R 22 Construction/Production
 

Some of us had the privelidge (sarcasm) of playing in the closed Beta of R22.
During which time some substantial changes were made to the way ship production was implemented, and a requirement for each planet to build numerous ship production factories of each type.

The "idea" behind this was to make the production of ships a more realistic, in that the more you built the longer it took for a given number of factories.

So now it is no longer possible to play your planet the way it used to be (R21<).

Essentially you will need a minimum of 5 of each factory type, and that will probably mean producing ships every 5 or so ticks to get them in anything like a reasonable time.

If you attempt to save a few days resources and build ships, it could take hundreds of ticks for them to arrive. (not an exageration).

I made numerous complaints about the issues in the closed beta and was more or less told to "shut up and live with it as it will not be changed."

After a couple of days in the closed beta, i realised that this was true, and that no changes to this "feature" would be made so I stopped playing, in the hope that maybe it would change.

Today the open Beta started, along with new ship stats, well u guessed it, nothing changed they kept the stupid idea.

Well played Planetarion, you have implemented the worst ever change to the game since the idiot who invented PDS.

I have heard all the arguments for this idea, and to be honest there is a need for something to be done to stop resource hoarding/donations, distorter whoring and for the game to evolve.

This frankly is not it.

I am beyond caring what is done to the game, I was under the missguided impression that the opinions of beta testers was actually wanted, but it seems not, all they want are people to test the game, not actually contribute to it's development. And if you complain about it get told to shut up as it wont be changed and to live with it.

R22 is the death knell of planetarion, and certainly a round I wont be playing under the current "features"

Judge

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

This is another proof of why the current "staff" is incapable of doing anything positive for the game.

first they "dumb it down" to its current level to attract new players, then they manage to do something as stupid as this, prolly under the influence of heave drugs.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Surely they can't be that stupid. That would make self covering impossible.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Self covering is now very difficult unless u put po on max construction workers and build like 15 factories of each type. And i u do that u cant build any other constructions :D

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

The question is ofc, is that a good thing?

The self cover option was a good one since people didn't solely have to rely on alliance and galaxy in order to defend themselves, but now they have to.. not sure if its a good thing.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I dont agree with the stuff you said about not listening Judge as they did listen and they did shorten the time needed to build ships.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

A bad idea, remains a bad idea no matter how much it is tinkered with.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

my idea of the factories was better, the number of factories determ the amount of ship you can build eatch tick, the present system sounds sucky

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

The entire idea of using factories as a limiter sucks major ass. robban's suggestion is feasible although (as do most ideas) needs a touch of refining.


An alternative way to do something about stockpiles would be to tax peoples' stockpiles every tick :)

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Its well known that PA team to ver little extent listen to the players8and then often to the wrong players).

The coming round looks to become one of the worst in a long time and the big problem is that after the round is over pa team will just 'twas a free round, so were allowed to experiment so plz stfu'

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

why in gods name is this neccessary; stockpiling is a valid tactic; everyone can do it and there is absolutly no need to "fix" or nerve it. this is one of the worst ideas in the last 10 rounds. it is just another limitation and you take another tactic away. and more limitations is the very last thing PA needs.

whoever came up with this idea should reconsider it and if he/she insists on implementing this crap he/she should step down and leave the PA crew. the intentions might be good, but intentions alone won't do anything good if someone lacks the brain to come up with good ideas.

not that it would surprise me to hear that, but it still pisses me off. this is something that i heard too often about the PA crew. who knows better what the community wants than the community itself?
i just can't understand why this is so hard for the PA crew to grasp :/

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

thats your take on it not mine :D

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Except from complaints that stockpiling is no longer usefull, is there any other problem with this or did they implement a change that actually works well as intended?

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

seconded.
please change it - add more ways of playing instead of removing them!

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

this new shit that ppl need factories that they can build theyr ships so fast that no need to wait 3 days just get ppl build less amps and then need more scanners even best thing is that someone change scanning system that no need scanners at all and now game is harder to learn for new players. and why pateam make all these new things what dont work good and make game suck more and not first fix things whats not work good before make new shitty things.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I had actually been thinking of playing this round, but after playing the beta today, Im in doubt.

Im not impressed at all. Not by the stats, not by the handling of it, not by the "features".

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Whilst I appreciate the sentiments expressed in this thread, I do feel that "jumping on the bandwagon" is perhaps an appropriate phrase. When converting to this slightly more "realistic" and "real time" view of research, construction and production, the PA Team really did have a harder time on the Production front than others.

