Elongated battles and favoring the little guy - Some suggestions?

Assymetrical trades: They already are somewhat. Look at it that way: if the most productive empire produces twice than the less productive, if the trade is at 20%, the big will receive only 10% of it's production.

The biggest problem with SEV is that unlike many games it doesn't have diminishing returns (except for research costs, but even then the progress is linear).
You don't have to pay more for fleets far away from your empire.
You are always better off with more planets: new planets don't cost you maintenance nor happiness with the more planets you havve, the more each subsequent planet would cost you.
The far away planets give you all of their production, just like the moon next to your homeworld.

Right now, as you start getting bigger, there is nothing to stop you in game mechanics except a bad position in the quadrant, and the first turns are the most important ones, since when you will run in another empire, if you are a few turns behind (he had four warp points to good systems, you had only one to a black hole) , that empire could be twice as big as yours... without any game mechanic to hinder a bigger empire.

PS: Fortunately you still have diplomacy, so several players could gang up on a bigger one. But you still have to know who is the big one, so probably the easiest way to favor the little guy is to show all player scores regardless of allied status or not. Maybe showing only player position and player score will be enouch, without going into details like nuber of ships and research/ressources per turn.

There is a way to prevent too explosive colonisation. It was implemented in IRM: make the production and especially construction a lot more dependent on population.
That way the true colonisation of a planet requires many population transport ships, and the overall pace of empire growth is limited more by your population growth than by the number of planets you can reach ASAP:
even if you have warps points leading to 4 different viable systems right from the start, you still have to choose which 1-2 planets you will develop first, if you grab them all at the same time, don't expect them to be fully productive right from the start!

Random events: for starters if they could happen more often! So far I only had a plague once...

Yeah, larger empires ought to face some sort of penalty for being so big, not just in diplomacy (what if it's a 1v1?). Huge empires constantly having to deal with riots would be one way (make sure there are events where troops get sabotaged). In addition to your list of ideas, what of the possibility of combat bonuses to the smaller empire?

Hmm actually, is there a way to program a massive empire to be sabotaged by themselves from internal terrorists?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

double post

Even then, you still have to get them there first. How many basic pop transport drops do you need until you have 200M? And then you only get half production and construction rate.
It's already a big step forward from 1 coloniser => 100% construction rate!

That is true I guess. Can't really think in terms of what the AI does.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Having construction more dependent on population is certainly a good idea (even if harder to balance ... like so many things).

I also like the idea of making intel less effective for bigger empires. I'm pretty sure this could be coded fairly easily with some kind of penalty based off either number of planets or number of systems or both. This wouldnt necessarily need to be linear either. It could be exponential or logarithmic.

-unnamed

I agree there should be a penalty for being a huge empire, smaller empire should be able to compete better.I'm suprised MM did not model this into the game, all the empire building I can think off have it included.I think maintenance should be much higher for superpowers.Can this me modded?

One way to level the tech field would be to implement a "common knowledge" event where once 3 empires discover the same tech everyone else would get that tech. I play another game that does this and it keeps the little guys in the tech race. In SEV I would leave colonizing techs and racial techs out but everthing else would stay in.

Although this idea will hurt everyone the same it should be a larger problem for larger empires.........increase the use of organics and rads based on population. I know BM has addressed this to a degree but not enough in my opinion. Every citizen in the empire will consume organis as "food" and I think of rads as power the more people the more power they consume and on low quality plantes this should be an even bigger power consumption. Resupply depots.....they just make supplies and ordinance outta thin air, they should consume 40% of each raw material to make 100% of the supplies and ordinance each turn. I also feel that each ship class and unit should consume some small amount of supplies in addition to the standard upkeep even if it doesn't move in a turn. This would probably be best implimented as an option when starting a game like finite resources is now.

Ashberry

From my understanding the maintainence is facility dependent (and ship, unit, etc). And there is no function to check how large the empire is or how many facilities are already built, available for the facility.

You could kinda model extra maintenance per system by making the spaceport much more expensive. That way if there are only two small planets with the wrong atmosphere, it would actually cost more resources to build and maintain the spaceport than would be gained from adding that system with its two small planets.

-Unnamed

Empires often lost money just to claim territory.If this is the only solution it might be needed to balance in single player.

Hmm actually, increasing population 'maintenance' (how much people consume in daily life) combined with great importance of population on production might be interesting. High production starts costing more. If we can make it non-linear then great, but if it's only linear then... at least high population 'upkeep' can force empires to spend less facility space on Research/Intel (thereby reducing the speed at which the tech race spirals out of control).

