DrDread

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11/5/2018 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	Telios wrote: Doctor Dread wrote: The game will get more players when the game works, it loses players when its horribly imbalanced Build it and they will come? That is rarely a winning strategy in business. Games always have player loss; real life, they get bored, schedule changes, etc. But the good games keep new players coming in. Look at Ogame, similar game in that it is a space empire building game. I just Googled "space browser game" and several variations and Ogame was always on page 1. I went in 16 pages without seeing Barons until I stopped looking. It is not an easy game to find or I would have been here years ago. Also, much of your player base seems to disagree with your assumption that there is a problem, perhaps if you gave a concrete example of the a hypothetical corp in a city that currently exists and how you believe it is broken. And how your changes would impact that hypothetical corp. If it is easier, use an existing corp, as we can all see each others assets regardless. edited by Telios on 11/5/2018 The money you make selling a t3 product at 500 demand is enough credits to sell down at least 3 t1 products into the floor at 10 and still make a profit while making the population go up. The big corps literally prevent players from buying low demand products or oversell high demand products at the cities they are working this magic on. Most of the player base complains about the things I am about to change. For every complaint from a veteran with 100b+ and 6 alt account I get , there have been 5 by smaller players
11/11/2018 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	So far, the changes I'm making her on the dev box looks quite world shaking. Like, its paradigm shift in the way you will be making money, the way it was originally intended. The old ways of exploiting a demand engine is going to be impossible. I akin it to some sort of Gamma Ray Burst hitting the economy of the planet. You won't notice much at first but soon, everything starts changing. The biggest change is that the volume for the components is less then before, the End products is a lot less then before, because end products are 5x the money and threes 3x as many of them, there volume is being set to 10% of normal instead of 50% normal that it was set to last time. Also, and I had to do this, there is now a volume scale down on the Civilian Services products. Its now 50% of normal. Lowering the volume of the higher products causes the same effect it originally was supposed to have back when they actually produced 5x more quantity. There is another heart breaker change also. The threshold for positive population is now 100 demand not 200 demand. That means to increase pop on a planet you need to get average demand Below 100 and at 100 average demand population will standstill. That brings average demand to 100 which is what all the math in the game was geared towards. Building a city to millions then holding demand at 200% is actually game breaking. The corp HQ bonuses are being reduced back to what they were at launch. Although I might up the level bonuses to compensate. I also re-worked the demand to population code again, I think there was still a bug. I made it so I can see every variable affecting the population to debug it. I plan to have a screen that details the population growth and all the bonuses affecting it since its really difficult to calculate at a glance. The math now works correctly in results . For example there are 144 products if about 12 of them are at 1000% demand and the rest are at 10% the average is about 100 and the planet is about standstill on population. And that's if the overall population is low. The higher the total population the less effective the low demand affect the population but the higher demand still negative at full amount. You can only realistically sustain a city that has a dozen products in the 500s if everything else is 50. and 50 isn't going to be easy anymore. As far as the paid account changes. I'm still on the fence about it. But since these changes are going to be so jarring, I will probably leave them alone for now. Trading with other players for example might be necessary to make high tier products effectively going forward These changes might go in next week or over Thanksgiving.
