TheBugKing wrote: ↑Sun Jun 03, 2018 3:28 am
what happens in the late game stage is that the empire's fleet is so large it becomes detached from the empire that built it. What we end up having is someone who has a fleet and also has an empire, but what we need is someone who has an empire who has a military force. The difference in wording is subtle, but the reality of the two are drastically different. Someone who has a fleet and an empire can afford to lose the empire and keep the fleet, Auroran Hegemony and myself both do this. Hegemony simply rebuilds his empire, I throw my empire to the wind favoring the maneuverability of my fleet to being tied down to my empire. In either case the war becomes a 1 v 1 competition between the fleets, which are directly tied to the WU output of the empire that built it. That is not war and it lacks most of the dynamics of war.
This insight really sticks out to me. With the shift from jumpships to starships, the higher halfLife of all starship types has really become noticeable. In Era 3 I believe that we increased the halfLife for some starship classes in order to differentiate them from jumpships, but now we have a situation where a starship forces have a longer lifespan than the planets that build them, so fleet strength is an product of historic imperial economic power and only weakly tied to an empire's current state.
News Feed:
I really like the idea of a reported in-game galactic news, perhaps there can be a "broadcast station" built on the the homeworld when you get to a certain level and then you can have all the galactic news. I think that overwhelming a newplayer on day one with "Hegemony was just attacked with 25% of the galactic force" would not make any sense and just add to the clutter of things they needed to figure out.
I like the idea of gradually introducing players to the larger world in some game types, it pairs well with exploring the galaxy. However, right now I am opposed to not showing entering players the whole galactic map right away in a persistent game, because it privileges existing players over new ones, exploration is tedious, and the exploration mechanic practically disappears once the map is explored. Exploration is a good mechanic for a time-limited RTS game, but I am not convinced of its value in a persistent one.
Making it something that can be destroyed.... would be interesting. Imagine the shock of losing that amount of information. I could see players like STU putting a lot of importance on something like that. An interesting aside to this line of thinking would be a ship that gathers information within a 500 ly or something, you are allowed 5 per empire at any given time. They would report the news to your empire feed, messages such "Imerpium is now building Gorgos Starships", "Imerium fleet of 15 M is heading NW from Deusoldorf 6 to OO 3422".
Maybe then the Galactic News Feed would be a buildable structure one designated SC at Tech 10. This way it has the ability to be destroyed and is separate from the Home world defense build up we see normally. With the Galactic News structure, you would be able to build 15 mobile news units and also have reports on every single empire the way you described. Otherwise, news is restricted to what you gather from the 5 mobile units.
You have to be careful to not give players an incentive to run multiple accounts just to get better intelligence. Under the current system a player can get perfect intelligence about any location fairly easily, so there's no incentive to do this.
Once you add something like "you are limited to 5 recon ships per empire" the temptation to double recon capacity by way of an alt account will be very high. Unlike resources or units, it's very easy for something abstract like knowing where a fleet is to pass from account to account. Most RTS games that include a fog of war mechanic deal with this by having the pace of the game be fast enough that it's not practical to run a second account in order to share recon - but Anacreon is decidedly not a fast-paced game. Players do share knowledge with one another organically and I think that's great, but somehow we need to avoid players "sharing knowledge with themselves".
Attrition:
I do wonder if there should be a limit to the number of ships someone can build. I enjoy the current attrition limits, it is altogether interesting and difficult to overcome. It brings a lot of challenges with it that I find peculiar, but having a nice dynamic. However, I wonder if we should suggest tampering with it. What if the small empire of Space faring tech level and below have no attrition limit; then a steady grade that increases attrition until reaching the Post-industrial, giving it an attrition rate of 50%? That would be a high penalty given the speed of starfleets. It would make things very interesting in terms of defense/attack. It would make the game incredibly unstable for empires to be as large as they are now, 1200+ in this era (how big will the get in era 4?). That is my real motive: Limiting the usability of giant fleets at a distance while increasing the ability to defend small areas of the map. Regional and local territory importance should be greater than the importance of a single massed fleet. If you are able to defend many small places well, then you will be able to defend your entire empire, not simply the sector capitals.
So essentially link attrition to empire size? That's an interesting idea. The secession mechanic is sort of supposed to do this, not by tampering with attrition directly but by periodically pulling sector capitals out of the empire above a certain size. What players have discovered though is that the L&O doctrine gives them a toolset to dodge secession entirely. I think the game would look very different if L&O were weakened or not a doctrinal option; however, it would be hard to retain player interest if there were a hard cap on imperial expansion since there is not a lot else to do besides expand. I also do not like unavoidable semi-random disasters like secession as a limiting mechanic - and players do not have a good mechanic for avoiding secession other than "switch to L&O and then freely ignore secession risk."
The intuitive fix is to replace the persistent universe model with a defined start and end state for games. This could be either a time limit or some metric of imperial domination. A hard cap would make mega-empires both less attainable and more threatening.
A harder approach that preserves a persistent universe would be to introduce oversize burdens on oversize empires, so that it is disproportionately challenging to keep expanding "wide" above certain levels. An example of one such mechanic: in Civilization 3, cities further from the capital generated less income for the player while still having the same operating costs, so that nonstop expansion into farflung areas became disproportionately burdensome (even Civ 3 had an endstate).
In general the game needs more effects that have a meaningful range beyond 250LY. When every 250LY circle around a sector capital is essentially the empire in miniature, there is not a ton of differentiation in the empire and expansion consists of basically adding clusters.
A good mechanic for Anacreon might be to implement the planetary combat mechanic and then have mechanics like insurgency length or strength and structure build time be partially a (nonlinear) function of distance to the imperial capital. So if you conquer an independent world 150 LY from your capital the insurgency ends in a couple hours, but if you take a planet on the other side of the galaxy the insurgency lasts a couple days and improvements take a long time to build. In PVP ground combat, your insurgents hold out longer (and maybe get periodic reinforcements) on planets near your capital, while in worlds on the other side of the galaxy they give up quickly. You would need to be able to move the imperial capital to a sector capital for players who start out in a corner or something; implement this by making the imperial capital a multi-day buildable structure that changes planetary designation on completion.
If the imperial center and imperial periphery were more strongly differentiated, effects of empire size would become much more noticeable.
Take my example of "pirate dens" from my
proposed Mesophon revision (it's in the third post) down. A pirate den is a single-planet NPE that a T&E empire can send resources to with a trade route, similar to Mesophon, but the pirate does not provide AEs. Instead the pirate uses the resources to build ships and randomly raid other empires' nearby planets and generally cause trouble, deterring enemy expansion near your planets without directly going to war with them. A pirate den is an example of an effect that would be useful to have on your imperial periphery (if you are T&E), but not deep inside your empire (it's a resource sink, but would not do anything productive with no enemy planets near it).