new priorities

[Makhil]

maybe it's time to introduce some new engineers priorities :
- emp resistance (vs Cath) : a percentage of frozen ships can still fire
- stealing resistance (vs Zik) : a percentage of stolen ships get back to their owner
- armour piercing missiles (vs Ter) : damage vs terran ships is boosted by x percent
- special shield generator (vs Xan) : armour vs Xans is boosted by x percent
Ofc you could only pick 1of those (and maybe they would work only when you are at your planet)
this could be used as a balance factor, when during the round we discover than a race is too powerful.

[noah02]

-sleeping : you can stick sleeping on for 48 hours and your fleet will be safe

[Smudge]

I like the idea but it would be silly as you can only change priorites per 48 ticks

[smeg9]

Maybe these could be a new Ressurction of un-destroyable (Apart from maybe structure destroying ships)

PDS, or SDS..

Whereby each one has to be researched, and the more you have the greater the resistance, depending on how many ships have been sent / number of anti-EMP shilds capped at 20% resistance, or something.

This could work out to be quite good,
PDS was always too weak against attack, you couldn't use them to defend, or run them if you had large incommings, but if they were equivenlent to structures (field generators) then this would make them powerful enough to be worth while, but with a cap so that it wouldn't ruin attackers.

[Smudge]

But then that would remove the EMP being a special trait.

Maybe an EMP based PDS for Caths, but not all races as it would unbalance things even more

[Appocomaster]

Not saying this won't happen, but most of the mentioned options so far would need a complete recode of combat so we're looking @ r16.
I never thought of sleeping as a priority.
6 / 12 / 24 hours where you don't loose roids/structures/ships if you're attacked, but you can't login. Or something? A sort of half way between vacation mode and normal, that can only be used once every 48 ticks.

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Appocomaster

Not saying this won't happen, but most of the mentioned options so far would need a complete recode of combat so we're looking @ r16.
I never thought of sleeping as a priority.
6 / 12 / 24 hours where you don't loose roids/structures/ships if you're attacked, but you can't login. Or something? A sort of half way between vacation mode and normal, that can only be used once every 48 ticks.

Basically vacation mode for a set amount of time.

To be honest that idea I dont like. It would lead to mass account "sleeping" on Sunday nights for example (which is when most BG's do there big attacks).

[Monroe]

I don't like the idea of race specific priorities, due to the length between changing of engineering priorities it wouldn't make sense.
I don't think there should be any change to the vacation settings, your just asking for abuse.
I like the idea about making PDS structures. It would make structure killers useful at some level. But then on the other hand it might lead to more bashing. IF however it was set so that PDS structures would always get killed before other structures (which would sort of make sense as they are primary military targets) they would serve some use, and because there is a cap on the total # of structures that you can own this can't be abused too much. It also makes sense from a strategic sense, because it forces you to strike a balance between military necessity and economic growth. I would recommend they still fire at the end after pods but before structure killers. As far as I can see it adds a new dimension to the game without changing much, and with very little chance of abuse

[ChubbyChecker]

Originally Posted by Monroe

I don't like the idea of race specific priorities, due to the length between changing of engineering priorities it wouldn't make sense.

That's the whole point though. If you could change it any time then you'd just tailor it to attack the incoming that you're getting right now. By having to wait you can target the races that attack you often without having this new feature unbalance the game too much.

[Monroe]

Originally Posted by ChubbyChecker

That's the whole point though. If you could change it any time then you'd just tailor it to attack the incoming that you're getting right now. By having to wait you can target the races that attack you often without having this new feature unbalance the game too much.

Well the other issue for me is this falls under the same class as the attack priorities that were tried a couple of rounds ago. That system really didn't work out well. As far as I can see this kind of complication would add much to the complexity of battle senarios without adding much to the game. Combat in PA is about precisly being able to gauge battle losses verses gains. By adding a variable that attackers /defenders could not accurately quantify takes away from the game imo. Unless there was a way to scan and read engineering priorities (which seems silly to me) any engineering priority that directly effects combat is a bad idea.

[ChubbyChecker]

I wasn't around when attack priorities were so I don't know how it works in practice.
You're probably right though.

[kamikaze69]

I wasn't around when these race specific bonuses were around either, but I have one question:

With regards to the race specific engineering modifications (ie. Makhil's original post) will these bonuses only be offered on defense or will they be available for attack purposes as well?

***SUGGESTION!!!***

Have the original 3 tier engineering priority system with an extra one dedicated for race specific engineering!!! With that in mind, set your standards as a single modifier for each of the races and then have this engineering priority on it's own dedicated timer.

eg. You are currently just coming OOP and you have Research 1st pri, Mining 2nd Pri, and Const 3rd pri. You have not set a race specific modifier engineering yet. Since you have had this engineering on constantly from the beginning, you can change your BASE engineering priorities as standard.
Then, all of a sudden, a Xan eta 10 pops out of nowhere (FI/CO with 1 travel tech). You as a Zikonian, decide that with your 500k of resources you best spend it on Cutlass and Thief, to try and steal some units straight OOP. To save your FR from getting too slaughtered, you set the RACE SPECIFIC engineering pri to Xan and hope like hell that you will be able to save enough FR to steal some of his FI/CO.
Now that you have changed this engineering priority, you now have to wait 48 hours until you can change that RACE SPECIFIC engineering priority. Your BASE engineering priority is unchanged, you can still change this right now if you wanted to.

thoughts??? comments???

