Rebalancing costs for Dark Avatar

It's a whole new world...

Published on October 22, 2006 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv Journals

Because there are asteroid fields that can be mined and provide resources to planets, we have had to relook at the planetary improvements.

Some of the changes have included:

A new type of improvement: Power Plants. These magnify the production coming in by X%.
Fertility clinics to increase population growth.
Much higher population limits so that lots of money can be achieved.
Morale is more affected by population than previously so reaching those limits will be tougher.
Lower level farms produce relatively little food so that new users won't run into big morale problems. Instead, we'll add an additional farming tech to gradually increase farming on planets.
We're adding a Food Distribution Center which will increase the % of total farm production.
Morale buildings will become significantly more powerful at the higher level so that you can keep people happy AS LONG AS you have researched the techs (entertainment networks won't be enough to get some 20+ population).
Vacation Capital Super Project will allow a single world to be a real fun place (i.e. high morale).
A new building called the Planetary Revenue Service PRS (one per planet) will increase the number of citizens that are taxed (right now a planet with 12B population only actually taxes 6B of the citizens, The PRS would increase that to ~9B which is a significant increase in the # of citizens you can get to).
Low-Level Factories won't produce as much as they currently do (making the asteroid fields more important).
Lab Networks (buildings that increase by a % your research)

The overall idea is that at the low level, money is easy to come by when you're getting started. Then it will start to try up if you don't build up your planets properly to get more population, more economic activity, etc.

For casual players, the system should be fairly straight forward -- simpler -- than GalCiv II. But for expert players, the gameplay becomes very sophisticated as planets now require a lot more choices than previous in terms of strategy. A LOT MORE.

In Dark Avatar, the relationship between food production, asteroid fields, and star bases will be very crucial. It does make writing the AI much harder (I'm going to basically toss out the planet improvement code in GalCiv II which I didn't write in the first place and that person isn't with Stardock anymore so we've been patching the planet improvement AI choosing code since release, better to scrap it and write it new with the new strategies in mind).

Another area I'm really enjoying is the re-design of ship values. A LOT More thought and experience has gone into the new values for how much hulls cost.

Basically: The bigger ships will cost a LOOOT more. But they will be a LOOOOT tougher. A capital ship should be a capital ship. It should be a big deal. We want to encourage players to make a choice between fleets of smallish ships OR capital ships and have both be valid paths. It will be very difficult to research both gigantic ships AND ultimate logistics for instance. You may not be able to get to both in a typical game which means deciding to have large fleets of small ships or smaller fleets of very very tough capital ships.

Logistics have changed as well. A huge hulled ship now uses 10 logistics points and costs 320 just for the hull. BUT, it now has 150 space (about double) and 84 HP.

So you could picture a couple of Huge hulled ships (using 20 logistics) with 300 space and 168HP having cost 640 to build...coming up against 16 small ships (48 logistics) with 384 space 128HP and also having cost 640.

The fleet of fighters would pack more punch per round but the hull ships would be able to take a bigger beating. There's so many factors to take into account (the time to research the corresponding techs, the "wastage" on building fighters -- i.e. can't build more than 1 fighter per turn, the "wastage" of a shot from a capital ship on a fighter -- a shot that does 20 damage on a ship with only 8 hitpoints isn't going to make it any deader).

The net result is that it just FEELS a lot better. Those capital ships are a big deal. There shouldn't be tons of them out there. One can imagine the best results being mixed fleets -- a couple of fighters and frigates to picket for the capital ships.

The other value I spent a lot of time on today was spies. We're going to have to put in an espionage branch because we want players to be able to put increasing amounts of money into spying.

By now, one thing you may have noticed is that money is going to be much more under control. At least, that's the intention. That it won't be nearly as hard to have lots of money to do things with but there will be a lot more choices on what to spend money on. But at the same time, we want there to be a real gulf between new players and expert players. A lot more variance in strategic options than previous.

Where before you might just throw tons of farms on a planet or tons of factories, now there are other things to consider -- asteroids? Do you build a food distribution center? Should you build a Quantum Power Plant? And if so, should you re-direct the asteroid mining to that planet instead of the closer one?

Much of the final balancing will be in the hands of beta testers starting next month.

Comments (Page 2)

Zephyr 72

on Oct 23, 2006

It sounds cool. I really love the game and the new ideas put into it. And I don't agree that the tweaks to the game that render "Old" good tactics less efficient will make the game more boring just different in a better way!

ignuss

on Oct 23, 2006

Looks great.

More stuff + more choices = more fun
At least in my opinion.

Gre_Magus

on Oct 23, 2006

Looks great. Will the power plants and lab networks replace the manufacturing capital and technology capital? I definitely like the flexibility of having multiple, smaller bonus to work with rather than one big one that the AI never seems to use very well. Plus it's definitely going to be interesting to balance building another factory versus a building that increases overall production, especially if the % increase is considered "bonus production" and only costs 50%. If not the math would be pretty simple - if a power plant gives a 10% increase to production, build 10 factories and then power plants aftewards. Of course it'd get interesting as you go up the tech tree. If the third generation powerplant gives a 20% increase, for example, do you go back and turn all your factories after the fifth one into power plants or is it better to use that social production on other projects if the planet's full, letting it go into military production? Sounds like there'll be no easy answers.

Brad Wardell

on Oct 23, 2006

One change I think we'll have to make is have the shots be based on the weapon and not the ship.

That is, rather than a ship targeting another ship, it's the weapon that's targeting another ship and it cycles through the weapons. It'll take some thought with regards to how to handle defenses.

Dano13

on Oct 23, 2006

If capital ships are much more expensive to create (as they should be - losing one should HURT), and capital ships are not as good against a group of fighters (since there is so much wastage in shots), then I confess - why build capital ships?

