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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 09:34   #1
Tietäjä
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Statistic conflicts

Another attempt to review and generate discussion over a few problems that have been observed with the current stats format. Shorter than the original rant, that got owned by some forum mishap.


Conflict #1: Variability against stability and balance.
The eitrades was introduced to bring variability to the combat scheme. It's a twofold cause: obviously, one more race brings more variability. This can be seen as a contributing, good factor. The downside is, that five races is harder to balance than four, and as we've seen for a third round now the eitrades has made itself a profile of the winner race, with domination of the top ranks for two rounds, and four top10's currently standing. Should the fifth race be dropped out to bring more balance with reduced variability? To continue the case, it's also been discussed recently whether one should keep on improving existing statistics or generate new ones. Essentially, this is a question about stability and balance against variability, too. On most occasions, generating a new set involves more risk of unbalanced, and obviously requires another adjustment process. Improving the existing ones gives higher overall balance (although, under the current empirical evidence seems a little pessimism should be included here too), a new ones would contribute to variability. Which route it should develop? Why a fifth race was introduced to bring more variability, why would one wish to introduce improving existing sets to bring more balance, as the whole puzzle obviously nullifies itself. Another question with the balance against variability issue is the number of ships. Currently the setup is 8+2+1. Should it be altered to perhaps 7+2+1, which has been seen in some example sets by for example jerome?

Conflict #2: The zikonian issue.
Zikonians were modified for round 20 because they were found to encourage newbie bashing and to be too powerful to balance out. So far the empirical evidence has pointed out, that the new zikonian indeed is more powerful than the old zikonian, or at least equally powerful (comparing round 19, not Tuxed0's my-friends-wanted-a-very-strong-zik set, to latest developments). What comes to newbie bashing, it may have been reduced, but it's still not uncommon to see a larger planet throw in at a planet with a long idle time on sandmans, often with a cathaar escort (I've seen this happen to myself, too). The alteration also discouraged an interesting tactical element - fleetcatches, the destruction of an enemy fleet. This may be a part of the contribution of from war game to flower power game, and whether this is a direction sought for or not should also be discussed. With zikonian, the new agenda relies on overly strong armors and damages - without those, the drawback of losing ships on hit becomes probably too large (as it's a massive one already), and with them, well. We've seen how ziks have fared.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 09:55   #2
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tietäjä
Another attempt to review and generate discussion over a few problems that have been observed with the current stats format. Shorter than the original rant, that got owned by some forum mishap.


Conflict #1: Variability against stability and balance.
The eitrades was introduced to bring variability to the combat scheme. It's a twofold cause: obviously, one more race brings more variability. This can be seen as a contributing, good factor. The downside is, that five races is harder to balance than four, and as we've seen for a third round now the eitrades has made itself a profile of the winner race, with domination of the top ranks for two rounds, and four top10's currently standing. Should the fifth race be dropped out to bring more balance with reduced variability?
No I don’t believe the fifth race should be dropped, as it provides greater options from an attack minded point of view, and in my opinion helps to ensure no stagnation, in terms of ‘oh my god I can only hit 1 race with 1 class’ takes place.

The problem with ETD is that in general they have always had the best ships with the ‘special’ abilities, as well as being generally high armoured and providing a good punch, and also generally covering themselves pretty well against most incoming. When you combine all of these factors there can only be one outcome, that ETD would always be the best.

Quote:
To continue the case, it's also been discussed recently whether one should keep on improving existing statistics or generate new ones. Essentially, this is a question about stability and balance against variability, too. On most occasions, generating a new set involves more risk of unbalanced, and obviously requires another adjustment process. Improving the existing ones gives higher overall balance (although, under the current empirical evidence seems a little pessimism should be included here too), a new ones would contribute to variability. Which route it should develop? Why a fifth race was introduced to bring more variability, why would one wish to introduce improving existing sets to bring more balance, as the whole puzzle obviously nullifies itself.
These stats should certainly be binned, as they are quite simply flawed in logic completely. The only reason they were a re-work was because Monroe was too pigheaded to actually see what everyone else was saying, quite an annoying situation to be honest.

