(October 13th, 2019, 17:39)RefSteel Wrote: (As for fully terraforming your worlds ... why in the galaxy would you want to commit enormous resources to researching a new technology and then not make full use of it when it comes in?)
Good point, actually. I found high-level terraforming techs to be rarely worth it in DG. I hope that gets tweaked a bit in the future.
(October 13th, 2019, 17:39)RefSteel Wrote: Given time, if DG gets popular (especially around here) people will come up with helper programs or spreadsheets to tell you what you're really getting out of your 153rd factory, but to me, that's extraneous to playing the game.
To some extent, those tools are built in. Factory output is a known quantity for a given Eco Restoration level. You can tell colonies to stop building factories when a certain cost is reached, and they'll get back to it once you reduce the cost again. Though you still have to ask yourself if you're willing to wait 20 turns, or 21, or 22, or ... for the factory to pay for itself. 20 turns, take it or leave it is easier.
(October 13th, 2019, 17:39)RefSteel Wrote:
(October 13th, 2019, 05:48)haphazard1 Wrote: The various slider overflows and advanced spending settings are very helpful for reducing the micro required to keep your planets doing what you want them to do during quiet periods in the game. It is easy to zip through a block of turns with much less micro than would have been needed in classic MOO.
I agree that this is a big improvement too! I actually like the (minimal) micromanagement that exists in MoO because it's a way to "stay in touch with" all my planets as they mature and contribute to the empire while still accomplishing something useful (though rather small) in-game, but that speaks more to my preferred level of engagement with the game's details, and also with MoO's small map sizes, than to the quality of the game. The ability to automate micro stuff like this is a big step forward from MoO, especially for larger galaxies.
Somewhat relatedly, fiddling with the research sliders every few turns had the side effect of keeping me up to date on how far everything is along...
RefSteel, did you ever write a post about what you'd change about MOO/what your optimal 4X game would look like? Just curious!
RefSteel (who I know from SGs is a much better MOO player than I am) makes a very good point about building out early industry vs. col ships. This is one of the main things that makes more industry 'almost' a no brainer. Grabbing more worlds can be more important. (This is probably most apparent when playing the Meklar.) Immediate defense needs also can take priority. But for much of a typical MOO game if a new robotic controls tech is acquired allowing more factories, building the new capacity at your mature core worlds is worth doing unless you face an emergency situation. Newer and still developing worlds are more complicated to decide.
On early engine speeds, I like the faster movement in DG. Starting at speed 2 rather than 1 reduces the tedium, while still requiring planning for transit times. The big jumps in ability to one turn move between most neighboring systems will still change game play later on.
I am still trying to find a balance with DG on how often I am checking all my worlds. In MOO I usually checked through my worlds every turn in the early and mid game, and a bit less frequently later. As RefSteel said, it is a way to keep aware of how my empire is doing and stay involved in the game.
Overall I am liking DG. I just need to find more time to play.
Quote:This (along with the economic penalties for ever interacting with the game outside of moving ships around; you can't even design your own first-generation ships without being docked for failing to use the game's default designs!) is a big part of the reason I found myself losing interest in DG.
Note that the economic penalty for designing ships is optional and can be disabled. I haven't reached a firm conclusion about this system yet, but my initial impression was not entirely favourable. I didn't like that it harshly penalizes the player for using destroyers and cruisers, when these ships are already very expensive to build and maintain compared to corvettes and frigates. Small fast fighters with stabilizers were already a staple in MOO1 and I don't think their dominance on the battlefield needs encouragement.
I kind of think that the base cost of designing a stock design should be zero, until you start tinkering with it. The base cost would apply again as soon as you want to start making the design perform better or complete faster. The only reason you should go for a suboptimal design would be to offset the cost of rushing it in an emergency.
(October 13th, 2019, 18:35)RFS-81 Wrote: Good luck, Jeff!
Definitely! Regardless of my design opinions, I hope DG does great!
Quote:To some extent, those tools are built in. Factory output is a known quantity for a given Eco Restoration level. You can tell colonies to stop building factories when a certain cost is reached, and they'll get back to it once you reduce the cost again. Though you still have to ask yourself if you're willing to wait 20 turns, or 21, or 22, or ... for the factory to pay for itself. 20 turns, take it or leave it is easier.
