[JonnyBGood]

There are a number of points to address in your post Shhhhhhh.

1) You are quite right, simple stats won't make people join the game. However for the newbie/inactive player is much more likely to a) get it right and b) understand why he got it right with simpler stats.

2) In reality he will be similarly immune to everyone else. But what you will see is that the straightforwardness of defence (there are a few x ship obviously trumps y ship combinations) means that the benefits of being involved with other players either via higher gal activity or an alliance are more obvious.

3) You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't you join as part of that saints bg? That's not really a natural growth outlet.

4) More complex stats are awesome for their depth but newer and less active players don't pay attention to more complex stats. They just get bored and uninterested. Also there are plenty of "holes" in these stats, far more so than with higher numbers of ships which invariably drives up the need for teamups.

5) I would agree, this represents a different type of move to the ones that have happened in PA recently. To be honest though I've been involved in a lot of those moves and while they've offered some fairly minimal benefits I would think of these stats as offering a different kind of potential benefit. The numbers and swing will probably be low either way, I sincerely doubt you'll see lots of people quitting over these stats. I think one of the few things that could make people quit in numbers is if we had something similar to last round where cath fi was so horrifically overpowered it disrupted the entire flow of the game.


Finally there's not a huge amount that can be done at this point. I had a few ideas back in r30 for different things for the stats and the only one I got was the extra pod because it required no coding. But there's only so much you can do with that and with the extra pod more potential combinations are used each round leaving less room for what is perceived as variation in following rounds.