Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

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2830 days, 1 hours, 34 minutes ago

Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I'd like to start a discussion about removing the ship limit. What good things could we expect out of it, what are the bad things we could expect. I would greatly appreciate no "I don't want to change the game at all" posts. This is not intended to be a petition, just a discussion about what kind of changes we could expect to see in the game.

Personally, I'm neutral toward removing the ship limit. It seems to me that the ship limit is one of the few things in this game that make it human playable. I feel that removing the ship limit would create additional pressure to get a build out of each starbase every turn that the game just wouldn't be any fun. You just can't balance expansion, warfare, and building w/o restricting one of them, and maintain the playability of the game.

In the current game, the 500 ship limit provides the capability to concentrate on ship building and expansion, while warfare takes a back seat. After the ship limit warfare takes a primary role. As the players concentrate on the dwindling resources and try to maximize the utility of each ship slot.

I think I'd need to see more changes to the game before the ship limit is removed, maybe a fleet combat addon that reduces the importance of each ship slot as many small ships can work together to fight against a single large ship. Whereas right now that would be impossible.

What do others think? What do you think the larger impact to the game would be if you removed the ship limit. Obviously some basic mechanics, tactics, and strategies may change. But do you think those changes might make the game more fun and engaging?

2830 days, 0 hours, 58 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I believe that the shiplimit is what gives the so-called "weaker races" a chance in the game. Without a ship limit, each borg base would push out a cube, while each fascists or bird base would push out a battlecruiser. The fact that the battlecruisers are cheaper to build, does not matter as much as one might think - ammunition costs the same for everyone (except those damned free fighter races ;)).

Regards

2830 days, 0 hours, 36 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

That was one of my big concerns too with removing the ship limit. The Borgs logisitcal advantage would be nearly game breaking as long as the player is able to keep up with the expanding resource needs of their empire. I still think there's a limit to how much a player can mico-manage in this game in order to keep it fun... but some people find that kind of micro management fun, I personally do not.

Plus you'd have to factor in the costs of each base. For 10k mc in sunk costs a borg player can get a base capable of pushing out a Biocode with twarps and crap beams. Whereas for a Bird/Fascist player you also have the additional 2.8k mc for torp tech. So based on the borgs inherent advantages in making money + their logisitcal abilities, from a production standpoint it seems that removing the ship limit would only benefit the slower races.

Of course Jobo, are you basing your appraisal on the current combat mechanics, or do you think that adding in fleet combat might help balance this out?

2830 days, 0 hours, 22 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Thanks Veldan, that was much better put than my post (which was a bit hurried). I've never tried fleet combat, so I'm basing everything on the current combat mechanisms.

If we redo how combat works, it makes sense to look over everything else, including the shiplimit.

I'm one of those micromanagers, with updated excel sheets, riding the queue, with a huge network of fireclouds supplying my bases with everything they need (and not a single ton of duranium more) to build cubes.

Removing the shiplimit would simply mean that I could do with fewer bases, but keep pumping out cubes at a rate I think any non-borg race would be hard pressed to match.

Regards

2829 days, 22 hours, 43 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I'm not sure I buy into your argument about logistics 100%, Jobo. One of the things I tend to do (if possible in a standard game, and in a no ship limit I would almost certainly do it), is I build an Alchemy ship pair (merlin + refinery) in each major cluster regardless of presence of Bovi's. Over time, these ships help keep a cluster productive with priority builds and regular queue builds, long after they've been stripped out. (Plus they provide fuel to allow built ships to actually move away!

Removing the ship limit would allow this to be more prevalent for each cluster, and could potentially reduce the long term logistical advantage of the Borg.

This tends to eliminate the problems I encounter with logistics. I think this might make the borg logistical advantages different from the regular races, but not really game breaking. Sure, the Borg can push out Biocides every turn, but you have the other carrier races pushing out Gorbies, Golems, Virgos, and Rushes.

Of course these ships allow bases to remain productive during the post-ship limit phase of the game, but might get compromised if you remove the ship limit restrictions... of course if you just remove ship limit.. it means ships can be cloned all game long. Which means that more and more fireclouds will find their way into non-borg hands as the game evolves, as well as Cobols.

2829 days, 21 hours, 29 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Ship limit makes the game playable.

Now we got 30 turns to make our fleets and economies grow by building starbases in strategic locations.

After that it's warfare and survival of the fittest for the ~5 strongest races that survived the initial build up on top.

At least for my capabilities 500 planets and ships is near the limit, so I'm happy as it is.

2829 days, 18 hours, 29 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

As Fed I wait for the shiplimit to refit my empty hulls and lets fight them against your weak early game ships ;-) But the limit could be 1.000 ...

2829 days, 13 hours, 47 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Late in the game, moving 150+ ships a turn becomes a huge nuisance. Fun for a few battlegroups that are actively engaged, but for the rest, a chore. I am usually happy when the ship limit hits which means that i won't have to frantically supply my bases to keep pumping out a ship a turn, and can instead grow my fleet slowly as the enemy ships are destroyed. Remember, there is no real fleet management or grouping function build into the game. Having no ship limit would make the late game unmanageable, especially for finesse races such as the privateers, birds, and fascists. Now, if you could group ships into fleets and move them as a unit, set multiple way-points and add a few other shortcuts like having a freighter assigned to a run and then having it do that run on autopilot, then by all means lets remove the ship limit. however, while we still have to click on each ship each turn and make a decision, its not a good idea.

2829 days, 12 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

No ship limit would as others have suggested make the game unplayable unless mining rates and alchemy rates were radically reduced.

On the other hand there are few things more frustrating then watching your empire wither while a dozen heavy hitters sit in the building que. I believe the way ship limit, building que and [to a lesser extent] the combat engine are flawed. I believe a system that limits the number of fleet tons allowable based on empire population (both colonist and native) would be much fairer. Races like the Birds and Fascist could build a half a dozen or more ships for every cube ship or super carrier.

2829 days, 4 hours, 51 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Lindy, I've read a lot of your posts over the past year where you mention your thoughts on how 3.5 should evolve in nu. And overall I think I agree with your stance. A weight based ship limit would be much fairer, some races, pack a lot more punch per kt than other races. I think the heavy carrier races would end up losing a lot if the ship limit were changed to weight based. Personally, I think the the Feds and Fascists probably pack more of a punch per kt of ship mass than the other races. Plus a lot of the game mechanics go off of mass anyway. For each 100kt destroyed you get 1PBP, for each 50kt you build you spend 1 PBP.

2828 days, 9 hours, 23 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

without wanting to write a thesis about this, i believe that a lost ship limit will put the lizard and the cyborg in advantage and the fed and crystalline will loose their core strengths which clearly depend on the ship limit. while the lizard wants a late shiplimit whatsoever to produce as many hissers and warships after the (for me, golden) 20 turns mark and is limited only by the 500 ships, the fed needs the limit to go on growing in the midgame, while all others have to stall. the same for the crystalline who also has his golden time shortly after the ship limit. the borg will have a big fuel and a mediocre mineral advantage, if he builds enough merlins.

in my little opinion also a game without ship limit will become a monstergame, where especially the races with smaller and mineralwise cheaper ships will have to move very big fleets.

2826 days, 11 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Hmmm. I am generally in favour of things that add more variety to the game, and the ship limit does tend to mandate against hulls which are not primary combatants, so getting rid of it would allow for more esoteric ship types to play a greater part in the game, and that's a good thing,

If we removed the ship limit:

We might consider looking at exhausting Bovinoid supply production just as minerals get exhausted, or perhaps reducing alchemy efficiency as noted earlier.

We probably should look at ways to ease the administrative burden of issuing orders when navies grow large -

allowing ships to be grouped (even if combat resolution doesn't change) for movement
filterable/sortable grid UI for ships (to identify as-yet unordered ships )
player-definable waypoints (for multiple ships to move to)

We could look at

applying some kind of maintenance cost to ships
inflicting damage with elapsed time or distance traveled to require maintenance
applying a cost surcharge to new construction based on the size of your existing fleet

although those (along with hull or tonnage limits which are dependent on population) are death-spiral mechanics that help bigger empires get even bigger, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Maybe we could look at crew production as an additional area of constraint?

2826 days, 8 hours, 24 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think it would be interesting to have a game where each player has a maximum ship limit = to the number of planets he owns.

1. PBP's would allow builds above this limit.

2. This maximum could be increased in a game. Example: 10 + # of planets.

3. Or, only count warships. But, to do this you might need a bit of tinkering. Example: Only ships with beams can do non-Explore missions. (chunnel, build fighters, rob, make webs, tow capture, cloak, etc). (Exception = Super Refit)

2826 days, 6 hours, 2 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I spent years playing with host999 - maybe we were more warlike than other groups, but we found that with our collective rate of attrition that the 999 limit was never hit - a few big empires ended up around 200 ships total (we usually ended the game around turns 80-100 though - never waited for someone to take over 60% of the galaxy or whatever).

I've posted it on suggestions - but I think 999 is a good idea for people looking for a game with more breathing room in the queue - but still a hard limit.

2826 days, 4 hours, 24 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

dtolman, it was actually your suggestion which made me want to start this topic. And by saying remove the ship limit I was speaking from the standpoint of doing host 999 since that would require the fewest coding changes I'd think. But I didn't want to throw that out there entirely because I didn't want to stifle the creativity of players.

I like the idea of a limit based upon production capacity. Whether if that be # of planets, which would make the early game more combat oriented as players actively seek to expand their territory of influence, and minimize their opponents influence.