Firstly:
I checked the average (and maximum resources) of the top planets a day before the final ticks of the last round - when stockpiling was at it's highest, I think you'll find - I've found the following:

Top 100 planets:
average of 200 mil resources stored / in production
Top 50 planets:
average of 250 mil resources stored / in production.

the maximum was someone with almost 900 mil resources, but I'm taking him as an exception for now.

When I did a quick check a few days before the end of last round, I found that pre end-of-round buying, the biggest amount of resources in ships was 60 million, which had no close second or third amounts.

Now, for this end of round buying, I took 350 mil resources (just to cover all bases). In all cases workers were on 35%.
7 factories - 27 ticks
10 factories - 20 ticks
20 factories - 11 ticks.

Whilst these figures are still not as 'low' as normal, they're not quite "hundreds". I don't think that it takes 'a few days' to stockpile 350 mil resources.
Edit: if you're quoting figures that you actually worked out, then they have to be, as Ace said, before we changed the formula when we weren't listening.

10 factories, 50 mil resources, 9 ticks.

Now, moving onto the stockpiling issue.

As far as I can see, there's 2 major issues:

1) building factories means you can't build distorters / finance centres (let's face it, they're the two major things people invest in)

2) I can't build my way out of incomings very easily.

Those posting here seem to be complaining that we're forcing you to make a choice. We're not making it more difficult to stockpile, we're just making it come at a cost if you want to produce ships quickly. We're saying "you can continue playing how you were, but this means that it'll cost you in production time". It's clear that you don't see it as this.

Instead of tossing a coin and chosing between finance centres and distorters, you now have to think and decide if it might be putting some more weight into factories. If anything, surely this would reduce the number of distorter planets, therefore meaning that fewer specialist scanners are needed? I admit that scanners will have an advantage (so much so I almost thought it was a good idea to change the amps vs distorters balance somehow).
In general, I can't see how it fails to do anything but add some sort of diversity. You can chose to cover yourself and have quick production, you can choose to be hard to scan, you can choose to have lots of finance centres, you can choose to be immune to scans, or you can go for a mixture. I thought that the notion of increased choice was supported, but it seems that is not the case.

Another area that hasn't been mentioned much is stats - you're more likely to concentrate in one area more than another (Xan have a slight advantage here, with 2 instead of 3 factories required).

Perhaps I should go and make some stats for 2 races, 4 classes, 6 ships each :(.
Also, since when was this feature a PA Team vendetta against stockpiling? I seem to have missed the announcement, which is strange as I write them all. heh.

Edit #2:
In not listening again, the maximum shipyard worker limit has gone up from 35% to 60%.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

appoco hun youre confusing me with numbers as usual, how about doing it simple and perhaps a bit fun again? dodgy numeric formulaes, strange shit stats etc, who do you want to play pa really?

last round was boring as hell and r22 doesnt look any better m8

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Once upon a time planetarion didn't have all this 'factory' gimmickry.

They are needless addons that add nothing to the strategic depth or excitement of the game. Get rid of them, they are nonsense.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I love that idea mainly because it forces people to adopt new strategies. It will be fun to see how people can adapt. PA was becoming a 1000 tick plan (the same round after round), I'm glad to see it has changed thanks to this new concept.
Glad to have read this thread too coz it made me change my whole planning (race, government, etc...). I think it would be good to point all the players to this thread (message ingame) coz a lot of them might have a nasty surprise when round starts.

I still have a question: is producing a FI faster than producing a BS ? (calculation is based on resources spent or number of units ordered)

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Once upon a time planetarion also had PDS. It had score formulas that encouraged bashing, and exponential growth. Once upon a time, planetarion had such a strong focus of activity over skill that any idiot could launch his whole fleet against random lowbie and still beat people who put time and effort into thinking.

Frankly, i'm glad that we've moved on. If you want to look back at the past with rose tinted glasses, that's fine. Its just not overly useful for current gameplay.

I actually think it adds greater choice. Finally, there is a cost of having a stockpile; in the past it was a "tactic" that had no downside - a drop in score (through reduced value) resulted in more XP, the resources were effectively unassailable (due to being able to be immune to covert ops), the forgone score was easily converted to actual score when it counted - immediately before the round ended (thus it wasnt a negative), and it resulted in stagnation as people chose not to attack planets with large stockpiles.