Quote:
Another question with the balance against variability issue is the number of ships. Currently the setup is 8+2+1. Should it be altered to perhaps 7+2+1, which has been seen in some example sets by for example jerome?
Races generally always have a ‘useless’ ship each, if stats can be produced that are balanced, I see no reason to have the extra ship just ‘because’

Quote:
Conflict #2: The zikonian issue.
Zikonians were modified for round 20 because they were found to encourage newbie bashing and to be too powerful to balance out. So far the empirical evidence has pointed out, that the new zikonian indeed is more powerful than the old zikonian, or at least equally powerful (comparing round 19, not Tuxed0's my-friends-wanted-a-very-strong-zik set, to latest developments). What comes to newbie bashing, it may have been reduced, but it's still not uncommon to see a larger planet throw in at a planet with a long idle time on sandmans, often with a cathaar escort (I've seen this happen to myself, too). The alteration also discouraged an interesting tactical element - fleetcatches, the destruction of an enemy fleet. This may be a part of the contribution of from war game to flower power game, and whether this is a direction sought for or not should also be discussed. With zikonian, the new agenda relies on overly strong armors and damages - without those, the drawback of losing ships on hit becomes probably too large (as it's a massive one already), and with them, well. We've seen how ziks have fared.
In all honesty I’m struggling to envisage a situation where Zik’s can steal as pre-round 19, and 50%+ of the active player base wouldn’t go them immediately.

I suppose it depends on the question, do we want fleet to be of higher importance than roids?

I’m just not sure I fancy a round where half the player base goes the same race.

Just a little side note for discussion, would about dropping Zik’s completely, going back to 4 sets as you say, and giving each race 1-2 steal ships that don’t actually die? Not an actual suggestion I’ve thought through, but just an idea I thought id raise.

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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 10:29   #3
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Re: Statistic conflicts

I think the game has been improved a lot by the lowered initiation cost for roids in terms of the reinvigoration to value play it has provided. However the problem with the stats from my perspective is that not everyone has a really good chance to defend themselves. Etd can fire first/emp people for the most part. Zik have stealing which, coupled with the increase in salvage they get from defending themselves helps a lot. Xan have poor armour and just literally can't defend themselves against xan fr and terran bs. Whatever about having one horrible inc to deal with having two (I'm actually excluding etd bs as they don't kill xan but they still ****ing own them horribly) is just sick. Cathaar really just need some zero loss def ships so they don't just get raped blind by everyone and their dog. Terran need to have their classes condensed. Personally I'd try and avoid having a terran race with more than four classes of ships as they're predominately going to fire last and deserve a shot at defending themselves. Currently they get caned by xan fi, zik fr and terran bs which is really just a bit much. This is probably going to end up being something similar but at least if they had say their anti-fr and anti-bs same class we'd be looking at something a bit more satisfactory.

A large part of stats development comes through the development of racial paradigms. Tweaking stats, as we've seen this round, doesn't really have a huge effect on the game. What counts is how people can play and the different approaches they are forced to take on. To be honest anyone who went cathaar in an alliance fighting for #1 this round is far more likely to end up contributing a lot less to their alliance in terms of net roid profit (this is a difficult concept, it's primarily to do with how well they can acquired roids and how much it costs their alliance to keep them) to their alliance. This difference is largely unhelpful towards producing a balanced enjoyable game. Frankly if I was running an alliance going for the win this round I would have banned anyone from going cathaar or terran. All your def options are covered by the other races with the sole exception of xan fr and you can easily work bps/gals to counter this.
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Last edited by JonnyBGood; 17 Jul 2007 at 10:40.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 11:05   #4
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by Game^
The problem with ETD is that in general they have always had the best ships with the ‘special’ abilities, as well as being generally high armoured and providing a good punch, and also generally covering themselves pretty well against most incoming. When you combine all of these factors there can only be one outcome, that ETD would always be the best.
Pretty much agreed. EMP attack ships, zero-loss steal defence ships to feed your attack fleets with. Perhaps with a little more caution would tip out the balance in favour of variability (as so far the balance has suffered too greatly of this variability).