I'm also finding myself drawn to a limit based upon tonnage. With possibly several tiers, such as a Single player has a minimum limit of 20,000 kt. But there's also a universal upper limit of 300,000 kt, and each PBP earned actually increases your minimum player limit by 50kt. Of course, there would need to be problems that get worked out, like what to do about giving ships away, and having your ships captured.

I'd like to see some kind of restricted production after some kind of limit.. whether if it be # of ships or planets, but with the capability to expand your total tonnage over time through positive player action.

I would like to avoid the death spiral where a large empire suddenly finds themselves at a huge advantage compared to everyone else. Maybe it's hard to expand your production to 20,000 kt, easy to go from 20,000 to 35,000, and then it gets more difficult to go from 35,000 to 50,000. As opposed to number of planets I would actually like to see a # of starbase option, maybe 1 SB allows you to build 20 hulls, 2 allows a bonus of +15 hulls, 3 allows +10, 4 allows +5, 5 allows +2, and each one after that allows only +1 ship. So by turn 30 when everyone should be at around 6 bases, each player is able to build 53 ships, and they don't get too many more builds for each base beyond that. PBP's would allow you exceed these minimums, cloning would never expire, and you can clone and build at the same time based upon existing rules.. probably need to be slightly modded.

2826 days, 4 hours, 9 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Ah - but the big empire has its own problem - a lot of vulnerable territory to defend per ship. Adding in wrap-around to the game (an add-on we always played with), means their are no "safe" borders for them to leave undefended.

Also, the game has its own basic economic limiter - the finite resources in the game. I found that by turn 80 in host 999 games, usually resources are completely tapped out on most planet. Production usually slows as a result, and it takes multiple simultaneous extended LDSF freighter runs to to feed a single starbase enough materials to keep pumping out full equipped tech 10 ships - bovonoid worlds excepted.

The extended logistical infrastructure to required to maintain starbases in the late game meant that we often had to divert ships to protect interior spaces as well - a single missing freighter could cripple production at a starbase.

I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of other people with host999 - I only played with the same extended group of 15-18 people, so our experiences may be atypical.

2826 days, 1 hours, 51 minutes ago

emork the lizard king

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I would not want to play without a ship limit. I wouldn't have the time to control all these ships. And I'm always happy that after hitting the ship limit I can concentrate less on maximizing my ship count and more on combat.

The idea of a dynamic ship limit for each player based on #planets / #production / #total fleet mass sounds very interesting.

2826 days, 0 hours, 50 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

As a Privateer player, I strongly oppose having to manage 250+ ships, with orders for robbing, mine sweeping, moving, etc. I would even propose a lower limit for ships, which could favor the weaker races like Birds, Fascists, etc.

In a balanced game you will have one-two enemies eliminated in the first 25-30 turns, which would leave ~50 ships for everyone, by turn 40. Ok, Privs would get more, Birds would probably get more, but generally people will have around 50 ships. It's a decent number and it gives you space to have 2-3 merlins, 8 LDSF, 10 support ships(probes, cobols, terraformers, glory, loki, etc), and the rest attack ships, about 25-30. 25-30 ships mean 3-4 fleets of 5-10 ships fight ships. Why do you need more?

2826 days, 0 hours, 36 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The problem with the ship limit is it hurts weaker races who need to build 5 ships to kill that one cube. You only have 45 ships by the time the limit is hit you can't go up against 1 cube, you can't risk loosing 5 ships to get 1 cube. Guess who gets more priority points from that scenario?

Maybe set it per race and give modifications for other factors. Maybe 1 extra ship per happy native race you have. That would limit the cyborg somewhat.
Or maybe your star bases set your ship limit. Let's say 1 star base can support 10 ships.
Just some ideas.

2826 days, 0 hours, 2 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I don't see how its possible to get 250 ships though - where are the minerals coming from for building these ships? Where is the fuel coming from to allow them to move? We never got close with host999 - we'd settle in around 100 ships with the major empires, and attrition & the lack of minerals would keep that number fairly steady.

2826 days, 0 hours, 2 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Dup.

2825 days, 23 hours, 50 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@dtolman: I said Privateer. If you check my finished games, you'll see I'm pretty close to this number. MBRs cost close to nothing and you have to count ships others build for me.

2825 days, 23 hours, 38 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Because fleets mean nothing in this game.

2825 days, 23 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

A support based fleet limiter would need to take some things into consideration.

#1: Ship Mass
An sdsf should not be as economically demanding as a Biocide.

#2: Ship Weapon Array
Since weapon arrays along with ship mass (within limits) determine warship effectiveness,
The weapon # and type should be considered.
It's a lot cheaper to maintain the 1 beam PL21 than it is the 10 beams & 10 bays on a Gorbie.

#3: Planet Count
The bigger the empire, the more likely the empire can afford supporting fleets.

#4: Economic power of empire (colonial & native combined to balance borg & non-borg)
The bigger the true economy of an empire, the better able to support fleets.
An empire of barren rocks should be less capable than a thriving growing empire of
heavily populated (both colonist & native) worlds .

I would discourage using bases as a means of limiting fleets.
This would just encourage useless base building for the purpose of hoarding slots.

Might be interesting to use supplies and not cash as a support mechanism.
It would favor the borg though but that's easily fixed by handicapping borg.

To the OP:
More than 500 just makes the game more tedious IMO.

2825 days, 17 hours, 39 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

PROS: You can build as many ships as you want!! WOOT!!

CONS: The game will be 100% ruined or at least no longer VGAP as we've known it.

As some have already mentioned, removing the ship limit will have a devastating effect on some races in this game.

Taking out the ship limit would require a complete re-write for all the races and their special abilities, it is basically a new game that you are creating at this point for the most part.

2825 days, 17 hours, 34 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@dtolman

http://planets.nu/games/12522

I had about 200 ships in this game when it ended, I also gave about 10-15 to my ally. If this game went any longer the 250 ship mark would've been achieved very easily.

Managing a fleet bigger than this for some races like Privateers, Fascists, Borg would turn into a nightmare. Privy's already require about 2 - 3 hour turns when things get really evolved and sometimes even longer! I don't want to spend an entire day on a turn :)

2825 days, 15 hours, 27 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Regarding building a bunch of ships.. like 250 or so. In two games already on Nu I've been able to build around 125 ships for non-ship stealing races (Robots and Colonies). Both of these games ended around turn 65. If I would have had to, I could have easily gotten both games to 200 or 250 ships easily through the use of Alchemy ships, Population, and Supplies. I'm in a game currently where by turn 24 my three man team was able to get together 171 ships. Now around turn 60 we've broken the 200 ship barrier, plus we're pushing out several hundred torps and about a hundred fighters a turn. Through growing our Bovi planets we're building enough supplies, and through strategic placement of alchemy ships we're keeping our fleets of ships moving.

My biggest fear about an addon like host 999 is that players will do whatever they can to fill up the ship slots, but host 999 will only delay ship limit by 10 to 15 turns. Because by the time ship limit hits around turn 30 (in a 500 ship game) you've got about 50 bases already (in a real competitive game) so it's only about 10 more turns of production to put out another 500 ships, just on existing bases. Very easy to do. Even if all that fills up the queue are smallies. And basically I find the 10 turns prior to ship limit to be "hell turns". I would hate having to extend that over a 20 turn period.

The more this discussion goes on the more I'd like to see a weight based ship limit. It would do several things.

1. Ensure that small useless ships aren't over valued.

2. Remove the current situation of most bang/ship to most bang/kt.

3. Heavy carriers are good, but other ship types will need to be rolled into a players arsenal as well.

4. The ability to slowly scale up the amount of tonnage based on .. some kind of game event..

It might be safe to sum up a lot of the comments in this thread that the game absolutely NEEDS "some kind of ship limit".

Most players would like the ability after this "limit" to slowly expand a fleet by having it based on some kind of real measurable number outside of "ship ID#". Some prefer some kind of production cap based on the size of their empire and economic development. Others like a simpler stance of just saying that the most ship tonnage in the universe is x, and that the number can only be exceeded by... some kind of event.. probably combat. How far off am I?

2825 days, 15 hours, 10 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

To Veldan Thank you for the kind words.

All; this thread is an interesting read with many valid points on both sides. The three biggest negatives to changing the ship limits mechanics seem to be; player work load, over all game balance and the "death spiral".

Player work load is mainly a user interface issue. This could be dealt with by adding some ship grouping, and command que (giving a ship several turns with of orders at once). How best to do this is a topic for for another thread.

The current building priority point system does have some balance and "death spiral" issues as others have noted. Most notably when playing a race that requires 2 or 3 ships to bring down a big carrier. In general it is harder to get the 2 or 3 ships out of the que then it is the one big one. If the big carrier races has more starbases with ships in the que it is very hard for a non carrier race to gain ground in the ship out.