11/13/2018 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	Serenity wrote: I would like to make sure I understand the changes clearly in the planned “Gamma Ray Burst” update. Volume changes Raw material: no change Components: lowered to …? End products: lowered to 10% of current value Civilian services: lowered to 50% of current value Planned volume changes applied to Silva Civilian services: 88,000 -> 44,000 (about 2,450 per service) End products: 189,000 -> 18,900 (about 235 per product) Components: 79,000 -> ...? Raw materials: 130,000 -> 130,000 (about 5,200 per product) Other changes Population growth threshold: lowered to 100 (from 200) Corporation HQ bonuses: lowered to 25/15/10 (from 50/40/25) Its not a change to VALUE, its a change to VOLUME. All products are worth the same, its the VOLUME that is being lowered on higher tier products. If the volume is 500 on Supercars at some city today, after the update the volume is going to be 100. That means it will take 5x less to lower the demand on it by a point. It used to be all products were worth 100 value but the higher tier factories would produce 20 and 50 qty instead of 10 like raw mats did. A long time ago it was changed so that the higher tier products produced the same qty but were worth more, 100, 250, 500, 750. That caused the current problem with the Demand Engine exploit. You used to have to sell 5x the qty of tier 3 products to make the money and you would crash a cities demand if you tried to sell it all in one place. TODAY that isn't a problem and it allows for the exploit to work. So to bring the math back in line without changing the value of the products, we instead lower the volume on the higher tier products by 2x and 5x so selling 10 qty is like selling 50 of a normal product when it comes to how much the demand will fall.End products should go to 20% (5x value) but its going to 10% because theres 3x as many end products (which should really make it 6% of normal volume 5 x 3 = 15) . I think that was a tangent..... So anyway The products were already scaled down a LITTLE several months ago, now they are being scaled down a lot more to match their value Its currently 1x normal for raw mats, 75% normal for components and 50% normal for end products. The update will make it 1x normal for raw mats, 50% normal for components, 50% normal for Civilian Services, and 10% normal for end products. Civilian Services should probably be lowered more than that, they are 7.5x the normal value but they can't be sold elsewhere and their aren't many different products in the category so it's kind of a guess as where they should be. LONG STORY SHORT.... there will be much lower volume on the higher tier products making the demand drop quickly on a handful of quantity.
11/17/2018 Topic: Guild assets bug Doctor Dread Administrator	Iyurrr wrote: While upgrading the unit previously set as a guild asset, the game will withdraw money from your wallet and from guild bank at the same time. I guess, it's a bug or a wrong approach. That's a good catch. I'm going to look at this by tomorrow. This might be a problem with any "other" cost like salvaging as well
12/17/2018 Topic: Serious 2 years old bug compromising sells Doctor Dread Administrator	There is a fix for this in the next update, I couldn't push it this week. I really want to push it 12/23. The simple solution was to allow you to sell at least 1qty even if you are at a fraction because of other sells. This can potentially allow a city to take more qty then its volume. That can be exploited by bringing 101 ships to sell a product that's at 100 volume. But its a stretch of an exploit especially when the demand still falls but the total amount.
12/17/2018 Topic: Parallel buying orders Doctor Dread Administrator	How exactly do you propose a "Buy Everything" would work? There are like 150 products to buy. You would have to declare a list of products you intend to buy which would allow for one ship trying to buy 150 different products at once. That would cause a lot of problems. Maybe force a list of 10 max? You are essentially exploiting the low volumes of a city by allowing for a 10k cargo ship to buy 100 different products at 100 volume each and filling the cargo in a single turn. I understand the desire for this, you could simply buy everything that's at 10 demand at one city and sell everything to another. I'm not even against the idea to be honest now that I think about it. Having an option to SELL from a list of 10 things would also give you more control also It would take some major changes in how buy/sell works, incorporating a list in addition to Sell Everything (no Buy Everything though). A feature for down the road that Ill try to keep handy
12/17/2018 Topic: Small qol for cargo gui Doctor Dread Administrator	Like, assume its the MAX the unit can take? Some people might assume zero on a ship leaving fleet. Perhaps it defaults to 0 unless that would keep too much on the fleet, in that case it defaults to max?
