DrDread

all messages by user

9/10/2018 Topic: Bug/Inconsistency with Unit Repairs Doctor Dread Administrator	I have to check, but the repair bonus might have gone to 5% for level 10. They aren't supposed to stack either.
9/10/2018 Topic: What is the best & comfortable business model? Doctor Dread Administrator	I'm still a little confused on how a single corp is managing to supply an entire city into the 10s of millions and remain profitable? Is it mostly buying and selling to make income? because running 200% log penalty on all factories seems like it would be counter productive
9/10/2018 Topic: Combat Events Doctor Dread Administrator	On event bounties its damage dealt but is only against the one units that triggers the end of the event. With Kaijus its one unit, on pirates and such its the base itself only. You might be damaging the ships and forces but one guy with commandos is going to obliterate the base itself
9/11/2018 Topic: Combat Events Doctor Dread Administrator	I think Serenity has it correct. It takes you r military power every turn and adds it to the total as a score used for division. Its been a long time and you will all make me look it up now =)
9/11/2018 Topic: What is the best & comfortable business model? Doctor Dread Administrator	In order to make a profit when you are at 100% log penalty you need to be selling at 200 demand (give or take tech and structure bonuses). At 500% you would need to be selling at like 500 600 demand give or take. Seems difficult
9/12/2018 Topic: Bug/Inconsistency with Unit Repairs Doctor Dread Administrator	I haven't checked yet but I think you always get your 1% then a bonus of up to 5% more for level 10 at a appropriate base. It always costs the same. You are under repair or not but how much you repair is based on whether you are at a Shipyard or base for ships or ground units
9/12/2018 Topic: What is the best & comfortable business model? Doctor Dread Administrator	If you can be profitable at 600% log pen its really on me to balance the mechanics. Back in the day the production was a lot different. Everything had the same value of 100 but the component and end product factories would be producing 25 and 50 units a turn at level 1. That made the game a different beast because when you scaled up production you were making 6000 units per turn and a whole planet might not have that much volume. Giving the different tiers different values I think causes some problems even though it solved others.. Raw mats aren't worth trading compared to end products which are 5x as valuable.. There also might be a little too much snowballing of production cost bonuses now. You get your cost reduction on the raw mats then you get it again on components and then again on the end product in addition to it already being profitable to produce mats into comps into end products with no bonus. There's also the problem of not enough players feeding enough demand Its all difficult to balance without running real world simulation. What I might need today is a lowering of the volume across the board which would fore prices down even with a scare player base. I also think that the way demand rises and stays high for a long time before the population falls still makes for a cyclic boom bust.
9/17/2018 Topic: Goods Exchange Contracts/System Doctor Dread Administrator	One of the "What should we work on next" poll options is to make it so you can simply go to a stack of product and declare it for sale with a price and then anyone can click on it to buy it. No transports needed. The contracts will be there for formal deliveries and persistent trades. Its something I want to add soon after Guild Bank because it shouldn't be that difficult
9/19/2018 Topic: Goods Exchange Contracts/System Doctor Dread Administrator	Its not much of a leap to set a "price" for a stack of product to be 500 Exotic Chemicals as opposed to 5000 credits. Using a "barter system" wouldn't be that difficult to implement on top of normal credits but I have to agree that, just like real world, currency was a huge advancement over the impracticality of bartering one good for another. However.... There might be some narrow situations where you want to trade one product for another to save an extra step of buying it with the credits you just got. In order to get the right ratio of raw mats at a factory you might want to trade your excess Wood for more basic chem on site. That would save you having to BUY Basic Chem on site which would cost 2x normal, someone might be willing to "sell" you the Basic Chem at value in trade for your surplus wood so you both can save the 2x cost of buying the thing you needed with the credits you would of normally received. It's a small step from selling for credits to a player and then buying for credits the thing you need from another player though
9/19/2018 Topic: Rough Idea About Competition And Challanges Doctor Dread Administrator	Having one sector be time dilated or reset in a finite time from the rest of the game wouldn't work. Any separation of paid players vs non paid would exasperate the player count problem. The general idea on escaping sol with a paid account is supposed to be partly for cost savings of your Corp HQ but that isn't much. A better reason might ruling another city or at least having a title in some product type in another city which gives you some kind of advantage, but there isn't a good mechanic for that to play out yet. When titles add to political prestige and that score bcomes useful then paid accounts become more valuable
10/9/2018 Topic: Contract Management Screen Doctor Dread Administrator	Contracts needs an overhaul. Adding filtering to the list isn't hard. When I come around to make the ability to simply put a stack of product "on sale" for anyone to click on and buy, Full blown Contracts will get some attention also.