I have been thinking about how to address this through a max tonnage as a function of an empires population. It is clear to me that a linear relationship between population and max tonnage will not work (ie x # of clans = y # of tons). My thoughts are more a long the lines of;

max.tonnage = min.tonnage + ( tonnage.race.modifier / 100 ) * SUM( ( planet.colonist.clans / C ) ^ K + native.bounce)

Where;

min.tonnage = config setting between 1,000 and 10,000

tonnage.race.modifier = config setting between 50 and 200 (100 for most races, the Borg would less then 100 Birds and fascist would be higher)

C = yet to be determined constant, most likely somewhere between 1 and 10

K = constant between 1.0 and 0.1. Based on the numbers I have run 0.66 (ie 2/3) seem about right

native.bounce will be lesser of;

planet.colonist.clans

or

native.gov.tax.mod * ( native.tonnage.mod / 100 ) * ( planet.native.clans / C ) ^ K

native.tonnage.mod would be as follows;
Humanoid = 200
Bovaniod = 50
Amorphous = 0
Insectiod = 50
All others = 100

Mathematically, I believe this is a good starting point. The exponential K value of 2/3rd is designed to take the edge off the "Death Spiral". Large centralized empires would be less efficient at generating max tonnage points then a smaller more defused empire, and two smaller empires could have a combined tonnage equal to or greater then one larger empire

2825 days, 14 hours, 15 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@veldan: you're not far off. One thing to consider would be decreasing the max number of ships. I think this should also be taken into consideration. Will it blend? :)

@lindybomber:(cool name btw) native.bounce would be 0 for amorphous is that intended? I find empires that manage to keep amorphous planets to deserve more brownie points than ones that keep humanoid or other more useful types. Humanoid is also too much. Avian, Bov, Insect should be lower than 100, the starbase boosting natives should be higher than Bov, but lower than 100 and amorph should be much higher than 100. Isn't this formula too complicated in the end? I mean, ok you can compute it, but what is the philosophy behind it? What does it reward, what does it punish? (I mean specially the second part)

2825 days, 4 hours, 58 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Vesuvius,

I think dropping max # of ship would be interesting. It would limit the amount of heavies pushed into the game, leaving those to post ship limit builds. That would be a very interesting game as well, but it might be slow moving since you can't get a huge assemblage of ships together. I think it would easily mesh with Lindy Bombers equation. I also believe that Joshua is working on allowing players to modify the hconfig settings, and maybe he could add in a line to just manually edit the max # of ships/planets. Maybe he could allow between 1 and 999 for planets, ships, bases, and so forth.

Lindy, I want to play with your equation a bit before I comment on it, I think there's a few things you might be leaving out that I would think should be taken into consideration. I think that whatever change if any... it should try to remain within the spirit of 3.5. And a single "simplish" equation to explain a game mechanic definitely fits within the 3.5 spirit.

2825 days, 3 hours, 53 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

LindyBomber, how does that function apply to the Borg? Wouldn't they have excessive tonnage compared to everyone else?

2825 days, 3 hours, 41 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Coldsteel,

That is what "tonnage.race.modifier" is for. for most races their modifier would 100, the Borg would most likely need a modifier somewhere in the 50 to 75 range. Also, natives do give tonnage points as well to help offset the borg population advantage.

Vesuvius,

Yes the amorphs give 0 (zero) tonnage. They are intended to be pest, and not helpful in any way. I welcome your input on my math. I don't expect this to work the first time around, there is going to have to be some trial and error to get the constants dialed in correctly.

Lindy

2825 days, 1 hours, 59 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@lindybomber: What i'm saying is that amorphous are already "pest" and hard to manage in keeping a colony on a Amorph planet, while humanoid, bovinoid and the others are quite useful and they shouldn't give an extra bonus. So if someone is able to manage keeping amorph colonies, he should get a bonus, while someone who only has 50 degrees, insectoid/bovinoid planets shouldn't. What do you think about this?

2825 days, 1 hours, 48 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

If removing the ship limit doesn't impact the performance of HOST, or the game itself from a memory/processing standpoint, then it may be worth considering as a GAME OPTION:

SHIP LIMIT (500) = YES/NO

My impression was that the ship limit was mainly instituted as a measure to keep the processing down to a manageable level.

2825 days, 1 hours, 10 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

isn't the planet count supposed to follow the military power usually? why turn it around?

(250 ships are achieveable, and they are on the edge of playability)

2825 days, 0 hours, 20 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I'd prefer to see the ship limit as a value that's adjustable during game creation. Persoanlly, I think the ship limit should be 'per race'. something like 100 ships for each race. This would allow each empire to tailor thier ships to their gameplay style. I can see a valid argument that it should be set up as 'tonnage per race' so races like Borg or Evil Empire dont just crank out 100 of the biggest ships and stomp everyone.

Adjustable ship limits would make this a much better game.

2824 days, 21 hours, 48 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@thin lizzy
Basically, it's a game design preference - if combat power is not divorced from economy to some extent, then that death spiral really encourages :

Players to drop if they start to lose, so separating the two encourages smaller nations to keep fighting.
A monoculture of play styles - everything is about maximizing the economy, because that's a greater enabler for victory than grand strategy or clever tactics which cannot be realized without the economic success first.

I think as a first step I'd like to be able to try a straight tonnage cap - instead of 500 ships have either 100,000 ktons across all races (which would be fun) or perhaps better 10,000 ktons/race before all later builds have to be paid for with PBP.

2824 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

"My impression was that the ship limit was mainly instituted as a measure to keep the processing down to a manageable level."

That was the exact reason.
Back in the 90s when host was run on 386's and 486's single big game host runs could take hours.

2824 days, 20 hours, 28 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Even on my Dad's 386 SX a host run on a mature game would take about 10 to 20 minutes without addons. Cplayer on the other hand cold take 30 minutes per race being played by the computer.

2824 days, 19 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Regardless of the original reason for a ship limit, there seems to be a consensus that removing the ship limit entirely will result in too many ships that will take too much time to manage.

2824 days, 19 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

True, with one caveat...

It will take too much time to manage with the current interface.

2824 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Lindybomber,

Host 3.15 Nitro was written to address mature games taking obscenely long times to host.

Tim Wisseman also posted in the old usenet & aol forums stating the reason he didn't expand
the 500 limit(s) was because host times would skyrocket.

host999 was a late host written by Tim.

2823 days, 18 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

So does that mean that with modern servers planets.nu can remove the ship limit with no adverse effects?

Have always wanted to play one game where there were no ship limits.

2823 days, 0 hours, 22 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Regarding the run-time problem: Tim's host had one big problem: it worked from disk. PHost is a lot faster just by working from memory. However, on today's hardware and today's operating systems (with disk cache), both host a regular game in a few seconds. I don't know how NuHost works, but it reports taking about 80 seconds for a normal game. There's probably room for improvement.

The bigger problem is play time. I currently need an hour or so with the Nu interface. I was faster when I could use PCC2. Give me double the ships with this interface and I give up, sorry.

But even with VGAP classic, I usually enjoyed the relief of the ship limit. Because it now means I can concentrate on strategy instead of pumping out ships like crazy. I once tried a "growing ship limit" mode: start with a limit of, say, 300. When that is reached, add 10 slots each turn (PHost "NumShips" option + perl one-liner = fun & profit). You probably don't even reach 999 until the game is finished. I found that interesting to play, but unfortunately haven't tried it a second time. OK, it needs a fair build queue mode to be fun, PHost PAL sucks here. PHost PBP is best, TimHost/NuHost PBP probably a close second.

--Stefan

2822 days, 21 hours, 50 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Stefan, thanks for bringing up already established phost solutions to this problem that we've been discussing. I've been chewing on Lindy Bombers equations for a few days, and now you've given me PAL to chew on.

Why do you say that PAL is unfair?

2822 days, 20 hours, 24 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I found PAL very frustrating to play.

PBP is simple: you build in first-in-first-out order, and you can trade your ship kills for faster building. Easy. You can collect PBPs if you wish, because they normally do not decay. And if you want a break, just have it. Your PBPs will still be there, and your build orders will still move normally.

PAL means all your actions from now *and the past* affect how fast you advance the queue. Which means you must still be pumping out action as fast as you can, because otherwise all others will overtake you on the queue. Which means, even if you fight and win, you'll not build, because others overtake you just because they fight more, in completely unrelated wars. Your build orders can even move backwards in the queue!

--Stefan

2817 days, 15 hours, 37 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I have been thinking about this more and we may be aproaching this issue from the wrong angle. This production should be limited by resourses not some abritry limit for funky math. What is we cut the mining rates down to about 1/3rd of the current rates and increase the cost of alcheme by 3x? Also income rates could be reduced to about 25% current rates, this would force the building for more lower tech hulls and equipment.

2817 days, 14 hours, 5 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The biggest and most annoying problem is fuel. With lower tech I would think that it would negatively affect fuel consumption due to the less efficient engines.

2815 days, 3 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

"lindybomber
"This production should be limited by resourses not some abritry limit for funky math."
Agreed.

"What is we cut the mining rates down to about 1/3rd of the current rates and increase the cost of alcheme by 3x? Also income rates could be reduced to about 25% current rates, this would force the building for more lower tech hulls and equipment."

This is feasible if build in space & free fighter production is also increased.
Else, you'd have torpedoes costing 4x what they currently do versus each fighter.

Instead of a 3T+2M+5S / fighter, it might have to be along the lines of 9T+6M+15S / fighter.
The big drawback here is that fighter production would be very difficult especially for the Bots.

A Gemini would produce 13 ftrs per turn.
A QTanker would produce 4 ftrs per turn.

2814 days, 18 hours, 54 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Bane,

This is a very good. I actually thought about that after the fact. Maybe instead of cutting tax rates the cost of all this components and hulls cold be increased.

2814 days, 18 hours, 20 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Why would it be more expensive to build torpedoes than fighters in a mineral poor universe?

2814 days, 18 hours, 7 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Reducing mining rates would not overly favor fighter races, but reducing income rates would greatly favor the free fighter races.

2814 days, 17 hours, 30 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

"eraulli,
Why would it be more expensive to build torpedoes than fighters in a mineral poor universe?"

I was referring to lindybomber's suggestion of cutting economies by 75%.

The preferred torps are the mk4, mk7 & mk8:
That's $13, $36 & $54 per torp + 3 minerals (1T,1D,1M).
Teching up to each is T5 ($1000), T8 ($2800) & T10 ($4500)
Build in space fighters cost 5 supplies & 5 minerals (3T/2M)
There is no up front cost for fighter tech and fighters do more damage than torpedoes.
So, for effectively 20 supplies, the fighter races get a weapon more powerful than torps
that have a substantially higher cost.