On the other hand, that's not helping smaller empires (let's not even think of immigration...) who won't be able to produce much at all due to a small population. No on second thought it's not such a good idea - in the long run, bigger empires have more population being born and thus can set up production worlds faster.

Hmm... which means the playing field is leveled in the early game (assume racial trait costs are suitably adjusted) but in late game the bigger empires can uncontrollably grow while smaller empires can't. I guess it's better than being able to uncontrollably grow right from the start.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

(blargh, what is wrong with double posting today?)

I like this idea.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

That would work if you could make each new spaceport more expensive than the precedent... otherwise the big will still keep getting bigger... but slower.
But it could still be a good idea.

An idea that could work: make the Colony Ship very expensive to build and especially MANTAIN (+300% for instance) - cut it's speed in half also, so that it won't be able to reach a new planet in one turn. That way you will only be able to mantain a limited number of colonisers - making the expansion more linear.

Hmmm, maybe changing how tech cost increases too... what if instead of a linear increase in RP cost per tech level, it had a slight quadratic/exponential curve to it? Probably in a BM style tech tree where you don't have many uselessly small upgrades in a 100-tech level area. Hmm... to really make this effective we'd need to completely re-think the tech tree yet again.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Bigger empires will be able to support more spaceports/fleets and will still grow faster and faster than small empires. But like with the expensive colonisers that could work if you couldn't set up more than a few spaceports at a time in new systems.

If you make research exponential, people will tend to diversify more, the tech tree then could be made more "narrow"... But the tech tree is not so bad, the problem of the spiraling-away research lies IMHO mainly in the exponential empire growth...

Just one thing that bugs me about this thread...

which I think would be important for mulitplayer games...why should a player who in theroy has played better that another player...that is to say has expanded and build up their empire to be bigger that their opponents have to be restricted considering that both players had started equal?

And don't get me wrong because I haven't won any of my PBW games yet...as I've been the smaller empire but thats my problem because I've screwed up, I shouldn't be rewared for playing badly or the other player punished for playing well if both players are playing by the same rules.

It just that when you don't have any diminishing returns on the empire size it's not about skill anymore, luck plays a too significant role, especially starting position.
Small advantages become huge as the empire grows exponentially, and the empires that had less luck or made small mistakes can't keep up anymore, sometimes even if they gang up together (especially in "no tech trade" games).

Look at the Civilization games, there is a reason they all have bureaucracy implemented in some form or another!

The goal is to stop the bigger player(s) to run away with the game.

Also there is the anoying thing that in the first 50 turns you are forced to play the "grab the planet" game, or to play an insignificant role for the rest of the game...

Also "grab the planet" is a problem because defenses are so cheap and easy to build. I had 5 basic weapon platforms stop a pretty advanced attack fleet. Why then bother to play in a momentum style?
I think I'll give a shot at early agressive play in one of my next PBW games...

I think that playing style is more of the problem than how the actual game works...because the games is working in the same way for all the players.

If you are a slow expander and like to take your time and you're facing a rapid rush planet grabber you are dead! If on the other hand both of you play the same style the game itself will end up being much more interesting...but playing style is up to the player, no?

And just coming back to starting positions...there will always be better starting positions than others, but its more or less been like that in all 4x games unless the map has been designed specially to give equal starting positions.

Mylon is it hard to be good at the early game? Also what makes you assume that a player who is good at the start of a game wont be good in the middle and and the end of a game?

Anyway...if you lose a game try and find out where you went wrong and correct it...most wars or battles aren't won because one side is better than the other, but because one side makes more mistakes!

For my part I would like to have several playing styles with distinct advantages and inconvenients, but all more or less viable:
What playing style actually beats the "rush planet grabber"? (But that would be beaten by another playing style)

Of course you have the "rush planet grabbers" that focus on research, and others that give it less importance... but those are minor details, the playing style is the same: get the more planets you can ASAP using hordes of colonisers.

I hardly see an empire with -10% to ship construction be sucessful against a same level player with +30% in the current state of the things... regardless of where he put those extra 2000 racial points!

While it's entertaining to posit the idea of a small empire being competitive with a large empire, history doesn't suggest that such a thing is actually possible.

History has shown, time and time again, that what wins a war is production.

