EventHorizon

all messages by user

12/5/2017 Topic: How to empty Transports of tiny goods remainders EventHorizon	So is there a way to empty out the last two or three goods left in a transport without having to waste turns selling one at a time? I'm just getting started here and trade definitely seems like the quickest way to make credits early on. Just trying to minimize the wasted turns when you get down to small amounts of goods left to sell. The way the volumes works ends up wasting a lot of time on selling very small amounts of goods.
12/5/2017 Topic: AI Supervirus Takes A LOT more than 10% of profits EventHorizon	Just a heads up that your description of what the AI supervirus does dramatically underestimates the amount of profits it steals. This is because it takes 10% of all surplus value each turn but when you have a negative value on other turns it doesn't reimburse you 10% of the value of whatever you paid for. In any productive economy profits are realized at the END of a long cycle when you factor in all the costs of production, including the largest cost of building factories, distribution centres, purchasing transports etc. What this virus is doing is taking 10% of all revenues and that is a lot higher, about 10x more than what 10% of profits would be. I'm still pretty new to this game but I'll make the estimate that actual profits only amount to about about 20 to 25% of total revenues at most. So 10% of profits would only add up to about 2 to 2.5% of total revenues. That means if you take 10% of revenues you are effectively cutting people's profits in half, maybe worse (probably much worse for new players who have virtually no cash flow at the beginning, which is unfair and discouraging). In the case the mercantilists in the game, who focus mainly on trade and don't bother with production, their losing 10% of the sale price, which means they also pay 10% more for the goods they bought and effectively lose about 20% of their profits. For example if you buy goods for 1 million credits and then sell them for 2 million credits you are losing 200,000 credits on a 1 million credit profit. My suggestion to fix this is to take 10% of profits at the end of 100 turns, rather than taking it every turn for 100 turns so that it more accurately reflects 10% of overall profits. edited by EventHorizon on 12/5/2017
12/6/2017 Topic: #! Priority: FIX THE LAAAAAAG! EventHorizon	Seriously. I came to try this game out a few days ago. I think I like it, but damn it is practically unplayable a lot of the time because there is so much lag. That has to be your number 1 priority because no one is going to stick around to play this game if it takes ten minutes for a page to load (that is no exaggeration either, I have literally waited that long more times than I could count). Probably the worst is trying to set up trade loops for units. Half the time I can't get any response from the website when I try to create new orders or even click on the "create new orders" link or even the "orders" tab. The browser doesn't show whether or not anything is loading so I have no idea if anything is happening. This becomes a huge problem when building a loop because when I click on "add new order" and nothing happens I can't help but think I need to click on it again and if often end up with multiple copies of the order on the list when there is finally a response from the website. And if the turn ends I have to go back to Assets page and start all over again. When it takes half an hour to build a single trade loop for a single unit, that game becomes an exercise in frustration rather than an enjoyable experience. edited by EventHorizon on 12/6/2017
12/6/2017 Topic: #! Priority: FIX THE LAAAAAAG! EventHorizon	Neerio wrote: think this is a local problem. Which means that this game, and only this game has this problem in whatever constitutes the locality I'm in (North America? Canada? Vancouver?). I can go play tons of other browser based games, based in Europe or wherever, without any of these problems. The lag is absolutely atrocious on this game. I've seen people complain about it a lot in review forums elsewhere online as well. Whatever the reason for it it is a real pity because this seems like a game with a lot of potential. From what I can see though, hardly anyone plays it and even out of those accounts a lot of them are dead. I suspect a lot of those people left because this game is just too annoying to play with all the lag.