If the income was cut by 75%, the cost of the torps increases by a factor of 4 relative to fighters.

Make sense?

2813 days, 22 hours, 17 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The ship limit was simply put in to make sure the server didn't get overwhelmed when processing the turn.

People have argued that changing the ship limit would change the game but honestly it wouldn't really change it all that much. Games usually run pretty fast and people are mixing it up when the the 500 ship limit is hit. To be honest, there are quite a few exploits people can do to use the ship cap to their advantage that would be fixed by moving away from the current system.

The cap should be changed from 500 to something like 750 or 1000 to see how it goes. The only other thing that would make sense would be to make the cap "race specific" instead of a pool.

Something like 100 to 150 per race would make the great ship building race a thing of the past.

Even is Joshua leaves it at 500 for the server generated games, it really should be set as an option on the custom games tab that way RL friends playing together can decide for themselves.

The next evolution of Planets really should be based around "options" in the custom games.

2812 days, 20 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

> The ship limit was simply put in to make sure the server didn't get overwhelmed
> when processing the turn.

That's a quite liberal interpretation of history. The ship limit was put in because PDS BASIC (in which VGAP3 is written) does not allow dynamic allocation, and Tim didn't expect it to ever be reached. Quote from original doc:
-----
      ERROR: ALL 500 SHIP SLOTS ARE FULL!!!

                500 ships are the limit. I have never heard of this
             happening, but you never know. No new ships may be built
             until some ships in that game are destroyed or scraped.
-----
Still, VGAP isn't too bad here. All games have limits, but only few have rules what happens when they are reached. I recall sitting frustrated in front of "Dune 2": if you build a unit when the limit is reached, the unit is simply lost, all resources gone. We at least have a build queue.

Ship building must be limited somehow to keep the game manageable. Limiting it through resources alone does not seem to work, as we all see. Fixed per-race limits wouldn't work, either. If Lizards do have 250 planets and are about to win, why should they be limited to 100 ships? Limiting ships by some score ("if you have 100 planets, you are allowed to have 100 ships") isn't easy -- what do you do if someone loses score? I once played with an experimental add-on that "swaps out" ships in this case, but I wouldn't say it enhanced gameplay.

So, raising the limit seems to be about the only thing to delay the limit. Plus a decent build queue mode.

--Stefan

2812 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I don't like the idea of removing or changing the ship limit. Ship limit is part of the game, just another rule to follow and to take in account. It encourages the players to burst their economy at the beginning giving importance to the growing of their race and penalizing the players that start confrontations too early. It's too a way to counterbalance the races that have an exponential ratio of growth like the borgs. They would take a great advantage if the ship limit is removed. Most of their planets become like a 4m. bovinoid planet producing 400 supplies each turn with their factories . That wanna say that they would have a constant and infinite flux of mats to build new ships and since they are the only ones able to move ships instantly from any part of the galaxy they could win the battles just by numerical superiority. Sending all the ships he can build each turn until he could win the battle just because you run out of mats counter the lost of ships. I can say more, you would be almost unable to capture one starbase. the defender will just have to leave 50-100-200 small, and cheap, ships orbiting his planets just to make your capital ships waste ammunition/fighters before fighting against his war ships. You are coming with a T-rex with 190 cargo? I would put 38 sdf before you fight against my Diamond leaving you without torps, making you waste 6650 mc and 190 of each mat in torps just to the cost of 380 mc and 78 of each mat in sdf... and ensuring you will lose a fight that you would have win.

And about upgrading the ship limit to 1000... I don't know about you but in almost all my games it takes all my effort not to run out of mats some turns before we hit the 500 ships. I wouldn't be able to build each turn because I will have to search mats in too far away planets or wait till my merlyns produce the needed amount of mats to a new ship. Giving again advantage to the borgs/priv that are able to move ships faster and cheaper than other races.

So, I'm against of removing the ship limit in public games. In the private games you should be able to make anything you want.

Regards,

Nite

2812 days, 19 hours, 32 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I agree with streu and nitemare. I haven't seen a feasible suggestion for how to change the ship limit, other than perhaps to put in an overall tonnage limit instead of a ship count limit. I thought an interesting suggestion was to have a limit depending on planet count, but it is not clear how to deal with the case that your planet count goes down -- keeping the ships seems fair, but then allies could manipulate this by trading planets to each other.

2812 days, 18 hours, 20 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

i am totally against removing the ship limit.
the game will simply become unplayable. once you have reached >150 ships planets becomes a full time job.
if i would have to manage more ships i would need a secretary...

ulki13

2811 days, 7 hours, 59 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I like the ship limit and I totally vote against removing (unless in private games of course). It splits the game into two parts.

1. Rapid expansion & fast Star Base building, focussing all ressources on building ships
2. Developing of fleets & weaker planets, more war-orientated strategic approach

The removal of the ship limit would change the basics of the game. Regardless of the massive balance-change, you need to develop completely different tactics and behaviour. Furthermore, it would put the whole Priority Buildings system useless.

If you want to do it in a private game I guess there's no one who will stop you. Put this should not be implemented in the normal game cluster.

2811 days, 3 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I like the ship limit, and it is totally neessary to make the game playable. Once you have >100 ships, you need so much time for a turn, you can´t have a real life anymore. So please do not remove the ship limit! More, please make a option to turn it down for private games, so if just three players play you can set it to 100.

2811 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Not to many people want it removed but many want it changed. I think setting a limit based on the number of star bases you have is a good one. Each race can support 12 ships per star base. This has the added feature in smaller universe games of limiting the ship quantity. It also means in games with 500 planets with only a few people you can amass, if you want, quite a fleet. In 11 player games if the planets are doled out evenly and you can somehow put bases on 25% of your worlds that gives you about 120 ships. That is a lot of money and resources.

The ships are balanced by fire power vs. cost and not balanced for a ship limit. So with a ship limit luck plays a big part of your survival, do you find a few good planets early enough to get some of your key ships built?

Do the math it works out pretty well.

2811 days, 1 hours, 40 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Sorry, but no way. Look at our team game Bazal. Ulki, emork and I have together 54 Bases and we can build many more. That would be 648 Ships to move, and as Lizard I could use every ship. Now I need about three hours a turn, more or less. Mor ships ore time.
I think the ship limit is very well, you have to build up early and have a strong economy. Without it it´s a different game.
Domlos

2806 days, 22 hours, 31 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I have to agree with the current ship limit. You could maybe have it as a host option for people who want to experiment. The big problem with the ship limit is when people spam it with 20 starbases producing SDF with stardrive. Then sitting them over a planet or in deep space with no fuel so they can't be easily destroyed. This i believe is exploiting the ship limit to prevent other races having a fair opportunity in the game. It is also very difficult to prevent. The only way i can think is to alter the ship lists to remove the useless ships AND engines that have no practical use. This would go hand in hand with reducing the amount of engines needed on alchemy ships. This would at least mean spamming the ship list would cost MC's.

2806 days, 6 hours, 46 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@nitemare
While I have misgivings about messing with the ship limit, one thing removing it altogether does do is restore the roles for some smaller ships,

E.g. while 38 SDSFs may make an effective torp sponge for a T-Rex, they just make a bunch of tasty hors d'oeuvres for a single Reptile destroyer with blasters.

2805 days, 20 hours, 41 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Once the ship limit is reached then those that are engaged in battle tend to be able to build ships at a more rapid pace than those that aren't. I've been playing since 1994 and consistently - moreso with the expansion of computing resources and Internet (as opposed to 300 baud BBS) - the complaints on the ship limit are from players who have been stuck in economic expansion with crappy ships at the 500 ship limit. They want the ability to build more powerful ships to handle the assault of races that have already been mixing it up and have already ammassed a fleet of "lets get it on" warships. Privateers and Crystals, aside, their ship strategy is different than other races.

Let's face it, when the ship limit is reached, your economy grows exponentially more than your ship building so it is soon a moot point as to being able to afford building a kick ass warship. Plenty of minerals and money - and that includes spending for tech-10 torps versus tech-6 torps (for example). Again, Privateers and Crystals aside when it comes to ship building (for them a valid strategy is ship acquiring - it is a race advantage, afterall).

Absolutely, it sucks to have a mid-tech level ship engage in a tech-ed out ship. Attrition is also a huge factor. Losing 5 or 6 ships against an opponents 2 ships is painful, regardless of the accumulated build points.

The 500 ship limit encourages a strategy that employs economics and ship building. Victory conditions may suggest a large number of planets but you need to be able to hold them and you need to be able to acquire more of them - especially at the 500 ship limit. And that simply is not as easy as it sounds when your ships are crappy compared to your opponent's ships. Eliminating the 500 ship limit allows for lazy play, boring play, and play without strategy. And I would argue, the ship limit actually enforces a game requiring strategy that begins at turn-1 same as your starting position.

Don't remove a key component of the game that begets strategy. That's what Nintendo systems are for.

2749 days, 22 hours, 16 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I have played many games with a cap of 500 and 999 and I have enjoyed both styles. I will say that I have never seen a game where the ship count reached 900. Due to attrition and lack of mats. It does change the game style and allows new tactic. Glory ships are not limited, Guardians now lead a Rush into combat, Loki's never stop being produce and Cobol's become a key trade ship. I will say the games are a lot more involved and time consuming, no more playing 3-6 games at once.

I like both game types and have always liked more options. I would really like to see a Stellar game with host999. That would be something new...

2749 days, 12 hours, 47 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

hors, Excellent points, well made & so true. Enjoyed reading them.