Quote:
These stats should certainly be binned, as they are quite simply flawed in logic completely. The only reason they were a re-work was because Monroe was too pigheaded to actually see what everyone else was saying, quite an annoying situation to be honest.
In fact, I would be tempted to agree with you - why I posted the counter-argument is the fact that there was a debate about improving or not, which evidently ended up in favor of improving (or that's what I'm told: note my departure from the development forums regarding the given incident).


Quote:
Races generally always have a ‘useless’ ship each, if stats can be produced that are balanced, I see no reason to have the extra ship just ‘because’
This is what I think also. The useless ship, in my opinion, comes from the fact that you have 8 ships you need to have, and you can't forfeit having those. Adding another defence ship will probably make two alternative defence ships either of which is just plain useless, or one more zero-losser to make of a fortress, or just a ship to replace an attack fleet ship with - useless to begin with.

Quote:
In all honesty I’m struggling to envisage a situation where Zik’s can steal as pre-round 19, and 50%+ of the active player base wouldn’t go them immediately.
A very valid point. What comes to the given sidenote, I reckon Appocomaster tested some spread-around steal for all races with moderate (or even better) success in round 14.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JBG
Cathaar really just need some zero loss def ships so they don't just get raped blind by everyone and their dog.
Yeah. Concencus approved, for some reason not implemented for this round.

Quote:
A large part of stats development comes through the development of racial paradigms. Tweaking stats, as we've seen this round, doesn't really have a huge effect on the game.
Yeah. Maybe the problem comes down from "every race has to be able to effectively attack every race". The other aspect of it, racial characteristics, is also an interesting one. Whilst cathaar is the EMP your opponents, and cathaar is generally beaten by flooding them (which eventually usually happens), terran is about armor (which should, in my opinion, as you said, work through the path of being able to flak yourself with it, which'd naturally require less shipclasses, which would also suit terran "simplicity"), zikonian about stealing (d'uh, but the grand question here is about how to balance zikonian so that they are initially able to attack something (given contradiction of high initiative and high power, and dying on steal), without being completely overpowered, filled with kill ships (or maybe just the rate of kill ships should be increased so that the idea would be to have a few ship types for which you can collect fleets around for through stealing, and to have some initial kill ships in attack fleets to make attacking others than just emp "viable"), xandathrii should be the one to fire the kill frags first, crash easily, and be severely hampered by EMP blasts.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 11:20   #5
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Zikonian are always going to be hard to balance due to the disparities that arise through what you steal. This is an essential aspect to the race, it wouldn't be zikonian without the possibility that you can steal an awesome fleet or equally your planet can just suck. Personally I'd try and separate their attack fleet and their stealing fleets out somewhat similarly to has been attempted but it's really rather difficult. It's difficult to know and to be honest I'd probably get the rest of it sorted first and then start throwing in different approaches with ziks and see what results logically speaking. Zik just have some inbuilt advantages and disadvantages that don't apply to other races.

One good thing to recognise in terms of mildly revolutionary thinking is that maybe not every race has to have the same number of ships.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 11:55   #6
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
One good thing to recognise in terms of mildly revolutionary thinking is that maybe not every race has to have the same number of ships.
This was also mentioned last round, and as was said earlier, lets remove ships for ships sake.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 12:02   #7
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
Personally I'd try and separate their attack fleet and their stealing fleets out somewhat similarly to has been attempted but it's really rather difficult.
Granted, the whole mess with 5 races is rather difficult.

Quote:
One good thing to recognise in terms of mildly revolutionary thinking is that maybe not every race has to have the same number of ships.
Yeah. Zikonians and cathaars are especially, due to their different nature in compared to other races, potential candidates for this. I'm not sure if it'd be "possible", but worth a thought.


