"Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Hi all,
as usual, we are likely to have a free "winter round" between Rounds 49 and 50.

Please place any suggestions for the following here:

1) Race themes (number of races, names of races / their ships, abilities associated with races)

2) galaxy / alliance setup (including ETAs, prelaunch etc)

3) anything else (flag asteroids, etc).

It'll probably be a 2 week round with 30 minute ticks from the 14th until the 28th (with subsequent havoc), but comments welcome on this too.

I'm not binding myself to use any of the suggestions ;)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

1. Elves (etd), Polar Bears (ter), Reindeer (cat), Grinches (zik)

2. 6 man galaxies and cluster allies maybe?

3. PDAUN scans dont get blocked by dissies, only inc scans are.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Golden resource bonus roids for sure. Call them "Santa's little helpers."

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

dont overlap havoc and winterround, no need to split up the few players remaining ;)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

So we need 10+ names for elves, 10+ names for bears, etc?

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I think signup for winter round will be occurring during havoc :) and then signup for round 50 can occur during winter round havoc.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Grinches would be easy though. E-cool AD posters!

Golden roids.

No fi pods. No intag defense bonus. Fi 1 tick faster than Co. In-cluster ETA -1 for both attacks and defense.

20/40 Salvage for attackers. 40/70 salvage for defenders. Cap salvage to prevent profit. 20% armor increase across the board.

Slight boost to XP.

Good full-MT stats. 2 pods per race. No 0 loss defense, with the possible exception of a single Cat ship.

P.S. Happy to see this go up so early!

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

8 person private galaxies
how about. random. mixed. race ships to make people work harder with. strategy
this will force people to really work as a team to succeed. no alliances only galaxies

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Id like to see a no exile game where people cant be exiled during the holliday round.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

So that the round of a active player is ruined if he gets into the wrong gal, thus having a very few amount of people actually bothering to play ?

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Chin up pal. Everyone would be in same boat.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

No, they won't.

Leaving something like that entirely up to one spin on the wheel would be very stupid.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

There's a difference between disabling galaxy exile and disabling self exile. :)
Edit:
Also, with private galaxies, you're kind of assuming that you know the people you go into private galaxies with. We could do pure private galaxies rather than a private/random mix.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

maybe some pre-set shuffleticks where you can select yourself to be 'reshuffled' or your gal can set you to be reshuffled

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Whilst in theory this might be a viable situation (depending on circumstances), some sort of auto reshuffle, or even manual reshuffle of certain galaxies, would require a complete recode of the shuffling mechanism and I'm not willing to commit to that for a 2 week free round.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

couple of thoughts , 6-8 in private only gals, no outside def no eta bonus in cluster . no coordination between gals other than avoidance is permitted and any gals that cooperate on attacks are closed with zero tolerance (the last winter rd was ruined by the 8 most active gals working together), stats wise pick an old set or go for war/science .

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

war/science ftw

also, deeming who cooperates and who doesn't can be pretty hard..

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Cooperation would be difficult to restrict; I think it's impossible to effectively limit it. The best way of restricting co-operation is to make it more advantageous to not co-operate.

war/science is doable but hard to do as we can't just transfer r4/5 stats; I've done it once before but science were apparently overpowered. Also, it's boring as **** with just one astropod; it's far better to have 2-3 per race!

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Maybe an easier implementation to send these planets to c200 at these ticks than?

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

easy enough to restrict , if your attacking with someone from outside your galaxy you get 1 warning do it a 2nd time and your closed (zero tolerance) or you could just kill the cap so attacking with someone from outside your gal = zero roids

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

What if two galaxies (1:2 and 1:3) decide to attack 1:4 with no aim of co-operation? Please don't tell me that your alliance never claims a galaxy and then piggy backs / is piggy backed by another alliance who decided to hit it?

Also, your option involves reviewing every single fleet attacking fleet launched at the same galaxy as another fleet from a different galaxy, working out if there was some degree of co-operation, and then warning / closing manually.

What if 1 planet attacks with another galaxy? do we close the whole galaxy? Would the one planet "suicide" to allow for a whole competing galaxy to be closed?