2749 days, 0 hours, 16 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I'm of the opinion that games should END. A beginning, a mid-game and the end.
The ship limit helps speed us towards the end game, that is you make your moves, if they're bad moves and you lose battles your opponent gets a numerical advantage. That numerical advantage is key towards ending games.
We need caps on number of planets, number of minefields, number of ships.

Others may disagree but Host999 games lasted forever. Small package big punch ships like patriots and arkahms are over emphasized. The rebel rush rules the day.

2744 days, 19 hours, 27 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Nobody is asserting that ALL the games should have a 999 ship limit. Just start a new one with this new add on. I personally would give it a go.

So if you don't like the idea just don't join. But it would be nice to have at least one game running here with a 999 or no ship limit.

2744 days, 1 hours, 54 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

This has been going around and around for months - I certainly don't see a reason why 999 can't be offered on private games, at the very least. Its just another option.

2742 days, 0 hours, 18 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Every single post in this thread about how a no ship limit cap would be better or worse is purely speculative.

Some people have put forth very well thought out arguments about why it would be game breaking, or why it would be game liberating, or why it would give so and so an advantage.

But seriously...No one can know for sure until we try it.

And I'm game if you are :)

Edit: I didn't realize games with no ship cap w have actually been done before.

But i'd still like to try it out, and experience a no cap game for myself.

2716 days, 12 hours, 5 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

So when the Fu&$ are we going to get a game here with a 999 ship limit?

Don't like the idea? Cool. Don't join that game. Dont want to hear your analysis. JUST DON'T join.

But this shit has been run into the ground for awhile. Why are we (the paying members) not being offered this game to join?

Joshua?

D

2714 days, 22 hours, 1 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I utterly, entirely, hate the ship limit.

Currently, the 500 ship limit forces one to pump out as many ships as possible. One build every starbase - every turn. Some players won't realise to do it - they will be screwed in the end game. For them, it's a game-wrecking stupidity of a rule. But some people will, and the ship slots get filled with all sorts of interesting ship choices. Eros hissers, SD1 SDSFs anyone? Empty FED hulls? With fascists, one at least gets to pump out glories.

It is possible to run early blitz warfare if the conditions are right, but after that, no sane mind engages in full scale warfare before the ship limit is full. It is more important to maximize territory with minimal combat and pump out ship after ship. The fighters and torps can be built later.

The ship limit is an artificial constraint that breaks the economic model and rewards, well, not good strategy (in fact it penalises it), but intimate knowledge of the rules and the ability to game them. It is almost pointless to build a good economy by ferrying a lot of clans to the outer limits of ones empire, as the ship limit will quickly be there to remove economics from the play. What seemed like an intuitively good idea becomes a terrible waste of resources. And while building a starbase 'ahead' of the build queue is good playing with the current rules, it is still a ridiculous thing to have to think about such meta-game moves in general when playing a strategy game.

Summary: I would love to play a game without a ship limit.

2714 days, 21 hours, 52 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Ship limit should not prevent you from devolping your outer worlds and continuing to gather more resources.

Ship limit actually forces you to build SBs on most of your planets, regardless of quality, since the ID of the planet becomes more important. So by not developing your outter planets you are basically allowing the build cue to pass through those worlds without a build, which is not good.

If anything it adds an extra layer to the strategy of the game, however it might not be a welcomed layer by some and it certainly increases the complexity of the game, there is no arguing that.

It also forces combat, which I think is the most important benefit of it.

I can't really picture what a gmae without the ship limit would play out like but I'd assume it would last much longer than our current games. Hard to say till we try it though.

2714 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Not in the long run, no. But the big freighters will only leave for the fringe when the ship limit is reached. Sending them out earlier will result in missing a few sure builds in exchange for a vaguely potential future build.

2714 days, 21 hours, 36 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Well one thing I've learned about this game is that you should never stop expanding your territory.

And who knows, the fringe planets might be closer to the cue than your internal planets, it all has to be managed perfectly or else you get behind.

Its much easier to build on a fringe planet if the cue is coming if that planet has been established earlier on, as opposed to just rushing resources there to try to get it in time.

2714 days, 21 hours, 25 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

i see it that way: before the ship limit it's the opening phase. after that the game starts.
if you don't have to earn your builds with either investing 20grand or fight hard, the lizards
will run away from anyone - with eros classes and transwarp merlins.

(not that they do it anyway)

2714 days, 16 hours, 49 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Lets also keep in mind that removing the ship limit hurts the Fascists a lot!

2714 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I don't know. Having 50-100 glory devices could be very interesting for the Fascists. Launching 4 glory devices at an invading fleet does nasty things.

2714 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Removing the ship limit would heavily favor the fed/lizard/etc over the empire/fascist/etc.

2714 days, 5 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

If we had rebalancing, and tools for group movement/automated movement... I think that an uncapped game would be great.

It wouldn't be (classic) vgaplanets3 though.

Which might be OK.

2713 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I have had this conversation plenty of times in the past.

I don't know that any of my points are necessary after the lengthy discussion. But if Planets. NU had not started when it did, I might already be headlong involved in creating an updated VGAP. The game is broadly worked out. We were going to use an upkeep system to replace the ship limit. That is, each ship has an associated upkeep of cash. Under current VGAP restrictions, upkeep would be impossible to do without majorly complicating the game. (Where does the cash come from?). But it has some implications.

1. Imposes a soft limit on ship production. You CAN build more ships, but can you afford to keep them in service?

2. It limits how far ahead of noobs the experienced players can get in the early game

3. Encourages players to continue expanding.

4. Gets rid of lots of silly behaviors. (SDSF stockpiles, for one)

5. Super refit is not as good

6. Lady Royales are very good

7. Requires a central bank account for each team.

2713 days, 22 hours, 38 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Re: upkeep

Inflict damage on each ship, per turn, and/or per light year travelled, say. Might be nice to track damage at fractions of a percent if possible, so 1% / 100 LY traveled would be meaningful.

We could change the repair costs to be 1 supply per 100 mass to fix 1% damage, so that big ships cost more to maintain or repair.

Might want to add a new friendly code of "repair other ships" so that small-cargo ships like the Deth Specula and small carriers can be maintained by an escorting supply ship. Or it could be a mission - maybe for freighter hulls.

2713 days, 21 hours, 8 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Once again I must question, why does the ship limit discourage people from expanding?

If you stop expanding in this game you die, regardless of ship limit , period.

2713 days, 9 hours, 26 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

It doesn't discourage expanding. It discourages the economic build-up of the fringes before the ship limit hits.

What I mean is that sending an LDSF to the fringes of an empire with 1200 colonists in it, consumes a lot of fuel and removes the LDSF from the near territory economy build-up for 7-8 turns. In a competitive game, that freighter is unlikely to build up a starbase good enough for decent builds before the ship limit hits. Meanwhile, missing that LDSF prevents 2-3 full mineral loads with MCs to nearby starbases busy churning out strong ships.

Only after the ship limit is (almost) reached, will it make sense to send freighters to the fringes, to build up more starbases to play the build queue.

2713 days, 7 hours, 0 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Modifying the ship limit or getting rid of it will really change the game. But, if people want to play in such a game, I don't see why not. Make it host configurable. In fact, that could be a perk of captains: start a game once every three months. In fact, I would like to see such games as (each in a different game):

1. No ship limit

2. No ion storms

3. Towing restrictions (cars can no longer tow tanks).

Such host configurable games would be announced a month ahead of time.

2713 days, 5 hours, 26 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

When I was thinking about military score, I realized that tow strength should depend on number of engines as well as warp speed.

So an advantage of the 8 and 10 engine giants is that they could tow everything else. As it is right now, engine number (above 2) basically just serves to increase cost.

This is a big change, like the engines boosting shields. One that could maybe be investigated.

JM

2713 days, 4 hours, 36 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I would like to point out that the original VGA3 is a quite carefully balanced game, not perfect, but quite carefully balanced and its longevity is a testament to this. Some of the ideas that are floating around here are not balanced.
The majority of the people who come to the site are people who enjoy the original, quite carefully balanced game. I'm all for room for private games where people can test and enjoy modifying the numbers and the code and maybe you could suggest such an experimental space.

2713 days, 4 hours, 35 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think it is clear that classic matches should always be offered.

2713 days, 0 hours, 28 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

> Modifying the ship limit or getting rid of it will really change the game. But, if people want to play in
> such a game, I don't see why not. Make it host configurable.

Tim-Host supports 999 ships, PHost supports 999 ships. Has anyone of the players who want to play in such a game already tried that and still want it?

I did, and it was a lot of work. Good if you have nothing to do other than commanding your ships. Bad if you have a day job.

Thus, the question is whether it's worthwhile to implement and risk that everyone who tries it only tries it once. Possibly, because Nu doesn't care much for backward compatibility, upping a constant 500 to 999 would actually be not too much work, but going for an infinite limit would be.

--Stefan

2712 days, 23 hours, 53 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Before I played at Rc-world, my local group only used 999. We liked it.

2712 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Yes. We standardized on Host 999 with Wraparound and loved it.

2712 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I've only tried a host999 game once, but I do recall that I hated it. I think I ended up with some 300+ ships that I had to move around each turn - the time spend doing that was staggering.

I have a suspicion that the largest proponents of unlimited or 999 limits on ships, are the players that tend not to build all that many ships under the current limit - otherwise they would not be so eager to play unlimited ship games.

The current shiplimit works quite well, it moves the game into the last X in 4X (eXtermination) around turn 25-30, turning the game really interesting.

Regards

2712 days, 19 hours, 24 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The more I think of it, the more I like it. It will attract all the children on here that just want to shoot stuff. They join a game and then quit when their big guns get killed. You can tell them from their profiles - they have played 500 turns, but the games they are in or finished only make up 200 turns. This will siphon them from regular games, making the regular games better. We can call them PlayToy999 games.

