YOR Super Ability has to change

Published on November 22, 2006 By Zydor In Beta Reports

The Super Ability of reducing opponents down to 3 moves that the YOR have needs to be amended. Its way over the top at its current value, and extremely frustrating. Build in game frustrations and you ask for angst from new or casual players. It destroys the flow of the game.

Of course it can be countered by using heavily defended ships with Eyes of the Universe ability, that can just plough thro anything they throw at them on their way to taking out high value influence planets. Thats not the issue.

A new player will be put off the game very rapidly before realising how to counter it, and you'll lose them. The move reduction should not be as harsh, a value of (say) 50% would still achieve the desired result of delaying entry and exit, but without destroying the flow of the game, and the likely the side effect of the player putting their fist thro the screen

An absolute value of 3 move points will just achieve player frustration, not innovation. A percentage value (say 50%)- as opposed to a hard coded absolute value - will gradually degrade the effect over time as opponents fleets get faster, but stilkl achieve the effect of protection when most vulnerable at the early game stages.

Game features have to make sense when placed in context with the rest of the game, or you lose players and gain bad reps. In my view this one makes no sense as it stands.

Regards
Zy

Comments (Page 3)

SleekDD

on Nov 26, 2006

I don't have the beta but the super ability sounds pretty fun. Using influence is a nice means of cordoning off the effects but when hearing of influence starbases, it made me wonder.

Captain: 'As long as we hear those annoying Korx ringtones advertisements on our radio, our engines will be just fine.'

Frogboy

on Nov 26, 2006

So ships gettign 40 moves per turn is not something the AI has been designed to deal with.

DethAdder

on Nov 26, 2006

So ships gettign 40 moves per turn is not something the AI has been designed to deal with.

I was thinking about that after seeing your previous post. Would there be a way to get the AI to focus more on speed and their related tech's. It would be pretty awesome if an AI declared war and next turn you got transports popping out of the fog of war hitting your planets. It would sure change the way people defend their planets. You would have to keep some ships in orbit to combat them, instead of being able to meet them head on, since they'd be on your planets in one turn. It would make improvements such as the orbital fleet manager more useful too, as I've heard a lot of ppl say they don't use them. I use them occasionally, but not as much as they should be used. Just random thoughts.

djhenson

on Nov 26, 2006

i think the yor ability is great! all these new abilities doing something incredible, something that no game has ever made a pleyer do before. something, that until now, was considered impossable.

IT'S MAKING US THINK FOR ONCE!!!!!

this game is just plain great. different maps instead of choosing a custom one, makes me not do this:

ok, new game, do this, do that, then he is going to do that, then i stop him with this.

instead i have to guess, and i think it is pretty wierd i can understand how a warp core works on star trek, or how to properly wage war on a galactic scale, yet my brain shuts down in math class.

djhenson

on Nov 26, 2006

Frogboy

on Nov 26, 2006

The issue of moves per turn goes to the heart of AI programming: The more moves a unit gets, the more possible moves it might make.

Chess AI is only possible because the moves the pieces make are so limited. In GalCiv, it's bad enough that nearly every piece is essentially a king with N moves. But if you give the king 40 moves then any sort of AI strategy goes right out the door.

The GalCiv AI is based on adaptive prediction. That is, based on how the game is going it will try to predict what its opponents (including the human) are going to do. But it can't even remotely predict what units that do more than 8 or so moves can do.

Given it takes a super computer to play chess adequately against the best chess players, one can imagine the complexity of having a competent opponent in GalCiv is as-is on typical hardware.

The problem with ships with 40 or more moves per turn is that they might as well just set the difficulty down lower because that is what they've effectively done.

DethAdder

on Nov 26, 2006

ahh.. I understand the limits now

. It would take some massive processing power to calculate that many probabilities. That also explains the slowdown people have on larger maps with many AI ships, as the AI has a lot of "thinking" to do.

Cetane

on Nov 26, 2006

What I've seen in the metaverse data is that most of the "top players" really are just building obscenely fast ships that strike every alien world in a single turn and wipe it out before the AI can even react.

The argument that a transport of 85 moves to 3 is too harsh really tells me that I need to go back in and make engines cost a lot more space and money.