12/7/2017 Topic: Planets and Resources etc EventHorizon	Suggested changes: 1. Gas Planets only have fuel and energy as resources (add fuels as a basic resource to the game) 2. Terrestrial Planets are the source of most chemicals with only trace amounts found on other solid planets (not gas) 3. Only solid planets with an atmosphere and a water source can support cities. Everywhere else are mining camps or outposts etc. 4. Most star systems should contain at least one terrestrial planet (latest NASA research supports this) to act as an economic hub. 5. Solid planets without atmosphere are the main source of metals but all solid planets have some. Pollution could be one reason not to mine on planets with large populations. 1. GAS GIANTS have virtually no value as a source of chemicals for industry. What they do have is Hydrogen and Helium, which are mostly useful as fuels (don't forget that any planet with an atmosphere will have more than enough of these for any chemistry related needs), often a lot of radiation and a lot of energy. That should be what you can mine from them, fuel and energy. While jump gates may get you from one system to the next, travel within a solar system would likely depend on a combination of short range propulsion to get up to escape velocity and then something like solar sails or ion drives as very slowly accelerating but efficient sources of fuel for long distance travel. The problem in this game is that fuel is not a part of the economy, nor is it a consideration for military operations, which seems like kind of a gaping hole because energy and fuel are the backbone or pretty much any economy. You can't have transportation or power for factories and homes without them. *One interesting thing to consider is that solar radiation is a lot less useful for energy near gas giants because they are so far from the star they orbit. You could have technologies, manufactured on terran planets (where the chemicals actually exist) that use hydrogen/helium or even the magnetosphere of gas giants to heat and power mining operations outside the core planets. Those operations would provide clean, non-carbon based fuels for navigation around gravity wells (planets, moons, suns etc) both on the ground and in orbit within star systems and for military operations.* 2. TERRESTRIAL PLANETS, smaller planets with lots of carbon and silicon and an atmosphere (generally closer to the star they orbit), would be the main source of chemicals, given that they would hold virtually all of the carbon that is accessible. Keep in mind that most of what we know of as chemistry requires resources found on an earth like planet to be possible. 80% of all chemistry and its products is organic and almost all of that comes from coal, oil and natural gas. While it's obviously not possible to perfectly recreate a real world scenario in a game I think making the terrestrial planets the primary source of chemicals in the game makes a lot of sense. 3. Water is another key consideration because it is essential to life. It seems highly implausible that cities will ever exist on a planetary body that doesn't have a natural source of it. Similarly, a breathable atmosphere is essential to human life. For these reasons it makes little sense to have "cities" on planets that don't have both available. Terraforming could be introduced but that would necessarily change certain properties of the planet it was done on. 4. Most star systems will be largely self-contained economies unless resources or products are made rare enough that only some systems can produce them and even then interstellar trade would only be for those products. Bottom line is that any economy needs a population of consumers to support it. For that reason most star systems should contain at least one terrestrial planet that can support a major population. Some rare ones could have more than one, making for possible conflict between the two, and some could have none but have rare resources or highly concentrated sources of resources to make them attractive as mining outposts, for pirate factions etc. This happens to be fairly close to what NASA's latest findings are as well. 5. Metals and minerals should be available mainly from solid planets, BUT mining should produce large amounts of waste/pollution that would make it more costly on terrestrial planets with large populations so solid planets/moons without atmospheres and asteroids would be the main source, their high density and low impact of waste/pollution more than offsetting the additional cost of transporting it to market and worth defending an outpost.
12/7/2017 Topic: AI Supervirus Takes A LOT more than 10% of profits EventHorizon	Actually I think you're kind of refuting your own point there. If the virus was causing you to lose money you could simply halt all sales on that planet for 100 turns, absorbing the relatively small storage costs by comparison, continue production letting demand recover, and then sell off your product once the virus was finished. You could also ship to sell in off world markets, dump in contracts that won't be completed til after the virus period is over, dump into manufacturing higher level products etc etc. Basically you could make your balance sheet read red for the whole time if you were motivated enough to do so. You could just make the percentage like 2 or 3% and leave as it is. I don't know if this balances well against the cost for the player using the virus but it would make it so players would endure it rather than engage in potentially more costly work-arounds.
