Blackspace!

[Kayerts]

I propose scaling the TPH by ship size instead of number of engines, via the formula:

TPH = 1+ rto / ( Size ^ (1.2 + 0.1*Size/100) )

I propose that this formula suck it.

I'm kidding, although my inner math nerd gets terribly upset when it sees 0.1 * [term] / 100. Still, I don't think any good design leads to making 10000 engines = 1 engine on a sufficiently big ship, and that's what exponential growth in the denominator will get you.

DU, if audience participation is indeed desired here, could you throw out a few target points you'd like the formula to hit? So, e.g., a size 100 ship with 30 Cijaas should have X tph, a size 500 with 50 impulse arrays should have Y, a size 1000000 ship with 500000 impulse arrays should have Z, etc.

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

Still, I don't think any good design leads to making 10000 engines = 1 engine on a sufficiently big ship, and that's what exponential growth in the denominator will get you.

Ships aren't really meant to grow to size 500,000, you know

But if it really bothers you:

TPH = 1 + rto / Size^( 1.2 + 0.2*tanh(Size/200) )

 

[Kayerts]

Ha, right, and I actually like your new formula.

But the point of the size 1 million ship example was to establish bounds for the continuum. Obviously the big guy is going to get the short end of the formulaic stick, but it forces the consideration of how short exactly that should be. The current result (1 tph) is probably too low. What's too high?

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

Ultimately it should be a question of combat balance and time constants required to achieve a certain status (and thus it also depends on combat and trade mechanics and other things).

But bearing in mind that one of the design goals DU has stated is 7 TPH for big ships, and that ships should never be bigger than size 1,000, the above formula seems like a good place to start (perhaps with some tweaking).

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

Jumpgate #1 found at -118, 122
Seems to be dormant.

 

[Kayerts]

Sure, but I don't think he's done the things he needs to do to have lower general Tph and still keep the game playable. Moreover, not all big ships are created equal; how many engines to buy should still be a meaningful question even for the big guys, so there should be some significant variation there.

By the way, DU, I tried creating a new account. The signup screen provides some much-needed info, so that's good. The screenshots you used are kind of hilarious due to the chat logs; e.g. the first line in the image for "Conquer" is me talking about how I crashed the combat system. Overall I'd say things look pretty good, although I would highly recommend offering at least a basic scanner at Ahbet. If you don't, I doubt most new players will ever find Melcar.

 

[villain of the story]

What is and what isn't supposed to happen are way too retarded arguments and shit is way too fucking astronomically expensive to afford when the biggest ship size is to be 1K anyway, ie. credit-grinding will be an abysmal job, no different than just about any zombie-grind game out there.

Before the FUCK-UP(tm), growth of wealth was balanced by these astronomical prices. Look at the top 10 fat jews:

1. Relationship (Faceless Man) $24,498,890,168,177,000
2. Implausibly Large (Legion of Idiots) $389,877,450,449,250
3. Squish Tickle (Wild Slop) $788,169,302,610
4. ToddHowardiser (villain of the story) $774,902,639,449
5. Tranquillity (deniz) $391,783,404,336
6. Starscream (Spectral Miasma) $203,486,855,869
7. Insomniac (denizsi) $190,596,695,542
8. HMS Squatting Dutchman (Sitra Achara) $113,755,307,833
9. Heart of Gold (Kayerts) $90,597,096,686
10. Master of the Universe (Baron) $79,531,978,866

Apart from the first two, who probably got their wealth through early exploits, which one could take from the immeasurably high gap (and in-game messages), "distribution" of wealth was looking to get naturally curbed and balance towards the $1T mark and combat was just starting to take off with people generating enough credits to feel courageous about going out guns blazing. Not exactly possible now, since there's no sense in sinking my precious credits into a worthless piece of shit that can do pew pew and be done for.

