PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

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24 days, 22 hours, 24 minutes ago

PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

PLS settings for ships question.

So we finished off a private PLS game with the following settings. This game had 4 humans and 4 computer players.

Minimum # Ships -----------------> 8
Ships Per Planet ----------------> 1
Extra Ships ---------------------> 5
Number of Planets ---------------> 550

This seemed like WAY too many ships near the end game. With Alchemy ships in the mix most of us had fleets in the 130 - 200 ship range with all of them being active ships. This made the turns take a CRAZY long time just managing all the fleets of ships running around. It also made Neutronium a PREMIUM resource for sure but something most of us were able to overcome or manage. Seriously the 4 of us were managing, collectively between 400-500 ships.

In the hopes of keeping a similar game running faster I am thinking about the following settings

Minimum # Ships -----------------> 10
Ships Per Planet ----------------> 0.33
Extra Ships ---------------------> 5
Number of Planets ---------------> 425

So if a player was holding say 200 planets they would be sitting on, at best, 71 ships vs. the potential 205 ships in our old game that we could have been holding onto.

Does this "feel" right to everyone? What are your experiences / settings in PLS games that kept the fleets meaningful but manageable in late / end game?

24 days, 14 hours, 33 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

4 human players on a 550 planet map, is asking for big fleets.
You would have have similar result with just plain 500 ships global limit.

I guess if you really like big games, but small fleets,
you have to choose the settings you propose.

Im curious to know what races you played.
The settings you proposed would be crippling to most torpedo races.

Im in a PLS*2 game, and thats really limiting my economy as lizard, i hardly have any hissers left, as i have to recycle them.
But, that is in a game with 11 players and 500 planets.

Im beginning to think that the ship limit should be based on ship tonnage, so torpedo races and carrier races are better balanced.

24 days, 13 hours, 50 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Normally you have about 45 planets per Race... you had 65 per Race... also decrease Starmap area if you lower planet totals unless you want greater distances between Planets (helps the Privateer, Colonial and Cyborg when you have higher fuel requirements between planets).

Two hundred plus ships is perfectly normal if you are winning.

Traditionally 500 ships for 11 players... but the game takes longer when you have limited Ship Slots. I lean towards more ships is always better.

Reduce your planet totals if you want games that aren't a chore to play.

24 days, 13 hours, 29 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Silicone from your history you have only played 347 turns in finished games in 6 years on the site.

You may have deleted a lot of games which would possibly have been custom games with low planet counts.

But you cannot have experienced many standard format games if you think X 1 is way too much.

500 ships for a game is standard. The less players you have the bigger the share.

For specialist games for non public games for people who want low ship counts then yes less than 1 is ideal and PLS can be used to ballance it out.

But I have concluded you spend most of your games in private games with friends who don't play a lot of 11 player 500 planet / 500 ship format.

But if you like that sort of format then the site is set up for you to make games like that.

Some people want more than 1 : 1. Because they want more ships to play with.

I think 1 : 1 + a number is ideal and fits into a standard format.

But then I am possibly biased as well from my playing preferences.

24 days, 6 hours, 30 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Dines & @Glynsalternate

I should make it clear that the settings above are proposed, the settings we used in this game was PLS*1, Min 10, extra 5.

We setup the game as 2 teams of humans against the computers. Re-Reading the races in the setup document I found it was actually 8 computers but 2 of them went down really quick. All computer players were Lizards and the humans were Rebel and Colonies on team 1 and Birdmen and Borg on Team 2.

Team rankings at the end were Birdmen, Colonies, Rebels, 1 Computer player, Borg, 2 other computers (They were barely alive). As you can see the Torp races were doing pretty good actually. The Birdmen needed about 1.75 ships to take out 1 of our carriers but they had the most planets by far, they were at least 20 planets or more ahead of the colonies and I was about 20 behind them.

Realistically at thurn 85 or so (where we decided to call it) I was rebels and building about 3.75 rushes per turn and losing about the same against the Birdmen player.

@Martinr

True but I also took a really, REALLY, long hiatus there but I will fully agree I don't play in a lot of public games. I haven't really played in very many games with low planet counts and only 2 blitz games that I can recall though most of them have been standard sized.