To cut back a little.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JBG
I think the game has been improved a lot by the lowered initiation cost for roids in terms of the reinvigoration to value play it has provided. However the problem with the stats from my perspective is that not everyone has a really good chance to defend themselves.
I was thinking of this. Recently, what has defined the goods from the bads has been the ability to protect yourself. I based my evaluation on round 21 statistics on an evaluation of these, and it went surprisingly well. The noble basics are, obviously, that everyone needs to have a chance to protect themselves.

For terrans, I guess the best way is through enabling their high-armor poor-initiative ships to flak themselves by pairing up (as you said, by teaming up the non-pod class ships too).

Eitrades is rather bizzarre here too. I somewhat don't like the idea of eitrades having superior steal ships to zikonians (or in fact, having any at all - I think eitrades is best characterized by a mix of cloak, emp, and terran-likes). Maybe some other way to sort it. Cloaks of course work here.

As do with xandathrii, I'm still convinced that in most cases xandathrii should be firing first. To compensate for this attackswise, they should probably have a harder time and having to rely on the cloak (from which the ability to mix classes) to some extent. I particularily liked how, during round 17, xandathrii frigates and destroyers would have worked in to wipe out bombers, but I guess scanning system affects this a lot too.

With zikonians defending themselves, there's little to say. The steal ships tend to be very strong, and need to be strong to compensate for the two downsides (poor initiative, ship trades that is a twofold thing).

Cathaar come up on the toughs here, and will probably need a pair of zero-lossers to work it out. These need a balance too, as they tend to blow out of proportion.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 12:14   #8
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Re: Statistic conflicts

zik pod armour is a drag dammit
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 12:41   #9
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
Cathaar really just need some zero loss def ships so they don't just get raped blind by everyone and their dog.
As a dedicated Cath player (all rounds I've played since the races whre introduced I've been cath) and my biggest problem is that i get flooded by a single ship class.
When I attack, the defender just organizes "some" ships for def (eg maurauders when i attack with my CR) and then tells everyone and their dog (as you called it) to send ships of this class to def, nomather what these ships target. Free salvage with a zero chance to loose ships. It's clear that everyone is willing to send def.
For attacks that's ok. If I don't get flooded, i get away without a single lost ship. In case the Cath Ships are combined with someone else (Cath Cr with Etd/Ter BS for example) they are great, maybe even a little bit to strong.

The bigger problem is the defense. If I don't have enought ships my def ships will be blown up by xan fi, etd co, xan fr, ter de, zik de and possible ter bs in case i don't have scorpions available.
Xan fi, Xan Fr aren't that much of a thread due to the fact that I can stop them with ships from my attack fleet (so I'll have many of them) and due to the fact that xan are frozen very easy.
If a Cath don't have Scorpions it's his/her own fault to get beaten by BS.
The big problem are Etd Co and Ter/Zik De. If you can't organize enought other ships Spiders and Black Widows shouldn't be in the battlefield at all.

So my suggestion (in case the currect stats will only sligthly change for next round) is to switch targets for Spiders and Black Widows.

So the Spider would be an Fi which targets Co at Init 1 (to counter the Init 2 Beetles/Voyagers). With a similar resource cost as now 2 guns would be work. (less efficientcy than the actual BW but it won't get blown up)
The Black Widow would be a Fr which targets De at init 3 (after Viper/Roaches). At the currect cost for a BW, 3 guns would be to less and 4 guns would be to much. So I suggest decreasing the costs (and armor and emp res) a little bit and assign 3 guns to it. The decrease would lead to the BW to be target more often in a battle with mutiple Fr class ships and this would fit with the rather low Arm/cost coefficient of the BW for a Fr class ship.

Well that's just my suggestions for more balanced ships stats but maybe my view is biased (I just love Cath) so my suggestions would make the Cath to strong specially the Spider would be a very strong ship then.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 12:42   #10
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tietäjä
Eitrades is rather bizzarre here too. I somewhat don't like the idea of eitrades having superior steal ships to zikonians (or in fact, having any at all - I think eitrades is best characterized by a mix of cloak, emp, and terran-likes). Maybe some other way to sort it. Cloaks of course work here.
I'd have to agree. The ranger is, if anything, even better this round with the increased numbers of terrans. And improving terran without changing the ranger is just going to add to the problem.