If sinking time into this senseless bullshit is what you want, fine. Personally, I'd like to spend as little time on credit-grinding and more on combat and have FUN! and was expecting DU to take measures, without nerfing everything at once, to make combat a more viable option to compensate for how fucking difficult it is to even catch and attack someone. And around size 500-2500, it becomes just enough to generate enough wealth in a relatively short time (eg. a few days with a few 1:3 Robotics surges) to patch up a combat ship, have your fun, get destroyed and pick up where you left with a minor setback. Now, shit will take too much time and money to even patch up a combat ship.

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

Perhaps it's just a matter of perception - I view playing the game as dicking around in an alpha test. Come next week, you'll have 20 new game mechanics and features and price changes and what not. So I don't expect everything to be balanced every step of the way.

 

[villain of the story]

Why do you lie?

 

[DarkUnderlord]

DU, if audience participation is indeed desired here, could you throw out a few target points you'd like the formula to hit? So, e.g., a size 100 ship with 30 Cijaas should have X tph, a size 500 with 50 impulse arrays should have Y, a size 1000000 ship with 500000 impulse arrays should have Z, etc.

The fastest speed achievable should be 56 T/ph. This would likely be from the biggest engine sitting on the smallest possible ship you can put it on, with just enough power plants to run it. Think rocket-sled.

Larger ships should always move slower than smaller ships - even if they devote an equal percentage of space to engines.

Larger ships will have other means of travelling long distances (you've already found hints at two methods).

Big ships should be able to achieve 5 - 7 T/ph without devoting their entire space to engines. Those ships that do devote their entire space to engines shouldn't move all that much faster than 12 T/ph (depending on their size).

It would be nice if there was some benefit in having 1 large engine and 2 smaller engines or multiple engine types. EG: 1 Large Engine with 2 Smaller ones might take up less room than 2 Large Engines and maybe use less power but still move at a reasonable speed.

There's obviously some sort of thrust, sc and pu consideration in all of this to balance it all. Cost is a factor too but I won't look at that more deeply until I re-work trading.

 

[deus101]

BAH! I wasted my initial 500 clicks fucking around and forgetting where the stations where.

 

[Wild Slop]

for the scanerless directionless

A goodwill basic star map

--- The Core ---

[-5,8] Ahbet
[-6,-7] Jola-7
[-11,-10] The Edge
[ 6,-9 ] Melcar Mining

--- "uncharted" ----

[47,-62] Lonak Research
[73,27] JK-Weapons Sys
[21,56] HWD Lab
[-43,-18] Eitec Industries
[-13,85] Laser Beam Test Facility
[-74,88] Aulos *Only one of several planets in this system that isn't barren.

 

[villain of the story]

I demand avatars for ships so you see ships' avatars in sectors. Might as well go fullblown next-gen since the game has turned shit.

I'd like this to be my ship avatar:

 

[DarkUnderlord]

What is and what isn't supposed to happen are way too retarded arguments and shit is way too fucking astronomically expensive to afford when the biggest ship size is to be 1K anyway, ie. credit-grinding will be an abysmal job, no different than just about any zombie-grind game out there.

Before the FUCK-UP(tm), growth of wealth was balanced by these astronomical prices. Look at the top 10 fat jews:

1. Relationship (Faceless Man) $24,498,890,168,177,000
2. Implausibly Large (Legion of Idiots) $389,877,450,449,250
3. Squish Tickle (Wild Slop) $788,169,302,610
4. ToddHowardiser (villain of the story) $774,902,639,449

Stats as of now:

• 1. Relationship (Faceless Man) $24,498,890,168,177,000
  2. Implausibly Large (Legion of Idiots) $389,866,550,780,020
  3. ToddHowardiser (villain of the story) $932,777,393,116

So you made $157,874,753,667 - that is one-hundred and fifty seven billion dollars - since posting that this afternoon, so that now you're sitting on a $932 billion dollar fortune and yet you're whining about people's inability to make insane amounts of money?

The most expensive piece of equipment in the game is the Nova reactor at a base price of $298 million. With your total net worth you could buy 3,122 of them, which incidentally would require a ship with 17 million structural capacity - or over size 200,000 with the standard 80 Hull... a size that clearly ships were never meant to get anywhere near... and yet somehow things are stupidly expensive?

