Public Review: v0.30 Nuts and Bolts

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Geoff the Medio
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#16 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Daveybaby wrote:I would imagine that this could potentially apply...
I was asking what the point was supposed to mean, not questioning whether it would have any use in the game.

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#17 Post by Daveybaby »

noelte wrote:Wouldn't it be better to have terraforming projects rather than buildings? makes more sence to me
I was just giving an example of what the field could be used for. How terraforming is actually to be implemented is neither here nor there.
Geoff the Medio wrote:I was asking what the point was supposed to mean, not questioning whether it would have any use in the game
Well, in the example i gave, it implies that the building requires a specific environment/set of environments. Thats how it read to me, hence the example.

Thinking about it though (its monday morning so thats a challenge) I guess there could also uses for the other menings youve given, such as, say, a pleasure park, which would require the planet's habitability to be in the green ring (to use Moo3 terminology) for the race. Doh! :oops:
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#18 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Daveybaby wrote:Well, in the example i gave, it implies that the building requires a specific environment/set of environments. Thats how it read to me, hence the example.
My point is that the text in the design document should be clear about which if any of the possibilities is meant. If all or several of the interpretations we came up with are meant, they should be listed without ambiguity. Granted, it's not supposed to be an exhaustive list, but there's little use in having a point in the list if it's not clear what the point means.

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Stockpiles

#19 Post by drek »

Just occured to me that stockpiles aren't mentioned in the design doc, cept in my own section on nutrient distribution.

Suggest that industry and research do not stockpile; nutrients, minerals, and (most importantly) money do stockpile. For v.3, no restriction on stockpile size.

Related note: what are the effects of going below 0 money? (a possibility with building maintaince fees, if they exist) Yet to be decided?

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#20 Post by drek »

As a small balance tweak to make fun multiplayer games in v.3 more viable, I suggest the homeworld's system begins the game with a small number of defense bases, as a defense vs. rushing. (to be replaced with something else in v.4)

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#21 Post by noelte »

drek wrote:As a small balance tweak to make fun multiplayer games in v.3 more viable, I suggest the homeworld's system begins the game with a small number of defense bases, as a defense vs. rushing. (to be replaced with something else in v.4)
Right now, defence bases have no attack value. We should simply change the values from 0/1 (a/d) to 1/1. This would do the trick.
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#22 Post by drek »

hrm,

The homeworld already starts with defense bases. Guess I never noticed before.

'nother note, though this might wait until content phase. Perhaps we should give ships a maintaince fee; it gives the new money resource a purpose and would reducing rushing.

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#23 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek suggested I post some altneratives for construction meter and population growth.

As discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=13320#13320
and here: http://www.freeorion.org/wiki/index.php ... ers_Growth

I think construction should grow at 0.5 / turn, every turn, up to its max.


Edit: somebody said growth not dependent on current population was previously rejected, so I suggested some other formulas here: viewtopic.php?p=13908#13908 ) The rest of this post, before "Also:", is thus probably irrelivant. /Edit


A simpler, less hard-to-see population growth curve would work similarly, except with growth rate dependent on the growth / health meter. Something like this might work:

health meter = 20 -> break even

each health meter point above 20 -> + 0.1 pop / turn

each health meter point below 20 but above 10 -> - 0.1 pop a turn

each health meter point below 10, loose more and more pop (- 0.1 more per point per point), so

30 -> +1.0 / turn
...
21 -> + 0.1 / turn
20 -> 0 growth
19 -> -0.1 / turn
...
11 -> -0.9 / turn
10 -> -1.0 / turn
9 -> -1.2 / turn
8 -> -1.5 / turn
7 -> -1.9 / turn
6 -> -2.4 / turn
5 -> -3.0 / turn
4 -> -3.7 / turn
3 -> -4.5 / turn
2 -> -5.4 / turn
1 -> -6.4 / turn
0 -> all pop dies


Also: We could scale up population by a factor of 10, so that rather than using gradations of 0.1 above, everything would be whole numbers for growth. Then again, various factors could modify things unexpectedly, putting us back into factions anyway... so maybe it doesn't matter...

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#24 Post by noelte »

METERS
Just a small thing. Some Meters are supposed to have an break even point at 20. That sounds quite odd. I would suggest using always a break even point of 0. If we need an upper and/or lower bound, we define a min/max value. Complains?
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#25 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Some things don't really work with a "negative" meter value, but anything can be displayed as a positive meter with a non-zero break even point. We also wanted to keep all meter values in the same range, so rather than have some going -50..+50, and others 0..+100 or -33..+275, we settled on 0..+100 for all meters. This also makes things easier to display graphically, or so is the theory.

The 20 breakeven was picked to ensure everything had the same breakeven (if applicable), and was a number big enough to have some range between break even and 0. 0 is generally the "nothing" or "worst possible" situation... ie. all population dies or somesuch. We also figured the game needed more room to grow with tech, as opposed to more detail to how fast your people are dieing, so the breakeven is 20, not 50.

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#26 Post by drek »

Geoff summed it up much better than I could have.

In v.3 there's only two meters that need a breakeven point, farming and health. Wouldn't want the farming meter to operate differently from the other resource meters....or for health to be the odd man out, the only meter that goes negative.

It'll be easy for players to learn that anything below 20 is crappy.

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#27 Post by noelte »

Maybe i wasn't clear. I don't care, how meters are displayed. I'm more concerned about how meters and their effects are calculated. it scares me like hell if i see a formula like

Population Change = Current Population * (((Max Population+1) - Current Population) / (Max Population+1)) * (Health Meter - 20) * (0.01)

with some magic numbers. Also if someone decide to mod those values because he thinks a break even at 30 suits more, he has to find all former values at 20.

I would like to define meters as:
1- meters with have only posive values: 0 - 100
2- meters with negaive and positiv effects : -20 - 80.

How those meters are displayed at UI is another matter. For instance they could simply shifted to 0-100.
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#28 Post by Geoff the Medio »

If you want to impliment them internally as 0 break-even, that's fine with me.

I was under the impression that the design doc roughly for describing how the game plays to the user. So if there's a formula in the design doc, it's the formula as seen by the user, which need only be emulated by whatever algorithm is used in code...

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#29 Post by noelte »

As i thought about it, i discovered that this is a programming decision which none of you guys should bother. It's something i have to decide on my own (or together with zach). So never mind. ;-)
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#30 Post by Ellestar »

There is a "Multiplicative" modification type in a meters so i don't think that it's a good idea to shift or scale meters in programming.
---
Hmm. Another population growth formula?

So now a number of planets is more important than quality. A planet with 40 health (as i understand, Optimal Environments+Adequately fed, Average size) grows to population of 20 in 10 turns. Planet builds another colony ship in 27 turns.

Planet with 25 health (Terrible Environments+Adequately fed, Average size) grows to population of 6 in 10 turns. Planet builds another colony ship in 44 turns.

Now an interesting stuff.
Planet with 30 health (Optimal Environments+Poorly fed, Average size) grows to population of 20 in 19 turns. Planet builds another colony ship in 28 turns (compared to 27 turns with 40 health). That's not good, homeworld will be switched from a farming focus.

---
By the way, IMHO first you should decide if you want migration to a new planets or you don't want it in addition to inventing population growth formulas because they depend on each other.
---

Edit:

Maybe it's a good idea to implement a mirror-like star system generation? In almost all PvP games, everyone uses maps with an equal territory for each player. That's including games like SMAC. So one sector of a galaxy map should be copied N (N-number of players) times by turning it around a center of the galaxy.
Last edited by Ellestar on Mon Aug 16, 2004 9:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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