Quote:
As do with xandathrii, I'm still convinced that in most cases xandathrii should be firing first. To compensate for this attackswise, they should probably have a harder time and having to rely on the cloak (from which the ability to mix classes) to some extent. I particularly liked how, during round 17, xandathrii frigates and destroyers would have worked in to wipe out bombers, but I guess scanning system affects this a lot too.
How exactly is a race which fires first most of the time going to have a hard time attacking?

Quote:
Cathaar come up on the toughs here, and will probably need a pair of zero-lossers to work it out. These need a balance too, as they tend to blow out of proportion.
A lot of these things are inter-connected. One race with the same stats in two different rounds might actually be much better or worse depending on the environment. Being able to judge this and coming up with a satisfactory overall view (I like the word template here) should be a priority for stats development in my opinion.
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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 12:49   #11
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Re: Statistic conflicts

I think that the special ships etd have that correspond to the other races types should be nerfed in this to make them lose some of their edge but retain the "type"

the cloak ship - > available on fscans/unit scans
the emp ship -> has really bad emp resistance (co) or its not a ship class that cat dont have as an emp ship (bs) - also should only be 1 emp ship, gets rid of broker as emp tbh
the steal ship -> steals after roid cap

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Unread 17 Jul 2007, 13:29   #12
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
How exactly is a race which fires first most of the time going to have a hard time attacking?
Zero-loss defences, and forcing them to field (cloak here) off-podclass ships to negate zero-loss defences. I have to admit, though, it does get difficult. I'd reckon it's going to need it's "spectres" (but I guess reasonable flak helps here too - ghost is hardly the "optimum" reasonable flak for spectre).


Quote:
A lot of these things are inter-connected. One race with the same stats in two different rounds might actually be much better or worse depending on the environment.
Indeed. And the ranger is a prime example of this (little terrans, mediocre, lots of terrans, awesome, whoever said eitrades salvage!). Man, being a zik I'd change all my steal ships to kills for a fast pop that zero-loss steals xandathrii frigates and generates massive salvage while on it.

Quote:
Being able to judge this and coming up with a satisfactory overall view (I like the word template here) should be a priority for stats development in my opinion.
Indeed. I think the current "template" used could use some changes.



Some good suggestions there, Tsm, but I don't think our codewhores will give in to those.
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Unread 18 Jul 2007, 10:55   #13
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Re: Statistic conflicts

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Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
How exactly is a race which fires first most of the time going to have a hard time attacking?
You can force them to target another common ship; perhaps an attack ship. This way your target will have a lot of these ships, meaning you have to commit a lot of attack ships. This fleet will be effective at attacking, but prevented from being overpowered as you will find it difficult to split the fleet in 2 and hit more targets.

Round 17 xand FI targetted thief (CO->FI) and pegasus (DE->FI), both of which were attack ships; and that was the theoretical justification.