12/7/2017 Topic: #! Priority: FIX THE LAAAAAAG! EventHorizon	Thx Dr. Dread. I have been multi-tabbing, but yesterday it just got to the point where it was taking me ten minutes to get a response so I kept having to restart what I was doing. The order tab for assets and the Viewscreen seem to be the most sensitive to this. Anyway, it seems to be much better today. I guess upgrading the server, unlike new features, is a pretty big financial cost. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. I was actually drawn to this game when I saw something you posted saying you wanted to do Astroempires only better with more depth. I think this mostly looks really good. I played AE for many years and like most players was most frustrated by the fact that the developers did very little to update the game after the first couple years, although they kept promising to. How many hours did people waste posting in their feature request forum only to see nothing ever implemented?!
12/7/2017 Topic: Structure Suggestions: Space Elevator/Spaceports EventHorizon	Structure: Space Elevator Purpose: to transport goods from surface to orbit at much greater efficiency. In terms of game play there would need to be a fuel cost associated with bringing freight ships to orbit that would be dramatically reduced by use of a space elevator. No more than one per city. Under management of the city's mayor. The idea here is that this could be the focal point for trade and in terms of game play a key fixed asset that can be attacked/raided and needs to be defended. Also a structure that would require the collective effort of a whole city or even planet in early stages of development to facilitate full scale trade. Could be combined with Spaceports... edited by EventHorizon on 12/8/2017
12/9/2017 Topic: Raid successful even though attacker destroyed EventHorizon	Battle ID: 13015 This seems like a bug. The attacking player successfully raided me for 2500 soap even though his lone attacking unit was destroyed.
12/14/2017 Topic: Dispelling the Myths about Traders or "Flippers" EventHorizon	So apparently my hardcore foray into what many players call "flipping" or what is normally just referred to as trade, international trade, interpanetary trade etc has touched a few nerves and sparked some intense debate on the local channels. I will be 100% honest here about how much I've been able to make in credits and how much work is involved. How much am I earning? Currently my income daily, IF I'm on top of my trade network and the last few days my internet was down so I haven't been able to do that, is about 5 to 6 million per turn which translates to about $750 million per day. I suspect I could get this even higher if I put in even more time and built even more transports but it probably maxes out around $ 1 Billion per day. It took me a while to figure this strategy out and longer to be able to produce all the transports required and understand how to set up their order loops etc. If I were to start from scratch again I suspect I could be up to about $500 million per day in less than 5 days. How do you earn money trading? The answer seems quite simple. Buy low, transport to another city and sell high. In practice however there is a lot more to it. First of all you need to do your market research. For this you'll need a pen and paper because the existing report in game has one fatal flaw that basically makes it nearly useless for traders. It's one use is to see changes in trade percentages over the last 500 turns. The flaw is that it doesn't show trade volumes, average, high, low or most recent. Trade volumes determine how much you can trade between cities and how quickly demand % will change in response to your trading activity. This is important because trade depends on wide margins between buying and selling. While you can sell high you also have to pay twice the market rate to buy the goods in the first place. For trading to be worthwhile you need a margin of at least 500%. You might look at the market and think well that's not very common. BUT it's more common than you think because the margins for higher end products are multiplied. Components are worth 3.25 times their demand percentage and End Products are worth 7.5 times their demand percentage. So a 500% margin for raw materials translates to about 150% for components and about 75% for End Products. Because a single point change in demand percentage has a much more significant impact for End Products and Components you have to increase this to compensate for the more rapid deterioration of profit margins. I generally won't trade components for less than about 225 to 250% margin and End Products for less than about 150% margin. It's important to understand how trade volumes work. For those who aren't familiar the trade volume of a city determines how much of a good can be bought to raise the demand by 1 point or sold to lower it by 1 point. For traders this is especially important on the low end because you buy at twice the demand % but sell directly at the demand %. When you set up a trade loop between two cities for a given product you have to consider how long it will take