I didn't realize that - and it's another example of DG supplying good information and controls to the player, definitely a big improvement in that department over most (all?) other 4X games I've played or heard of! Also, to be clear, I don't want to stop building factories when doing so passes some arbitrary cost/return threshold: I (may) want to pause building factories when they'll no longer (pay for themselves in time to) help me do the next Really Important Thing I want the planet to do. An obsessively lengthy discussion of this in relation to MoO and DG follows, in spoilers since it makes this even more of a wall of text:
Even in MoO, population growth (and the resulting production) makes it tough to pin down the exact moment when I should switch over from facs to The Project Itself, but the point isn't getting it perfectly right anyway; the point is prioritizing the planet's development for the future (i.e. facs/terraforming/soil/etc.) against getting the Important Thing (one or more Colships, planetary defenses, major investment in a new research project, a new ARS Battleship, etc) ASAP (and potentially balancing both against alternative Important Things).
Now, the sense I get is that the change in factory costs is usually sufficiently gradual in DG that this can be approximated anyway, much like in MoO; the cost of getting the timing slightly wrong generally won't be too big. My worry is that even approximating it in advance seems like it would be difficult, time-consuming, or both, without a good mathematical understanding of the formula by which factory costs increase and its application to a given world. I may be (and hope I am) wrong about that; my fear is that basically every new world (maybe with exceptions for special worlds like MoO Rich/Art worlds that are good enough to be worth alway maxing out) will want to do a rote "build facs until they'll no longer speed the spaceport, then build that, then swap to research or ships" cycle, and that the point where you want to swap to a spaceport will be a separate and involved calculation for each planet. (Note MoO doesn't have a consistent 20-turn payback time for factories either, except as an average for large numbers of facs for non-Silicoid races in the very early game; it's just that, apart from usually-minor results of rounding errors, the changes happen in big jumps, with the discovery of IIT, RC, or waste reduction/cleanup tech, and apply equally everywhere. Precisely because the changes aren't smooth and are happen only on special and planned occasions, they're interesting events to which a player can respond and plan for as an "emperor" rather than as a calculator.)
In any case, it's not so simple to calculate the return horizon on a DG factory for a reason I mentioned only in passing in my post: The population growth penalty for waste. I understand (from reading other threads) that Jeff Graw is thinking of changing and removing this anyway, and I definitely support that. Population growth is important in any game, but doubly so in DG's default rules (i.e. no colships, transports from spaceport worlds auto-colonize) - the meta may have changed since then, but I recall that part of the reason the pop growth slider was originally removed was that the AI programmer at one time found that force-growing population was a too-powerful One Right Answer. (This seems logical to me as a consequence of the way spaceport colonization works.) As such, anything that restricts population growth is a very questionable build, and this effect is emphasized when your planet is in the middle of its growth curve (larger natural pop growth means a percentage reduction has a larger total effect) - and the effect is very hidden. All the information is there, but piecing it all together to realize the expensive factory you're building may actually be reducing your planet's overall productivity (at least) until you get better Eco Restoration technology would require a very good understanding of planetary growth curves, planetary waste mechanics, and the different ways in which your overall population growth relates to the expansion of your empire. Even in MoO, it's so easy to underestimate the power of rapid natural population growth that many players (even extremely-skilled veteran players) overbuild factories on planets that would actually help the empire better by shipping out the pop that's working the extra facs (to worlds with lower pop or in greater immediate need) so as to stay in the middle of their growth curves and help grow population. (Partly, vets tend to do this to avoid micromanagement tedium; if there were cool DG-like advanced labor-saving options - say, "Ship all newly-grown pop to the following world every turn" - that would change things, but partly it's also because of competing priorities that do demand that the planet be maximally developed ASAP, like the need to crank out a series of colships or warships, or to be able to put up planetary defenses quickly in an emergency.) But when the facs you do build actually reduce your growth rate, building them (at least until you get good waste cleanup technology) can really be a trap.
The tl:dr might boil down to something like, "MoO leaves a lot of important information for decisions like this hidden or unclear; DG does this a lot better, except in the case of the long- and even short-term production impact of factories slowing population growth (which doesn't happen in MoO). What annoys me about DG's increasing factory costs is the way they seem to me to make the decision about when to switch from facs to [other stuff] more explicitly about specific numbers, less about changing needs and technologies."
Quote:RefSteel, did you ever write a post about what you'd change about MOO/what your optimal 4X game would look like? Just curious!