As for the players I play with in Private games two of them have more experience in public games, 1 of them not too much more but he left and didn't return until PLS became a thing because, like me, he didn't like the "lock the queue" mini-game that is REALLY what the standard formats are about. The other player has played through dozens of games with 6 top 3 finishes and 3 or 4 wins.

Most of the games I have played in though did adhere to the standard sizes but again we are all pretty busy these days and just don't have the time to necessarily get those turns done. We want to play more than 1 turn a week so that the game doesn't take a year+ to complete but if these turns get to take too long the worry is we won't finish the game out either.

@Everyone
The big issue with that game, and main reason we didn't finish playing it out, was that it was simply taking way too long to do a turn and we are busy people. A fast turn was probably 2 hours of work and they were complicated enough you really wanted to spend the time consecutively as breaking it up just makes it take even longer. We started missing turns and it started to feel more like work and less like a game. Not that we didn't enjoy it but we also didn't finish it out either.

So that all said I am looking for some game settings that will give us action and options but not turn into the slog that our last one did. What would you guys suggest to solve the problem?

24 days, 5 hours, 43 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Less planets, and a high FoF.

I miss the invasion scenario from the old servers.
In an invasion game, you get one invasion point every turn you hold on to an enemy hw.
First player to 50(or another number) points win.
That way you cant just sit back with a big fleet, but you have to use it.
In a private game, i guess you could keep track on it based on an honesty system, but it would be nice if the developers would make this an official scenario..

24 days, 5 hours, 30 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Dines

Not sure FoF is a good idea for us as there would only be 4 humans. We liked the idea of some computers because it gave us a chance to build up a little before having to hit each other. It would have sucked to have one of us knocked out really quick due to a lucky homeworld strike (that did happen to a couple comps).

Less planets ... what would you suggest as a planet to player ratio?

24 days, 1 hours, 14 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

24 days, 0 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Siliconscout,

You might want to have a look at my PLS Settings Assistant Tool. It gives you good data on overall fleet size and limits.

http://planets.nu/_library/whisperer-scripts/pls-helper.html

23 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes ago

eyecaptian

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Would be just easier to remove the stupid ship limits, and go back to basics, if you can gather the minerals then you should be able to build, end of story.

23 days, 21 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@eyecaptain: Not so easy. Just look how MUCH minerals you have available after this ship limit is reached. That would be HUGE fleets - not much fun to have to control them.
One would have to drastically reduce the minerals in a game for that. But even then with Merlins you get plenty to build a lot of ships. Then the Neutronium will get a pain, unless you increase neturonium amounts drastically.

There is a huge impact on economy, it would be not so easy to balance this out. And there is the big question in the end: does it benefit the game? The ship limits feel a bit artifical, but at end of the day, I think it is likely that in the end they make the game better than without them.

23 days, 21 hours, 0 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Zavha: Are you not spending resources on Minefields?

-looks at his Finished games-

Well... apparently you aren't and your opponents don't seem to be doing so either.

Neutronium Alchemy consumes quite a bit minerals... we've seen players already build more ships than they can afford to move around and lose because of that.

There is a 9,999 Ship Limit game in progress, Turn 3 so far... so we will see.

23 days, 2 hours, 1 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

> Would be just easier to remove the stupid ship limits, and go back to basics

Not if you want everything to work properly and remain compatible with older games. The "testing" implementation that Joshua created doesn't always do Chunnel properly when the target ship is >999. Fixing this, with a 3-character friendly code, is the big problem.

Also, the OP is commenting on the pain of managing the ships he has. Just think about what would happen for these same players if there was effectively no limit to the number of ships. The fleets would be much larger, and fuel would become the deciding factor in the game.

The ship limit is one of the aspects of the overall game balance. Change that limit and you change the balance.

22 days, 23 hours, 23 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

"Whisperer: The "testing" implementation that Joshua created doesn't always do Chunnel properly"

This implies it has been tested even once... that is false and a blatant lie created due to personal bigotry.

22 days, 22 hours, 57 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Took me a bit to track this down. Here is what Joshua actually stated about how Chunnel will work in 9,999 Ship Limit Sectors;

"Joshua: Recently we tweaked the host side code to allow > 999 ships without breaking host. It still doesn't solve problems like setting a chunnel target (though it does a match of the last 3 digits). The game designer does still have a 999 limit on it.. but the host side is actually prepared to go higher."