I don't think this is a viable option; I'd prefer game mechanics to encourage a lack of co-operation, rather than making the multihunters spending ages reviewing every single attack fleet launched and trying to work out if they should be warned or closed.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I don't think you can remove cooperation from a game like PA, which is built from the very core up on the notion of cooperation. And even if you could, I don't think it's desireable.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I don't mean a complete lack of co-operation, but if the top few galaxies NAP and farm all below them, it's not that fun for all of them. If there are suggestions to stop this and to stop attacking together, etc, it's probably better to make it more attractive to hit people your size / etc rather than to try and farm smaller galaxies

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Maybe have it so every 48 hours the entire universe is reshuffled*? Would be pretty crazy, and wouldn't allow people to play with their gals, but would solve the concern about some gals being better than others...

*I'm not convinced this is a good idea, I just thought I'd throw it out there.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I wouldnt mind seeing the following...

4-6 man BP shuffled in with 3-4 randoms. Maybe make galaxies only 8-10 planets big. Each galaxy will be limited to only 4 exiles while each planet can have as many exiles as they want. Yeah its possible a galaxy can be totally screwed over but the chances of that happening I think are small enough. This will hopefully force galaxies/BPs to seriously consider a new or inexperienced player that is active as a good recruit to the galaxy.

Limit clusters to only 3-5 galaxies and hopefully we will have 5-8 clusters. I would like to see cluster wars come back and the -1 eta advantage on ships traveling in-cluster.

If your going to implement alliances limit alliances to only 20-30 planets each max with all counting. Alliances could have a -1 eta advantage so that means if your alliance mate is in the same cluster as you, you would get a -2 eta advantage. So now having a good active cluster and helping every planet in the cluster and being of the same alliance is beneficial.

As already stated use previous round stats that were good/fun with maybe some minor tweaks if needed.

Yeah there are several ways the cluster/alliance eta advantage can be abused. But lets face it, people have played so often that they look for ways to abuse it and gain an advantage instead of playing "fair" and within the "spirit" of the rules. I think Furgion killed the spirit of PA back in r2/3, VVOMM buried it under a deep mountain and FoS is guarding it.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Forced random race for everyone.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

R6-9.5 stats would be fun :)

I like the idea of allowing small bps (definitely no more than 4) mixed with a decent number of randoms and small private gals.

Only allowing self exile would be fine if the scraping of truly inactive junk planets to c200 is more aggressive (e.g. after 24 ticks).

Cluster def eta advantage and several small clusters could certainly be fun.

I don't think anything trying to enforce specific behavior in the meta-game is ever going to work right. (e.g. trying to force no cooperation/avoidance between gals, it's just as dumb as trying to enforce "good" behavior in havoc)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

its prob a silly idea.. but thinking maybe let people use credits if they want (donation) and spend that money on some advertising?

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

war/science, 5 man private gals vs 8-10 man random ones, disable alliances, try cluster naps (c alliances), remove dists, faster scan research.. cant ask for anything more

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Pds pds pds pds!!!1

edit; bah anti capslock filter :[

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

you must not see all the block wars AD posts ... I mean if someone looks up the same gal as another alliance they must be in a block ... right?

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

lmao this is how HAVOK should be ... shuffle every other day

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

All random races, or look back upon some stats that were sucsessfull.
Private gals or all random gals, no ingame alliance tags for ranking, play for galaxy/planet ranking, cluster bonuses

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

World cup: everyone from a continent is put into one cluster or by country/galaxy. Planets are ranked the same, but alliance scoring (country scoring) is determined on rank. so Rank 1 planet is worth 1000 points planet 2 999, etc.

Also i think trying to get this shuffling system working is important, here are a few ideas on ways to work it...

Instead of auto exiling to c200 when planets are set to "not wanted" after however many ticks it is (48 i think?) have predetermined ticks where "not wanted" planets are auto exiled.

Give a selection of eligible galaxies that one can exile into so the player can choose, instead of exiling around for the whole round trying to find that perfect gal.

or just have priv gals of 10 and one random gal with everyone else and people in the random gal can go into a ballot where the priv gals bid like an auction using the gal fund for players to import into their gal. 72 ticks from time of bid till time of sale should give other gals enough time to counter bid and bump those prices up!

