(Brainstorm) Increasing penalty for negative credit flow - for better immersion

[Iceman]

The fact that you guys need to write guides and coach other players, admirable as it is, just makes the problem stand out as a sore thumb.

Umm what? Plenty of games that are popular and widely received have had players coach other players in these ways... None of that really indicates anything, especially in itself.

Sorry, I thought it was evident from the rest of my reply that I was talking specifically about guides and coaching for the scrap way of playing. Like I said, I wrote my fair share of guides for a bunch of games. I also coached a bunch of players in as many games.

This statement just seems very obtuse to me, although not all that surprising from what I've seen you write so far

Yea, I guess it's time for me to pull out of this discussion, I have abused my participation in this topic.

Is it really the communities that leave in the exploits? Or is it the devs that do not want to spend the resources on fixing them? Because they deem it not worth it (not just the dev time but also the testing required).

Why would you need to learn (and be encouraged to) stuff that really shouldn't be allowed?

The meta just came to be because of a flaw in the design. I'm pretty sure most exploits were not "by design".

Just because a thing is unintended doesn't mean it's invalid or needs to be removed.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that closing exploits requires reworking the entire game?

Do you jest? I hate to bust your chops— there is no getting around rebalancing vanilla and lot of over mods if scrapping is cut out. To anyone that's actually played them, you'd immediately see why

Removing or nerfing scrapping to oblivion would 100% entail adjusting the stats of just about every empire, ship and structure in the game, some to dramatic degrees.

So your point seems to be that this exploit was intentionally added to the game by the devs, since not having it would totally unbalance the game. That would be odd, I guess. They seem to know nothing about game design and balance too, because they created this game completely dependent on a mechanic that can be considered (IMO) a cheat, and designed all the empires from the get go with all that in mind. Notice I'm not saying that this is my opinion, I'm saying that the way you're putting it leads to believe that.

Also notice, and sorry to bust your chops, that other people made suggestions that do not bring armageddon to the world.

Making the the game feel familiar + preserving some semblance the tactics and attack timings after all of that would be quite difficult to say the least.

Uh, ok.

(...)
You're defending your backyard, so I have no more comments to make. So

Negative. The fact you seem to be immediately chalking up that the lack consensus to "scrap is bad" is probably a failure of imagination or bias

there is no bias on your part then.

and my take away is that both sides have merits to their views and should be respected without throwing one or the other under the bus.

No comment.
Good talk though!

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

This got me thinking about what I would do if I somehow could implement changes we wanted to economy and income in BOTF (Sadly though, I'm very unsure these would even be possible to do).

Option 1a:

An immediate and flat percentage penalty (maybe somewhere between 25 - 50%) on research and industry as a penalty for having any amount of negative income per turn, similar to how morale also lowers output of some sectors. Maybe intel, energy and agriculture should be adjusted as well to further simulate a strained war-economy. It could represent the "wear and tear" of key infrastructures & that are falling into dilapidation due to corner-cutting, lack of resources + trained workers.

Option 1b: Same as above, but the penalty grows and scales with the difference between ship support cost and ship population support

Option 2:

The state of negative income per turn lowers morale empire-wide a certain number per turn (maybe 2, 3 or even 4 points? There are a lot of ways to 'farm' morale in MP and offset negative changes). Income, industry and research would all begin to tank with the morale, albeit not all once if you as a player are managing other morale factors expertly. The decline would be more gradual then option one, but would not be ignorable in the long term.

There should be possibilities. There is also a changed ship population support formula by Gowron you might want to look up (BoP topic IIRC?).

You could use the negative income amount and/or the ratio the current fleet support cost exceeds your total ship population support as base for a global intel/research or morale penalty.

OT: Reminds on the martial law research display glitch. System output wrongly added to total research/intel points. One has to subtract respective values when calculating required percentages to reach next tech areas. As if the hidden bonus feature doesn't make the on the fly prediction hard enough...

disabling the automatic retrofit of all older models. So, a Destroyer I would stay a type one even if a type two is right along side it. I'm pretty sure no mod creator has done this option, though. I wonder why that is...

Disabling auto-upgrade screws the BotF AI and sucks for the crew-experience feature. Hence ECM uses difficulty depended player only hull damage penalty. The very old building-mod by Joker offered options for auto-upgrade on/off or AI only + similar modifiers for ship build and support costs.

2. Selling ships, selling structures and producing trade goods will give only 1 credit per 4 industry points.

And why not use the same formula that TGs uses? Insta fix for the exploit

Possible shipbuilding bonuses to industry + auto upgrade -> require lower scrap/sell ratio than trade goods to remove the exploit (vanilla about four times - klingon destroyer). ECMs consistent square root is so low that this doesn't matter anymore.


@ Traditional BotF exploit MP

I see no need to dispute players who have fun with this and want to keep it that way. True to be told if I was to return to BotF MP, I'd go with old-school exploit vanilla - just for fun.

Removing exploits makes the game harder and much more strategic (every miscalculation hurts). However, it demands relearning strategies for all races, starting levels, galaxy sizes, difficulty and minor race settings from scratch. I learned a lot playtesting ECM T1 cardassians/klingons on hard with no minors. But I realize we can't expect casual players to tolerate that level of punishment.

