[Mzyxptlk]

Alright, I've given the APS system some thought over the last week or so and I've decided that I don't like it. Here's why.

Note: because the mechanisms for attaining APS and XP are pretty much identical in all the important ways and because XP has been around for much longer and thus has more available examples, for the remainder of this post, when I say "XP", please read "XP and APS".

In my view, the goal of Planetarion is stealing and holding onto roids, thus increasing your income and making it easier/possible to steal and hold onto more roids. XP departs from that basic goal and instead rewards stealing roids from certain planets and alliances more than others.

In theory, this means that strong players gather more XP and thus that high XP planets have good fleets. After all, generally speaking, you get XP by stealing roids from high value players and to steal roids from high value players, you need to have a good fleet and to cooperate with your alliance.

However, XP does not actually measure military strength. Quite the opposite, in fact; ever since r16, XP planets are commonly regarded as weak (especially defensively) one-trick ponies that contribute little to the overall strength of their alliance. Winning rounds on XP is now (correctly) viewed as impossible, even disregarding the influence of MT stats and fortressing.

This results in a strange dichotomy in which there are ways of gaining a large amount of score that are actually bad for the development of your planet in the long run, because the artificial nature of XP rewards players for doing the wrong thing.

The only way this can be avoided is by making sure that the XP of a planet accurately reflects the combat strength of same. I have 2 objections to even bothering to try to make that happen.

First, as easy as 'balancing' sounds, it is actually very hard to do. XP has been around for 28(!) rounds and still does not work correctly. Up to and including round 16 it was much too strong (changing the goal of PA and reducing cooperation and weakening intra-alliance bonds) and ever since then, despite more tweaks than I cared to count, it has been too weak and, as said above, encourages strategies that yield short-term results but are counterproductive in the long-term.

Second, even if we manage to balance it correctly, even if XP accurately reflects combat strength, it wouldn't do PA any good, because then it actually mimics that other part of score that we have: value, which is already a good way of measuring combat strength.

The last couple of months I've mentioned a few times that I'm in favour of removing XP altogether, but this is the first time I've explained why. APS is basically XP for alliances, so everything I said about XP also applies to APS.

There is only one aspect of XP that I like: it is non-removable. That's something I'd like to preserve. If XP were removed, I'd want to change score to measure how many resources a planet, galaxy or alliance has spent, regardless of current fleet size or roid count. In such a system, value would measure how much the fleet of a planet, galaxy or alliance is worth (and nothing else). I think Heartless originally came up with this suggestion, and I wholeheartedly endorse it.