less fleet slots

[mist]

having posted about how XP is spinner's way of trying to make people play the game how he wants it played, and even managing to resist my usual rant about how the game needs to be changed, rather than trying to shoehorn players in to doing what the admins want i got to thinking about how this could actually be done.

a simple way of doing this would be to reduce the number of fleet slots available.

at the moment, every planet has 3 slots, mostly that's a defence fleet and two attack fleets unless you're one of the arseholes who attacks with 3 fleets. lets assume that people pt 1/3 of their ships i each fleet, not totally unreasonable. that means that if a planet wants to attack something the same size as its fleet it's going to be looking at something about 1/3 its size (value). iirc, there's a hard cap at 40% nowadays (?) so that means that the average attacker will want to be hitting something as small as they possibly can (and i even managed to avoid my rant about how static limits are lame!).

conversely, if you have two fleet slots and dedicate the same amount of ships to defence/attack you're going to be wanting to attack someone with twice as many roids in order to be able to grow as quickly, puttig your target in the 65 - 70% range, still not particulalry 'honerable', but not so bad...

anyway, as most of the 'newbie bashing' is done quite early on - at least if we believe the alliances who say that later on their members are too busy attacking real enemies to bother with newbie bashing anymore - there could then be techs/quests that gain the planet more fleet slots, perhaps going up to as many as 4 so that once the alliance wars start people can utilize fake fleets etc etc. as a complete asside, this is something that you could use to differentiate between free and paid accounts without really damaging the freebies.

anyway, i'm guessing this won't be a particularly popular idea, however i await the reasoned responses as to why with interest.

-mist

[Linkie]

I think the idea is good, however, I believe for this to work HCT resarches needs to take less time.
I also like the idea of more than 3 fleets, due to the 1-targetting idea, I believe this is needed.

[Methedrine]

It's definately an interesting idea, mist, however it will require some tweaking of ship stats and/or roid capping as well.
People prefer to hit targets with "juicy" roids, in other words targets which offer you roids for a certain amount of ressources. To determine this amount of ressources it takes a few factors: roid initiation cost and time until the lost ressources are back in (your fleet loss is compensated). The result of this would be roid gain vs. fleet growth, if one can compensate his/her fleet loss for the capped roids within 24 hours (which pretty much equals one attack window, as in 1 attack per day) it's a target that should be hit; calculating this is pretty much obvious but just for completing the logic behind my post: (current_income + income_from_new roids) = (lost_fleet_converted_to_ressources). Most times this can be extended to 36-48 ticks for fleet compensation but that's already a less good target, from my point of view, and alliances know how to "fairly" distribute good targets.
If you can mange it to balance the ship loss for roiding, then it's great. One solution could (and most likely would and should) be to increase the amount of asteroids in the universe, the other solution (or part of it) would be to make defense very hard. This could relatively simple be achieved by increasing ship armour and so on. HCT researches to cost less time is another reason (why not remove them and simply set a hard-mining limit like 10000 roids at a max?).
But as Linkie already pointed out: With only 1 target per ship it is hard to provide defense - but then again it might play into the 2nd part-solution I suggested.

The only real problem that I can see with this is that nobody likes to lose asteroids and would therefore not want defense to become harder to get.

[mist]

yeh, everyone seems to want roiding to be easier, but getting themselves defence to be easier as well :P

i see what you mean about returns on roids, however i don't think your numbers are particularly great. people tend to roid if they'll get a payback, if the best planets are taking 3 days to pay back losses, odds are people will attack them - otherwise they'll get left behind, so i don't see that as too big a problem. however, a balance between ease of attack and defence is important, i agree.

problem at the moment is that alliance players are more likely to get defence than not, whereas newbs probably won't, hence the bashing in the first place, even if targets are less juicy people would rather hit something that they know will work, than hit something they don't believe will. however, changing this directly would probably annoy the alliances somewhat

although, when i last payed attention i found the att/def balance slightly too far in favour of defence. however, there's also a lot of problems with combat being too predictale etc etc, so that's a matter for another thread really.

-mist