With just one third of that cash you can easily buy a size 1,000 ship, fit it out with weapons and go nuts and kill practically any of the other players in the game with atk and def ratings in the thousands which would be more than a match against any of the ships in the top 25 (excluding "the biggest two who exploited" as you said). And yet you reckon you don't have enough cash to go nuts killing things?

Riiight.

Now, shit will take too much time and money to even patch up a combat ship.

I took on Faceless Man when he was size... 10,000 I think? With a size 200 or so ship and almost killed him in 5 rounds. That was before the combat system was re-balanced even more in favour of smaller ships.

Sadly Faceless Man has now learned the value of high mobility weapons and due to his sheer size does mean a fairly hefty ship has to go up against him because even 1% of his heavy weapons hitting can hit hard and even though his high mobility weapons do pissant damage, he has enough of them that it adds up- but a size 5,000 can survive a couple of rounds and dish out a few million damage to him depending exactly on how it's fitted out - which seems about right given the comparative sizes (Size 500k vs a ship 1% that size).

Also sadly, a size 5,000 ship does cost about $5 Trillion which you shouldn't be getting anywhere near now but again, considering Faceless Man's size 500,000 costs somewhere in the vicinity of $54,629,169,838,314,212 that seems cheap by comparison. Either way, Faceless Man will be dealt with soon enough and if you have a brain, you should be realising that 5 Trillion out of however you say that other number is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. Which if you work it backwards, means size 1,000 ships should be very, very afraid of much smaller and significantly cheaper ships.

That said I'm still gathering combat data before I re-balance the weapons but as it stands, believe me when I say that small, cheap ships have a good chance of taking out the big guns. The only downside is that yes, it does take a couple of rounds - but are you really bitching that you can't one-hit things? 'cause I guarantee you that if I made one-hit kills possible, you'd be the first to bitch about your size 1k ship being one-hit killed.

 

[Kayerts]

I took on Faceless Man when he was size... 10,000 I think? With a size 200 or so ship and almost killed him in 5 rounds. That was before the combat system was re-balanced even more in favour of smaller ships.

It was actually size ~3300 vs 70, but basically the same ratio. I'm not totally confident that combat was rebalanced in favor of smaller ships, though, since I think at the time there was a bug that made bigger ships do no/negligible damage to sufficiently smaller ones. Still, you're very right about big ships needing to fear smaller ones, mostly for two reasons:

(1) Getting big becomes increasingly inefficient cost-wise, in terms of credits to combat benefits.
(2) Getting big is also inefficient combat-wise, since standard weapons do around ten times the damage per SC that turrets do.

Anyway, I already said this in the in-game commlink, but in case anyone else shared Villain's concerns: the two big ships aren't a threat. They don't actually hunt little guys. They sometimes hover over planets, where occasionally little guys attack them, for reasons that escape me. (Maybe they think all 40K of the Implausibly Large's turrets will miss? I guess they feel lucky.) Regardless, they don't seek out combat. They are an utter nonfactor in PvP. The only reason they have guns at all are for PvE encounters, in which they are by far the underdogs.

If you still want to form a Rebel Alliance to try to assassinate the rightful Emperor and Defender of Mankind, be my guest, but (a) DU is probably going to solve that particular problem for you and (b) until then, they can be safely ignored.*
*Also, you will probably die if you try. But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and/or oblivion.

Regarding the thrust formula, I'll try to work something out. There are some dynamics that make the function nontrivial to design (differing hull sizes, power efficiency scaling favorably with size, etc.), and there a few parameters I have to guess at, but the goals provided should be plenty to work with.

 

[deus101]

the hell...i dont even have a POWER SOURCE...i was sure i bought one....

Damnit....can someone blow me up so i can start anew

 

[villain of the story]

So you made $157,874,753,667 - that is one-hundred and fifty seven billion dollars - since posting that this afternoon, so that now you're sitting on a $932 billion dollar fortune and yet you're whining about people's inability to make insane amounts of money?