None of that has changed, except for the fact that now there is a cost of doing this - to make use of a large stockpile, you need the factories to do it, which means less emphasis on distorters, or amps, or research labs (early on) or security centres (later). This means, finally, all those score related benefits now mean that there is a directly related cost with pursuing such a "tactic" - forgone resources (if sacrificing finance centres), less likely to land//more likely to be attacked (jammers), and your stockpile being more vulnerable to attack (through covert ops).

Effectively, if you dont like the idea of building factories, dont. Rely on your extra income and/or your better offensive abilities to get your score, rather than being able to build yourself out of trouble. If you want to build yourself out of trouble, then build more factories.

Its a fair choice, i reckon.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

As I stated in my original post,

>> "I have heard all the arguments for this idea, and to be honest there is a need for something to be done to stop resource hoarding/donations, distorter whoring and for the game to evolve." <<

That said, the issue that will become self apparant as the round unfolds, is Structure Killers (SK's) and Covert Operations to destroy factories.

It seems obvious to me, that rather than (in most cases) SK's are included in a fleet as an afterthought, or even in error, they will become the number 1 priority ship for players to have and use.

Where as before 99% of players would have 1 of each factory, and if hit with SK's could replace them and his ability to produce ships within half a day or so, the new set up will see high numbers of factories being targeted to seriously reduce a players ability to manufacture ships at all. (or in a reasonable time)

In discussions with other players in regard to this we concluded that SK's will be the norm rather than the exception, and that the Defence Teams in an alliance will now have to focus on defence against SK's rather than protecting a planets asteroids and ships. (Although fleets caught in a fleet catch manouvere would still get priority)

It was further concluded that all members would be instructed to produce and use SK's as a priority, and consideration was being given to not allowing attacks unless SK's were used in the attack fleet.

In regard to Appoco's statement that there has been dramatic improvement in production time, well indeed there may well have been, but the requirement for multiple factories and the resultant use of SK's as a tool to thwart them will soon become apparant.

For example, as you stated a reasonable amount of resources can be converted to ships using as few as 7 factories of a given type, or as many as 15/20 ? Four or five waves of attacks with only one or two landing could see a whole production chain fall down by the destruction of half your factories. No factories = no ship production, so now you have resources piling up behind you and no way to use them in a reasonable period.

You of course have to replace your factories, but at 6 ticks per unit it could take you 2 days to rebuild back to what you originally had, meanwhile you need more as you have more unused resources.

The implementation of multiple factories has a knock on affect that will slew the whole game towards destruction of a players planet.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I agree with Judge. Yesterday in Beta cardi, crusie and me and few others set out to test exactly that theory and guess what , its easy to twat a players structureas at any stage and set them back to tick 0 efectivly no matter how far into game they are after just 2-3 landings. yes ur new idea was maybe good in some ways but did u stop to think how quickly it can be undone?

And banning us from beta for SK isnt going to help as in real round instead of 3 of us trying it their will be whole alles doing it. I suggest everyone gos a race that can protect their structures best, ie ETR.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

haha you guys got banned for trying out what the beta is supposed to be like?

how sad isnt that :o

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

As an afterthought on the issue with SK's.

What happens if a player has ships in production and all his factories for that given ship type are destroyed?

Would they dissapear?

Would the production just hang untill he rebuilt the factories?

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Its a very sound and agressive idea, If they they can get the actual production to stay static, as it currently changes tick then i really hope to see it implemented.

It finally gives Structure killers a use, the stats on them havent changed all that much so yes in beta with fast ticks they are being built en mass and are effective, but with 1hr ticks i doubt everyone will be building them quite so aggresively or in such massive numbers, making them just as ineffective as all other rounds.

But unless that time bug is fixed, i think the idea should be dropped, worked on and implemented next round, not this one.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

hmm? I'm not sure what you mean.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

How would you feel if you were on the receiving end of 5 waves that included SK's in every wave?

And a scenario that we have seen many times.

You have incoming at your planet, say 3 waves (not unusual for the average player)?

The 1st wave is uncovered but eta 6
The 2nd wave has some cover, but you need to build some defence yourself to help cover it.
The 3rd wave has more or less full cover.

So 1st wave u ignore, set your fleet on pre-launch out of harms way and take the roiding on the chin so to speak.

2nd wave you put the ships in production at the correct eta to arrive nicely intime to support the incoming friendlies.

3rd wave we can just ignore as it is covered.

So the 1st wave lands, lo and behold SK's and your unlucky as the factories that are in use get hit, and you lose some or all of them.