12/17/2018 Topic: Improvement suggestion: search city in move orders Doctor Dread Administrator	In the next update I have added more things to the City and Bookmarks list of the move order. You can choose "Current Location" for whatever unit your on instead of having to pick the city or structure hes at on the map. You can choose "Corporate HQ" also. The Warpgates show up on the list too.l . On the bookmarks list you get a location listed for every place you have a corp asset. So if you have a structure at 13:8 or something, you'll get that location on the list as Earth \| 13:8. I think I expanded the lists to look at the entire solar system now also. You should have access to every location you would care about on the dropdowns. If you are trading outside the system or to a new location, you are going to have to use the map. I might include a search button next to the X:Y coordinate box on the move order. allowing that field to be used as the search but its like one click away to the view screen which already has it
12/17/2018 Topic: What stimulates a city's growth Doctor Dread Administrator	CIties aren't meant to hit 100 mil. The resistance buildup as a city gets bigger is one of the things that balances cities out. 100 mil worth of city would take more resources than the planet it is on can probably provide. The supply and demand makes that impractical and not profitable. You would have to run the lower value resources and at overcrowd levels which makes the price of everything go up. Thats what forces you outside the planet for resources. I think earth might be able to sustain 5-10 mil pop per 25 cities = 250mil population with local resources on a stretch of perfect specialized corporations. You cannot "grow" a city purposefully, there are some things that help like Hypernet Towers ect. but no one corp is suppose to be able to support a single city in any practical way. , I realize it is fun to do so and is popular mechanic in almost any other game, but it cannot work that way in this game. Controlling and owning a city is regulated to Rulership mechanics. Through that we can make features that incorproate the "build up your own city " mechanic somehow, but it cannot be done through sheer force of selling by the single corp that wants to own it. Cities become a size in accordance with how much is being sold there by the masses of corps. You may be able to grow "your" city through some mechanic that brings more people to your city to sell. Perhaps Rulership allows you to play the Astro Empires style "Buildup" game with the city you are craving. That idea is where the megastructures came from. It was thought that the city ruler would build the megastructures in "his" city to make it a more attractive city for people to do business in. Getting elected graduates your game into that kind of thing maybe. But that "game" has to stay with the city itself. It hasn't panned out though. I would like to make Megastructures more meaningful so if you wanted to build up "your" city you literally could by investing in Megastructres that offer some other benefit besides a city boost, probably political prestige/influence. You could make structures that boost specific categories of products in addition to Hypernet Tower which boosts everything but those structures pay you in accordance to how much business, of whatever particular type, is happening there also. I realize there is a lot of potential in City Building and would like to incorporate the mechanic but It won't be through sheer volume of selling by yourself. It will have to be something along the lines of a megastructure game and rulership
2/24/2019 Topic: Major changes coming that will re-balance the game Doctor Dread Administrator	Serenity wrote: Can we have unlimited logistics as an 'experiment' until the reset? Unlimited logistics will make the game burn out to a single dominate corp within 3 months. I'm open to changes on how logistics might work but no limit is not an option. The current ideas for increasing your logistics besides leveling is 1) Make it so you can spend your research points on logistics 2) Implanting a Political influence Stat that you gain through having titles, including ruler ship, and even the new "strategic locations" idea. The political influence stat will boost logistics in several ways. So once you max out your normal logistics you will have to move on to becoming a ruler, Top the ranking of production for your chosen goods (titles) and / or controlling special locations that can potentially boost your logistics also. Things like certain Megastructures should also give you a higher political stat which in turn increases logistics. A paid account will give you a small political Influence stat. Part of the "not pay to win but maybe pay for 10% bonus" doctrine. There was another CRAZY idea that sounds like it came straight from EA which would create different tiers of monthly subscription, $5, $10, $15 a month which would give you bigger Political Influence Stat depending on how much you pay. Yet another crazy idea was to drop the subscription model altogether and offer a one time buy in starting at $5 and going to $90 and do the political prestige bonus, and paid account status benefits, for life of the account. This would probably be the best change if we wanted to keep players. I will like to also point out that increasing your MAX logistics through Free to Paid or strategizing at a ruler ship level isn't something new players would be interested in. Its something big established corps would be. That makes it great to keep the game free to play, until you're obviously into the game and have become established before encountering pay for advantage. Changing the payment model is a far off idea that would have to come well after political stat is implemented. But long story short,political stat will open up a lot of ways to increase logistics.
