idea from an outsider

General discussion for the game Anacreon
Post Reply
User avatar
Atarlost
Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 2391
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:02 am

I don't play Anacreon because I don't like the real time shared universe paradigm, but I poke around because I'm one of the guys who deletes bot posts and stuff and I occasionally read stuff and something jumped out at me.
Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:It's probably currently impossible to defend any specific individual planet against a mature empire, since big empires can assemble jump fleets so overwhelmingly large that they will eliminate all planetary defense structures without taking appreciable losses and can only be realistically harmed by another jumpfleet of similar size or by a painstakingly-assembled starship fleet, which is unlikely to be able to catch said jumpfleet.
The consensus appears to be that jumpships are a serious balance problem and it sounds like it may be a critical mass problem.

There's actually a solution: jump interference. It's used to limit offensive movement in Starfire. Or at least it limits offensive movements in the novelization and I assume it's from the game.

Basically, if you jump more than one ship some may collide. The more you jump the more chances for collisions. In that setting the average number of collisions for n ships should be the chance of two ships colliding multiplied by C(n, 2) or n!/2(n-2)! and since Anacreon is a computer game it can actually roll a collision chance for each combination of ships. The actual collision chance can be tweaked.

The result would be that any jumpfleet large enough to overwhelm any defense would suffer crushing attrition to jump interference every time it jumped while small raiding fleets would be largely unaffected. Since jumpships are, as I understand it, unique in their jump mechanic they must also be unique in their technology and other ship types don't have any lore reason to suffer the same drawback.
Literally is the new Figuratively
Watch TV, Do Nothing
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:22 am
Contact:

Major features that balanced the original Anacreon simply haven't been introduced yet. For example, the original Anacreon had minefield and jump suppressor megastructures that players could build that would either prevent or restrict enemy jumpship movement through their territory. Minefields could be destroyed by starship task forces and jump suppressors could be destroyed by attacking them with any ship type. However, megastructures haven't been implemented in-game and there's no known timetable for when and if this will occur.

Attrition-based jump interference for individual large fleets would definitely place major restrictions on jumpship activity, but couldn't it be circumvented by the player assembling multiple smaller fleets, spreading them across the map, and then jumping them all onto their target across a short interval?

My proposal for rebalancing ships is detailed here, with the specific restrictions on jumpship movement in the second post. Basically, I think gunships should be extremely effective at fighting jumpships and that jumpships should have certain movement restrictions imposed on them to make it possible for gunship fleets commanded by an alert and active player to catch up with and destroy them if they don't have strong starship backup.
User avatar
Atarlost
Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 2391
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:02 am

Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:Attrition-based jump interference for individual large fleets would definitely place major restrictions on jumpship activity, but couldn't it be circumvented by the player assembling multiple smaller fleets, spreading them across the map, and then jumping them all onto their target across a short interval?
Only if attrition is calculated per fleet rather than per incoming ship but the battle is calculated against all incoming ships as a single unit.

If two fleets jumping to the same location suffer jump interference there's no work around. If two fleets jumping to the same location each face the full defenses in separate battles it's just sending forces piece meal into a meat grinder. The jumpships in that case would fall afoul of the numerical disadvantage and be smashed with barely any getting any shots off. Some degree of fleet splitting would probably be optimum, but either way they're taking losses even if they have overwhelming numerical superiority.
Literally is the new Figuratively
Watch TV, Do Nothing
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:22 am
Contact:

In Anacreon the attacker can choose when to initiate the attack, since the defender is unlikely to be logged on (I think most people are only playing this came a couple minutes a day). Battles don't begin the instant a fleet arrives at a planet, so an attacker could gather a force at a planet by arranging for a different fleet to arrive every couple of watches until there are a really large number of small fleets over a planet and then attacking with them all at once.

Forcing any foreign fleet arriving at a planet to initiate a battle would not be a satisfactory solution:
  • Problems with pathfinding sometimes require players to temporarily move fleets to other players' planets with non-hostile intent in order to complete a multi-stage movement.
  • Since there is no real diplomacy right now, all players are modeled as hostile to one another. However, players have formed quite elaborate alliances via messaging, forums, etc. and may want to send forces into a threatened friend's territory to counterattack hostile fleets. (There is currently no way to have them automatically defend another player's planet, though.)
  • Players may want to make a show of force against another player without actually attacking them.
  • It's not uncommon to accidentally send a fleet to the wrong planet, especially when player at higher zoom levels.
  • The AI Mesophon empire will buy and sell ships in orbit around its planets; auto-attacking would turn every sale attempt into a bloodbath.
User avatar
catfighter
Militia Commander
Militia Commander
Posts: 466
Joined: Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:17 am
Location: Laughing manically amidst the wreckage of the Iocrym fleet.

The game seems to have suffered from some serious "inflation" of fleet size, so taking off some zeros or having production occur only once every couple of watches could remove the mass-attrition question entirely once the current fleets peter out. I think a lot of the problems could also be solved by allowing for complex fleet orders. For example, being able to tell a fleet to go to a star along a multi-point path or telling it to "Attack" or "Do Nothing" upon arrival would be really helpful.
Behold my avatar, one of the few ships to be drawn out pixel by pixel in the dreaded... Microsoft Paint!

Day 31: "I have successfully completed my time reversal experiment! Muahahaha!!!"
Day 30: "I might have run into a little problem here."
Watch TV, Do Nothing
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:22 am
Contact:

catfighter wrote:The game seems to have suffered from some serious "inflation" of fleet size, so taking off some zeros or having production occur only once every couple of watches could remove the mass-attrition question entirely once the current fleets peter out. I think a lot of the problems could also be solved by allowing for complex fleet orders. For example, being able to tell a fleet to go to a star along a multi-point path or telling it to "Attack" or "Do Nothing" upon arrival would be really helpful.
Advnace orders would definitely be helpful; I suggested them a few months ago. I was mostly thinking about them for starship fleets, though; how do you see them as helping the jumpship issue?
User avatar
catfighter
Militia Commander
Militia Commander
Posts: 466
Joined: Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:17 am
Location: Laughing manically amidst the wreckage of the Iocrym fleet.

Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:[*]Problems with pathfinding sometimes require players to temporarily move fleets to other players' planets with non-hostile intent in order to complete a multi-stage movement.
[*]Since there is no real diplomacy right now, all players are modeled as hostile to one another. However, players have formed quite elaborate alliances via messaging, forums, etc. and may want to send forces into a threatened friend's territory to counterattack hostile fleets. (There is currently no way to have them automatically defend another player's planet, though.)
[*]Players may want to make a show of force against another player without actually attacking them.
[*]It's not uncommon to accidentally send a fleet to the wrong planet, especially when player at higher zoom levels.
[*]The AI Mesophon empire will buy and sell ships in orbit around its planets; auto-attacking would turn every sale attempt into a bloodbath.[/list]
Giving onArrive orders (attack, doNothing, goTo, etc) solves those ^ problems. While it would (at current) make the Blitzkrieg Problem yet more terrifying (the ability to have your Grand Fleet Auto-Attack every single enemy sector-cap without having to manage a single thing outside of the original complex order is...well...y'know... :shock: ), I think the tradeoff would be worth it.
Behold my avatar, one of the few ships to be drawn out pixel by pixel in the dreaded... Microsoft Paint!

Day 31: "I have successfully completed my time reversal experiment! Muahahaha!!!"
Day 30: "I might have run into a little problem here."
Post Reply