Having 5 races does have one advantage, at least for the statistics style I prefer. I begin with a grid targetting system; with 5 races you can have each race able to hit the other 4; each attack fleet having 2 targets. This prevents any kind of real necessity for race-on-race battles which, at least in the case of xand, are nearly always ugly and difficult to balance. And can be a bit of nightmare for ziks as well.
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Unread 18 Jul 2007, 11:32   #14
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Pre-round I pointed out that it was entirely unfair for a race's primary target to be itself in terms of what it did to the racial dynamics unless everyone's primary target was themselves. The attempt with etd co was that now etd would targe themselves but due to other options beyond the mere switching of targetting you still have a situation where there a lot more xan on xan conflicts than etd on etd. Personally I'd just get rid of race-on-same-race battles being practical for anyone. I think an over emphasis was perhaps put on balancing the nitty gritty details of stats pre-round rather than the overall aspect.
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Unread 18 Jul 2007, 12:05   #15
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
I think an over emphasis was perhaps put on balancing the nitty gritty details of stats pre-round rather than the overall aspect.
There is a reason to why this was done, and it's twofold. First, there were supporting opinions on forums in favor of improving the set at hands instead of creating a new one. Second, the creator of the set at hands (over all, and perhaps with an amount of support from other participants of the discussion) felt that the design idea (the template, or the overall aspect, however you call it) is superior to previous ideals, hence it needs to be upheld. Because opinions that differed from this stubborn view the creator of the statistics had, and over which he had no interest to discuss at slightest (pointing out to the thread regarding R21 statistics discussion where the creator of the statistics first states that his method, or whatever he called it, is now proven very well working, and after critisism on his concept - and notice, at this stage of the debate, at the method/concept, not at the person - he merely swept it off claiming it's not on the thread topic), so it was continued.

The fact that a lot of people now seem to agree that a different sort of template needs to be designed for superior balance underpins the point that it should have been done earlier, but wasn't done for given reasons (in fact, discussing it with Game, there was an intent to do it earlier which was for silly reasons wiped off; in general, the concept the current round and the previous are/were played upon has received a level of moderator-administrator blind support which probably helped it achieve a level of untouchability).

But overall, it's a good thing that the design concept itself is now given more discussion rather than the small details.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gate
Having 5 races does have one advantage, at least for the statistics style I prefer. I begin with a grid targetting system; with 5 races you can have each race able to hit the other 4; each attack fleet having 2 targets
Which is a very valid point to defend the 5 race plan. Perhaps this is a way that could perhaps be strived for as a "template" (also, I hate the whole discussion about "primary attack fleets" and "secondary attack fleets" - in my opinion, one should work so that there's no clear distinguishion between the "good" and the "bad" attack fleet race per race).
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Unread 18 Jul 2007, 16:11   #16
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Re: Statistic conflicts

I think your history is slightly confused there keiz. Pre-r21 the opinion was voiced, by myself among others, that stats iteration was likely to prove more productive in terms of race balance than chucking out new sets round after round. However obviously if these stats weren't even vaguely balanced reusing them would be a waste of time. I don't think we need to drag back up that other debate either dude

Nor is ensuring both attack fleets are as good going to be easy. In general the larger class (and I mean fi/co fr/de cr/bs so three classes) will always prove more useful as defence appears slower and you can fake using it.
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Unread 18 Jul 2007, 17:29   #17
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
I think your history is slightly confused there keiz. Pre-r21 the opinion was voiced, by myself among others, that stats iteration was likely to prove more productive in terms of race balance than chucking out new sets round after round. However obviously if these stats weren't even vaguely balanced reusing them would be a waste of time. I don't think we need to drag back up that other debate either dude
Ohk. Wonder why the stats were continued for r22, then? Okay okay, debate over. I stand corrected.
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Unread 23 Jul 2007, 19:55   #18
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Re: Statistic conflicts

can someone tell me what ships are useless?
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Unread 25 Jul 2007, 17:53   #19
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Re: Statistic conflicts

As a terran seeing large zik fr is abosutely an huge annoyance without outisde defense it is impossible to defend against. To help balance the zik, ter i think it would be beneficial to either lower the harpy init to 6, but probably a better solution is to raise thief init to 7. only a suggestion let me know what you think
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Unread 26 Jul 2007, 01:30   #20
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Balancing the zik is so difficult. If you believe they're overpowered and try to increase the other races, you increase the zik as well as they'll be stealing those improved ships...
Maybe you can balance ziks not by tweaking the stats but by restricting their capacity to steal ships from planets turned inactive. Example: if a player does not access his account during 48 hours (more?), his fleet is automatically 'protected' (until he logged in again). It means his ships won't fire and won't be fired at and can't be stolen. In essence you could only roid an 'inactive' planet.
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Unread 26 Jul 2007, 06:07   #21
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Re: Statistic conflicts