The comparison has been made in other threads that SE4/SE5 are really an interstellar version of the US/Japanese Pacific War fought in WW2. Japan was a much smaller empire than the US. They had better battleships, a much better fighter (the zero), and a big advantage in that the picked the start date of the war and essentially crippled the US fleet.

But the US had production. We won, hands down. The US outproduced, outresearched and out-intel'd the japanese.

I suspect the same thing will happen when wars get fought between different species: whoever can field more ships and more troops will win.

The easiest way that I can see to limit the effectiveness of big empires in a multi-player game is to put a short time limit on each turn. If you only get 30 minutes to do everything you need in a turn...well...then suddenly having 100 planets is a HUGE disadvantage. You just can't keep on top of everything.

Japan were level on tech and were competative for 4 years until a steller converter made them surrender.Now in game terms Japan would have been behind in tech and wouldn't have made a mark on US ships,hence the need for dimishing returns in the game.Like what has been said all modern strategy games has ever higher mainetenace or a capital city/world penalty.The bigger empire in the game would still be more powerfull.

Besides they has been many occasions in history where smaller emnpires have won,Mongols,Prussia,Alexander,Huns,ect.

A time limit in SE5! O_o That would certainly work, but it would spoil the whole game concept! In Se5 you HAVE to take your time.

It's just that it would be good if the smaller empire was more competitive with a large empire, like in other games.

Also, why would you take a bonus in combat (and a penalty in production) when you will not have to fight for the first 30-40 turns, and the other empires would have outproduced you, reducing your advantage to naught?
(Or maybe we simply don't see enough people trying sucessfully that strategy...)

right, but what about the battle of Britain, I'm fairly sure we were heavily outproduced by the germans, however we still managed to hold our own for quite a while.

so maybe the production helped the US as you said but it did not help the Germans much.

Of course japan was fighting more than just the USA.They were fighting the British empire, were in a mess fighting in China.The Soviet Union also declared war in 45.So japan were fighting many bigger empires,same applies to Germany,but this is off topic.

There is one thing that allows several small empires to be stronger than a bigger one: trade.
The problem is that in Se5, intel and research points are no longer traded, thus it's a lot less efficient and the bigger empire could break those trade treaties via intel.

And some people prefer to play with technology trading forbidden, since it spoils the strategy and diversity of the game. But when an empire rises above the others in terms of tech, it becomes very hard to stop it.

IMHO for a good multiplayer game you should be able to see other player's scores, or at least only the rank and score, without all the other details. Because otherwise how do you tell which player is the closest to steamrolling the rest of the quadrant?

I think this is important, and I don't think there's and simple, quick fix.

The bigger empire should certainly have the advantage, but if it's all a done deal after 30 - 50 turns there isn't much point in playing out the rest of the game.

Myself, I plan to discontinue the 1 homeworld start. That'll even things up a little more and it's right there, available already.

I think planets should have an optimum population of 50% to 75% of their capacity. Overcrowding should hurt, and productivity should be decreased when there's a labor shortage.

The severity of war exhaustion could be increased - I haven't even noticed it, so it can't be doing much. BUT before it can be done, diplomacy needs work. Peace treaties should be handled differently than other agreements, and there really should be a ceasefire system. Also, offering peace should alleviate war exhaustion even if the other side doesn't accept. That prevents multiple opponents from dictating your war exhaustion with excessive declarations of war (both cases: random stupid AI's and gamey humans).

For human-only games, a drastic increase in supply depot maintenance would improve things. The AI could never cope, and can't keep its ships supplied anyhow, so it's out of the question for them.

Historically, large empires have been difficult to maintain. Some have endured and some have quickly fallen apart. I would expect spacefaring empires to have greater difficulties holding together. Distance makes the rebellious bold.

I have stated this before; and will repeat it. RESEARCH IS TOO CHEAP! Research needs to cost minerals/rad/org & RPs to be done. More importantly, High tech (LVL 90+) ships CURRENTLY cost like 20-30% more in construction/maintenace than low level ships (Less than 10). The GAP needs to be 200-300% or 2-3 times the cost in construction costs & maintenance.
see http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/2620

Doing the first will stop the massive research tech rush as it will cost equally big economy to provide min/org/rad needed to research.

Doing the later will cause super big empires to be very carefull when building high tech ships as they will be costly to produce and maintain. It maybe cheaper to have 3-4 cheaper smaller "lower tech" ships than "ultimate tech" super big battle ship. Therefore battles will not be very one sided where bigger empire with higher tech always win.