10/19/2018 Topic: Applied Pledge but did not get starting Credits. Doctor Dread Administrator	Mallagan wrote: I started my corp and my Corp started at the proper level however, i only started with 5k credits. Corp started at lvl 10 so it was shortly liquidated before i could even change production. lol edited by Mallagan on 10/9/2018* Sorry I didn't see this earlier my machine was down. Was this the original Kickstarter pledge from years ago?
10/19/2018 Topic: Show Production Rate(%) on Assets Page Doctor Dread Administrator	Don't you kind of already get this on the Assets page if you click on "Structures" on the left side?
10/19/2018 Topic: Battleships Bug? Doctor Dread Administrator	Serenity wrote: Unfortunately, most of the ships has very little HP compared to their size. I think, only the monolith can be used as a tank. Ground units are superior compared to ships, both in damage and survivability. Edit: In my opinion, the best unit to use for tanking damage are Neo Tanks. They have 200 size and 100,000 HP (without artifacts) for 10 logistics and 60,000 upkeep. Edit2: A Battleship has 100 size and 30,000 HP with level 10 Health upgrades (without artifacts) for 10 logistics and 250,000 upkeep. edited by Serenity on 10/10/2018 edited by Serenity on 10/10/2018 Ships were not supposed to be superior in all ways to ground units. Ground units, even if that means fighters and variteks, are the primary "force" in the game. Ships are very expensive options to take on ground forces because ships in general, especially the big ones, don't hit the ground very well at all considering what they cost o use. That was by design. Even the idea of Variteks which don't have bad weaknesses except not hitting ships hard at all but no strong counter unit are terribly expensive and almost impractical to use, financially, unless they are the right unit for the job at the time Currently there isn't much to attack "in space" so everything is essentially a ground fight. Because the ships are so large and ground units hit them so slightly they make good "tanks" for a ground fights, drawing a lot of fire, but only if you bring other actual ground forces. You can't simply mass ships and expect to do well in ground fights unless you have an overwhelming fleet. If you do want a ground hitting fleet of ships only the most effective money to attack vs ground is Cruisers/destroyers depending what you're hitting and Monolith. Battleships are all around units that even have hangar capacity and the Dreadnought is mainly an anti big ship unit. edited by DrDread on 10/19/2018 edited by DrDread on 10/19/2018 edited by DrDread on 10/19/2018
10/21/2018 Topic: Show Production Rate(%) on Assets Page Doctor Dread Administrator	Serenity wrote: No, I don't. On Assets page, if you click the Structures tag on the left side of UI it groups all your locations and shows what is being produced there, the comps required and it also has an "out" columns that shows how much its putting out per turn for everything. Is that not what you're looking for?
10/24/2018 Topic: Show Production Rate(%) on Assets Page Doctor Dread Administrator	OHHHhhhhhh , I misunderstood "rate of production" =) I will see how easy it is to drop that into the notes.
10/28/2018 Topic: What should we work on next? Doctor Dread Administrator	The Guild Bank is probably going in next weekend. I haven't had much time to work on it over the last couple months. I hope things settle down in the future. It is only doing military assets but if it goes smoothly I want to make it possible to add structures. It has tuned out mostly like what we talked about. Guild can set a tax rate which is from 0-20% and goes against all its members PROFITS from the previous turn and collects it in a guild bank. Guild leaders can bring up any asset for any member in the guild and simply toggle it as a Guild Asset.. The maintenance costs for guild assets will be drawn from the Guild bank and not the player who owns the units. The guild page will have a few tabs to show members, the guild assets and the accounting for the guild bank which everyone can see. It also shows the average amount of tax collected by each members over the last 100 turns. Assuming no game breaking bugs I will try to add a way to transfer straight into the guild bank and also the ability to tax members at different rates. edited by DrDread on 10/28/2018
11/4/2018 Topic: What should we work on next? Doctor Dread Administrator	Guild bank has gone in and I have shook out some bugs. It works as mentioned above. I would appreciate if yo notice something broken about the guild bank, Especially if its a money bug. I still want to add a few more features to the guild bank such as Making structures be guild assets and new construction cost going against guild bank. I might let the guild bank simmer as is for a little while while I try to incorporate the next thing on the list which is Unit order management. I want to try to do an idea someone had of being able to make Variables that you can use when making orders, such as a variable for city location and then you can simply change the variable in one place and all the orders based on that variable will change. Yo would be able to make the delivery location of dozens of units be based on a variable and when the prices change enough, you can simply switch the variable.