[Monroe]

Originally Posted by kamikaze69

thoughts??? comments???

Since you guys wern't here let me explain. A couple of rounds back (I can't recall the exact round) there were no pods, all ships could steal roids. How it worked was there were a certain percentage of ships that were assigned for different tasks, attacking otherships, stealing roids, destroying structures, ect. As you researched different techs you got new bonuses you could choose to impliment on attacks, so you could get an extra bonus for stealing ships, or to your ability to hit other ships, or your defense ability (making yourself harder to hit). It was a rather complicated sceme and the end result was when doing calcs you simply assumed the attacker and defender would put max attack bonus on and leave it at that. The whole system added very little to the game, other then a lot of confusion and as a result was abandoned. What you guys are suggesting is a return to a similar system, in that you can get extra attack/def bonuses by setting special priorities. As I have already stated this simply addes a layer of complexity to the coding and playing of the game without adding any new or inovative strategies to improve the game.

[Cayl]

-posrep
-negrep

Giving bonuses to your opinions on the forums.

[Helix]

Originally Posted by Monroe

Well the other issue for me is this falls under the same class as the attack priorities that were tried a couple of rounds ago. That system really didn't work out well. As far as I can see this kind of complication would add much to the complexity of battle senarios without adding much to the game. Combat in PA is about precisly being able to gauge battle losses verses gains. By adding a variable that attackers /defenders could not accurately quantify takes away from the game imo. Unless there was a way to scan and read engineering priorities (which seems silly to me) any engineering priority that directly effects combat is a bad idea.

How do you know if that feature worked out well or not? Nobody knows as none of the code for that round was ever released so everything was pure guess work.

The simple way to making it so people know what their losses would be is to make the priority available to see on a planet or surface or tech scan or sumthin.

[Helix]

Originally Posted by Monroe

Since you guys wern't here let me explain. A couple of rounds back (I can't recall the exact round) there were no pods, all ships could steal roids. How it worked was there were a certain percentage of ships that were assigned for different tasks, attacking otherships, stealing roids, destroying structures, ect. As you researched different techs you got new bonuses you could choose to impliment on attacks, so you could get an extra bonus for stealing ships, or to your ability to hit other ships, or your defense ability (making yourself harder to hit). It was a rather complicated sceme and the end result was when doing calcs you simply assumed the attacker and defender would put max attack bonus on and leave it at that. The whole system added very little to the game, other then a lot of confusion and as a result was abandoned. What you guys are suggesting is a return to a similar system, in that you can get extra attack/def bonuses by setting special priorities. As I have already stated this simply addes a layer of complexity to the coding and playing of the game without adding any new or inovative strategies to improve the game.

You seem quite confused about the entire PAX system of combat. First of all there was no ship stealing in PAX combat. Second of all, you capped roids so long as 22% of your ships were not killed. This was dubbed the 'disturbance factor'. All ships fired at the same time, there was no initiatives, and all ships were kill ships. There also was no defense ability, it was simply a war priority in addition to other research/mining/construction priorities. With war at #1 it gave you a 10% bonus in firepower.

Personally I thought the system worked just great, and it was despite what some people say, the most balanced round of PA ever. However admittedly this was due to the fact that there was very little differentiation between the races (no emp for cath, no stealing for zik). The reason why that system was abandoned was because of the lack of differentiation (people yearned for emp and stealing to come back) and also because people did not like having the combat formulas kept in the dark, even though the cabeza and Kals bcalcs were darn close enough.


ON TOPIC : I like this idea, it certainly gives a way to help counterbalance an extremely powerful race. If cath are too strong, have everyone in your ally turn this on and it helps make covering those calls easier, in turn making the game more fun for everyone. Another idea for this could be, say for the cath one it makes you stronger against cath, but weaker against terran.

[Monroe]

Originally Posted by Helix

The reason why that system was abandoned was because of the lack of differentiation (people yearned for emp and stealing to come back) and also because people did not like having the combat formulas kept in the dark, even though the cabeza and Kals bcalcs were darn close enough.

I couldn't remember all of the details of PAX, thanks for clarifying. But you sort of made my point for me, combat in PA is about knowing the odds and being able to acurately gauge gains and losses, if they want to make this "combat priority" available in a scan fine, it might make sense, otherwise it doesn't add anything as I stated previously. As to adjusting to powerful races, this is something that is argued every round, and I don't believe there ever will be a perfect balance. Race balance is something that is and should be addressed and tweaked between every round. In my opinion an adjustable ingame balance doesn't make sense, it just adds another unnecessary complication to the game.