Next steps

Creation, discussion, and balancing of game content such as techs, buildings, ship parts.

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Aquitaine
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Next steps

#1 Post by Aquitaine »

The next step for you enterprising forum types is to crank out some numbers. Playtesting time!

Before we can start designing techs, we need to know (rough) levels of how many RP are produced by Empires. Obviously the v0.2 numbers will change once we add tech that affects your RP production, but we need someplace to start.

What I'd like folks to do is to play through v0.2 with this in mind. Play through three different ways:

- Focus your entire empire on military expansion with minimal RP focus
- Balanced focuses
- Heavy focus on RP

Record the number of RP you produce at:
- Turn 1
- Turn 10
- Turn 25
- Turn 50
- Turn 75
- Turn 90
- Turn 100

Go further if you want, but that should be enough to get us going.

I know we could simulate these numbers using the formulae we have, but I'd much rather get actual data from the game. This is tedious, but hey, welcome to being a designer...
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

noelte
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#2 Post by noelte »

Before we can start designing techs, we need to know (rough) levels of how many RP are produced by Empires.
Why? I would rather say, we need to know, how much more rp's are needed for tech b (related to tech a) and maybe how the production of rp's will scale at time.


EDIT: Ok, i get it. You meant, we should see how many RPs are currently generated .....
Press any key to continue or any other key to cancel.
Can COWs fly?

Aquitaine
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#3 Post by Aquitaine »

Right. :)

I don't think anybody is pretending like the numbers we come up with vor v0.31 will be anything like the final ones, but I'd rather not just have arbitrary RP costs from the beginning. And judging by the brainstorming board, it appears as though we have a lot of people around here with too much time on their hands.... :P
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

muxec
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#4 Post by muxec »

Played v0.2 did not build any defences and so on, in real game with working AI would be imposible. Balanced focus, colonize all.
RP in turn:
1 - 85
10 - 100
25 - 143
50 - 329
62 - 490

Too boring, no, I can't any more.

Best wishes

Bastian-Bux
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Location: Kassel / Germany

#5 Post by Bastian-Bux »

Well, I try a max production = colonisation, min research approach.

- Turn 1 80 rp, 80 pp
- Turn 10 95 rp, 103 pp
- Turn 25 110 rp, 158 pp
- Turn 50 126 rp, 332 pp
- Turn 75
- Turn 90
- Turn 100

To be continued while finishing.

MisterMerf
Space Squid
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Location: Saint Paul, MN (USA)

#6 Post by MisterMerf »

I was aggressively expansionist for 62 turns and then switched over to RP production. My results:

1 - 80 RP
11 - 101 RP
21 - 125 RP
31 - 155 RP
41 - 183 RP
51 - 285 RP
61 - 522 RP
______________-
71 - 1174 RP
81 - 1845 RP
91 - 3211 RP
101 - 4103 RP


Mark III Completed - Turn 32
Mark IV Completed - Turn 51

Aquitaine
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#7 Post by Aquitaine »

Wow, big jump from 51 to 61.

FYI: The RP production system is different in v0.3 (with meters) so these numbers are definitely not The Bible of RP Production, but it should give us a guideline. Thanks to those of you who have participated.

We also need to come up with the multipliers we want to use based on galaxy size (since if you're playing in a real small galaxy, the growth curve is going to flatline). What size galaxies have you guys been using?
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

Bastian-Bux
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#8 Post by Bastian-Bux »

Giant, with all candy ^^.

Thought that would be fastest way to get RP.

The explanation for some of the huge jumps you see is the starting planet.

Its so huge and powerfull compared with all new colonies, that you'll not be able to set even a secondary priority until at least turn 30 (I often wait till 45). So till this very moment you carry an unused overproduction of food and RP with you. Actually even with highest colonization I had till the 60s a food overproduction, from homeplanet alone.

This will definitely change with the v.3 version, as we will have a totally different playing with the new meters. So Aquitaine, take our numbers with a lot of salt ^^.

Scrapped the other stuff, had nothing to do with this thread ^^.

Aquitaine
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#9 Post by Aquitaine »

It's quite likely that games will last longer than 100 turns, but I'm going to use these numbers as a basis and invent a lot of the others. I think it is a safe assumption that overall RP production will go down with the addition of meters, but tweaking RP costs later is pretty trivial.

What we need to do now is figure out an overall plan for technology tiers -- that is, early game, mid-game, late-game. We are fairly limited here because we are only dealing with a subset of the overall tree, but it would be nice to have some idea of structure before we start inventing stuff on the fly.

It seems like we can bank on the first ten turns producing 80-100 RP, so let's start at the very beginning and then I'll make a bunch of new threads sometime next week and make an announcement about how this mess will be managed. I'd like a few volunteers to oversee categories, though -- your job will basically be to direct discussion for something as small as an individual tech tree tier (1 theory and related applications) or as large as an entire category. I think the input we will get on these will outpace my ability to moderate all of it, so I gotta ask you guys for help on this one.

