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 9)
9 PagesFirst 7 8 9 
on Dec 13, 2006
Reply • Quote (Citizen)Evil StormbringerDecember 13, 2006 14


Cat got your tounge or just premature pushbuttonitis?   
on Dec 13, 2006
Thanx Goldy and Random50. It's the same way for me. I HATE slow moving ships, because um they're slow. I hate it taking forever to get somewhere. NOW I in no way am defending ships with HUGE moves, either. I think that there can be a happy middle ground somewhere.

on Dec 13, 2006
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.



riiight.

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


The player is not designed to deal with speed 16 ships when limited to "6 to 8 moves per turn".

How dare those humans steal our tactic!

(all in good humor)
on Dec 14, 2006
Cat got your tounge or just premature pushbuttonitis?


Premature "pushbuttonitis"!
on Jan 06, 2007
I've got another suggestion for speed balancing:

Make the starbase interdiction module continue to reduce the speed of slow ships by 1, but also cap the speed of fast ships (at about 10). Instead of clipping the movepoints to the max speed, it should deduct the drop in max movepoints from the available movepoints. So if a ship with speed 25 (which I guess is still possible with Ultradrive and best miniaturization but big engines) moves 5 hexes and enters a starbase ZOE, both max and current movepoints drop by 15, so it's got 5/10. Next rule, negative available movepoints get charged against health. So if you moved 20 hexes, leaving you with 5/25, and entered the ZOE, you still lose 15 movepoints, doing 10 damage to each hull in the fleet. Probably that damage should be adjusted by hull size (tiny take 1 damage for every 2 negative movepoints, small 2:3, medium 1:1, large 4:3, huge 3:2) Kinda like space thickened up or something (think what would happen if you didn't slow down before entering atmosphere...)

Another thing that could be done is to adjust engine speed vs mass. A troop transport with a billion soldiers has a lot more mass than a cruiser with a dozen crew and some spare ammo.
on Jan 18, 2007
If I was going to suggest any change for the Yor ability it would be to make the speed the square root of the ships normal speed with a minimum of 2.

Then the fastest you could go would probably be 10 (normal speed = 100) or so. Most late game ships would move around 5 to 8, depending on the players playing style.

The nice thing about this is that it would be very easy to calculate the remaining speed available when entering or leaving the interdiction zone.
on Jan 19, 2007
Strongly disagree. I think the Yor ship speed cap is awesome.
on Jan 21, 2007
What is challenging about the Yor is that anything in their influence is slow *AND* Yor are hard to culture flip. Only way to push their influence back is to go to war (or get your friends to).
on Jan 21, 2007
Making friends with the Yor and building influence base trails could work. Even if they're hard to culture flip, I've seldom seen them become major influence players.

In one of my DA games I built a "bypass" by using inf bases to lop an edge of their open-space inflenece area. This cleared a path that for ships from my "provinces" that I put on autopilot to rally points in my core territory.
9 PagesFirst 7 8 9