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

please don't do random race. Analyzing stats and picking a race is the the fun part of pa.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

There is no "spirit of the rules". That is just the bludgeon the incompetent use to beat down the creative and unorthodox. They used it in round 26 when XP came around, they used it in round 22 when cov oppers terrorized the universe, they used it in the late 20s when fortress galaxies reigned supreme.

(Not that I'm trying to imply that blocking is in any way a creative way of play, mind you.)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Not a viable idea, unfortunately.

I can confirm there won't be random races and there won't be pds.

I'm up for discussing the races (and bonuses), the governments, the stats

MT stats sounds good as we've not had it in a while, but re-using stats does mean we can't do any custom themes really unless we re-use a previous winter round stats. I'd prefer to re-use MT stats for Round 50 - I will re-use MT stats for Round 50.

I'll have to check code-wise if it's easier for me to do private / random galaxy mix or pure private (and maybe get some feedback).

Is the galaxy formation a key issue? Worth a poll? I'd set it up ingame, I think ...

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Might be fun to go for some wierd govs like:

Snowballism
20% mining bonus

Jesusinthecribacy
50% research

Rudolphism
-1 eta(hard to implement?)

Santaism(not to be confused with satanism)
extra fleet slot(hard to implement ?)

WhiteChristmasism
40% construction


(ps havent thought about if the numbers are balanced)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

extra fleet slot is hard to do.
They're a bit random; perhaps slightly more balanced? :)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Grinchism
20% mining bonus

Jesusinthecribacy
50% research

Rudolphism
-1 eta

Santaism(not to be confused with satanism)
15% research
10% construction
10% mining

WhiteChristmasism
40% construction

Yeah they are slightly random I made em in a minute ;) im all for balancing em dunno which ones that are imba tho :P
All i wanted was for them to be very different so its a big difference in what you pick.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

can't give -1 eta without making sure every fleet gives at least 2 ticks for def, and even then it's overpowered (it'd have to have significantly worse value / res / construction bonuses than anything else; the above would definitely be minimums in terms of comparitive value).

Of your above comments, no one would go for "whitechristmasism" or "jesusinthecribacy"

Also, any votes for a return of the vegetable lamb? (rep if you remember what it is)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

you can always cover incs ingal or cluster/ally with a lower hulls class, and if you go eta -1 this wouldnt really come in handy before lategame as youll be way behind on research compared to a cribacy? Im pretty sure the round is short so wouldnt research come in handy? And im guessing scans will be hard to get so getting a good number of dist with wcism doesnt seem to farfetched either. but its not hard putting on a -5% mining bonus or smth on it :)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I thought winter round where no alliances... So how could eta -1 be that OP?
Only ingal defence which is eta 5 anywho...

Priv gals cap 7, Random gals cap 9...

I've seen several active and experienced players in the past choose going random as strategy, when the setup of max ammount of players in a private galaxy is way lower than max ammount of a random galaxy.

15 minute ticks...
(Shuffle every 50 ticks could be a very nice change)

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Cluster / Parallel alliances are possible

Random galaxies need to be 10, or 11. They will grow through the round as privates won't, but they're generally going to be less active. It's difficult, because either we have random galaxies being capped and "overflows" creating new galaxies, which kills new galaxies, or we have private galaxies slowly getting outnumbered by random galaxies, then the private galaxies disband and make it even less worthwhile to "stay private".

I've already said shuffling mid-round won't happen.

15 minute ticks means that, even if you sleep for 6-8 hours, you're looking at 32 ticks whilst you sleep - way too high. Also, a 2 week round will be like an 8 week round, and that's probably a bit long.

ETA adjustments will probably have to happen as well, which we've done before (e.g. ingal def is eta 3/4, base ETA is 14 not 12, or similar).

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

That is not actually the problem with private/random galaxies. The problem is people forming private galaxies in random galaxies, thereby bypassing the private galaxy limit.

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

exactly what i tried to point out mz. ty

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Bah Bumbug to the lot of yas :p

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Plus the fact that r4/5 has Weapon Speed and Agility, which stats don;t have now

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

I actually coded the combat engine to (potentially) support those again, but not sure if they'd actually work as they're currently untested ... may have a bug-filled combat

Re: "Winter Round" Suggestions
 

Well, as the "Winter Round" is nothing more than a glorified havoc period, you might as well use it to test some bugs. At least then there would be some point to it.