2616 days, 2 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

How about instead of 999 --> 666

2616 days, 2 hours, 38 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

One thing that annoys me about the limit is it is difficult to build better ships to upgrade your fleet. The Feds can do a refit, so they're sitting pretty. Everyone else has to wait (and wait).

In the early game you build low tech ships because that's all you can afford. In the mid-late game I am reluctant to recycle these ships as it opens a ship slot that can be taken by an opponent.

i.e. 1 recycled ship opens 1 ship slot but only gives you 1 PBP. IMHO a recycled ship should give you 1 PBP per every 20kt (or say 50kt) of hull that you recycle. Currently you only get 1 PBP if you colonize/scrap a ship, no matter how massive the ship is, and this encourages people to "collect" SDSFs to gain ships slots.

If the PBPs were more generous, then I could recycle a couple of mid-size ships to give me enough PBPs to build 1 large ship, knowing that the 2 ship slots I open will at least allow me to use one of the slots for my large ship (and then let someone else build a ship also).

It encourages the entire fleet to get bigger and better without increasing the total number of ships and hence there is no time penalty in having to manage a very large fleet.

Of course the Feds now lose some of their super-refit advantage (but only a bit).

2616 days, 1 hours, 47 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Super Refit is a big advantage (i think more worth than 50 points) and it _would_ loose a lot of his might if other races would also have such a possibility.
You need 1 BP for every 50kt. A ship that is destroyed gives you 1 BP per 100kt. So it could be an idea to change is from 1 BP per ship to 1 BP per 100kt or 200kt. Even 100kt is a bit critical as then mineral rich races like the lizard can build at the beginning many Merlins and us this as BP pool.

> Everyone else has to wait (and wait).

No. Just attack 8) That is the "last phase" of the game. If you want to build new ships, you must destroy other ships. Else you will get no or only less chances for a build. That is ok
You must risk something to get new ships. Else you would reward the one, who is waiting and waiting while the others fight and only transfers his ships in more and more better ships.

I know it myself that it is not nice that there is the point where there are only slow builds. But everyone knows this and thus everyone has to plan in the early phase what and how many ships he will have at the ship limit. One will build only few but very good ships. Others build many but not so good ships. That everyone has to plan. And after this early phase: fight and risk to become better.

Othrym

2616 days, 1 hours, 29 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

othrym,

You are incorrect. Attacking does not get you build points. As the Fascist, I attacked the Borg. I killed 10 biocides by rushing to his territory, building star bases and then towing the Biocides to the star bases that killed the biocides after sacrificing a Victorius (and the towing Coldpain).

Attacking Fascist killed 10 biocides = 0 build points.

Defending Borg killed 10 coldpains and 10 victorious = 70 build points.

Lots of famous generals, such as Stonewall Jackson, Julius Ceasar, and Rommel, used defensive attacks. They were rewarded with victory. VGAP rewards the defeated with extra ships.

That is the major flaw of the ship limit.

2616 days, 0 hours, 58 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

@adder, seveith, mjs68508:
Have you played a PLIST game with minefield limits? Those have been around for almost ten years now, and I haven't heard a single complaint. And if you did play, had a problem, and didn't complain, I have to ask: why?

The topic of minefield limits was discussed for PHost back in 2001. Three possibilities were implemented:
- an increased limit (10000 minefields max)
- fixed per-player limits
- variable per-player limits (implemented as an add-on)
From my statistics, fixed per-player limits are the most popular. Variable limits would solve the problem of endgames with only three, four races remaining. But it seems nobody had a problem with that.

Cyborgs jumping into other races' territory and spending their mine field slots is not a problem because "miX" friendly codes are normally turned off in such games.

Robots aren't overly limited due to this rule because their race advantage is to lay BIG minefields, not MANY. MANY is Crystals, therefore they get more slots.

Sure, you cannot defend 200 planets with 40 minefields. But that's a moot point. You cannot defend 200 planets with 1000 minefields either if you don't spare the ships to replenish the fields. Because then I jump into your territory, destroy the fields, and take the planets one-by-one. But if you have the ships, you don't need costly mines laying around all the time.

One point which makes minefield limits a little more feasible in PHost than in HOST-derived games is that PHost offers more fine-grained control over which minefield to enlarge or scoop, and how many torps to use.

2616 days, 0 hours, 22 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Hello mjs,

in the first point you are right - a bit. One problem of the PBP-system is that you do not get any points if your planet/starbase kills a ship. The reason may be, that the PBP are for the ship building and not the starbase building queue. Thus if you risk a ship you can get PBP to build new ships, if you risk a starbase you can build it again without any queue.
Where you have a limit you have rewards and a priority system.
If you kill a ship with mines you also did not get PBP as there is (beside the resources) not limit.

Of cause if you play a tactic where you sacrifice something to have a better chance in another fight, that is your choice. It is no defensive move, if you activ tow someone to a place where he is destroyed.

Anyway - your comment "That is the major flaw of the ship limit." is not correct. Even if it "would" be unfair (what i do not think - although i often myself would wish to get points if my starbases destroy a ship 8) that you do not get a point if your starbase destroys a ship, this "fact" would not be a flaw of the ship limit. You them would have to speak about a change in the point system.

2616 days, 0 hours, 19 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

mjs,

It just means you were doing it wrong :)

Switch your tactics around and your results will be better. Have the SB soften up the Cube then finish the Cube off with a Vicky. So just have a D7 sitting there to tow the damaged cube to your Vicky.

But why must I ask would you not tow the Cube to a bunch of pop ships and a vicky to finish it off? That sounds much more of what you should be doing, since you get the BPs for the pop ships and the BPs for the Cube.

You should be dominating BPs as the Fascists after the ship limit, that's the whole reason for the pop ships. No one else has guided mine hits, you're the only one, you gotta use them to your advantage!

Removing the ship limit is a mistake IMO, it really hurts the Fascists and the Feds, BIG time.

2615 days, 22 hours, 26 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I have played a few games with the 999 host. Actually it hurts the EE, Borg and Bots the most. The Lizards, Rebels, Bird and Fascists do much better with an 999 host. The birds actually do the best with the higher ship limit. It becomes possible to deploy small fleets against heavy carriers. But a new problem arises, everyone runs out of fuel but the Borg, Colonials and Birds. The Borg and Bots run out of mats. The Borg can’t afford to make Biocides as anyone can throw tons of junk x-ray ships at them to kill off the fighters. Host999 changes the tactics a lot. The biggest problem is turns take forever to move 200+ ships per race. They can be fun to play just make sure you only play one game at a time or you will be drown by the logistics. Oh and the EE become unplayable unless they get 20+ fighters per base.

2615 days, 22 hours, 21 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The problem with starbases giving PBP is that starbases are in effect very cheap and strong. Defense in general in VGA is overly powerful and far too cheap - the best game on Nu right now for seeing this is the scorpius war.
Even the largest ships can go down to a 200/60 base and you, the attacker, can be left with nothing, the base back to full strength the very next turn. The 10k MC to make such a base is a trivial expenditure over the course of a long game.

This hits particularly hard in the end game, when the map is littered with bases and the queue is barely moving.
I have seen many large assaults simply peter out through attrition due to SB. The value of ships like the SSD and racial abilities like pillage and RGA cannot be understated. Few games on Nu progress to such late stages that this is felt, but they really are big advantages.

Bases/planets giving PBP would actually do the exact opposite of what you suggest mjs - the borg would get even more PBPs. Why would I risk a ship when I can tow you to a borg super-world? Sure the klingon/rebel is immune but the rest aren't and you won't be helping the klingon in the balance.

2615 days, 22 hours, 10 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

capnkill,

I agree with you 100%. After a couple of games with the Fascists, I have learned that handling glory devices is one of the major, if not the major key to Fascist play. You need them for cloaker detection, combat, and ship queu control ( A Nef is only 2 PBP's.)

2615 days, 21 hours, 21 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

agree, vacco, except the mineral problem. if done right, the cyborg should have more minerals than all others

2615 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

> The problem with starbases giving PBP is that starbases are in effect very cheap and strong.
> Defense in general in VGA is overly powerful and far too cheap - the best game on Nu right now for
> seeing this is the scorpius war.
> Even the largest ships can go down to a 200/60 base and you, the attacker, can be left with
> nothing, the base back to full strength the very next turn. The 10k MC to make such a base is a
> trivial expenditure over the course of a long game.

People have produced ship lists that do not have this problem during the last decades...

That aside, "back to full strength" isn't entirely true. Bases repair 10% per turn maximum (in contrast to ships which are back to full strength within one turn).

--Stefan

2615 days, 20 hours, 58 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

That's the other thing, these turns take long enough as is, I could not imagine trying to manage a fleet in a 999 ship limit game.

But as with everything, having games like that wont' hurt anything. Its good to have options :)

As long as the vanilla games remain, I don't care.

I would be very interested to see the killing floor make an appearnace at some point here at NU. I've never played it but from what I've read it really changes evrything about combat, sounds very cool.

2615 days, 20 hours, 56 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The Borg run out of mats 1st... You strip mine everything and move to making mats from supplies and you still are short. Without a ship limit you never get to stock pile mats. You do end up with lots of cubes but how many 1 shot Gaurdians does it take to kill a Cube? The Borg don’t have the most cost effective ships just some of the biggest ones. Seeing stacks of 20 Gaurdian becomes a reality.

2615 days, 20 hours, 22 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think having a support cost would control the the ship count. If you had to pay $$ and minerals every turn per ship depending upon ship size, complexity of equipment (like tech levels and # of beams/torps/bays), and number of crew members. Sure, you might be able to afford to build the 40 Biocides, but can you afford to keep them operational?