Obviously it was the last time I made any significant sum like that due to the new thrust formula. I had to spend all the clicks I had left, which was a meager 500, on those last trade rounds. Now I've downsized my ship from 2500 to 473, replaced all Cijaa engines with the much more space efficient AGA9 engines (as many as my 5 Nova generators can power) and now I get 5.01 clicks as opposed to 1.88 from before. YAY SO MANY CLICKSES, CANT WAIT TO SEE IT MAX AT 500 IN 4 DAYS AGAIN!!

The most expensive piece of equipment in the game is the Nova reactor at a base price of $298 million. With your total net worth you could buy 3,122 of them, which incidentally would require a ship with 17 million structural capacity - or over size 200,000 with the standard 80 Hull... a size that clearly ships were never meant to get anywhere near... and yet somehow things are stupidly expensive?

Why do say that when you also say:

Also sadly, a size 5,000 ship does cost about $5 Trillion which you shouldn't be getting anywhere near now

I wasn't getting anywhere near that size then; even enlarging my ship from 1000-and-something to 2500 had cost me nearly all of my credits -around 600B at the time- and earning that amount back wasn't exactly a day's job; and not an inch further now, now we're out of precious clicks.

With just one third of that cash you can easily buy a size 1,000 ship, fit it out with weapons and go nuts and kill practically any of the other players in the game with atk and def ratings in the thousands which would be more than a match against any of the ships in the top 25 (excluding "the biggest two who exploited" as you said). And yet you reckon you don't have enough cash to go nuts killing things?

And from where exactly would these clicks required for chasing and attacking ships with my size 1000 ship come? Kind of impossible when the highest Thrust you can possibly have with a ship at that size is around 3 (three) and that is with the *entire* structural capacity used up on engines. Anything less and the thrust is something pathethic in the 1.0 to 2.0 range. So yeah, great math skills there!

Now, shit will take too much time and money to even patch up a combat ship.

I took on Faceless Man when he was size... 10,000 I think? With a size 200 or so ship and almost killed him in 5 rounds. That was before the combat system was re-balanced even more in favour of smaller ships.

Also sadly, a size 5,000 ship does cost about $5 Trillion which you shouldn't be getting anywhere near now but again, considering Faceless Man's size 500,000 costs somewhere in the vicinity of $54,629,169,838,314,212 that seems cheap by comparison. Either way, Faceless Man will be dealt with soon enough and if you have a brain, you should be realising that 5 Trillion out of however you say that other number is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. Which if you work it backwards, means size 1,000 ships should be very, very afraid of much smaller and significantly cheaper ships.

Clicks, man. It's all about the fucking clicks. Not enough clicks = no trading = no money = no combat. Yes, I could quickly burn through what money I have so far amassed real quick for a few fun combat rounds and then never get even close to the same level of wealth since bigger the ship, less clicks and less trade rounds.

I'm not bitching about not one-hitting anything or stuff being too expensive. I'm bitching that the new thrust scheme sucks ass and takes away all the opportunity unless you are insignificantly small to ever see any substantial benefit from trading. I don't care if you make it so that a small ship could enter the asshole of my 1K sized ship, avoid all attacks and pull a one-hit Death Star anus run on me. I just want the precious clicks back. CLICKSES! WE LIKES CLICKSES!

 

[Johannes]

Anyway, I already said this in the in-game commlink, but in case anyone else shared Villain's concerns: the two big ships aren't a threat. They don't actually hunt little guys. They sometimes hover over planets, where occasionally little guys attack them, for reasons that escape me. (Maybe they think all 40K of the Implausibly Large's turrets will miss? I guess they feel lucky.)

Because there's not so much to do so might as well try the combat system out - how many misses until my mobility 16 ship gets hit?

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

He's probably stuffed with 50% mobility weapons, which means ~50% chance to hit per weapon X a million squillion bajillion guns. So, I wouldn't try that if I were you.