3/1/2019 Topic: Demand changes and City surplus Doctor Dread Administrator	Serenity wrote: So, I have these ideas for sometime and I finally decided to share them with you. Demand changes: I would increase pop growth threshold to 150% (from the current 100%) and I would also increase minimum demand to 50% (from the current 10%). As I see the main problem pre Gamma Ray update was the 190% difference between minimum demand (10%) and pop growth threshold (200%) that enabled players to keep demand for Raw Materials and Components very low so they could sell End Products and Civ Services at very high demand (well above 300%) for insane profits. The Gamma Ray update fixed the difference (now it is only 90%), but it also reduced volumes. Because of the reduced volumes and the pop growth threshold set to 100% it is hardly profitable to keep cities growing. My 50-150 idea would keep the difference between minimum demand and pop growth threshold low (100%) so It wouldn’t be possible to have insanely high demands in a growing city, but it would make city building profitable. And, with the increased minimum demand, super specialized corporations could earn some profit even at minimum demands. Also, it would make cities not selling any products for a lower price than their base value. City surplus: The basic idea is, cities would store products that are oversold at minimum demand as surplus in a visible and interactable surplus storage. The maximum capacity of these storages could be based on product volumes. I was thinking: product volume x 100. Cities would consume 10% product volume from their surplus every turn. It would keep demand at minimum as long as there is enough surplus. Buying from cities at minimum demand would remove the amount of products bought from the surplus storage without increasing demands. If there is no surplus left the demand would increase normally. With this people in a well-supplied city could buy products for base price without hurting pop growth. There could be some system in place for leaders and title holders to earn some extra money (or political influence?) based on city surplus. Maybe a small percentage of product sales from surplus. If leaders would have the power to limit accessibility for products at city, planet and system level it would make everything more interesting. (To be honest this is true without any of my ideas) I don’t really like this but it could mean the possibility for cities being raidable. Always appreciate ideas! But that idea sound sounds little tricky to implement. I agree with both things you mention. he volumes are probably too low and the population growth threshold might have to go up. Since the volume dropped on the higher tiers by a staggering amount, the TOTAL volume has gone down in relation to the population. People are also probably right in saying that the prices, especially at low populations, are not durable and can change too quickly. I am considering upped the total volume I might literally add a zero to the volume amounts you see now. That would make it take a lot more effort to drop the price of a product and you can reap the benefit of a higher demand for much longer. To balance that out a little, I might make the demand increase slower then it does now also but not 10x like the volume increase, maybe 2x The prices will be a lot harder to move around especially once the population increases. I also might try to bring back the mechanic that caused pop growth when products were bought or sold. Right now population growth is based purely on the current demand. I used to have a tricky math mechanic that would increase the population when activity (buy and sell) was happening in the city also. I could bring something like that back in. It means even if the demand was 200, if everyone is buying and selling the max volume the planet pop will still go up. That might become exploitative again however, The population threshold being dead even at 100% is a nice round number but perhaps 100% demand should be where a steady population growth happens. I don't want to bring it to 150 like you said, but perhaps 100% demand causes a 10% pop growth and 110% makes it break even. Since the minimum demand is 10% this kind of makes sense. I might try to make these changes once I push this next update and we can try it out. edited by DrDread on 3/1/2019
3/23/2019 Topic: Custom Variable Feature and minor changes Doctor Dread Administrator	I finally pushed an update today. The major feature change is "Custom Variables" as requested in my "What to work on next" post. Although not exactly automated scripts and logic, that can now be something added later. Custom Variables There is a new link on the bottom of the Assets page for "Manage Variables" this screen allows you to make a named variable for Location, Product Type or Production value. Then you can go to your assets military orders or structures production setting and you will notice an additional "Custom Variable Link" Dropdown. If an order s linked to a variable then that order will change automatically whenever you edit that variable and change it to something else. So for example, You make a "My Delivery Location" location variable set to New York and a "My Hot Product" product variable set to Pork. Then you go to a farm you have and link the production to "My Hot Product" (which is Pork) and link the transports Transfer Cargo order to pick up "My Hot Product" (Pork) and then a move order to "My Delivery Location" (New York) Then when you notice that New York is oversold, you can go to Manage Variables, edit you "My Hot Product" variable to be Beef. It will automatically change whatever is linked to that variable to be Beef instead of Pork (Several production sites, and several "Sell" orders across several assets for example). When you notice that New York ain't so hot anymore, you can change your "My Delivery Location" variable to be Houston and it will automatically change any order linked to it to "Houston". There is a section in the guide for Custom Variables under "The Basics" The 1 qty sell bug Your units will always be able to sell at least 1 qty of product even if this means the total sold in one turn to a single city exceeds it volume. This will prevent your units from canceling orders when they can only sell a fraction of a unit. Assets page notes now displays production quantity and production rate Free account players can now vote in all events except elections. Salvaging product now uses 10% of the average demand for that product across the entire system you are in. Quality of life improvement on movement orders The drop down for "Select Location" on Move To Location order now includes "Current Location" (of the asset you're looking at), "Corporate HQ", and also includes entries for warp gates and all cities across the system the unit is in. The Bookmarks drop down now says "Bookmarks / Assets" and includes an entry for every location in which you have ANY assets including a simple count. These should make plotting routes with the move order much easier and almost entirely remove the need to "Find on Map" for any normal route within your own corporation. The next thing I intend to work on is selling a stack of product without a contract. Simply clicking on the product stack and setting a price and amount you want to sell. It will show up immediately int he Contracts section (Which might be renamed) on a separate tab possibly. Anyone can immediately pay or it and get them transferred immediately. That shouldn't take long.