The game was designed around the assumption that ships would top out at speeds of around 6 to 8 moves per turn. That means the AI was designed looking for ships that might be getting tops in that area.
So ships gettign 40 moves per turn is not something the AI has been designed to deal with.

Would the almighty Frog hand us the script he wants us to play by so us players in the top of the Meta can avoid the perceived cheese and quit violating sacred ground.

I have no idea how to write/build/develop a game. Wouldn't care to try. While I enjoy minor changes to fix issues that develop you must surely realize that no matter what you do we will still find a way to win. Changing cost and size of the engines should be the least of your worries.

I have been playing this game since the first beta and I have enjoyed most of the changes. The ones I don't care for I have adapted to and still manage to get the win. If you really want to fix this thing help the AI with its war fighting ability, economics, and colonization. Better designed ships, not just faster. Better built planets, better use of Star Bases, and have them delcare war by attacking with ships at least in the vicinity of my planets.

Here is my profile so you don't have go searching for it.
F.C.

Frogboy

on Nov 26, 2006

Fuels - my comment is mainly directed at Metaverse players who, having figured out how to "beat" the AI by building ships with 50 moves per turn that strike every planet and conquer all in a single turn think that the AI is "poor" when in fact the problem is that there's no practical defense to such a strategy. No reasonable player could predict someone attackign and moving in forces that are 20 or more spaces away and in a single turn conquering a dozen planets.

Now, where the frustration on my part comes is that these same players then come on the forums and give tips on how the AI should be improved -- not mentioning that they are winning through this tactic (though the metavers data lets us see what happened though it takes some effort on our part). So instead we get endless "the AI needs to do better managing its fleets" or "the AI needs to build up its planets better" as if any of those things would have prevented it from being conquered in a single turn.

I don't blame players for playing the game in any way it allows them to play. It is my job to help make sure that the game is functioning as designed. Ships moving at 20+ moves per turn is not how it was designed to be played. So I'm updating the engine component values.

You'll still have ships zipping around at 12 to 18 moves per turn, which is still difficult. But it'll require a lot more effort.

Cetane

on Nov 26, 2006

understood. it will be interesting to see if speed reduction will infact help the AI that much. I still think their dhows will be no match for my strike groups. And the only reason I have massive strike groups is because of a great economy. i applaud your efforts though.

VR/

VermiciousKnid

on Nov 26, 2006

So I'm updating the engine component values.

Hehe I can't wait for that patch. Get ready for the flood of 'OMG I found a bug engines are insanely large now' threads.

sanddemon

on Nov 26, 2006

Also, something to note Frog is that the +speed racial trait is super expensive...but has little meaning when ships fly at 40 a turn. If stuff was capped at 6-8, that'd make it that much more important.

IztokBitenc

on Nov 27, 2006

Hi!

Ships moving at 20+ moves per turn is not how it was designed to be played. So I'm updating the engine component values.

I support that.

But please don't blame us for playing differently than you supposed.

I already mentioned the fact that high speeds (30+) were too easy to achieve in this game. With ultimate engine it takes only a small fraction of the hull space to move large ship at speed 20+ (IIRC 3 engines). It is true that such a speed helps tremendously to deal with huge bonuses AIs get at highest difficulty levels. I've never been hiding that I'm also playing a "blitzkrieg" style if wars. But from my PoV it's silly that a large or huge ship od several 10000 metric tons travels at speed 20+ with engines almost as large as are in a tiny fighter of 10 metric tons.
So you could increase the sizemod for engines (just please don't touch the weapons sizemod

), and also introduce "diminishing returns" for more engines (speed = base_speed * 0.8 ^ num_of_engines).

And because that's the topic of changing Yor's super ability and you love sqare roots

: why not change the fixed speed limit of 3 to max(3, sqrt(speed))?

BR, Iztok

gypsy2299

on Nov 27, 2006

Frogboy have you considered restricting Ships to one or two engines? Would not this slow down ships as you desire?

Cetane

on Nov 27, 2006

Since you are going to do this why not limit the speed of the ship based on the hull size. Wouldn't that be easier?

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!