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 4)

TOV

on Oct 24, 2006

Defense is underrated as it is. Implimenting this diminishing returns would only make them weaker. I think, when a ship fires, it should go up against all defense as normal. (Note- please wieght the defense to the higher rolls) To combat this, the player and the AI can link weapons systems togeather so they act as one. Either that, of have bigger guns become available on the tech tree wich do the same thing, only whose values are fixed. In either case, the result is Anti-Capital Ship and Anti-Fighter Turrets.

Brad Wardell

on Oct 24, 2006

TOV - the method I suggested above makes defense MUCH more powerful.

thehandofzarquon

on Oct 24, 2006

TOV - the method I suggested above makes defense MUCH more powerful.

Definetly. The defense as rolled could have absorbed up to 30-some damage, which is 1.5x as much as 20 Defense could normally deflect...

And just as a minor observation, using a each weapon fires seperately system could potentially support weapons that have different fire rates. For instance, one weapon might fire once per round and have average damage. One might fire once every other round, but have a higher damage to make up for it... one might even fire 1 to 4 times in a single round, but have minimal damage. Heck, there could be a module that skews damage rolls for Missiles up to the higher range or something... Just an idea.

Of course, I still have to suggest putting a limit on the total number of times a single ship can re-target per round if the current target is destroyed... it would help to reduce the number of rolls made each round and would also serve to help increase the value of defense, among other things.

In any case, I'm awaiting Dark Avatar anxiously, keep up the good work!

thehandofzarquon

on Oct 24, 2006

As an addition to my last post, since I can't edit, basically... I'm still hoping/shooting for more ways to make ships with different and unique functions, or at least mechanically different in some way

Brad Wardell

on Oct 24, 2006

Probably not in any GalCiv II updates. But I could imagine in a future Galciv III having weapons that have a firing rate, accuracy, and range as factors in design along with ship manuverability, thrusting, etc. But that would involve tactical battle stuff which won't be in GC2.

nullspace

on Oct 24, 2006

Hey, I like the current combat system. It has a interesting paper/rock/scissors relationship where big ships with high attack > big ships with high defense > little ships with high attack > big ships with high attack. This relationship is made possible because of the way defense and targeting work. It seems like the proposed changes are going to completely remove this aspect of strategy. If weapons can individually target enemy ships, it doesn't matter whether you're shooting at large enemies or a small ones, just put on as many weapons as possible. And the changes to defense make it so defense is no more useful against a swarm of little ships than against a dreadnaut with lots of weapons.

If you're going to replace the current system, make sure the new system has counters with strategic differences, and doesn't just "balance" the combat my making everything the same. TOV's suggestion for Anti-Capital Ship and Anti-Fighter Turrets is a good start. In Frogboy's idea for defense, when a single weapon rolls an attack higher than the enemy's total defense roll, the result is a double-whammy: the defender loses hp, and it loses defense equal to the attack roll. So an anti-capital weapon would just be a very big weapon with very high attack. If it's big enough that you can only fit a few on the biggest hulls, then we're back to the old paper/rock/scissors relationship, except that big ships also have the option of weilding many small weapons in order to counter small ships.

IMO, the current system is good. It could be balanced better my making defense more powerful or cheaper, but it doesn't need to be thrown out. On the other hand, the proposed new system has potential, too.

Frogboy

on Oct 24, 2006

I agree, I think the new system we're talking about will require some balancing.

No dout about that. But I think it has a lot more potential for flexibility than the existing one which basically gives the advantage to the guy who just cranks out tons of fighters.

TOV

on Oct 24, 2006

TOV - the method I suggested above makes defense MUCH more powerful.

After reading your description carefully, I am starting to think you are right. I have overlooked that every round, the defense is reset. That bit of information changes everything. With your system, defense prevents damage from happening at all. However, there is one flaw I see: A large number of fighters could wear down the defense faster per round than a small number of larger ships. This could be fixed by giving the higher numbers a slightly higher chance of being rolled.

Lord Reliant

on Oct 25, 2006

How do (or will) ships determine which ship(s) to attack? For instance, do they all gang up against one big one? Do they each take a small one? Under the new way of defense, it would really be good to have all ships concentrate on ships one at a time since one fighter could wear down the defenses of one ship and the others could go in for the kill, whereas the defense as it currently stands, I believe, isn't reliant on this method.

