The Ancient Race trait horribly unbalanced

I can see where you are coming from. On the mod I am working on I have been thinking of reducing the population growth of Ancient Races. So they grow slower. But that would only hurt the AI when you played against the computer.

The courage to endure.

I would agree that it's probably under-priced. At a cost of 1000 it's almost a no-brainer to pick Ancient Race plus Natural Merchants. However, increasing the price to 3000 or even 2000 seems like overkill. Setting it to 1500 ought to be sufficient; that would prevent Ancient Race players from also using the other expensive traits.

SE4 never ended up having everyone in multiplayer take the trait... Sure its nice and all, but its utility only lasts so long, compared to other traits that are useful for the entire game.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

I agree it is underpriced. It gives way too much value in the early game...so much so a player using it can easily dominate any other player who does not have the trait. I would suggest a price of 2000.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

i concer,

the ablity to know the whole map is a major advantage. The main question is how much is that worth? IMO it should be very high on the list maybe the top rated or at least equal too.

I'm in the same boat as Fyron. It's kind of useful for scoping out breathables early on, but in PBW action, almost every player will quickly swap races via the migration treaty clause and share maps/sensor data so it ends up more of a waste of 1000 points.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Granted, SE5 hiding system positions makes the trait marginally more useful than it was in SE4, but that's not enough to justify costs as exorbitant as 3000 racial points..

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

I agree with the Captain Kwok and Fyron...it has only a limited use in multiplayer games and as the number of players in a game inceases, the usefulness of the ancient trait decreases.

I would say...
On a small map against one other player it is a must.
On a medium map of 4 players it will be very handy.
On a medium map of 6 players useful
On a medium/larger map of 8 players useful/slight starting advantage.
After that I'd say it was a waste of 1000 points.

Just my 2p

----------------------------------------------------------------
Join PBW Emperor Of The Universe League Today. Follow the Link to EOTU
http://thewelloftakahlah.spaces.live.com/blog/

Its also EXTREMELY useful for getting ruins, I didnt see anyone mention this, thats killer right there!! Unless you are just adding them in so anyone can get them....(lame)

and a question, if I were to change the atmosphere of a planet in a sector the ai or human didnt have sensors in would the ai and or the ai know it was changed (because of the trait)?

On the one hand, I find myself enjoying a PBW game where this trait has been banned the most. On the other hand, I favor diversity, as long as the price is right. Put it at 2000 and it becomes more balanced. 3000 is really overkill in my book, but if games allow more racial points than 2000 I can see it become more attractive, which in itself would unbalance things again.

----------
See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.

I rarely take Ancient Race, because it sucks a large chunk of the fun out of the game for me. "eXplore" is my favorite part of 4X games, and Ancient Race almost entirely eliminates that. Exploring the last unmapped system on the map is a bit of a letdown for me.

-----
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

2000 is overkill for the cost of Ancient Race trait.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

I've never seen the need to use it, a few good scout ships and you have the exploring done easily, and about a sector or two from your front lines if you're smart...much further and you're spreading out too much IMHO

The point of the Ancient Race trait, at least in my mind, is to find easy choke points at the beginning of the game. As long as you don't over-reach (know your limits), you can rush to colonize and easily defend those points way before someone who doesn't have the trait. You can then develop inwards at your own pace. This makes it a massive strategical advantage in the early game. Although it's true that as the game goes on, the trait has lesser noticeable effect than some others, you have to remember that SE has a rather large steam roller effect. If you do well early, chances are, your later efforts are much easier than they should have been. So I have to agree than it should definitely cost more than 1000 points.

Having said that, I do enjoy playing without it more, just for the exploration feel.

Yeah, like Fyron I can't see it worth spending more than 1500.....

I explore so vigourously that I just don't need it.

I'm in Fyron's camp, I'm afraid. I've tried games with and without it, and while I agree it can help find chokepoints early and can help find out where the squishiest enemy systems are late in the game so you can open warp points to them, I still don't see it as worth more than 1000 points. For someone who really uses it to the utmost, I might see it worth 1500, but I think that's rare, honestly. Personally, I'm reasonably happy with it at 1000 points.