2615 days, 19 hours, 44 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think that if you removed the ship limit, as it applies to the weaker races, you would need fleet combat to even it out. TKF showed that in fleet combat the torpers are bolstered slightly by numbers and fighters are lessened even in equal numbers due to more beams taking them down. Of course the ability to assign fleet actions to ships such as standoff ranges or target priorities could over complicate things.

A support per ship would be a simple fix but hard to manage without having a centralized funding system such as planets 4 has. Plus shipping minerals would have to be more efficient than it is now for a no ship limit game, due to the rising fuel usage of having that many ships moving materials to pay for supporting a huge fleet of ships.

Also, wouldn't a support mechanism hinder smaller empires so you end up with a 'death spiral' situation.

2614 days, 22 hours, 41 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Fleet combat would be an ideal situation, but would likely alter the game substantially. People have been talking about fleet combat for 20 years :> I remember playing fleet combat in a game once (I think it was phost, but I could be wrong) many years ago, and if I recall correctly, the ship effectiveness changed dramatically.

I think having some sort of support cost associated with your ships would keep the fleet sizes under control and would be directly reflective of your economy's ability to support the ships (which is really what people are saying by talking about maximum tonnage per planet or per population).

2614 days, 20 hours, 46 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

There is a fleet combat addon for VGAP, The Killing Floor (TKF) :http://www.donovansvgap.com/addons/tkf.htm

It does VERY much change everything. The Birds become EXTREMELY powerful (tow a ship to a fleet of Res/DW and they kill it with no losses, repeat).

If I recall, Torps are more powerful too, as I remember thinking that torp races are better in it. It was a fun change to the 1v1 combat system, but it does make a very different game. I would not like to see it to the exclusion of traditional VGAP combat.

2614 days, 20 hours, 12 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

The most interesting alternative I've seen to the standard ship limit is the PLS (Planets Limit Ships) addon. Which means you are allowed to have one ship for each planet you own. This leads to approximately 500 ships over the course of the game. The nice things about this addon is that you can control your fleet size by your aggressiveness. Races with smaller ships can send them aggressively into battle knowing that they can quickly replace them as they die... attempting to overwhelm an opponent with a continuous stream of ships. Making a strong economy that much more potent. Additionally, it adds even more encouragement for everyone to go out and attack. I can also take a lot more risks, perhaps attack a starbase to see if its undefended, because if my ship dies I'll just get a new one.

I'm not sure how this addon handles cases related to capturing enemy ships or giving ships to allies. If anyone has experience with this addon I'd like to learn more about it.

2614 days, 19 hours, 38 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

THe version of PLS I used to play with did this:

For each build sequence (Priority then Regular) check the current starbase. If the owner is under his ship limit, build, else skip that one and go to the next one.

As a result, captures, give ship, and the like just caused you to go over your "limit". It did strange things to the balance of the game. The best version I every played with it used Host999 and PLS and gave 2 ships per planet. That was enough so that you could have a decent freighter fleet, an attack force and a defensive fleet. It also made it so that even the smaller empires could build enough of a fleet to try to fight back out of a losing position.

2614 days, 19 hours, 31 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

+1 for the PLS idea as it is the best and easiest implementation form of a ship count control and a solution for the people who are waiting and waiting for shipbuilds after the ship limit. Thus you can "exchange" your ships on will. Of cause this also reduces the Superfit advantage. But races with a good economy has also a disadvantage so it may be balanced. But it could be dangerous with the new "clone after ship limit" function as then someone who get a gorbie can change all his ships to gorbies etc.
Nevertheless that would be an interesting concept, but should be only a variant of the normal games like the "Stellar Cartography addon"

2614 days, 17 hours, 13 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Surely then 2 players could build up an unlimited number of ships? I give all my ships to player B, and build a bunch of new ones... He is over the limit, so can't build any more, but so what?

2614 days, 16 hours, 34 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Easily solved by disabling the gsX friendly code and "Force a surrender" starbase mission for players who've reached the limit.

That would leave the only way to acquire new ships past the limit, is to attack and capture, and the tow-capture for privateers and crystals. but they can't clone, so it might be a balancing advantage? Hard to say. But I would play this game. I think it would really shake lose some new and interesting strategies.

All those pro-players are grimly shaking their heads as they see their carefully thought out strategies and play styles threatened by new ways of doing things. Great fun :)

2614 days, 13 hours, 31 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I like the PLS idea. It leaves the max total ships at 500, so fleets are still of a manageable size. (How would Debris Disks be handled?) It also makes every planet important, even that 1 degree Amorph with no minerals.

Big Carrier races will be able to swap out smaller ships for big carriers.

Small cloakers will be able to send cloakers on long range, one way raids to disrupt economies.

Borg - upgrade Cubes. Upgrade all Fireclouds to Warp 9 & Mark VII's - sweet!

Fascist - super fun: glory device missile barrages - sweet!

Evil Empire - upgrade to Gorbies. More mundane than than the previous 2, but helpful.

I think all races, except the 2 ship stealing races and the Feds will like it. And they're not important (grin).

All races will always be able to build Merlins and Refineries later in the game.

I got dibs on the Fascists for the first game!

2614 days, 11 hours, 5 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

> (How would Debris Disks be handled?)

If one combines that both addons (what I would not do in order to analyse the impact of both on their own) i think than Asteroids would not count as planets as it is at the moment regarding to the win conditions.

As the PLS is a kind of SuperRefit one should disable the "after the limit" new clone function for this games - or disable it to all but the Fed. Than this could be a small balance to his lose with his unique feature.

> I think all races, except the 2 ship stealing races and the Feds will like it.

Indeed? Nevertheless I would join up as privateer test pilot 8D.

(BTW: What means "to got dibs"? To apply to play or to bet on?)

2614 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Ok... So I let my privateer ally 'steal' all my ships as I build them?

Or, slightly more effort, but I think it would still be worth while. I build up to capacity and then hand over a bunch of non-descript planets to my ally. Each 'non-descript' planet is effectively allowing 2 ships for the team.

Lizards would probably be unhappy with it too I'd imagine. Hissing ships all of a sudden become a mighty expense to the growing empire.

I like the idea as a whole. Just needs refinement.

2614 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

But not too much refinements. The advantage of VGAP is that there are nevertheless (most time) easy rules. No complex organisation, administration etc. The PLS is a easy and a somehow logic idea to bring a resources-to-supply-ships rule into the game. If you know start to discuss too much in order to try to keep the "same balance" as before (what you will not succeed in) the the small ships races will start to say "lets make 1 planet supplies 4 ship 'units', every 100kt is a ship unit ..." and so on. So just take a easy rule and try it. There will never be the same balance as before because we now can never evaluate all ideas any good players will have.

2614 days, 2 hours, 18 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Will be hard to find crystalline players to those kind of games. Why to play in a game where any player will be able to replenish the stolen ship the same turn they lost it and will be able to change his cheap early ships for high beam type ships neutralizing his best weapon?

No, thanks.

2614 days, 2 hours, 8 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Use the ship to conquer a planet? Then you got (with the new ship in the first for the planet) a second slot and he (if he has at once build a new ship) will be 2 points over his limit and will not be able to build two ships as soon they are destoyed or also captured.

2614 days, 1 hours, 32 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Crystalline ships aren't good capturing planets and an intelligent enemy won't send heavy phaser rushes to get captured, he will send Iron ladies, they aren't great capturing planets ships either, and if in any moment he is running out of fuel, don't worry! Just colonize them, or send them in any stupid movement to lose then and construct a new shine one in your front line.

There is too the drop out problem that with this kind of game is greatly improved. Any race that has the "luck" that his neighbour drop will have still greater advantage over the other races.

And what about the unbalanced expanding abilities that some races have over the others? And they are not exactly weak races by the way.

But like always, with private games you should be able to have as many customizable options as you like.

2613 days, 22 hours, 52 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

He sends a Iron Lady and not a Rush? Cool, then you can cut him with a Diamond like in normal game. And I also did not believe, that he will just colonize the ship and build a new one. First your webs will stop his movement (I have seen your layered Webmines in Holstein. Was i wrong when i counted 6 layers? 150kt fuel per turn, 30% hit propability per lightyear?) and second a new HP.TW Lady will cost him more than 500 moly ... no easy job even in end game ...

The drop problem you also have in normal games. There is in my eyes no great difference. In normal games you have more planets so more starbases so more changes in the build queue. With the PLS you have more planets and can thus build more ships. The only difference is that whith the PLS you can build the ship at every useful starbase. But well ... whether you build a ship on a backyard starbase and let it fly to your frontier ... or you build the ship at the frontier and have to transport the minerals to the fronier ... that difference is not so great. Many might indeed nevertheless build there ships in the backyard as there is less risk that this starbases are destroyed by a sudden attack.

And ... by the way ... the "luck" may be hard work. And every race can have it.

> And what about the unbalanced expanding abilities that some races have over the others?

The expandin abilities give them an advantage in a normal game and thus also in this kind of game.

But maybe one should not say 1 planet support 2 ships but say only 1 planet supports 1 ship. Then you will never have a more than 500 or ship limit problem.

And ... in order to return to your question, than the gameplay of that "not exactly weak races" change also a lot. There great strength is that they can have a good transport system that can consist of many cheap Fireclouds. Thus they need many fireclouds to get their cubes around. Until now 1 clan planets where ok for them. Now they must protect them else they will have to sacrifice ships in order to build more cubes if that unprotected planets are captured.

> But like always, with private games you should be able to have as many customizable options as you like.