There will be one thread containing the finished results from each category, and one brainstorming thread (not on the brainstorming board) for each category. Beyond that, we may have one thread for each 'tier.' I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to break this down just yet.

getting there!
Aq
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

drek
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#10 Post by drek »

erm,

the above was me.

MisterMerf
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#11 Post by MisterMerf »

The example I posted was about a 125 star galaxy (where I obviously had access to the whole thing ...).

Bastian-Bux
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#12 Post by Bastian-Bux »

Hmm, as it looks like drek is right about that 30. Nearly every race will have to set meters in a way that research is minimized (to maximize the colonisation). So the numbers will be at 25-33% of what we see now.

So looking at our numbers I'd make the following guess:

~25-30 RP turns 1-10
~30-35 RP turns 11-20
~35-45 RP turns 21-30
~45-55 RP turns 31-40
~60-80 RP turns 41-50

With v.02 I had the feeling that the starting systems came into early blossom ard turn 40. After turn 60 at least the starting system had served its purpose as industrial motor, and could move on to producing food an/or research. v.03 will be a bit faster, as we can funnel more early power into colonization effords, but it wont be that much faster (due to population growth speed).

So I'd suggest that the first research shouldn't come earlier then turn 10, so would cost ard 250-300 RP to complete. Maybe make the tier 1 research 5 turns á 50 RP. This way a "standard" race will be able to get the first tech after 8-10 turns, while a research heavy race (which would use our current numbers I guess) would be able to have 2 research going one from the start, and would have finished 4 at turn 11 or 12.

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skdiw
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#13 Post by skdiw »

I suggest use a simple formula like a power function or a recursive function for the cost of a tech like rp_cost_at_some_tech_lvl = K * tech_lvl ^ a, where K and a are constant. A power function will have the cost behavior such that the cost of basic tech early in the game will be low, some special focus will be needed for effective research in the mid-game, and highly specific during the late game. Each tech will belong to a certain tech lvl and the tech available for research is all the tech lvls researched added together so this makes the prerequisites system based on lvls much easier and less confusing and also makes balancing the tech tree much easier so you don't have to manipulate as many variables for every tech. What you can do to makes things even easier, for the purpose of testing and v.03, is make the cost relative to the game, that is pool every players rp together then divide that number by the number of players to get the average rp generated per player, and use that average number to solve for constants K or a such that a typical player can get a tech or two in ~ 10 turns. We can use constants K and a for analysis and for AI for latter versions of the game.
:mrgreen:

Aquitaine
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The next next step...

#14 Post by Aquitaine »

Look! New threads! And they're all locked! *entice* *entice*

I need volunteers to moderate these threads. I've heard from a couple of you, but if you're interested, please email me at [email protected], and indicate any preference as to which category you'd like (or if you'd like more than one). Preference will be given based on seniority and, well, despotism on my part. Rules are as follows:

- Your job, as moderator, is to determine the best way to get the results needed by the design team. How you do this is totally up to you. You can make people email you and post results, you can post ASCII hieroglyphics and make people decipher them, but I'd probably recommend some kind of organized submission process. But the point of this rule is that I will not be personally guiding every single one of these. I will be monitoring them for general project standards and such, but this is a chance for those of who you have been wanting a chance to 'do something' to do it!

- Before anyone contributes to these threads, please be certain you have read and understood the Effects Document since that's the official language of the tech tree (other than Spathi.)

- It is unlikely that anyone from On High is going to step in after you've done all this work and be like 'wtf this category sucks we're doing it my way.' With that in mind, this is just the tree for v0.31, and this process will start all over again for each category that gets added. So there's no guarantee that the tree that passes for v0.31 will in any way resemble v1.0. I think most everyone understands this though.

- We do reserve the right to change completely any of the fluff parts of the techs -- the name or the description. Partially this will be left up to the art folks as well, since they have to produce assets for each of these, and there's only so much farm art you can put in a game.

What to do now: Email me if you want to volunteer to moderate a thread. Obviously, don't moderate threads other than yours on this board. As always, if stuff is getting out of hand, report it to myself or Tyreth.

Thanks,
Aq
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

solartrix
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#15 Post by solartrix »

AQ - Don't know if you're still looking for RP numbers, but here are a couple of sets. 1st with balanced production thru all 81 turns, the 2nd with focus on pp the first 41 turns, then a gradual shift to balanced pp/mining/rp.

Turn - 1st game - 2nd game

11 - 102 - 96
21 - 141 - 108
31 - 196 - 118
41 - 275 - 151
51 - 485 - 326
61 - 651 - 471
71 - 811 - 764
81 - 1007 - 1180

In both games I took over one other race's homeworld. It was about mid-game in the first game, and then right at the end in the 2nd game.

Hope this helps...

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