3/23/2019 Topic: What should we work on next? Doctor Dread Administrator	Custom Variables has finally gone in. There is a post in the Development log about it. It took forever but it was mainly lack of time spent working on it. I should have more time now. The next thing going in will be selling a stack of product instantly without a contract.
3/27/2019 Topic: Smothering the promised child in their grave Doctor Dread Administrator	Its only your Corp HQ confined to Earth. You can build factories anywhere. the only thing you lose is a small amount of production bonus for structures near your Corp HQ it s also a little harder to ship new structures via ACPs the farther out you go.
3/27/2019 Topic: A few more minor changes went in today because of Doctor Dread Administrator	A few more small changes went in today because I had to fix a bug with Custom Variables Terran Fed in Earth spawn level 10 units all the time now. There is also a "Earth Protectorate" Fleet that responds to large battles on earth and should re spawn if destroyed. Resource Overcrowding has changed from 1000 to (100 x Resource Value) So a value 12 resource has OCrowd threshold of 1200 and would take 2400 to hit 100% OCrowd The product volume has doubled across the board. This mitigates the added potential of raising overcrowding cap and also the drastic lowering of the volume on higher tier products that we did months ago. Free account should be able to vote in everything but elections. Asteroid mining should respond to research levels in a category. The next major feature we are working on is the ability to post a stack of product for sale without having to make a contract. Simply click on it, set a price and amount and it will show up on a list where contracts are. Anyone can buy it instantly.
5/5/2019 Topic: Product Marketplace and Artifact Fragmentd Doctor Dread Administrator	Artifact sites don't produce items directly anymore, they produce an appropriate "Fragment" at a much faster rate. You can combine enough Meta Fragments into the 3 different levels of Metaphysics artifact by clicking on the fragment pile in your assets for example. All the research facilities have been changed to make the equivalent fragment type. Artifact fragments are eventually going to be used in quests as a valuable type of currency/reward Also you can now click on a stack of Product and simply declare how much you want to sell it for and how much to HOLD, so you can keep a minimum of the stack on hand. These stacks will show up on the contracts page (which has been renamed to "Trade") and anyone can buy any quantity of your stack up to the limit you set. The trade is instant . The Contract version of trading stacks was updated to work better also. You can still trade a stack via contract if you need to engage all the formal mechanics.