This will also cause mothballing ships be a viable strategy for big empires. Only activate the big expensive guns when the situation demands it.

Yes, the (at least) 3 Good planets start makes starting positions less important, and speeds up the early game, which is really handy in multiplayer.

Overcrowding is an interesting concept, but IMHO it shouldn't apply until your planet is over 90-95% population. If it would affect happiness in some ways, it would be great. Also you would have to put some system in place to penalize scrapping/jettisoning population: you could add a cost to scrapping, but what about jettisoning?

I've noticed effects of war exhaustion myself, but they could be more pronounced. But you shouldn't change the war state system: why should you declare war if it will hurt you more than your opponent? (otherwise he will simply cancel it)

About supply: http://spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/3640

Larger empires should have more unhapiness, and the event of rebelling colonies more likely.

That's an interesting idea: if you make high level ships more expensive, the research will become less powerful, and sometimes you might find it interesting to build older ships. More choices is always good. You'd have to be careful not to overdo it, because against a human player, research is a lot less powerful ally.

Massive research is only a consequence of an expansion rush, if you make the research a lot less powerful, the expansion rush strategy will still remain, and players specialising in research but not in rushes will become even more at a disadvantage.

Yes! That's the problem with space empires! Vertical growth is too limited in early game compared to horisontal growth!

Making planets a lot bigger right from the start, or facilities smaller, and providing a facility that could speed up construction would adress those problems.
Or what would perhaps be more in SE style, add more planet types.

As I think of it, you have plenty of means to vertically improve your empire in SE5:
Facilities, population growth, spaceyards, robo-miners, colonisation techs, value improvement plants, atmospheric converters, planet creators...
It's a shame most of them are not really useful until late game...

Perhaps we should make more middle- and late-tech starts on PBW.

Well, as I see it, we are talking about a multiplayer problem. There are other, easier means to make the AI empires more powerful.

I think that the problem is not going to be solved by a) making planets bigger/facilities smaller as you still have the same problem that whoever has more planets is going to have more production/rec/rp/intel b) making reseach more expensive(here I'm takig about the facilities or the number of RP points needed) as all you do is slow the problem down but not solve it...you can still tech rush as its relative to the other empires haveing les RP's than you.

However I do agree that making the costs to build and use higher level tech more expensive is a really good idea as pkoko said and would make for quite an interesting game.

Now I could just let this slide but I'm not going to

- Making planets bigger will solve a part of the problem if there isn't a way so speed up facility construction: you'll have more choices for vertical expansion.

- Well, some racial traits probably more suited for the middle-late game empires, and less suited for coloniser swarmers : Cunning, Brave, Physical Strenght (you don't need them before you attack someone), Environmental Weakness, Low Reproduction (planets will get filled eventually), Advanced Power Conservation, Mechanoids, Lucky, Advanced Storage Techniques, Psychic, Deeply Religious, Temporal Knowledge...

We should not have something like that, only one best empire/playing style, especially one that would be independent on game setup... but several completely different and viable ones.
Look at Starcraft: three completely different, but equally good races, and some variations in gameplay for each of them. Why should Se5, with all the customisation it allows, only have one best empire type and strategy?

It's about what you said: removing the excessive advantage from one empire and playing style.

Battle of Britain...well, that's harder to simulate with SEV, because in SEv, you usually don't have 60 fighters start on each side, and the winners end with 52, and the losers with 46.

But, that was primarily an issue of supply -- german planes had too little fuel reserve to hang around, while British planes had freshly refueled. The british were receiving fuel and ammunition produced both from their own colonies, and from their allies.

Plus, the Spitfire was arguably technologically superior to the Bf109. Also, the British had more effective sensor technology (RADAR!).

I'd say that the Battle-of-Britain was pretty equally matched in terms of production, with the victory going to the more technologically advanced side.

Also, German engineering is wonky and finicky and hard to make go. British engineering is usually bad, too, but the Spitfires and Hurricanes were more easily maintained than the Bf109s.

Another poster had mentioned that the Japanese were competitive for four years. They managed to do damage, but in terms of technology, they fell behind the allies with every passing month. By the end of the war, they weren't even scratching US ships...

Mylon, consider making a MP-only mod first, then figuring out the AI side of it much later once everything is balanced. If we don't bother trying to cater to the AI, Vertical Building can truly be made powerful.