Also, I've toyed with the engines formula, came up with this:

1. TPH = 1 + rto/size, as before
2. Instead of directly scaling TPH, scale the power requirements non-linearly.
3. In order to achieve benefit from multiple engine types, scale their power requirements individually.
4. The form of PU scaling should be of the form:

 Total PU required = base pu * number of engines * scale factor

Where the scale factor is of the form:

scale factor = 1 + A * log10(number of engines)^B

A,B should be tailored for every engine to produce reasonable results. I've seen decent results with A = 10, B = 3.5 for Plasma engines and A = 5, B = 8 for Cijaas (haven't messed with Judsons yet).

Alternately, just build a lookup table with custom numbers that suit you, or do so in Excel for a few points and interpolate with your curve of choice.

Also, if you choose this route, you should give a heads up so players can prepare.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I just want the precious clicks back. CLICKSES! WE LIKES CLICKSES!

Fuck you and fuck your clickses!

4. The form of PU scaling should be of the form:

I thought of that and decided I didn't want to. Currently the formula that runs Thrust is the same one that works scanners and comms too - and they seem to be fine. Then again I did manage to spend a bit more time on those. I don't want to go down the path of messing with power because I think that's just going to add more headaches when it comes to working shit out.

At this stage I've been designing larger engines and the formula I have is good in one respect: I can have massive engines with insane rto but worse rto / sc ratios than smaller engines but because there's a diminishing return by number of engines, less is actually better. The only downside is that yes, adding one smaller engine reduces the overall thrust. I can tweak that but it may not be what I want. The other downside is it creates an absolute limit. There's a point where adding more engines is useless and you may as well just forgo them all and stick with your +1 Thrust. Which is just stupid.

Part of the decisions involved is the distance between systems too and just how far you should really be able to travel. How many days it takes to get to another system and so on - though I'll hopefully have another solution for that too shortly.

Anyway, I've done a temp "fix" until I work something out.

 

[villain of the story]

 

[Kayerts]

I thought of that and decided I didn't want to. Currently the formula that runs Thrust is the same one that works scanners and comms too - and they seem to be fine. Then again I did manage to spend a bit more time on those.

No, those don't work, either; it's just harder to tell that this isn't intentional. Scanner range drops if you add a low range computer of a higher information density. This didn't seem jarringly illogical to me at first, but it's not like you get "data" information on objects that exceed the "data" range; buying a data computer just shrinks your scanner range for no apparent reason.

It's more noticeable with comm scanners, where your data banks can shrink if you buy additional comm devices. (Unrelatedly, I don't see value in additional comm devices, aside from more storage; it's not like we were running out of frequency range.)

Anyway, non-monotonicity (i.e., this property) is an undesirable quality in a diminishing return function. I don't understand why you want to handle diminishing returns on a per-equipment basis. Doesn't it make a lot more sense to do diminishing returns based on the sum of the conferred quantity (or sum and size, in the case of thrust)? So, for example, instead of doing this weird thing whereby:

2x comm. devices with 22 data banks = 36 data storage
2x comm. devices with 22 data banks + 1x comm device with 5 data banks = 33 data storage (somehow)

because you're dividing out the number of units of equipment, why not just calculate raw data banks and plot it on some asymptotic function? So:

2x comm. devices with 22 data banks = 44 rdb; someAsymptoticFunction(44) = 36
2x comm. devices with 22 data banks + 1x comm device with 5 data banks = 49 rdb; someAsymptoticFunction(49) = say 37

I saw what you wrote about big engines, but that seems like a complication whose sole impact on gameplay is to handicap size, which you can do much more straightforwardly through directly hobbling size in the the thrust calculations.

 

[Ninja Cartographer]

Flying Saucer spotted at -139, -138, hanging around an asteroid field.

 

[Temaperacl]

Flying Saucer spotted at -139, -138, hanging around an asteroid field.

For those like me who keep blowing up their ship and have a bad memory for where things are, here is a small map of the core area thanks to 700 or so the new sensor devices:

 

[villain of the story]

What's in the cluster in the bottom left?