before the demand percentages converge to a point where your trade will no longer be profitable. The absolute bottom is going to be where your sell % is just twice your buy% but in reality is that it's somewhat higher because you're never going to set up the perfect trade network, and some trades will go into the negative for you, especially as your trade network grows larger and the time required to adjust trades every day grows larger. So trade volumes are important and the reality is that unless you have a very large margin on a given trade or have the time to switch up trades more than once a day (which honestly seems largely unworkable for anyone who has a job or any kind of a life outside the game) you're going to want to avoid buying in any city with less than 200 trade volume and mostly want to focus on cities that have 300 or better. In cities like Rabat with 1000 to 3000 trade volumes you can run multiple trades for the same product, each with a different selling or buying destination, if you use level 1 transports at 500 cargo capacity. While upgrading your transports will make more profits for you in the short term, it will also tank your routes more quickly (especially if there is a large disparity in trade volumes between buy and sell markets) and end up costing you more over the course of a 144 turn cycle (24 hours) and even worse if you happen to have a day where you have to let your trades hang because you don't have time to get online. If you really want to get into micromanagement you could tell your transports to fill only at the current trade volume but that's a lot of micromanagement and probably not worth your time to fuss with. In practice some of your routes will be slowed by other players buying at the same time as you and forcing your transport to take additional turns to fill. Volumes will also change in response to your trading activity and other players' activity. Such is the chaos of a market system. So, as you can see most of the work in trading is in the repeated rounds of market research and reassigning trades on a daily basis. I don't bother with raw materials trades because it's rare to find 500% plus trade margins and even when you do it is a very narrow market because there are only a small number of raw materials where you're going to have a lot of competition from producers that will throw most of your calculations out of whack anyway. The money is in components where margins tend to be the highest (at least right now because of the size of current cities on earth - and yes earth is mainly where you can actually do a proper trading strategy, everywhere else there just aren't the trade volumes or the diversity of nearby markets to make it worthwhile) and in end products where you can make the biggest profits, especially in interplanetary trade (but also require more maintenance to avoid crashing your margins and suddenly costing you a lot of money). Doing all this reasearch probably takes at least an hour to an hour and a half on a daily basis with pen and paper in hand and A LOT of clicking on the demand tab of the view screen until you have surveyed all Components and all End Products (low and high percentages), written down the buy and sell percentages (these need to be adjusted so that you have a standard for Components and End Products or it can get very confusing very fast) that meet your minimum standards and eliminating any with too low trade volumes (unless the margins are very high), and finally ranked your trades from best to worst. That's the first step. The second step is to check your list against the trades you already have running, adjust any trades that include products that are in your list (usually this means changing either the buy or sell destinations or sometimes both), mark all the product trades that are no longer profitable or only minimally profitable and then switch them up to ones that are. This process requires that you have a proper naming system that includes Product Abbreviation then Buy City then Sell City for your transports so you can find and organize them more easily on your Assets page. It also involves A LOT of micromanaging because not only do you have to change destinations for move to and buy/sell orders but you also have to adjust the order of orders so that transports that still have old product can go sell them before starting the new loop. I'm still in the process of perfecting this but I would guess that to maximize market potential you could go as high as 30 plus transports on Earth and probably a half dozen or more Frigates (freighters are too slow) for interplanetary runs (the jump gate tolls and the cost of frigates both to build, upgrade and maintain means you have to have even higher margins to make it profitable). That's with the existing market and level of competition in trading. So, if you think trading is "easy" you couldn't be more wrong. It's actually quite challenging, both in terms of time and in terms of understanding some key game mechanics and doing the necessary calculations. Next post I'll address the myth that trading is parasitic and has no benefits for cities or non-trading players.