So now the 2nd wave where you ordered ships to help selfcover is no longer covered and your poor alliance mates will lose a chunk of there defence ships.

So the 2nd wave lands, and you lose even more factories and considering that you can lose 20% of your constructions per attack, that is 40% of them gone.

In all likelyhood with the emphasis being on the need for ship factories, it will be them that take the brunt of the attack.

Now your planet is seriously crippled, your looking at around 70 to 80 ticks to get back to where you were 3 hours ago, and meanwhile (as i said elsewhere) your resources are piling up.

Make of it what you will, but it is my opinion that all we will see are mass exits of players as they get destroyed.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Presently (as in R21), when covert ops destroy all/any factories of the required type, the ships that are currently in production are still produced, but no new orders (for those classes) can be placed. So, presumably, this would be extended towards production - it wouldnt change as the order has already been put in place. I will check, however.




Frankly, your concerns are valid. But i dont really see that there is a massive difference between using SKs to knock out a dist-wh0re and/or using SKs to knock out someone's finance centres, and using SKs to knock out production, with the exception that really high levels of bashing (ie, knocking out all of them) can hamstring a planet for some time.

Clearly, wouldnt the solution be to just use the current production formula, but have some minimum base level? Thus, only if *all* of your structures and *all* of your factories are destroyed, then you are truely stuck?

Also, you would be able to use your entire stockpile right up to the tick that the combat with the SKs occurs - thus, you still have eg 8 ticks in order to use your stockpile to either 1) defeat the SKs, or 2) clear your stockpile so that resources that you build up whilst you're rebuilding your factories arent hamstringing you as much (as Judge mentioned below).



Another alternative would be to reduce the 20% max kill rate to something far less damaging; eg 10% or 5% or whatever, as then you'd have to truely get waved all to hell in order to loose the sufficient number of structures required. Further, even at 20 factories of two types (which is alot), that's only 40 out of up to 150 structures or about a third, so any damage a SK does will at most be resulting in 30% of firepower (which is stuff all) onto factories.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Did someone get banned from the beta for trying something that seems like a flaw in the gamesetup?

Thats pretty serious stuff

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I like apocco, but this whole thing is badly planned and even worse in its execution. I hope they come to their senses and remove this before tickstart.

Stockpiling is a valid for tactic for those who want to use it, but to "get" the top100s who use it they decide to punish the entire playerbase.

Now Joe Blow cant help cover himself on his incomming, But Ritche Ritch doesnt have that problem cause he has an 1337 alliance that does everything for him.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I diagree with all this stuff about resources pilling up - if you have had enough waves land on you to kill most if not all of your factories, then chances are you don;t have many roids left to stockpile the resources with.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Easiest solution would be to just remove the structurekillers, structurekillers are disliked by most of the community and i would hate to see a round where they actually get high strategic value.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

im actually looking forward to this round now.. just to see the head on **** up thats about to occur.


Any chance of you removing the infastructure upgrade shit. Im forever seeing "you have reached your max constructions blah blah" just because i have 10 light factorys and decided i might need a amp or finance centre at some point

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

That would not be the case, the number of factories you have is directly related to how fast you can build ships, it has been noted that if you order ships and a new factory is built during that time, then the production time decreases.

The converse of that would be that the loss of a factory that was in use would slow the production. Less factories = slower production.



Losing even 20% of your ship building capacity can seriously affect your entire round. ala r21 u lost maybe 2 out of 3 factories and could replace them in 12 ticks with the correct population settings. there is no way you can replace 4 or 5 factories in anything like that time.

Indeed, but the production time is not static, it is dependant on the number of factories as I stated above, so even if the ship prodution is not lost but just remains static, it will remain static until you have replaced at least one of the factories for that ship type, and then progress at a very reduced speed.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

The only problem with that is that it makes distwh0res and scanners much more difficult to nerf, but tbh i think it might actually be worth removing SKs as well :(.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I am not even suggesting a large stockpile, just a day's res or overnights res, and then u get hit with sk's u cant build ships of a given type, ( a zik losing all his medium factories for example?) would seriosly cripple the ability to play. Meanwhile you are rebuilding your medium factories, and spending res on BS/CR and Fi/CO just so u can get rid of it.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Yeah, I think the lack of strategic value for structure killers has been self-imposed. I've been on about the idea of just forcing the whole alliance to do SKs and then run in massive teamups on enemy planets. Touche. Too bad there's not going to be enough able hands (and I'm definately not one of those) to organize it.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Indeed - i didnt 'play' the beta, and talking with kal/cin atm i'm now beginning to see the problems involved.