For example yes. But the "Stellar Cartography addon" also changes the balance a lot. And? If you do not want to play it. then do not do it. With some races i will play that addon, with others not. Everyones desicion.

Othrym

2613 days, 13 hours, 38 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

With 11 races and the very wide range of abilities between them, someone will get screwed no matter what rules are changed. In real life, ships are important, but crew morale and experience are also very important. However, adding those would make a complicated game even more complicated.

If a change is going to be made, it would be nice to make the game a bit less complicated. For instance, get rid of mineral transport. Just assume there is a merchant marine transporting minerals and supplies and cash (at least at star bases). This would free up ship slots used for freighters and possibly alchemy ships and fuel carriers.

There are a zillion other possible ideas. But, if any idea is chosen, someone will be helped and someone will be screwed. It would be nice if any changes are host configurable and tried in separate games like Stellar Cartography and Melee games.

2613 days, 12 hours, 21 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

There are 4 options here for removing the ship limit they can be adjusted in many ways

1. just remove it.

2. planets supporting ships:
start with each player have x ships. ( 5-10 ships) then each
planets +1 ship ( can be 2 per planet is the same in the end.)
starbases +1 ship ( would make sense)

3. planets supporting mass of ships:
your HomeWorld gives you 2000kt (or you start with X kt)
planets give 400kt per planet
starbases give 300kt

4. resourse based support of ships would need to be based on Mass in 1 of 3 ways.
A. MC only
        -(helps races with economic bonuses feds, liz)

B. MC and supplies
          -( helps races with economic bonuses Feds, Liz, Fascist)
-( hurts free fighter races they need supplies for fighters)
C. MC and supplies and minerals.
           -( helps races with economic bonuses Feds, Liz, Fascist) though the Feds mining at
   70% may find this hard as well.
all 3 make the crystals harder to play as they need these resources for mine laying.

for any of these to work the ship limit would need to be removed.

notes:
-the cost or support amounts can be changes to try and balance it)
- in all the ways problem is you run out if resource to build ships ( or support them) so ship limit will not matter you can only have so many.
-biggest problem with the 4th option resource based support limit is were are the resources taken from.

final though is would be best to just have the option to add "no ship limit" in the game config like Stellar Cartography. and do the same with the race adjusting that is being talked about that way as well.

2438 days, 1 hours, 42 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Interesting thread. I think there's a place for games with no ship limit, for the hard-core VGAP gamers, but personally I find my turns take too long as it is. I guess one has to decide "would I rather play in one or two HUGE games, or three or four limited games". As I've played in a few Micro games with 8-15 ships max, I'm enjoying a game that takes 20-30 minutes per turn. Some of the huge games start to feel like that term paper I knew was due on Monday & haven't started yet.

2437 days, 14 hours, 43 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I say add the 999 ships along with a configurable final date set. See who the real strategic leaders are. It's lame (even though within the rules), for people building ships, just to build junk ships to keep others to build. Also I understand 300+ ships probably makes players eyes glaze over with management. Play a couple games without the limit, somewhere here playing 999host, didn't go over anyways. Maybe 1000 ships is the magic number.

2437 days, 13 hours, 9 minutes ago

echoclusterveteran

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

It's not lame. It's a zero-sum game to use Dungeonmaster's words.

Start reading the posts in this forum:

http://planets.nu/discussion/quality-vs-quantity-a-vga-planets-inquiry-into-values

No limit changes everything drastically because it is no longer a zero-sum game. I can assure you that such a game would be almost, if not entirely, unplayable. Ships are the capital of the game.

Even now, one game can take 10 hours per turn if a player has more than 200 ships. I know that from experience because I've had endgames with that amount of material. You'll go crazy if you have more than 1 or 2 games going at that rate. But if you have no job and no family, more power to ya.

One game with tenacious players would last at the very minimum 200-300 turns because the capital would continue to build. Fuel and resources get low but in the fuel-rich universes of Nu plus lots of alchemy etc. the building would continue ad infinitum. The lack of ability to limit the capital in the cluster would often result in a stalemate, and the winner of the game will be the only person who doesn't finally quit because it would be so time-consuming and so exasperating.

It would be interesting to experiment with a moderate increase (maybe to 550 ships) just for solid proof. Everybody who plays in such a game would grasp the fact that there would be more ships than planets in the cluster, thus adding so much more material to the game that the players would have to be prepared to spend much more time playing their turns.

More ships than planets is the problem. The number of ships and the number of planets needs to be equal for it to work out feasibly.

Bottom line: games with an increased ship limit would only make people drop out because they will get weary of the fact that the game may never end. We need games where people actually stay in, and where the game has a beginning, middle, and end. Eight months is long enough for one single campaign. A 999 game without dropouts could easily last two years. An unlimited ship game - God only knows, but I'd place my bet on an almost endless stalemate. If you want to play one single game until the day you die, go for it. If your opponents kick the bucket before you do, then you win :P Good luck with that, get lots of exercise, keep your cholesterol under 200, get regular prostate exams, and maybe you can get a win out of such a game.

P.S. Yes, time limit would rectify the problem. But it's still not a zero-sum game and therefore a very, very different game. The Blitz games have essentially no limit, so maybe it will work. Epic conquest will NOT work.

2437 days, 9 hours, 55 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think we'll see that the "real strategic leaders" are the Colonies, and the Borg.

I think it's more lame we don't have to pay upkeep for existing ships. But since we don't, we need some reason why the Lizards won't get smeared like anchovy paste when they are building TRexes to Borgish Annies on Turn 40. The ship limit serves that purpose - it is a balancing factor to mitigate the fact that different races have wildly differing ship lists. If we shift that balance point, we should expect the consequences for differing races to be widely varied, which is not a good thing.

2436 days, 23 hours, 19 minutes ago

echoclusterveteran

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

Colonies and Borg? How about a Fascist with an endless supply of glory devices. It would be terribly fun to be that player but it would also be a full-time job.

2436 days, 23 hours, 0 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

A lot of moaning and groaning over an option that would be trivial to make available for PRIVATE games. Or heck, SENIOR OFFICER GAMES.

I've played 999 before. With full 11 players you end up with 80-90 ships/player. This is not an unreasonable amount of ships for empires that cover ~50 worlds. For larger empires, there were several that would hit around 200.

And we never did hit the ship limit. Why? Because resources constrained the amount of heavy ships we could build, and because without a ship queue, there was no reason to spam little ships out to clog up the queue.

Possibly we were more aggressive than average... but I don't understand why this is still debated after I posted almost a year ago. Making this available for private games wouldn't break anything, and would give some data to Joshua and the site owners about real-world effects.

2436 days, 22 hours, 49 minutes ago

echoclusterveteran

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

You played 999 under Phost? Were the resources as abundant as on Nu?

BTW I'm not moaning or groaning and I don't think the others are either. This is a sublimely interesting topic because it hits at the heart of the object of the game, which is to prevail over all others by monopolizing the resources.

If I played a 999 game my strategy would be to defend a small empire and spam the queue. Then when everybody else finished fighting, I might have 600+ ships but I could then go take over everything. It would be very fun and very time-consuming and I am confident that if the others in the game didn't also try to max out the queue that I would be the winner. If others figured it out, then we would have a very long and drawn-out endgame. (See my above post about prostate exams.)

I say give it a try! Let's all watch with bated breath to see the outcome of such games with good players :) [I will wait on the sidelines!]

2436 days, 22 hours, 26 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I played with host999 by Tim W. (thost). Resources were set to normal or scarce.

I'd love to play with you in a 999 game... my empire could always use a weak client state to shore up our borders :)

In all seriousness, we found 999 a more aggressive game. Races that had cheaper ships wouldn't think twice at tossing a fleet of medium ships at a few heavy/expensive warships as they could be replaced 1-1*. It certainly closed some strategic avenues, but it opened others.

* ignoring logistical idiocy such as sacrificing a fleet when replacements could be 10 turns away.

2436 days, 22 hours, 25 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

In talking with a friend of mine we had an interesting thought about how to balance a lack of ship limit.

I don't know if this idea has been floated before. Perhaps if you added an extra resource of "Crew" which was a pool available to your empire based on your population of Colonists. Certain races could get extra in their pool from certain natives (Feds, Rebels, Colonies, Empire for Humanoids. Crystals for Siliconoids. Lizards for Reptiles). The Borg would have a huge advantage in this, I guess, but it could be balanced by giving them a lower ratio of Crew per population.

2436 days, 21 hours, 39 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

dtolman: "... but I don't understand why this is still debated after I posted almost a year ago."

Blame me. I saw the link to this thread in a different forum, and thought it interesting, although for a different angle. Time, and how much I want to spend on one sector. I understand your math in coming to the "about 200 ships per player", but we all know it never seems to work out that way. There's always a few races with 25 ships at turn 60. That leaves a competitive player with 300+ ships to cycle thru. More power to ya', and I don't think anyone said it shouldn't be an option, just count me out.
Anyway, with the ship build template utility, it's become a lot quicker to cycle thru my low tech bases and pump out those 1-PBP ships each turn. ;-)

2434 days, 19 hours, 13 minutes ago

RE: Pro's and Con's of Removing ship limit

I think that the reason the ship limit comes up so often in discussion, and has been for 20 years, is because it is such an obviously-artificial limitation.

There are 500 planets, well we can explain that by saying that's how many exist. I can only build 100 factories on a planet due to the population limitations, it is explicable.

I think if you managed the limitations through other means, be it by reducing the amount of resources or a crew resource like I mentioned earlier, then the limitation feels more natural.

Not all ships are equal, so a ship slot being occupied by a SDSF or a Gorbie being the same feels very wrong too.