12/15/2017 Topic: Dispelling the Myths about Traders or "Flippers" EventHorizon	Maharava wrote: Remember, kids, trading ONLY WORKS if someone's building cities up for you and the reverse is also true. Building cities only works if someone's trading for you. Or more to the point, building planets and solar systems rather than trying to favor one city over another only works if you have people trading, often in large volumes. This is even truer when the game is underpopulated and too few players are spread too thinly over too many systems and cities. Temporary imbalances in demand percentages are unavoidable because of the gap between plans laid and plans realized and how the market changes unpredictably in the meantime. Long term disparities where players waste resources trying make one city grow, rather than distributing evenly to make all cities grow, is a choice that players make, and from a global or even systemic perspective it means that while a few players may gain prominence in their isolated fiefdoms, the system as a whole will suffer because of that waste . Yes, competition is part of the game but at what level does it make sense to let that override the need for cooperation? Traders are in the unique position of both wanting populations to grow because it increases trade volumes and increases trade opportunities as well as holding no loyalty to any particular city, but rather to the planet and system as a whole. They want all populations to grow, not just the one in a specific city. One city growing to a large size while others wither and die (and 30% of the posts in local are anouncements of cities failing) is completely useless for traders. ALL trade involves redistributing the profits earned in production so that corps can profit indirectly from the growth of the market as a whole. In this game it is unavoidable that players will do so and that some will specialize in that. This is an important counterbalance to the tendency of many players wanting to just build their own individual cities, which in many cases is likely because it is less time consuming and makes the game simpler to play. It is not that trading players are behaving parasitically. It is that the game design makes large scale trading so time consuming that only a minority of players have the time and energy to sustain it and therefore only a small number gain a lot of profits from a lot of activity. Because trade is important to growth we should find ways to make it easier to do and to rebalance the game so that both producers and traders can gain an equitable share of the profits.
12/15/2017 Topic: Where did you hear about Barons of the Galaxy? EventHorizon	Found it while looking around for a game similar to AE. So far finding this game quite good. Lots to explore. Also, I like, or at least I hope I WILL like the fact that the developer is willing to implement improvements to the game based on player feedback.
12/31/2017 Topic: Features Needed for Guilds EventHorizon	So, just getting into trying to organize a guild in game and noticing couple basic things I think are needed but not there: 1. Private Message limit needs to be raised. With only ten total posts per day it is difficult for guild members to communicate with each other in-game and more importantly for guild recruiters to be able to talk to new players and invite them in. I'd say 100 would be good but I'd even settle for 50. 2. Guild Boards/Tabs - Guilds need a way for leaders to permanently post information that all members can refer to whenever needed. Things like member production specializations, military orders, jumpgate levels and locations, city growth priorities, basic rules for guild members, people on vacation time etc etc. Really just depends on how the guild is organized. Without these it's left to members to try and dig through old private messages to find what they're looking for and new members will likely never see it meaning it will constantly have to be reposted. Either that or we need guild forums which can be made to serve the same purpose.
12/31/2017 Topic: Making some fundamental changes to the products EventHorizon	I support this in large part because I think it will encourage more guilds, more cooperation and coordination. Instead of increasing logistics so each corp can continue to go it on their own, I would argue you should hold them where they are to force corporations to look for longer term supply contracts so that Raw Materials producers specialize in supplying Components producers who in turn specialize in supplying End Products producers. More interaction and exchange is good for the game. Ideally prices balance out so that a player who produces only Metals can earn just as much as a corp that produces only Clothing etc and Guilds that are well organized with a good division of labor can minimize costs and maximize efficiency. One other issue I see is that players who specialize in Raw Materials face a basic problem, they have no votes in city elections because all their production is outside the city. I think this needs to be amended. Guilds can get around this by encouraging free account players, who can't vote anyway, to develop as raw material suppliers, but if you're off Earth under the current account restrictions you'll need to level the playing field for upgraded players so they're not unfairly punished in the electoral process for being Raw Materials suppliers.
1/3/2018 Topic: Making some fundamental changes to the products EventHorizon	Yeah agreed on the Alts question. One of the good things about the game design in BotG is that we can all see pretty much everything about what other corporations are doing. That makes it very easy for the player community to spot alts, and in particular those that are being used unfairly.