The idea i had - whereby when you hit the order ships button a snapshot of your factories/population is taken, which then results in a predicted time which then stays fixed for the whole order (eg, not making production dynamic once the button has been pushed) kinda falls apart, as Kal mentioned that you could just set population to full on ships, order (snapshot taken), then instantly switch it elsewhere for no loss. :(


Perhaps if it just took a snapshot of your current numbers of factories, and left population as an ongoing variable? That way, factory losses due to SKs (or covert ops, heh) and/or gains from new constructions finishing wouldnt alter the expected eta of your ships. However, altering your population settings would. As such, if you lost a whole bunch of factories, it wouldnt affect ongoing orders, only new orders - but changing your population settings would alter both.

How does that sound?

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

i could paste u the entire test, but its on the beta forum.

but for those not there.

building different ticks change the production tick.

once those ships produce they shorten the production tick for those ships still in production.

but not by the amounts that were there when you initailly made the the extra productions.

(made with the assumption that u started building on tick 1with a 15 tick build time, impossible i know but it makes things look clearer)

order 1 (T15)

order 1 (T29)
order 2 (T30)

order 1 (T40)
order 2 (T43)
order 3 (T44)

order 1 (T51)
order 2 (T55)
order 3 (T57)
order 4 (T59)

order 1 (T57)
order 2 (T62)
order 3 (T64)
order 4 (T65)
order 5 (T78)

now everything stays the same .. and we move onto tick 57 when order 1 arrives

order 1 (arrived tick 57)

order 2 (arrived tick 60 )

order 3 (arrived tick 61)

order 4 (arrived tick 62)

order 5 (arrived tick 64)

the only order that arrived as scheduled after all productions were in place was order 1

there is no way to tell when subsequent orders after your 1st one will arrive

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Sounds to me like a happy medium tbh, at least you know when your ships will arrive and that the arrival time wont change.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

Pretty much makes ship ordering a complete lottery.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

The whole ship production issue is causing more problems than it is worth.

As has been said by others, its a complete guess as to when a ship order will arrive.

The first one arrives on time, but then subsequent order can speed up as the factories are redistributed among the remaining orders.

Having ships arrive early can be as bad as them arriving late, so they arrive on the "wrong" wave and die?

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

The arrival time can still change - if you play with the population settings.

Also, once factories are lost, all new production would then be affected.

So rather that a proper "dynamic" system in production, you have a "sticky" system to determine your ships' arrival time.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

btw .. just to point out .. i did that tick cahrting of production with just 1 factory no population set and no government on place which is why it took so long .. actual initial build times can be and will be shorter.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

yes i got that, i was just saying current production wouldnt be affected by the loss of or the addition to the number of factories.

If u dork it urself by moving population settings then thats ur own fault/decision

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I figured that much, what concerns me is the lack of any real idea when an order will arrive out of production.

subsequent orders speeding up can be dissasterous if the arrive at a time when you have hostiles landing.

The order time has to be fixed at the time of the order, or basically your stuffed.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

I fail to see the problem. When I play starcraft or warcraft or command & conquer it's mainly the same - in the end one just has to decide what he/she/it wants to do.

Actually I would like to extend this thought to a point that if you lose all your factories everything in your production gets lost. From my point of view this increases tactical depth by a nice amount and takes away quite some of the sim-planet approach a lot of todays players have. Of course, it is fun to prod out of incomings when you are under attack, but it also makes the round stagnating a bit since it takes away a lot of incentive for smaller planets to hit up the foodchain. Now jonny average can try to sneak in on ritchie rich and roid him, knowing that his fleet is perfectly designed to cut through ritchie's fleet because he has an open hole, while before ritchie would laugh his ass off and build the required anti-ship.

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

This is exactly why beta's are pointless.
If you aren't allowed to try out valid tactics in a beta that could possibly have a big effect on the real round why bother having a beta at all?
It's supposed to be there for testing & figuring out what might go wrong, but when some people find a loophole & test it to prove something is wrong they get banned?
Good call there... :rolleyes:

Re: R 22 Construction/Production
 

That's the problem. You can't see. Or hear for that matter. Almost everybody in this community is telling you to scrap this dumb idea. Yet you insist on keeping it and instead tinker with the numbers and percentages. That IS NOT what we are asking.