This simply is not enough information to know if Chunnel to Chunnel targe ShipID# 1001 or 001 goes first because who knows what order the list of ShipID#s is traversed... or if it is even traversed linearly at all. I would bet it starts at lowest ShipID#, but you never know how it was coded on the Host side... we can see the code for the Chunnel Target pop-up however.

So in theory it might pick the first valid Chunnel Target with matching last 3 digits, meaning you each Cyborg Player could have 999 valid Chunnel Targets at the same time.

Side note: It could potentially even result in creating multiple Chunnel target of opportunities... for example a Chunnel could go to ShipID# 001 unless it is Robbed and then go to 1001... or having a Web-Crash-Chunnel 001 as first target in ordered list but if it fails to hit a Webmine go to 1001 instead. So if anything the Cyborg might be getting one heck of a boost.

Too soon to tell... might actually not work at all and even break sub 1000 Chunnels for all we know.

22 days, 18 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Glynsalternate,

> "Whisperer: The "testing" implementation that Joshua created doesn't always do Chunnel properly"
>
> This implies it has been tested even once... that is false and a blatant lie created due to personal bigotry.

False? FYI, it was tested in a Private game by @Martinr. As Joshus didn't respond in that thread, it's unknown whether this was a user error, a system glitch, a bug that was fixed or a bug that wasn't fixed. Based on Martinr's test results, my claim is optimistic.

http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3988355

> This simply is not enough information to know if Chunnel goes to Chunnel target ShipID# 1001 or 001 goes first because who knows what order the list of ShipID#s is traversed

This statement is absolutely correct, as far as it goes. What it's missing is that, as ship IDs pass the 1000 mark, there becomes a chance that a newly built Chunnel ship will have the same last three digits as an already existing Chunnel ship. This means that ONE of them is useless as a Chunnel destination (by Martinr's testing, any Chunnel target >999 is useless, so, once again, I'm being optimistic).

It should be noted that the frequency of duplication of the last three digits is greater than most people would think, as it turns into a generalized Birthday Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#Generalizations). The more ships that exist in the game (increases randomness of new Ship ID), and the more Chunnel Targets the Cyborg player has, the less likely that new Chunnel targets will be useful.

> each Cyborg Player could have max 999 valid Chunnel Targets at the same time

You're missing the above mentioned "Birthday Problem" aspect of ship ID allocation. In reality, once the ship ID goes past 1000, new useful Chunnel targets will become moderately rare events, especially if the player had a good economy in the early game.

Do the math; it gets interesting :)

FYI, your "side note" is completely irrelevant, as the resources that might be needed near ship ID 1234 are unlikely to be similar to those needed near ship ID 234.

Please remember Joshua's post:
From http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3903014

> Unlimited ships is definitely not a direction we see the game going from a standard configuration perspective

22 days, 18 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

:)

22 days, 11 hours, 58 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

"Whisperer: my claim is optimistic."

That is an optimistic label for a false claim.
___

"Whisperer: FYI, it was tested in a Private game by @Martinr ... http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3988355"

Martinr
7 MONTHS AGO • CATEGORIES • IGNORE • LIKE • GLYN LIKES THIS.

FYI, apparently this Glyn person was aware of that post and hit 'LIKE' on it over half a year ago.
___

"Whisperer: Please remember Joshua's post:
From http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3903014

> Unlimited ships is definitely not a direction we see the game going from a standard configuration perspective"

@Whisperer: Who suggested making unlimited/9,999 ships standard configuration? If anyone doubted you were bigoted against this new option, they probably aren't anymore.

Also that is literally the same post by Joshua I already quoted above so why are you telling me to recall it? Pretty obvious I did since I quoted it four hours before you did.

22 days, 11 hours, 21 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Here is the thread Whisperer quoted Martinr out of context; http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3902616

"Joshua: So if you did want to setup a game with a higher limit just create the game and we can raise the limit to 9999 or whatever."

I was under the impression Martinr just made a 9,999 Ship Limit Sector and didn't inform the Admins about it. If the Admins don't actually have to do anything further as implied by Joshua's post or Martinr did inform the Admins, then it indeed has been tested once.
_ _ _

"Whisperer: Of course, the FACT that, in two months, there hasn't been a single 9999-ship game is indicative of how useless it actually is."

