Exobots

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Ophiuchus
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Re: Exobots

#16 Post by Ophiuchus »

labgnome wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 5:39 pmPlus as far as balance goes no one was supposed to get gas giants, and now we have Sly so I think we have defiantly moved to even distribution.
The species are still very unevenly distributed between planet types. Most of the good_weapon species have the same preference.

In a certain sense I would like to move Sly back to a single homeworld actually. They provide can-colonize-gasgiants-capability you can not get in another way. I would like the systems/planets to be a lot more empty than they are currently (i.e. colonizing all environments is too easy).

The main reason for the way the Sly are is that for peaceful expansion you should not compete with other species for the environment so you can live in another empire without disturbing it. Unless we make colonize-everywhere happen much later in the game I guess it has to be this way.
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labgnome
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Re: Exobots

#17 Post by labgnome »

Ophiuchus wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 8:22 pmThe species are still very unevenly distributed between planet types. Most of the good_weapon species have the same preference.

Your statement is half-true. The good or better weapons species are found on terran, desert and tundra planets, all close together with the Misasorla native to toxic planets. IMO the solution is not to use planet classes as some kind of awkward, opaque and counter-intuitive balancing mechanism but to design more native species to better fill in the gaps that we have. The native species have gotten a bit more sparse since some of them were made into playable species.
In a certain sense I would like to move Sly back to a single homeworld actually. They provide can-colonize-gasgiants-capability you can not get in another way. I would like the systems/planets to be a lot more empty than they are currently (i.e. colonizing all environments is too easy).
I've had some thoughts on gas giant natives, but have been informed they would be incredibly difficult to balance.
The main reason for the way the Sly are is that for peaceful expansion you should not compete with other species for the environment so you can live in another empire without disturbing it. Unless we make colonize-everywhere happen much later in the game I guess it has to be this way.
This is something that will hopefully be much more possible once there are things like influence projects in the game.
All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.

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Re: Exobots

#18 Post by Ophiuchus »

labgnome wrote: Sat May 18, 2019 6:05 pm
Ophiuchus wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 8:22 pmThe species are still very unevenly distributed between planet types. Most of the good_weapon species have the same preference.

Your statement is half-true. ... IMO the solution is not to use planet classes as some kind of awkward, opaque and counter-intuitive balancing mechanism but to design more native species to better fill in the gaps that we have. The native species have gotten a bit more sparse since some of them were made into playable species.
You should NOT design (game-relevant values of) species in isolation.
If you have a spreadsheet of all the species, the distribution mechanism is neither opaque nor counter-intuitive.
And IMO it is also not awkward. It is one way how you can diversify environments and use it for balancing of species. A species needs a buff? Move it into a sparser populated environment.
Not using this tool and making every environment the same is a waste.

I would not mind making exobots the only radiation-preferring species.

A player mostly works with the content in the current game, so the player does not really need to know about the mechanism (similar to starlane creation - just use what you find). If you are gaming on a level that you need to know probabilities, knowing "all" the species is not a strange requirement.

The problem here is probably "Viele-Köche-verderben-den-Brei". There is rather the need for a design decision (if environments are considered integral part of balancing) and communicating the vision.
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Re: Exobots

#19 Post by labgnome »

Ophiuchus wrote: Tue May 21, 2019 1:37 pmYou should NOT design (game-relevant values of) species in isolation.
I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that we should not cluster species abilities around planet types, and should spread them out so that starting positions are more balanced.
If you have a spreadsheet of all the species, the distribution mechanism is neither opaque nor counter-intuitive.
If you need to build a spreadsheet to understand it then it's not transparent or intuitive.
And IMO it is also not awkward. It is one way how you can diversify environments and use it for balancing of species. A species needs a buff? Move it into a sparser populated environment.
I would describe that as awkward. There is nothing about the environment types in themselves that communicates what a species should be good or bad at. Also treating environments themselves as bonuses or maluses due to how populated they are creates ever-shifting goal-posts to that can be difficult to keep track of that would only necessitate future balance passes after the fact.

From my understanding there are not supposed to be any "good" planet types in Free Orion, and so as a corollary there should not be any "bad" planet types as well. The planet types and species they have don't need to all be the same but planet types themselves shouldn't be good or bad.
All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.

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Re: Exobots

#20 Post by Ophiuchus »

labgnome wrote: Tue May 21, 2019 3:14 pmFrom my understanding there are not supposed to be any "good" planet types in Free Orion, and so as a corollary there should not be any "bad" planet types as well. The planet types and species they have don't need to all be the same but planet types themselves shouldn't be good or bad.
If you do not design the species explicitly for balancing the environments (for which you will need the spreadsheet again) some of the environments will be more crowded than others (so "bad planet type") implicitly and without control.

To make them all-the-same you would need a good-weapon species for each environment, a good-troops species for each environment... and so on.

Also if all environments are the same, having different environments at all makes less sense. Same reasoning could go to star types (why should black holes be better star types than yellow ones?).

So trying to make planet types similar is not a good aim (you still need to do the balancing work and the resulting galaxy is less distinct/more boring).
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