Dano

danielost

on Oct 23, 2006

please forgive me

but i am not sure that anyone got my idea about multi shots just right

what i meant was have a pod like life support or sensors

the more pods you put on the more targets you can shot at in a combat round of course that would depend on how many guns you have too

if i am wrong about there being a mistake

sorry

i just wanted to make it more clear

Gre_Magus

on Oct 23, 2006

The idea of each weapon firing seperately is great, but the question of defense does sound tricky. One idea would be to make defense take up a lot more space, but make each weapon have to overcome all of a ship's defense. This of course could lead to some ships being almost invulnerable. So then make "big" weapons available. There would be two ways to do this. Either we could link weapons together, so that 3 phasors fire together and do 9 damage but only fire once instead of 3 times or you could have something like "heavy phasors" that do 9 damage but take up 3x the space. Either way it would present some interesting choices (that may be too hard for the AI to figure out...) Do you make a ship with one big weapon that can punch through a lot of defense but would be overkill versus a fighter, or do you make lots of smaller weapons to deal with small ships? You could have anti-aircraft (so to speak) frigates and anti-ship ones. If the AI could work this out (look at the enemy's (enemies') forces and see how many anti-fighter ships are needed and how many anti-ship ships) it would be a lot of fun.

SrGalen

on Oct 23, 2006

One change I think we'll have to make is have the shots be based on the weapon and not the ship.
That is, rather than a ship targeting another ship, it's the weapon that's targeting another ship and it cycles through the weapons. It'll take some thought with regards to how to handle defenses.

1. Weapon category, weapon type or individual weapon?

If category (beam/missile/mass), it will encourage the use of multiple categories on ships, as opposed to the more effective 1 category per ship in GC2, but will allow for a back door multiple shot capabiity - particularly if the target is selected before each shot. It will also make researching more than one weapon tree almost mandatory. Obviously, the order in which the weapons are fired will be a critical decision.

If weapon type (Laser, Plasma, Phaser, etc. for Beams) the need for researching various categories is reduced, and the backdoor multiple shot capability is increased, although the net attack values will by necessity be reduced because you are not using all state of the art weaponry.

If individual weapon, the multiple shot capability is maximized, although the value of each attack is minimized. No real change in research stategy would necessarily be driven by this, although the value of putting defense on smaller vessels is increased.

Repeating myself, the most critical decision here is if the target for any weapon system is fixed at the battle start or reselected before each weapon firing.

2. Defense treatment

One way to modify the way the defensive systems operate is to have the defensive systems as a whole act as an absorber of (potential) damage with a delay recovery factor. If smaller ship's systems recovered faster than a larger ship's, a group of smaller ships could wear down the defenses of a capital ship and then start doing serious damage, while the larger number of weapons on the capital ship would be tearing up the ether shooting at the smaller ships - whether a small ship would survive a hit would depend on defenses and the quality of the hit - if the option of individual weapon (above) was used, the smaller ship could well survive the less intensive shot from multiple weapons. For ease of calculating, I would suggest the use of a single % defense available variable, and adjust the various defense against category #'s accordingly - damaging individual defensive systems (or weapons systems) is probably too far into details for this game. Balance issues could be addressed by tweaking the defensive recovery delay factors.

Modifying to include critical/lucky shots as mentioned above (perhaps tied to % defenses available) would tilt the balance towards the smaller ships and could be included if needed.

I think this would allow a reasonably balanced multiple shot battle.

SleekDD

on Oct 23, 2006

I believe wastage is an issue in second order. Sure, it can be annoying that your 50+ attack power vaporizes a 6HP fighter but if the little bugger just can't touch you, all this does is make fights take longer.
Wastage becomes an issue when time is an issue and that pops up when both sides can deal out some degree of pain. Equipment options that allow multiple target tracking could make a worthy addition to the ship design system although some design issues accompany this (should it always try to target the maximum number of ships, even if it doesn't destroy them, should it work its way down?).

Balance is a tough cookie and the more freedom players get, the easier it is for them to pull the rug from under you with a newly doctored approach. It is a credit to Stardock that it is trying to strike a balance anyway while trying to enrich the game further still.

V1m

on Oct 23, 2006

Rather than critical hits doing HP, I think they should disable a specific module or reduce movement.

cyberj914

on Oct 23, 2006

Wow... just wow. Now that is an expansion.

Can't wait.

Wheeloffire

on Oct 23, 2006

I'm all for it. Losing one medium vessel in a fleet of three to five fighters is annoying. Tactical combat would have made sure my entire fleet was unscathed. Balance is needed in order for the player to recognize that gathering little fighters is a huge risk.

Alstein

on Oct 23, 2006

My concern is can the AI handle this, or will this end up giving humans a huge advantage?

Ceylin

on Oct 23, 2006

Two Points:

1: Critical hits are already in the game, if I roll crappy, and you roll really well, thats sort of a rare occurence, and I pay the price

2: Similiar to what SrGalen said above, handling defenses with 'every weapon fires' individually isn't hard.

-First make the defense roll for all the target ships defense - and use that as defense value D

-Now, fire each weapon one at a time at the target ship - making a roll, and subtract that value from D.

-When D is zero, each next weapon firing does damage (including the partial damage from the one that broke the defense)

-If the ship is destroyed, and there are weapons left the next weapon targets the next ship, and that ship rolls a new D value to be decremented.

-So basically, each round the defense value is rerolled to absorb damage

Frogboy

on Oct 23, 2006

Ceylin - that's brilliant!

I confess I hadn't thought of that. I'm going to see about having it work like that.

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