Of score (and game mentality)

[Tietäjä]

Of incentive mechanisms and their significance

We can all agree that the purpose of score is to define the winner. How score is calculated is the mechanism that signals how the game is essentially "supposed" to be played. I'll argue for this. Regardless of different rankings (galaxy, planet, alliance) it's the same thing. The current trend in this game is that the optimal tactic to win a round is to have highest defining planet value of all. XP is a secondary sidekick that will hardly win you anything, but that simply dwells in midst. It's, if you look at rankings (again, any) essentially white noise. Some have more, some have less, it's not correlated with score, it's more correlated with planet activity. But it's of no significance. Value is how you win right now. It's been so for most of the time. It can be more rewarding not to attack, to create pacts that reduce incomings, and to simply collect. In this fashion, the game is more a planet and politics management game than a war game.

Some will remember round 16 which was essentially different. Value wasn't necessarily the optimal path to play - in fact winners didn't play for value. That round, XP wasn't a sidekick but a defining factor. Playing the game the "conventional" way didn't yield best results - it perhaps still was a Nash equilibrium strategy. But winners played it different - fleet was a tool to gain score, not an end and means. Of course, this round was an extreme. But it shows how essential the score calculation is in defining how the game is (to be) played. This should elaborate that the score calculation formula provides an incentive mechanics: if you reward crashing your fleet for high XP gains, people will use that tactic to success. If you reward containing your fleet, playing low and passive, gathering and growing resources slow and safe, people will fence.


Why removing alliance rankings will not make a difference

As a blunt footnote here, my argument leans on the now called presumption that we want Planetarion to be more a war game than a management game. This is why removing alliance rankings will not change anything - certainly, it will and can change the focus from alliance rankings to planet and galaxy rankings, but "optimal strategies" remain. To win, possessing highest value will remain crucial. To possess highest value in the end, you need to play passive, avoid excessive combat, and contain your value. Alliances or galaxies or planet scoreboards, whichever. The game mentality will remain the same. If your aim is to reduce the focus of alliances, yes, surely, removing alliance rankings will gain this goal. I don't personally believe it's all that interesting, though, I think a more radical change needs to be implemented that actually gives people different incentives.


What can be done, and how to create incentives

Consider following. Game mechanics remain same: asteroids are gathered to collect resources, resources are collected to build fleet. But fleet itself is of not so much value in your rankings. Fleet will be used to gather score instead of being a heavy weight source of score itself. To give a few examples, attacking a planet with larger fleet and stealing asteroids from such would yield score (in an XP fashion). Fighting a combat would yield score (again, XP fashion): little to none if you're crushed and your fleet is devastated, a lot if you defeat a stronger opponent and damage him more than you damage yourself. The incentive mechanics of "value" would remain: you need to have a bigger fleet to generate more score, since numbers will matter here, but it's not optimal to consistently sit the fleet home in safety and avoid combat.

Let's consider again. Multiple smaller fleet value planets unite their resources and fleet catch a fleet of large value. They succeed, and are awarded large amount of XP for overcoming a superior force in battle. A larger fleet attacking a planet with smaller value would yield less. Bashing small fleets with large fleets would yield less. To emphasize, success in the scoreboards would encourage collecting fleet and using it in combat, using it to destroy other fleets and steal asteroids, which would encourage tactical maneuvers (like fleet trapping).

It's still a sketchy concept, but it should incorporate fleet value in much less impact of the score itself and much more impact of in gathering score. Score should not be obtained mainly through having a large value, but through participating in combat. The red herring is to change the game mentality from accumulating score through management into actively gathering score through engaging in combat. I'm aware this favors heavily active players, but more or less everything will. I'll refine the concept and formula if I'm arsed at some point (and have the spare time to do so).



edit. I'm aware people will have the first thought that I'm suggesting driving the game towards what it was round 16 - suiciding fleet for XP to obtain score. I'd like to point that this is not the case - the mechanism would involve a system (I'll elaborate it further at some point) that would essentially cause suiciding hamper your score growth potential: having no fleet would obviously make you small in fleet size, which would seem exploitable in a scenario where everyone has tiny fleets and everyone goes for nitpicking asteroids to obtain high scores from people with relatively larger fleets (speaking of a 100 ships against 200). This can be prevented by implementing possibly an exponential scale (dangerous I know) that means that the larger combats you participate in with larger fleets causes more XP thus score: consider following.

Score gained: a * (fleet destroyed - fleet lost) * score factor.

here a is the factual total fleet value of your fleets and your enemy's fleets (ie. enemy fleet per your fleet) - it grows the larger the enemy is, and reduces the smaller you are, and is capped between certain numbers, [0.25,4] say to give an arbitrary example. The second batch would mean that the larger the combat is the more score will be involved. Score factor is an arbitrary weight factor (because you'd need to reward asteroids too, and asteroid play in a different ballpark in terms of nominal numbers).