As was previously mentioned, change the scale of facility/planet sizes so you can have many more facilities (of course, scale down how much each facility produces etc). Then introduce "Deluxe"/"Elite" facilities which you'd want to raze and re-build your smaller facilities into (i.e. avoid the upgrade option as you can't build lower-level facilities once you research higher-level ones).

This way, you have some flexibility in how to grow - either you're too busy building on many worlds at once to afford the Big stuff, or you forfeit grabbing many worlds and funnel your resources into making Super Facilities that outperform (and are much more expensive than) the size-equivalent number of smaller versions. It's gonna give the AI Hell, but if it's a MP only mod (tell the AI to "do nothing" if it has to run a turn) then this could be useful.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Here's a thought: Kwok's announced an increase in colony module cost for BM. Now if you put the price up high enough, say 10k m/30k o/15k r, empires would have to be selective about which planets to colonize. These numbers would force players to select planets early on based on whether they want to colonize a lot or build other things first.

Similarly, a monstrous r cost on tech would channel tech rushers, and drive them to choose those planets.

I like the larger planets/smaller facilities idea. It'll need to be done on a non-trivial scale if it is to change things. It would be good to make the various terraforming technologies available early in watered down form.

If we ever get smart enough AI, it will be a big help since diplomacy is biased toward the little guy. But that's iffy.

It'd be nice if we had a game where one could choose between planet rush, tech rush, or paradise rush (development of a few really good worlds). Of course one shouldn't be able to do all three, and that's the trick. Now chance would play a role, and a player might be forced to decide based on location and available colonies. I find that acceptable too, but I expect some would be uncomfortable if they weren't free to pursue their favorite strategy.

Whatever is done will in time require reworking the AI to adapt it. I see some good ideas, and my mega-cost suggestions are probably not the best solution.

Rebalancing the late game to keep the little guys in the race as long as possible will almost certainly involve some sort of rebellion/unhappiness penalty based on size or rank. It shouldn't be like Medieval Total War where all your provinces rebel the instant you get over half the map, that's for sure. There should be problems with getting big, but they must be manageable and realistic.

I have to say I do like the idea of an intel penalty for large empires as well.

Coming back to racial traits....of those listed I'd say non are mid or late game traits...some are simply no game traits...lucky or mechanoids for example.
As for Deeply religious, temoral knowledge etc...these are traits that can make you much stronger but they should be used at your own risk of not being able to research them in time...I'd say on the whole traits are fine ... if used correctly on the right type of map.

What might need looking at are the government and social types for empires.

Ok...time to make a post. I've been lurking here for a while but never had the time/energy to post anything for myself.

The idea of prolonged competition (or even prolonged ship-ship combat as mentioned in the WWII ships thread...can't remember exact name) has always sounded like a great way to add depth and interest to a great game. One thing that I don't think has had the attention that it deserves is random dumb luck.

There are real life examples of such (apparent) luck, such as the HMS Hood exploding after a single hit in WWII. More importantly, it is a commonly used and easy to integrate game device. I'm a fan of RISK...which, of course, is basically a simple version of Space Empires...just a roll of the dice and some strategic troop placement...but that roll of the dice can generate a great deal of excitement/frustration and turn a lopsided combat upside down. I can't count the number of times I've attacked with overwhelming force and rolled straight ones and slowly watched my "death blow" deflate into a "nagging poke". Sometimes wierd things like this just happen - blame it on bad commanders, the weather, the local holidays, or bad food in the mess hall but sometimes the best laid plans just don't turn out right. It would be nice if this effect rose to the surface more often in the SE series. (Not as often as in RISK...that's just plain annoying - the best man should win MOST of the time...but once in a while would be nice).

So what about some new & more frequent random events? Something that would actually leave a mark. You could call them ship (or even fleet) rebellions, unexpected scientific breakthroughs, planetary rebellions, labor disputes, or whatever - just so long as they hit at an empires core offensive resources in a significant way. What about even random technologies - ruin type technologies that are only discovered through random events? The idea of increasing the chance of negative events...or simply events in general...for large empires sounds like a fun balancer too. None of this would solve the problem completely, but it would add excitement to the gameplay and keep that little tingle of doubt at the back of that mega-player's mind. (Hmmm...there is a slight chance that my mega-fleet of doom will be devoured by a giant space monkey while enroute to the enemy home system...good thing I have two)

Whew...that was long...time to go to bed...