the structure and just want the military but the structure is a defensive position with 8k hit points that the defender wants to draw fire with. The attackers can't dictate which units are not going to be on the defense. Converting all the product if no military defense is there makes raiding a lot easier, you can literary hit someones CorpHQ industrial center and take every thing piled up in one turn if his army is away and no defenses but leaving all his buildings intact. I suppose we can make it happen if you are set to raid after all. I mean if you're raiding you'll be moving stuff into cargo while attacking and if the military defense clears then the raid gives you "max cargo" transfer on that turn (because theres no military) and then converts the rest on the ground to your coprs. So next round the attack order will see that there is nothing to "raid" anymore and move the order to the next one. Actually if the enemyis producing there will be more product every round, BUT one of the triggers to stop a raid attack is that your cargo is full, and it will be, or at least at the point wher you can take anymore cargo it triggers as raid is over. ... typing out loud here. This all might work =)
8/16/2017 Topic: We pushed Orbital Megastructures for Testing Doctor Dread Administrator	Gammalpha wrote: So starbase only give bonus to ships huh? Because first post says it gives bonus to all units. Starbase should be giving bonus to all units, in the entire planet location at the moment. Including the ground forces, even the Orbital guns if you have them present. It doesn't have to be that way, that's just what they went in as. I can easily limit to be just ships, and units carried on ships if you want to make it a ship only thing. I see the starbase as sort of the recon/support/supply advantage over the entire planet. Giving attack bonus seems to be the only reasonable "bonus" it can give as a military unit that does not engage in the actual combat unless the fight is at the star base. Reducing it to just ships might be nerfing it to hard. it IS incredibly expensive at higher levels and 2x firepower doesn't even compare to someone who is coming in with a force half full of special units with artifacts all over them. The for star base money you can probably make twice as many units =)
8/16/2017 Topic: Ruler initiated "edicts" that cause real effects Doctor Dread Administrator	we experimented with rulers being able to make custom voting events, so you can make a vote to go to war with someone for example. but that doesn't actually do anything in game its purely a tool to make decisions. I do want to make actual "Edicts' that rulers can use against players that will actually be enforced by the game. For example, War Reparations event that was disabled would be able to be applied onto another player by a vote. We can make a "Trade Embargo" edict that won't allow a corp to trade at the appropriate city/planet/system of the ruler who initiated it. A no military edict that forces you to remove military units from a system (although Im not sure how I would enforce that in game, outside a credit penalty?). I can even do an edict that will change ownership of a certain military unit or structure, even an orbital like a warp gate. You can force people in or out of the artifact sites or threaten to trade embargo them in their home system, albeit limited to your scope of rulership. A star Lord could apply these to the entire system and essentially boot you out of Earth (perhaps Earth is immune) . I imagine all edicts would be temporary, maybe a week long. Those would be some powerful edicts and would give ruler-ship a LOT of actual power. There would be limitations of course. This wold be coming along with a new "Renown" (working name) that you can get for being a ruler, or having an orbital, or having Titles. It could be something like 10 for city ruler, 25 for planet ruler, 50 for star lord, plus 1 for each level of orbital you own and then another 1-10 for your "titles" depending on how big they are. This Renown or Reputation would be a stat next to your logistics and if your reknown is 40 than you get a 40% increase to all your logistics. Also, your reknown is a direct multiplier of your voting weight, which is usually industry driven, but certain votes can be made to use Military (such as ruler ship positions) or some votes, like the new edicts, can be made to use PURELY your reknown stat. A star Lord trying to issue a trade embargo on another corp for the etnire system would need a vote from every player with reknown in the entire system on majority, the target player would also get to counter with his own reknown, so if it s a huge player who is ruler of a planet with 8 warp gates and system titles, it won't be easy to push an edict on him. The scale or time frame for edicts can be scaled to the vote difference making reknown at least something that will reduce the penalty. These are some ideas for Edicts and Reknown, feel free to chime in with your own! ... also, reknown might not engage unless you're on a paid account. Which sounds like a sneaky way to "Pay to Get More Logistics" but not really. Not sure how everyone feels about that one. Renown is not something small/new players will have much if any of and not much use for because they cant even vote, its just a logistics bonus that scales at higher levels anyway.
8/16/2017 Topic: Ruler initiated "edicts" that cause real effects Doctor Dread Administrator	TimurThunder wrote: Hmm. I think if you want to enforce something in the game you should have to do it. Becoming a toy of the player in control is not something I would play even if I became the one able to dish it out. If you implement it please leave the option to resist by force. ... the option to resist by force. Hmmmm. Like if You blow up the Crop HQ of the ruler who initiated it, the edicts fail?
8/16/2017 Topic: Perhaps its time to tweak Geo Boosters Doctor Dread Administrator	I'm thinking we need to tweak geo boosters. The standard exploit seems to be letting the demand go into the roof but counteracting the population decline with Geo boosters. Geo boostes are adding directly to the population without any consideration of the demand. Instead It might have to change it to,multiplying the existing population growth and add that instead. Or something like, it adds to the current growth percentage, which is based on demand rates, so if that's in the toilet, say -0.08% a turn the geo booster lifts it by 0.10 to bring it to 0.02 and barely gets is positive. The break even point for a geo booster to make 0 population growth could be at about 300 demand but it would stack with a planetary one so the population will break even even when at 400 demand, plus a solar one so 500 demand. but you wouldn't be able to throw a geo booster at 800 demand planet and get a positive growth like you do now. Boosting the population with that kind of math mechanic breaks the game. Its very "cheap" to make a few artifacts to boost an entire 25 city planet into the stratosphere while everyone is selling at 1k demand. It should REALLY be it ONLY works on existing Positive growth, which means you would have to get the demand under 200 for anything to work edited by DrDread on 8/16/2017
8/17/2017 Topic: We pushed Orbital Megastructures for Testing Doctor Dread Administrator	Smokey wrote: Does the starbase only provide a bonus to the owner? Yes and no =) If the star base shows up to the fight on the attacker or defenders side , because one of the attackers/defenders owns the star-base, then the entire side gets the starbase bonus to all thier units. Its like your playing "support" with the starbase. Its similar to orbital guns in a way because all you have to do i bring a scout into a big fight and your orbital guns and starbase come onto the entire side your joined. As long as your unit is present, the starbase and the guns joins that entire side of the fight.
8/17/2017 Topic: Artifacts and ships Doctor Dread Administrator	This is a good point. The smaller ships scout corvette, freighter, and maybe frigate should be moved into the "small unit" category when it comes to the artifacts so they can use the low level ones. OR they get a much larger boost using the current big ones.

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