5/5/2019 Topic: What should we work on next? Doctor Dread Administrator	Selling a product stack simply by clicking on it and declaring a price and HOLD amount was put in today. Also Artifacts don't develop by ITEM anymore, they produce "Fragments" at a higher rate which can be combined in any level of artifact item you want. Fragments being a much smaller denomination of "Artifact" can now asily be traded as a valuable currency and will eventually be given out as quest rewards The next thing on the "What do you want us to work on next" thread is Anomalies/Quests! I will probably get a skeleton of this system in place and expand on quests as content as I work on the other features. The Anomolies/Quests already has significant work put into it which isn't in the game yet. After that it will be "Strategic Locations" - Static places in the game that you can capture by attacking any defenders with military that give unique bonuses or perks to your corp After that it will be A political Prestige Stat. THEN... a game reset
6/9/2019 Topic: Anomalies and Missions Progress Doctor Dread Administrator	This is just a post about how the work on the next update is going. I've been working on the Anomalies and Missions for the last few weeks. This is going to essentially be a randomized quest system in the game. You will be able to visit "Anomalies" on planets in space , and in DEEP space like settlements, Outposts, Starbases in the star system but also quasars and derelict spacecraft out in deeper space. Some anomalies will be hidden and randomly ping nearby ships who can reveal them. The different anomaly types randomly have different types of NPC mission givers and levels depending on the anomaly type. In turn NPCs have a random set of the types of missions they usually offer and the type of rewards. Poor Farmers will ask you to haul meat or vegetables, Affluent Trader will probably ask you to deliver an item from here to way over there quickly and an Intergalactic Crime Lord might have you rescue someone from a giant Darkstar Base in another sector and reward you with a ton of contraband or a pirate cruiser. Anomalies will randomly appear on the viewscreen to serve up a certain number of missions or a certain amount of turns (like weeks) before disappearing and then new anomalies will show up. These anomalies will have 3-5 missions available at any given time and randomly generate more as they are taken every so many turns. You will be able to see ALL the anomalies and their missions in a grid from the revamped "Events" page for convenience. The system is randomly generated between a level, an npc type, a mission type and a reward type (usually credits) which can get bonus scaled up for things like doing it quickly, having the right research tech when hauling appropriate goods.Your reward can also get scaled DOWN for taking too long. There is most likely going to be a "Deposit Requirement" to take certain missions like hauling goods. You will need to have a certain amount of money in your funds in order to accept it and for whatever reason you don't deliver the valuables, your corp will be charged the deposit. There is also going to be a level restriction of your corp vs the level of the mission. Their happens to be 10 levels of mission. This is a low requirement and just to prevent smaller accounts from trashing larger missions which are increasingly more rare to generate. A lot of the anomaly work is already in the live game, like the icons and much of the database infrastructure. I have laid a lot of the ground work, maybe all of, it in the database already, to randomly generate a mission and I'm now working on making one type of mission actually work. A Haul Product mission type. Once they goes in smoothly I can make other mission types pretty quickly. The types of missions I'm planning so far look like this Recovery Mission Salvage Operation Missing Person Rescue Mission Exploration Transport Cargo Escort Investigation Destroy Unit Destroy Ship Destroy Base Trade There is also another "feature" that might wiggle its way in related to missions. Ships MIGHT get secondary attributes which can be leveled up instead of the standard attack, hits etc. Things like Medical Science Stealth Sensors Diplomacy one more i forget... These stats have normal passive effects on the ships in your game but can also be used in more interesting mission types like "Disaster Releif" or "Covert Ops" missions that will use your ship stats. Those might come later after the "normal" mission types are all in place.
6/26/2019 Topic: [minor - display] Artifact (since last patch) Doctor Dread Administrator	The drop downs showing items not fragments was corrected. was in a few places actually. Like, you can't DEPLOY a fragment! The prod rate and percentage on the assets page, I might leave that out for now, it won't fit. Thanks for pointing these out
7/20/2019 Topic: What should we work on next? Doctor Dread Administrator	Anomalies and Missions have been put in the game in a limited way to test the system. There are a dozen or so Settlements around sol and gulyaev. You can see these settlements on the viewscreen - Overview or in the Events page now. You have to have a military unit at the location to accept their missions. Only one mission per military unit. You can only have a number of active missions equal to your corp level You can only do simple cargo haul missions for now. There are a dozen more mission types that are going to be added including anomalies in deep space which will reward explorers. The cargo mission takes a deposit worth what the product you're being handed is worth. You get it back plus pay on delivery. Use the Search Location order to complete missions (don't sell it). If your unit is destroyed the mission will end. There is no way to abandon a mission at the moment but they have a timeout or a delivery turn which is something like 10 turns plus the distance divided by 10 (slowest ship should make it with several turn to spare). A ground unit with a mission, can be loaded onto a carrier and the carrier can search a location to complete a mission. When a fleet or carrier does the search command, every unit in the group or being carried by will also execute a search command if it has a mission attached to it. Ground units with cargo can now be loaded onto a carrier. There will be some cargo space changes and some quality of life improvements being made soon to make transporting 100 loaded transports on a carrier less exploitive

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