I don't think I ever have - at least not explicitly! I do like to have variety, so I'm not sure there's one optimal 4X game design for me. It's also possible that if I tried DG now, I'd like it a lot more than I expect, in part because there are just so many options available that I might well find a set-up that I'd really enjoy. If I had more computer gaming time, I might give it a try and find out - but, sadly, I don't.
(October 13th, 2019, 20:01)haphazard1 Wrote: But for much of a typical MOO game if a new robotic controls tech is acquired allowing more factories, building the new capacity at your mature core worlds is worth doing unless you face an emergency situation.
I used to think so ... but then I played an SG with Thrawn where he completely flipped this on its head for me! When you make the jump from (say) RC3 to RC4, yes, it means you can build a bunch more factories - but instead, it can free up a quarter of your population to participate in invasions without reducing your factory production capacity!
Quote:On early engine speeds, I like the faster movement in DG. Starting at speed 2 rather than 1 reduces the tedium, while still requiring planning for transit times. The big jumps in ability to one turn move between most neighboring systems will still change game play later on.
Sounds good; I'll take your word for it! What I'll argue though is this: Incremental engine increases will always become less exciting as the numbers become large. Warp-2 retros to Warp-3 nuclear engines in DG will be every bit as exciting as Warp-2 nuclears to Warp-3 sublights in MoO, but you're starting one step closer to the point where the jump is e.g. from Warp 6 to Warp 7 and the change in transit times for most journeys is negligible or nonexistant. (With Starlanes, this may be a bigger or smaller deal: If you can't "skip over" planets en route, high-warp engines quickly become meaningless except if and insofar as they affect combat speed; if you can, the circuitous routes the starlanes make you take do make it a little more likely that advanced engines will shave a turn or two off a trip.)
(October 14th, 2019, 07:41)Zed-F Wrote: Note that the economic penalty for designing ships is optional and can be disabled.
Nice! I didn't realize that either! As mentioned above, DG does seem to have an excellent range of start-up options available!
Quote:I didn't like that it harshly penalizes the player for using destroyers and cruisers, when these ships are already very expensive to build and maintain compared to corvettes and frigates. Small fast fighters with stabilizers were already a staple in MOO1 and I don't think their dominance on the battlefield needs encouragement.
While the tactical rules were being refined, I was told the main playtester found that Huge ships were the best in battle, pound for pound, at least under the then-current rules (which should always be true in a well-designed system, by the way, to make up for their lack of flexibility - a battleship can only be in one place at a time - and the need to pour lots of production into the supership before you have anything to show for your work) and that may still be true. But the flexibility and potential for immediate completion will still always be in smallcrafts' favor, so big ships would need major advantages to overcome those factors and the extra start-up costs. (In MoO, I often literally build one huge ship of a given design as an anchor for my fleet: A monster ship like that is powerful and unique. If start-up costs for large ships are extreme, it sounds like that strategy is off the table in DG....)
I should also explain what I meant by first-generation ships, by the way - in spoilers again since I apparently write way too much about these things:
I can understand adding a cost for "prototyping" a new design as an alternative means of limiting the number of ship designs than MoO's hard 6-design limit (which would be hard to justify in a modern game). I doubt if it's effective when it matters (in the late game) and I suspect there are unintended consequences that make it more trouble than it's worth, but I haven't tried it out and I understand the reasoning in theory. My primary frustration is with the way the game begins, with several armed ships in your fleet, not of your own design, drawing maintenance, but necessary to fight the space pirates that are already guarding other star systems (and to hold off the AIs' free starting fleets if you meet them) - and the fact that the very first warships you build on your own, even with starting technology, again can't be of your own design unless you pay a penalty. The solution to this is the one DG actually provides though: The option to turn off prototyping costs from the pre-game options screen. (Even better would be an option to design my starting fleet of N ship designs on T0, and to select my starting fleet from among them, with a budget equivalent to the cost of the game's default fleets, especially with an option to set the designs I like as defaults for use in future games.)
Quote:my fear is that basically every new world (maybe with exceptions for special worlds like MoO Rich/Art worlds that are good enough to be worth alway maxing out) will want to do a rote "build facs until they'll no longer speed the spaceport, then build that, then swap to research or ships" cycle, and that the point where you want to swap to a spaceport will be a separate and involved calculation for each planet.