It took eight months for the first Public 9,999 Ship Limit Sector to be created and started a month later;

Created: 6/19/2019 2:30:11 AM
7/19/2019 2:36:40 PM Turn 1 Game started.
[Source: http://play.planets.nu/#/sector/317153/events]

22 days, 1 hours, 30 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

> Here is the thread Whisperer quoted Martinr out of context

I haven't quoted Martinr in either this thread or that one. With no quote, there can be no quote out of context.

> "Whisperer: Of course, the FACT that, in two months, there hasn't been a single 9999-ship game is indicative of how useless it actually is."
>
> It took eight months for the first Public 9,999 Ship Limit Sector to be created and started a month later;

I believe that's a record for the longest time to use a new feature in a Public game. It certainly deserves the Dunsel award.

22 days, 0 hours, 29 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Whisperer: You provided the following quote of Martinr out of context; http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3988355

quote
/kwōt/
Learn to pronounce
verb

mention or refer to (someone or something) to provide evidence or authority for a statement, argument, or opinion.

In English words can have multiple meanings and definitions that often rely on context to be properly understood.
_ _ _

"Whisperer: I believe that's a record for the longest time to use a new feature in a Public game."

Are we counting unlimitedfuel, unlimitedammo, nominefields, nosupplies and nowarpwells? What about Win Conditions that were made before Custom Sectors but never utilized by Admins like All Planets? Not sure there is an active All Planets game even yet actually. Are we counting Emperor ships as there has always been a pretty big gap between their release and their first construction in a Public game.

It took years before anyone noticed Energy Defense Field even worked on planets with Starbases... games themselves can take years.

I think a Custom 11 player Sector starting in a month in the middle of summer is well above average... does that upset you Whisperer? Why did you bring this up in the first place if it doesn't have anything to do with your personal bigotry?

22 days, 0 hours, 20 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Siliconscout: Sorry for feeding the troll.

So I think the current input regarding your question is about all you'll be getting.

I considered mentioning the scripts that help manage fleets saving a lot of time, but that would require that you are using the Old Client (http://play.planets.nu) which is unsupported now.

21 days, 11 hours, 25 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

> You provided the following quote of Martinr out of context; http://play.planets.nu/#/activity/3988355

Since Martinr never posted that link, I couldn't have quoted it.

> "quote /kwōt/ verb
>
> mention or refer to (someone or something) to provide evidence or authority for a statement, argument, or opinion."

Now that IS a quote out of context. The complete definition that you extracted it from can be found at "https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/quote". The "lexico" front-end uses the same backend as Google, specifically Oxford.

That definition includes an example ("the examples quoted above could be multiplied from case studies from all over England"), which clearly shows that the definition isn't intended to apply to ANYTHING I wrote above.

> In English words can have multiple meanings and definitions that often rely on context to be properly understood.

Yes they do, but the term "quoting out of context" has a very precise definition that has no correlation to your use of it above. A reasonable definition of "quoting out of context" can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoting_out_of_context

21 days, 3 hours, 56 minutes ago

glynsalternate

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

@Whisperer: Claiming that a link to a quote isn't quoting someone is not even the dumbest thing you've said... but it is up there.

21 days, 0 hours, 34 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

Jesus *#&@ing christ... if you guys aren't going to help me sort out some settings that work for the kind of game that I want to play can you please take this e-dick slap fight somewhere else? Now I remember why I rarely post questions around here.

I will say thanks for the link, I will play with that and creating a bunch of different options until I get a map set in a way that I think we could play well with.

Can we close the thread?

20 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

> I will say thanks for the link

I hope it helps.

If you decide to change the number of planets in the game, I have a script that helps with that. I also have a good script for researching player history. All my scripts can be found here:
http://planets.nu/_library/whisperer-scripts/index.html

20 days, 6 hours, 24 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

WOW ... also very helpful thanks man/lady as the case may be!

20 days, 4 hours, 59 minutes ago

RE: PLS settings for ships question. So we finished off a...

> WOW ... also very helpful thanks

No problem. If you find any bugs, please feel free to inform me. Also, if you're looking for a stand-alone script (not a plugin) to do a specific task, I'm open to suggestions.