TOV

on Oct 25, 2006

Unless stardock says otherwaise, the attacking order will be the same as it is now. The first ship to be attacked is determined by the formula:
ATTACK / (DEFENSE + HITPOINTS)
This formula is useful to design escort fighters for the capital ships. Just make sure the fighters have a higher value, and they will get shot at first.

sam0t

on Oct 25, 2006

New combat systems sounds neat. Iam glad there are people smart enought to improve the system. I know the current system is not the best, but no idea how to improve it. It seems DA is in good hands

SrGalen

on Oct 25, 2006

I.e. (this is what I sent to the team)
Capital ship with 6 Photon torpedos (attack of 6) vs. Frigate with 20 defense.
In each segment of a given round:
Round 1: Segment 1:
Photon Torp #1 rolls between 0 and 6. Frigate Rolls between 0 and 20.
Photon Torp #1 rolls a 5. Frigate Rolls a 15.
Result: 0 damage, Frigate Max defense reduced to 15.

etc.

Round 2: Everything resets other than HP.

3 thoughts -

1. A max defensive # vs each weapon category (Beam, Missile, MD) should be determined prior to the round IF the ship is facing multiple weapon categories. Then decrement them as described, absorbing potential damage until real damage is done. While this is going on, maintain a current % defense available after each segment (in addition to the calculated number). When weapon category changes occur, the effective current max defense is equal to the original vs weapon defense times the current segment % defense available (if any). Then continue to decrement.

2. If there are multiple categories of weapons (beam, missile, MD) on the attacking ship, the weapon selection should be in the order of most effective/highest damage first. This will tend to maximize the attacker's potential to destroy/damage the highest number of defending ships by hitting defending ships through the weakest available defensive array, potentially decrementing their primary defenses to 0 by using weapons not optimized against and then hitting them with weapons they WOULD have been optimized against.

3. Rather than automatically resetting everything except hitpoints at the beginning of each round, introduce a regeneration/defense system damage control factor for succeeding rounds - in your case, it's currently equal to 100%. By adjusting this factor for various sizes of hulls, you can tweak the relative combat effectiveness for the ships and maintain balance.

Credit back at'cha Ceylin.

Lord Reliant

on Oct 25, 2006

Going off of SrGalen's point #3 of having degenerating defensive power over rounds, I could see two technology improvements based off of this:

1. A technology that would return defense to 100% each round, as in the examples given on how this would work.

2. A technology that would actually restore HPs between rounds as a % of the hull size. This would be pretty effective on ships of any size, even if it was just a few HPs per round. Obviously larger ships would benefit more.

One of my biggest fears, though, is that combat will become too complicated or difficult to predict. With all the randomness in there that could indeed cause problems. I'm a big fan of defense playing a much bigger role than the current implementation, but if game balancing is an issue you could easily just increase the cost of defense/offense technologies to make them more valuable/worthwhile.

Decker22

on Oct 25, 2006

Well I thought of one other suggestion, would need a UI for it and may be a pain to make a AI smart about it. But how bout a Weapon battery/bank system, depending on size of ship there a # of weapon batteries which is a set of weapons grouped together. Could use the old combat system can treat each batterie as if its like a diffrent ship, and even use the old defense system, it makes a decision for the player to concentrate all the weapons in one primary bank to puncuture heavyly shielded ships , or spread the weapons across the banks as a multi gun ship allowing each bank to target another ship, if the current ship was destroyed.
Unfortunaly Players would resort most likely resort to putting 20 damage in each bank for one shot kills on medium ships and below and then put all additional weapons in a primary bank.

as far as # of banks per ship size the previous poster for limits on how many ships can be destroyed by size, sounds about right.

Branko

on Oct 25, 2006

The only gotcha I see what that though is that it could make turns take significantly longer.

Random numbers are pretty slow when you do enough of them.

I would think that you would probabpy generate pretty large random numbers (many bits) but you rarely need numbers that large, so every random number can be split into several sections (say 8 bits per piece) so you do not require a reroll to get multiple 'defense' rolls.
1 random longint (32 bits) could be used to generate 4 values from 0 to 255. Then again you guys probably have implemented your random generator to be very efficient for ints anyway.
Or you can use your threads to just continuously create and flush a list of pregenerated random numbers while the player is doing its turns. With the threated AI already in there that should be simple enough and then you only 'waste' CPU time that is left over anyway.

sorry, I felt a bit of my realtime programming bubble up in me, couldn't resist commenting on this

I'll shut up now and leave it to the pros (yes that means YOU).

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