Organic Hull Growth

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yandonman
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Organic Hull Growth

#1 Post by yandonman »

Here is a patch for discussion. My goal was to a) balance the organic ship line vs the other ships lines by soft-nerfing the organic hulls and b) add more flavor to the organic ship line (in line with their "ethos"). What I've done is reduced the max structure value of the organic hulls at build time, but gave them a "growth" effect that would slowly accumulate max structure (up to their current max structure values). This means that for a period of something like 10 turns, they are weaker than they were before, but afterwards, they have the same power.

(a thank you goes out to Eleazar's ship growth thread from 2011 and Geoff for the hints).

With my play-testing, I still think organic ships are a better value than other ships, but we now have some unique 'knobs' to play with in terms of their starting structure and growth rates.

Feedback very much welcome.

(I'm targeting this for post 0.4.3)
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Code: Select all

effects = SetMaxStructure min(Value + Source.Age*0.2, 5)
You probably want the Value outside the min function, so that it will stack with any other effects, rather than sometimes overriding effects applied before (if the total ends up being > 5) but not overriding effects applied after.

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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#3 Post by yandonman »

I've tweaked the formula as suggested. I'm getting an odd "Unknown" malus which is equal to the growth expected in a turn. Also, once fully grown, the unknown malus goes away. (it's almost like the client is one turn ahead of the server, taking into account the meter projection thread)
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

yandonman wrote:it's almost like the client is one turn ahead of the server...
That's pretty much it. The difference has to do with when the turn number is bumped (++m_current_turn) in ServerApp::PostCombatProcessTurns relative to when meter updating happens. For an easy fix, an additional round of meter updating after the turn number bump could be added, but would slow down turn processing.

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Sloth
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#5 Post by Sloth »

I just want to point out, that i like this feature a lot. I haven't really made up my mind about the numbers (or linear growth in general), but i hope it gets added one way or another.
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#6 Post by yandonman »

wrt linear growth - in my play testing, random vs linear growth probably wouldn't make much difference. You've got twenty ships, some are full strength, some are not - random gets evened out as you build more ships.

wrt numbers - My initial thoughts were they were too soft a nerf, but I've played a game where I got molecular cloud molested (-shields) and I lost to asteroid ships. I dunno - play around with the numbers and let me know what you think.



@Geoff - is the unknown malus a checkin stopper? I'm not comfortable with mucking with that area of the code.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#7 Post by Geoff the Medio »

yandonman wrote:@Geoff - is the unknown malus a checkin stopper? I'm not comfortable with mucking with that area of the code.
There's no way to prevent it as the engine is now, so no.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#8 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Quick test suggests it's functional as described, at least for the first organic hull. Can't comment on balance issues, though.

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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#9 Post by yandonman »

In my play testing, this is still a minor nerf. It doesn't swing the balance of the ship relative to any other type of ship yet, so the AI doesn't appear to have any trouble with it. Organics are still the ship type of choice. Other ship types still lose to organics, but the disparity is slightly mitigated.
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#10 Post by yandonman »

What's pending here?
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MatGB
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#11 Post by MatGB »

The two problems I see with Organics is they're too cheap to produce compared to other early hulls (except Asteroids) and a lot faster than other early hulls.

Perhaps keep it simple, reduce the speed to 80 and up the cost a bit?

I played a few games recently not taking a single organic and using robotics and similar, and while I liked the extra power per ship (and thus later game usability as well) they were too slow compared to orgs and far more expensive.
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Vezzra
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#12 Post by Vezzra »

yandonman wrote:What's pending here?
Probably just no one got around to commit that patch. I'll put it on my to-do list.

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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#13 Post by Vezzra »

MatGB wrote:The two problems I see with Organics is they're too cheap to produce compared to other early hulls (except Asteroids) and a lot faster than other early hulls.

Perhaps keep it simple, reduce the speed to 80 and up the cost a bit?
There needs to be done much more than that, it's not only the organic hull line that's unbalanced. So ship hulls are due for a major overhaul anyway. We want to do that since forever, a discussion concerning that topic can be found here. As you can see, that thread dates back to February. It's just that progress on this is really slow, but it will get done, just give it time... ;)

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Vezzra
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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#14 Post by Vezzra »

Ok, I've committed version 2 of the patch, rev 6342.

Yandonman, can you edit the description texts for the organic ship hulls (and maybe also the corresponding techs) to include explanations of the new mechanics? Preferrably with numbers for the stats where appropriate (intial values for structure and when "fully grown", as the automatically generated stat display texts on the design screen won't give correct numbers anymore of course). Otherwise players will probably be confused about what's going on with the structure stats of their organic ships ;)

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Re: Organic Hull Growth

#15 Post by yandonman »

Updated descriptions.
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