1/4/2018 Topic: Distribution Centre - a suggested modification EventHorizon	Instead of getting more sales volume from DBCs as we level I think it would make more sense for them to increase the number of buys/sells you get per level and just let players sell at max volume through them regardless of their level. I'm looking at this from the perspective of a mayor who wants to drive population growth by managing demand percentages in their city. DBCs are very useful for this purpose but they're also too limiting as they are and put a significant strain on logistics because it ends up being better in most cases to build multiple lower level DBCs in the same city to get the increased buy/sells while building each just high enough to surpass the current trade volumes. At level 10 your sales volume would be 120000 units per turn. Given that cities in practice max out around 20 to 25 million (and that requires a lot of effort to sustain) which means average trade volumes of 2500 give or take 500 or so, there is basically no reason to ever build a DBC past level 5 or 6. This whole set up seems to run counter to how the game normally scales so that players are encouraged to build one building up rather than building multiples of the same building, in order to get the most out of limited logistics points. If DBCs started with 1 buy/sell then scaled to 2, 5, 11, 22 all the way to a max of 120 then building a single DBC to level 10 could potentially make sense for mayors as it would allow buy sells across the entire spectrum of products. It would also make them more useful for short term trading in other cities where you could build a level 1, 2 or 3 DBC quickly to take advantage of specific opportunities and then scrap them later as needed.
1/4/2018 Topic: Distribution Centre - a suggested modification EventHorizon	Another little bonus you could add to DBCs is to have them reduce storage costs starting at 0.5% for level 1 and going up to 60% for a level 10 DBC. Given that they're basically warehouses this does make sense.
1/4/2018 Topic: Distribution Centre - a suggested modification EventHorizon	55 slots would be a big improvement. A couple players in one city could basically work together to manage the city market. I hear what nyno is saying though. If you start at 10 and the only levelling bonus is 5 more slots, it will actually be more cost effective to build mulitple level 1 buildings since you don't need to level to get the volume sales and 2 level one buildings are cheaper upkeep than one level 2. If it started with one slot and then increased to 2, 4, 8, 14, 22, 32, 44,58, 74 Maybe that could work? Another way to approach it would be to give DBCs the ability to do transfers for contracts. A lot of players would use them for that so the extra slots would come in handy and help reduce the drain on military logistics from transports/freighters. Also, i think if you put in the bonus for reduced storage costs that would be attractive to a lot of players who deal only in contracts and often have large stockpiles.
1/4/2018 Topic: Average Number of Active Users EventHorizon	One small thing you could do is remove the level 2 HQ requirement for contracts so existing players can offer some free stuff to new players who join their guilds. I think that's really the key. You need little communities in the game. That's what guilds should be. Right now the guild set up is really sparse. I know you've played AE and wanted to improve on it but one thing AE had that isn't here yet is guild tabs and boards that made it easier for guild members to feel part of an organized community. I'm trying to build up the guild I'm in now but the biggest obstacle is not being able to permanently post announcements, stickies or key goals, guild infrastructure, guild strategy etc. Make it easy for the player community that's here to recruit and organize new players into their guilds and you'll see better retention. AE had a pretty steep learning curve and a much slower start than this game and it managed to draw thousands. I think this game could easily surpass that because it's a better designed game.
1/6/2018 Topic: Making some fundamental changes to the products EventHorizon	Seren, I just discovered that when you instituted the price multiples you didn't adjust the production costs for the relevant buildings. This makes End Produciton proportionally 7.5 times cheaper than raw material production. I think this, more than anything else is where the problem lies. It effectively blows a giant hole in the logistics penalty if you keep your resource buildings lower level, mine and basically put all your big buildings in End Products (and components to a lesser degree). If support your move to flatten the price tiers but I think the most important thing you need to do is scale the upkeep/production costs for the buildings in each tier so that an End Product building is proportionally just as expensive to run as a resource mine. If you don't fix that I think you'll see a small impact from flattening the price tiers but it will still basically be the same problem on a slightly smaller scale.

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