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Originally Posted by Makhil
Maybe you can balance ziks not by tweaking the stats but by restricting their capacity to steal ships from planets turned inactive.
Wasn't this fundamentally what the change in stealing was all about? It's not like zikonians were overpowered round 19.
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Unread 27 Jul 2007, 16:31   #22
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Re: Statistic conflicts

It's worth noting the changes that appear to have now taken place this round. Etd planets still take the top ranks but they're more of a r17 cathaar winner race than a dominant race, apparently so at least. There was probably some element of confirmation bias (this isn't really the right phrase) with a vast majority of the good players going etd last round. You're also outright missing most of the ascendancy planets who went etd last round in this one (as etd at least). Zik have emerged as more dominant (although this can be partly said to be more a weakening of etd relatively speaking). Xan keep their roids better but I think this is more due to the massive amounts of roids they can cap than any defensive improvements. They can roid terrans with fi and fr+co, caths they can outflak, ziks with fr, etds with fi and themselves with fr and partly fi. This is a fairly comprehensive list of options. Terrans are still weak and cathaar still struggle to keep roids outside the big galaxies. It would be interesting to have a round in which everyone was ranked in terms of skill pre-round then handed out a race and had to play at the same activity level to see how balanced/unbalanced things actually are.

Of course part of balance in terms of what we should strive for development wise is making the races also appear equal so the game doesn't get unbalanced due to unbalanced race choices.
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Unread 31 Jul 2007, 12:47   #23
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Re: Statistic conflicts

I know nobody has responded to my post but I think this is actually really interesting. There have been micro-adaptions in the game, I notice it specifically with the higher amount of anti-bs floating around this round than last, which have balanced out the stats slightly. Really we should have seen the potential for this but for whatever reason we didn't but we should (?) all be able to now recognise it (hurrah for science!)
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Unread 31 Jul 2007, 13:09   #24
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Re: Statistic conflicts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
I know nobody has responded to my post but I think this is actually really interesting. There have been micro-adaptions in the game, I notice it specifically with the higher amount of anti-bs floating around this round than last, which have balanced out the stats slightly.
Yeah. On the short run, given, one round, the tactical scenario is rigid enough to prevent such adaptation. For the coming round, people get their planets reset, start over, and plan again their tactics - which allows them to adapt to an extent. Thus, on a long run, a change can happen which hasn't got as much to do with the statistical balance but the universal reaction. It's probably supported by the degrades on eitrades, which together have resulted in less eitrades having sufficient battleships to punch through, but the ones that do have sufficient battleships hit the top ranks. In short, there's polarization in the eitrades race.

The top10 spread:
Terran 1
Cathaar 1
Xandathrii 2
Zikonian 2
Eitrades 4

From this perspective, eitrades appears pretty dominant.

The top100 spread:
Terran 9
Cathaar 14
Xandathrii 23
Zikonian 37
Eitrades 17

Now looking at it, the correlation with cathaars, xandatriis, and terrans is pretty solid. For zikonians and eitrades it's the other way around. From this it's yet hard to interpret anything else but that medium size eitrades seem to struggle: whether this is statistical or of player spread, is a good question. A top500 will already be affected by the choices players make: it was fairly well known that terran and cathaar aren't such great choices, so the average active joe of top500 will probably have just avoided these races.

If you'd continue it to next round, you'd probably generate a cobweb theory. The next round would probably see less anti-battleships again, and perhaps some niche fix on eitrades to make it less viable on some aspect and more viable on another in order to cut it from having the excess cathaar syndrome (which cathaar doesn't, miraculously, suffer this round, perhaps because of overall inferiority). Obviously using the same statistics set (in principle) will cause people to anticipate the coming round somewhat in base of what happened the previous round.

I haven't paid enough attention really to analyze it further. I've just been drawing sketches of the current setup and kept coming into the conclusion that it's piss difficult and a real tiresome task (which wasn't a surprise, anyways; the more races there is, the harder it gets to balance out), after which I've usually moved on to the online roleplaying game thing.
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