Based on my experience so far, I don't think this would be an ideal approach. Any hostile worlds you colonize should not be used as population sources except if they will immediately be back filled, for instance. You do want some planets where you stop at roughly enough factories to keep about half your population employed, so you have some worlds that are more pop-growth oriented to use to fill up your other worlds, but you should plan to pick some worlds specifically for this role, and your poor worlds are a good place to start covering this need naturally. You might not need too many others dedicated to this job full time; it's not unreasonable to take pop from mature worlds and then backfill from poor worlds after the fact, for instance if you are invading. Also note that your invasion speed may be restricted by the need to build spaceports to extend your range, which slows down the rate at which you consume pop for invasions. You are definitely right about the time when you get a new RC tech being potentially a good time to start a new invasion, though.
After playing through ~150-200 turns in a couple of games now I feel like I have a reasonably good intuitive grasp of how to balance factory builds, terraforming, research, and other projects, but I don't think the player should be trying to do this as an exact science. In many cases (unless at a new colony or building a specific project like a spaceport) you want to be doing all of these at once, and just adjusting the ratios to the needs of the moment. Sure factories and terraforming gets more expensive as you go along, but the game is designed to have more turns elapse between major events, and longer timeframes in which those investments can pay for themselves. The main thing to keep in mind in DG is that investing in tech (especially tech that reduces waste or lets you expand to new worlds) is a good way to extract value from your production without increasing costs of vertical growth, so is more important to invest in earlier.
Regarding the point at which new engines become less exciting: starting warp speeds are a bit faster but increment relatively more slowly (sublight speed 3 in moo is a +200% improvement over retros, but only a +100% improvement in DG) and average travel distances are longer in DG, and there are more nebulae slowing you down. I would say new engines become less exciting at about the same point or a little later in DG than in MOO.
The more I mess around with the prototyping mechanic the less thrilled I am with it. It seems pretty open to abuse, can produce effectively game-breaking results, and takes large/huge designs off the table for much/all of the game, depending on map size. I think I'll be leaving it off for future games unless some major changes are made to it.
We may have a minor difference in philosophy here, or at least priority. I actually somewhat agree with you that the sliding scale of costs makes guesstimating the optimal point more difficult, although we probably disagree on extent.
The reason that costs scale as they do is to avoid the all-too-obvious inflexion points that step functions create. In MoO 1 this is when you transition from one robotic control level to the next. At least on a theoretical level, this increases depth since now instead of a few points sticking out as obvious targets, you have a whole gradient of targets that may be ideal for any specific goal.
That said, a lot of this stuff can be modded. In:
Dominus Galaxia_Data\StreamingAssets\GameData\Variables\Buildings.txt
You can see that the cost is derived by:
10 * ((FACTORY / MAX_POP) + 0.5) * 0.9 ^ (IF(HasVar(ROBOTIC_CONTROLS_BONUS), ROBOTIC_CONTROLS_BONUS, 0) + IF(HasVar(FACTORY_COST_MAX), (FACTORY_COST_MAX + 1), 0));
And this can be changed to something that plateaus at each robotic control threshold.
(October 15th, 2019, 01:48)RefSteel Wrote: I recall that part of the reason the pop growth slider was originally removed was that the AI programmer at one time found that force-growing population was a too-powerful One Right Answer. (This seems logical to me as a consequence of the way spaceport colonization works.) As such, anything that restricts population growth is a very questionable build, and this effect is emphasized when your planet is in the middle of its growth curve (larger natural pop growth means a percentage reduction has a larger total effect) - and the effect is very hidden.
That's part of it, although I'm not sure that spaceport colonisation is as big of an effect as that. Even in MoO 1 growing population becomes a very obvious one-right-answer in many situations.
The other part is the idea that population should be more of a strategic resource that can have real scarcity. Sending population to invade enemy worlds in MoO 1 doesn't have very much opportunity cost (at least or especially late game) when you can just grow that population back in a few turns. And the corollary is that it's highly annoying when an invasion is marginally unsuccessful and the besieged world rapidly grows its population back before more troops arrive.
Quote:(With Starlanes, this may be a bigger or smaller deal: If you can't "skip over" planets en route, high-warp engines quickly become meaningless except if and insofar as they affect combat speed; if you can, the circuitous routes the starlanes make you take do make it a little more likely that advanced engines will shave a turn or two off a trip.)
In practice it's usually the opposite. Travel outside the starlane network exists, but happens at 1/4 speed. This makes for a painfully slow trip, but you can bypass static defences at choke-points. Without starlanes super high warp speeds are often marginal and superfluous. With starlanes, super high warp speeds begin to change the nature of how you move your fleets.