[Final Run]

There should be possibilities. There is also a changed ship population support formula by Gowron you might want to look up (BoP topic IIRC?).

With anything Gowron I would bet it's in BoP too, but I'll just have to look for myself

You could use the negative income amount and/or the ratio the current fleet support cost exceeds your total ship population support as base for a global intel/research or morale penalty.

OT: Reminds on the martial law research display glitch. System output wrongly added to total research/intel points, so you have to subtract respecive values when calculating required percentages to reach next tech areas. As if the hidden bonus feature doesn't make the on the fly prediction hard enough..,

Excellent, thank you~

I was asking how something could be done and here is something that might help in that hopefully, so that makes the thread worth it for me

It may not even pan out as the best approach for an update or in a new mod that I or someone else may make, but at least we could give it a try to see how the players like it.

Disabling auto-upgrade screws the BotF AI and sucks for the crew-experience feature. Hence ECM uses difficulty depended player only hull damage penalty. The very old building-mod by Joker offered options for auto-upgrade on/off or AI only + similar modifiers for ship build and support costs.

Well this explains a lot

[trevtones]

Disabling auto-upgrade screws the BotF AI and sucks for the crew-experience feature. Hence ECM uses difficulty depended player only hull damage penalty. The very old building-mod by Joker offered options for auto-upgrade on/off or AI only + similar modifiers for ship build and support costs.

Well this explains a lot

I know I've played mods that use this but I forget but how long does it take for the hull to heal from this hull damage penalty? If this is an effective way to stop the type 1 to type 2 upgrade exploit it might be something to consider for MP.

And I know it's off topic but @finalrun I'm curious how you rank the 5 races on T5 start for RMPM? You think Fergs are better than Cardies or Klingons?

[Final Run]

And I know it's off topic but @finalrun I'm curious how you rank the 5 races on T5 start for RMPM? You think Fergs are better than Cardies or Klingons?

Yeah it's quite a bit off-topic but I'll humor you this time

100% Ferengi are at least #2 if not #1 on T5 Tech level, imo. There is not even a doubt in my mind anymore-- that’s not to say the advantage is vanilla-levels of huge, but it’s certainly not something I'd ignore. Taking a page from the fighting game franchise, It’s best to look at the sum of the match-ups

(They only have one challenging match-up in the past, that is with Klingons. The combination of cloak and disruptor focused armament basically means that the Ferengi penchant of torpedo & keep away play is reduced).

...

The things I've found that makes playing Ferengi a breeze:

The amount of money Ferengi will be generating on T5 with raiding is truly sickening, and Ferengi are one of the best at raiding ofc. We may play with raid limits to steal only when the target bank is not negative, but even then it is still powerful even if the worst vanilla abuses have been cleared.

Throw in the money they get from trade, economic intel and diplomatic leverage, and I just don’t see how the others can compete without a little luck. With good morale and level 9 factories, all 3 starting systems have the potential to pump out a raider in one turn. With just ten turns, that’s 30 Raiders built…

Bombing systems and takeover is also a cake walk for Fergs with they have a dozen or so Cruisers to absorb damage. With those transports that move 2 spaces and all those torpedoes for planetary assault it’s easy to blitz a bot empire in 45 turns and immediately turn around and attack whoever your opponent is before they’re really ready. That also means the game ends around turn 100ish, so no time for fancier dreadnought type ships to get upgraded in most cases.

Somehow that is managed though, the Ferengi in return would be happy to just scrap 4 raider II's for marauders at a 4:3 exhange, the latter being a monster once it gets its upgrade. Meanwhile groups of them are likely still zipping around at four spaces a turn raiding systems. (Feds/Cards don't have cloak, so they struggle even more at preventing this)

So far in my most recent one on one T5 games (with Hewer) I won as Ferengi 4-0 and he picked Klingons three times-- challenging games for the most part but I broke through in the end. He picked Cardassians once too, that one was probably the most lopsided victory and easiest game of MP I ever played in a long time.

Maybe that’s just player error, but tbh I think there’s a little more to it.

Realistically we’d need at least a dozen games before drawing definite conclusions, but I think the trend so far seems to be worth looking into.

[trevtones]

Bombing systems and takeover is also a cake walk for Fergs with they have a dozen or so Cruisers to absorb damage. With those transports that move 2 spaces and all those torpedoes for planetary assault it’s easy to blitz a bot empire in 45 turns and immediately turn around and attack whoever your opponent is before they’re really ready. That also means the game ends around turn 100ish, so no time for fancier dreadnought type ships to get upgraded in most cases.

I've never been a huge fan of T5 and games ending at turn 100. If It were up to me we'd be playing T1 on large maps all the time
I ranked Fergs 3rd so Im not saying theyre bad I just think the industry and ships of the klingons and cards are better but yeah I can see how effective they are as raiders. Maybe If I raided more and stopped conquering everything the Fergs and Rommies would be higher on my tier list!
My news years resolution is to raid more in botf!