11/4/2018 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	It has been a couple of years and the games meta has revealed some problems that I will try to address in the coming weeks. The biggest issue I see is that the games fundamental trade mechanic is grossly lopsided. Corporations are able to run at huge Logistics penalties while still making gigantic profits in almost any product they like. Big players can afford to sell t1 products down to 10 demand to boost cities while making up for it by selling t3 products at 500 demand consistently. I don't blame the players, it's the math on the system that is lopsided. I'm going to put in some changes that should slowly bring the game in line. Volume on higher tiers scaled down more - The Demand is consistently way higher then the game intended. It seems pretty easy to work a city so that you can keep the expensive products in high demand and dump the t1 products to balance out the population. Keeping one t3 product at 500 and selling it slowly makes enough money to allows you to dump several t1 products down to 10 demand to balance the population. It USED TO BE that higher tier products were worth 100 but produced a much larger quantity. that made t almost impossible to dump it all in one city or planet because you would crash demand quickly. Since that was changed to make the higher tiers more valuable the counter balance to keep the volume lower on higher tier products was to literally make them scale lower. The t2 be at 0.75 normal volume and t3 be at 0.5 normal volume. That helps but it wasn't enough. I plan to increase that to match the t2/3/ scale up in value. So probably make t2 be 0.5 normal volume and t3 be 0.20 normal volume. t3 is especially a problem because there are numerous end products and given the way demand ticks up on all of them they simply produce 10x more "volume" . I might end up making their volume scale to 0.10 normal because of it. Demand ticking up slower at higher levels - The demand ticking up into 5-600s has always been a problem.Its not like there is 5 products in the game that everyone deals with at some level. there are 150 in the game and every single city offers a hundred new demand lines that you can rotate out. I've tried some strategies to make the demand tick up based on population levels but thats not really working. Demand isn't supposed to be past 200 on a good day. I want to try an idea a player had. I will keep the small town limitations in place where the higher tier products don't engage until the city gets 2,3,5 mil population but also The demand will tick up more slowly as the demand increases. Normally the demand goes up 0.1 a turn or 100 points in a 1000 turn week of real time. I plan to make it so it ticks up based on its current level. Maybe the normal 0.1 until 100 demand then it goes up by 0.09 until it gets to 300 then it goes up by 0.08 etc. Maybe even more of a scale down than that. That would greatly extend the time it would take the demand to hit higher and higher levels. Lower the Corp Location Bonus - There are too many bonuses flying around now. The Spaceports and Hypernet towers are adding 20 and the corp bonus is already 50. You can produce any t1 product at 60 credits or t3 at 300 without even having any corp levels in it. Because of the diminishing returns of the bonuses, the huge ones you get that apply to EVERYTHING from your corp bonus dwarfs the levels. These also are exponentially multiplying with production increases of higher level factories. I want to bring the corp bonuses back to 25, 15, 10 or even 20, 10, 5 for City, Planet, system. Corporations are only supposed to be very profitable in a chosen product or set of products. I think the demand scaling will be the most effective change to the game. It really doesn't stop anyone from making huge profits on high demand, but you shouldn't be able to mathematically make a "demand engine" out of a city. I'm also considering limiting the free accounts to being able to use contracts or trade with other corporations at all due to alt account abuse. I mean you can still do it, but at least you'll be paying to do it. Free accounts will also be prevented from being in a guild since we now have guild banks and taxes. I want to try to enforce no trading between free accounts and mitigate it when it comes to attacking to raid products.
11/5/2018 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	The changes are not there to punish anyone, the game is broken mathematically. The game was balanced when t3 factories were making 5x the product. Now that they are not you have to make the volume for t3 product be scaled down to 20% of what it normally is. That should correct the "demand engine: exploit happening everywhere. The game will get more players when the game works, it loses players when its horribly imbalanced

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