Feedback Imperial Stockpile (round 2) - Storage for all

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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Ophiuchus
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Feedback Imperial Stockpile (round 2) - Storage for all

#1 Post by Ophiuchus »

This thread is for the settings in master and the coming test builds

Code: Select all

                           cost Tu   Ratio  Use Limit
Predictive Stockpiling      0RP  1  +0.40   +3
Generic Supplies           40RP  4  +0.20   +7
Transcendent Design       150RP  5  +0.00    +0
Interspecies Academy (6x)  30PP  5  +0.05   +15
Interstellar Entangle Fac 200RP  5  +0.20  +15
Made a branch/PR out of it:
https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/pull/1912

From the start building things costs now 2.5 times as much as it costs using PP from the supply group (Before was 5 times as much).
Early tech has improved transfer ratio and later tech has improved use limit.

You can improve efficiency to 100%, higher ratios should get cut 100% in the backend.
Break even for the academies is 600PP each (meaning 3.6k if you build all of them)

From the experience of the first round we expect that in the beginning the stockpile can be very useful, but later on the extraction limits are too low. So probably gamers will have more stockpile than they are able to spend, with those unspent PP becoming the eternal imperial storage.

Looking forward to your reports :)
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

Ophiuchus
Programmer
Posts: 3433
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:01 am
Location: Wall IV

Re: Feedback Imperial Stockpile (round 2) - Storage for all

#2 Post by Ophiuchus »

Im in a game starting with etty. I got quite behind some other empires because i early got me a Slith planet for troops with two other empires having it as priority as well. So i had to spend quite some resources defending that.
Roleplaying i didnt go for my usual organic stealth bomber fleet but first for robotics and then for asteroids.

Early after acquiring that planet i got some good use of the stockpile. The southern Abaddoni neighbor sneaked an outpost behind my defenses and build it successfully, cutting of the Slith planet from production.

My military was bound waiting on the Slith planet to defend against the next onslaught.
I used the stockpile to produce comsats and building shipyard/drydock to repair the fleet.
For those (and especially the comsats) it didnt matter so much that the ratio was "only" 0.4 - i really needed those.
If the ratio had been 0.2 maybe I would have retreated my fleet instead of rushing shipyard/drydock.

In turn 174 im now second best. Northern neighbor is leading - very strong, big fleet (Self-gravitating with plasma guns and fighters - but on mass driver level), else good tech/research and good production.
Has detection 50 which is bit too much for my stealth ATM.
Luckily not very aggressive. Found me some ancient ruins with Misiorla and a Laenfa planet.
So Im sure I will rule the planetary stealth game and also come around soon.

Around turn 180 I captured one computronium moon inside my neighbors territory (luckily were trith on the planet so my stealth is like 60 there). My biggest fleet basically got stranded there with one of my neighbors forces between the fleet and my empire. I build on that planet using the imperial stockpile: some comsats (which are now mostly useless around t190), shipyard, drydock and finally a resonant moon to "upgrade" some of my ships there.
For the resonant moon i had use of my 70PP extraction limit.
Meanwhile I started slowly eating away the third best empire, which is now about to collapse soon.
My research is now way better than the northern neighbor and Im almost catching up on production.
Also with new ship stealth tech the production for disruptor ships started (stealth bombers for interrupting supply lines). Also new planetary stealth tech is about to arrive, making my planets untouchable for the northerner.

This empire was not distributed because the neighbors were too close and stealth tech too late. At the borders there was some use of the stockpile like in the two described situations.

So probably will play until I kill the northern main force and then the game is won...

edit:
...which took longer than anticipated. Luckily the AI sent one main fleet on a death mission to my stronghold, opening up the way to its computronium moon. Else it would have taken even longer.
In turn 220 Im finally clearly in the lead. In production is nice, you can see its production going down when I started disrupting the supply lines. And it went up again when it researched the next detection level and killed off my disruptors. Then with my next stealth level, there is again disruption and production going down :)
If the AI researches omni scanner I will need to rebuild my main fleet a bit but not much.
In the end game i sometimes rushed production when i couldnt decide which project should be delayed.
Last edited by Ophiuchus on Tue Dec 19, 2017 2:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

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Oberlus
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Re: Feedback Imperial Stockpile (round 2) - Storage for all

#3 Post by Oberlus »

I haven't had the chance to think of the Interspecies Academy building because I never tried to build it before.

Until now FO had these building classes:
- Empire-unique (only one for empire is possible).
- Group-unique (only one per supply group is useful, so you tend to build only one).
- Planet-unique (only one per planet is possible, and usually you only need these in strategic possitions).

The thing is this building is a new category somewhere in between group-unique and planet-unique, since you can place more than one but only if separate enough from previous academies. I think it is an invitation to micro-management, the more the wider is your empire.
I see it somehow gives some extra flexibility to the IS use limit: if you can place 6 of those, big empire, then you are getting +90 use limit (for a maximum of 115 if I understand the numbers in the table), and you can't place as many if your empire isn't wide enough. However the fixed limit is still a problem, it makes hard to keep a good balance for mid/late game on any possible galaxy configuration (for example, it could be a bit overkilling in low systems/player settings and insufficient for high systems/player settings.

I would change Interspecies Academy to an empire-unique building much like an Industrial Centre, make it more expensive and only give a fixed bonus of +10% to efficiency ratio and a variable increase of the use limit depending on your number of colonies in the empire (probably +1/colony) and then add two tech upgrades for the building (much like IC) that increase the bonus per planet by +1 (0.5?) and the efficiency ratio by +5%. So top tier IA gives you +20% efficiency ratio and +3 use limit per empire colony).
This way there is no need for micromanagement, and the system seems relatively capable of adjusting to the varying conditions that mid/late games can show: the more planets you have, the more you can draw from the IS for a single project in a stranded colony.
With this mechanics, it may be a good idea (or not) to rethink the name and building's concept. Looks more like an Interspecies Imperial Stockpile.

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