(October 15th, 2019, 07:48)Zed-F Wrote: The more I mess around with the prototyping mechanic the less thrilled I am with it. It seems pretty open to abuse, can produce effectively game-breaking results, and takes large/huge designs off the table for much/all of the game, depending on map size. I think I'll be leaving it off for future games unless some major changes are made to it.
Well, the costs can certainly be adjusted. But I'm planning on making the ships a bit less "size class" and a bit more "character class" pretty soon. This is already somewhat the case. Smaller hulls have better base initiative and defence, but worse base damage reduction. In most cases this makes larger hulls a bit more preferable.
But I also want to add some innate characteristics that give each size more of a role. For example, small hulls could have reduced turning costs. Huge hulls could have the ability to perform reaction fire, and so on.
Thanks for the response, Jeff. It is helpful to know the reasoning behind some of the game's mechanics.
I like the idea of different classes of ships or types of ships (using the techs that offer functional mods maybe?) having more specialization. It would add incentives for more varied ship designs, which I think would be a good thing and give more scope for player decisions and play styles.
The ability to set the various options for a game, and even to mod some of the functions, is also a big positive for DG to me. Both the increased flexibility to make the game more like what a particular player wants and the increased replayability are very welcome. The potential for fun variant play is also nice to have.
Quote: Well, the costs can certainly be adjusted. But I'm planning on making the ships a bit less "size class" and a bit more "character class" pretty soon. This is already somewhat the case. Smaller hulls have better base initiative and defence, but worse base damage reduction. In most cases this makes larger hulls a bit more preferable.
Let me highlight a couple concerns with the prototyping system so you will have some more useful feedback for your next iteration, then:
In MOO1 you tend to either want ships that are very big or very small, but both approaches are made viable early in the game and one is not necessarily better. Putting the bigger ships behind a big cost barrier because “bigger is better” does not feel like MOO1, it feels like MOO2. If big ships are too good relative to small ones then IMO the solution is to rebalance, not restrict access.
One of the challenges in MOO is the limited number of designs, and figuring out when it makes sense to make a new design to maximize your overall fleet effectiveness. However, as the pace of tech increases as the game goes on, it can reach a point where new designs can be obsolete by the time they are built in numbers and reach the front lines. In DG this is even more true since the diminishing returns on infrastructure encourages more investment in research relative to ship production capacity. Prototyping in particular adds a further period after you make a design but before you can even build it. This risks exacerbating the problem of the march of progress quickly becoming too relentless.
It’s very possible to get crazy powerful results out of the RNG when designing ships using prototyping. If I build a ship with 2 neutron guns, and the RNG decides I get to have 3 instead, that’s worth tens of thousands of RP worth of tech investment into miniaturization, which I am getting for a pittance. This happened on the second ship I designed. If I install a shield on a ship, and the RNG decides I get a couple extra points of DR, I can be effectively immune to enemy weapons long before I would naturally be able to do so with pure research. This happened on my third design. Sure this only happens sometimes, but the result can be way too powerful relative to the cost.
Don’t like the design you made due to RNG screwing it up? This doesn’t feel good. Fortunately you can always re-roll, but this worsens the previous concerns; you have to pay another 10 turns (+ time to collect prototyping cash) before doing what you wanted, and you get another opportunity to roll a super-ship that’s way more advanced than you should be able to field. Moreover if you are willing to save-scum you don’t even have to pay those 10 turns or the prototyping cost again, and the results you can get re:super prototypes can be so powerful it actively encourages save-scumming. Generally speaking I would rather have systems that disincentivize save-scumming rather than encourage it.
I am not sure what changes can be made to prototyping that would alleviate these concerns. An honest effort might have to touch not just prototyping but game balance in general. I don't feel I should be suggesting solutions here, though; back seat developing can be annoying to some and you have a better idea of how all the systems are intended to fit together than I do.
(October 15th, 2019, 18:40)Zed-F Wrote: Generally speaking I would rather have systems that disincentivize save-scumming rather than encourage it.
Just want to butt in for a second. Ship crafting is one of the systems in DG that is purposefully immune to save scumming for exactly that reason -- unless you want to go all the way back before you submitted it.
That said I may refactor the random number stuff in the future to make things fully deterministic, or even have a toggle like 1oom.
Jeff, it's trivial to save the game before and after making a design, then push end turn 10 times to see what you get without bothering to play the intervening turns fully, before reloading. This is not in any way immune to save scumming.