--
Creator of Space Empires V Editor and DevnullMod
http://www.devnullsoftware.com/se5

Meh, if one is unhappy with it, just allows "all players have see all the galaxy" option in the game setup.

Otherwise, its good early on to find choke points.. but thats it... once i encounter some ennemies it stop being much usefull.

Ruins location? Cool, but reaching it is another matter; you dont know where are the other players. And its only worthwhile if you have the right colony tech.

____________________________________________________

Without ammo, nice guns are just sophisticated clubs.

You can figure out where the HWs of other empires are simply by looking for the telltale signs, by size and value.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

That isn't guaranteed, but it works quite nicely in games with multiple homeworlds.

It's guaranteed to mark out all the likely candidates. You'll get a few false positives, but the chances of having too many worlds with near-perfectly matched values (of the correct size) aren't high.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

What are the highest and lowest values a homeworld have?

I think 100-125 and Large.

Like Fyron said, they do sometimes spawn, but in a large universe you might only end up with 5 that aren't homeworlds.

In a stock game we all had full view on. When I use Ancient I search out all the "homeworlds" nearby. I still missed that one of my colony targets was an AI homeworld.

-----
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

OMG Ender,
This again? IT'S NOT THAT USEFULL! You can clearly see in the game we are playing I have found the choke points relatively fast.

~Slimbo

Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design...

i think its disadvantageous. It makes you not build scouts and frigates early on and makes planet menu useless for finding breathable NEAR you. Even in very late game i use ton sof firgates with o;ne or twowapons that t\can be produce very quickly and cheaply and retrofitted from begining ships, i would lose wihtou tmy exploration ships.

It's obvious that someone will think that each of the traits is unbalanced if they are able to utilise it well. Therefore, people who like to use the trait should discuss whether they think it is unbalancing and why, and those, like myself, who see no need for it and therefore don't use it should maybe leave the issue alone. If there is someone that uses it a lot but doesn't consider it unbalanced this would be helpful to the debate.

We'll see how long that lasts.

~Slimbo

Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design...

I might consider 1500 points for the Balance Mod, but I don't think I'd make it 2000.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

i say 1500 even thoughi hate the trait and think its an annoyance, themost overpowered trait is Natural Merchants...

Natural Merchants is one of the most underpowered traits. Spaceports are such a tiny percentage of system space, and take so little time to build, that the advantages of NM are negligible over the long term. The short term advantages are dubious at best. 500 would be a more appropriate cost for NM.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

I agree - Natural Merchants should cost only 500. There's no way it's worth more than that (not when you consider +10% resources costs 500)

And I think that 1000 is a good price for Ancient Race at the moment - I do use it, but it's not worth more than 1000 imho.

heck no!!!! NM is incredibly useful it allows u to get resources faster and not haveto colonize more than oneplanet. it alosa llows u not to have to; wooryy that the enemy will; bomb the ;one planet with th port makinga ll the resources useless.

Hmmm - I've never really been drawn to the Natural Merchants trait myself. Long term it only boosts your productivity by a small amount (once you have the three colony types and all the breathers, a single saved kiloton of facility space isn't very much).

It helps you get a return on a newly claimed system quicker than without, but in the earliest turns your empire is usually running at a surplus until your construction capacity increases. And personally I'd say that since warp point defences are more effective than defending in open space, that once the enemy has his ships running amok within your system that it's maybe only a couple of turns until you lose the whole system if your opponent is aggressive. Of course it depends on how you manage your defence.

But back to Ancient Race - I was one of the people suggesting it was underpriced a while ago, although reading this thread I am tempted to concede to those who have played a lot of PBW. There's definitely some luck involved in the starting state of the quadrant and its players which defines whether you get a large benefit from Ancient Race or not, or whether it was a waste of points that could have been spent elsewhere... that would suggest to me that it is close to being balanced.

The Ancient Race trait does give you the ability to pick out distant planets of value and colonize them early. However, many competitive players already use the 'leapfrog' colonizing strategy, which is sending out colony ships to their maximum range before colonizing to establish more distant borders and then filling in the enclosed systems later. They can easily cover/claim the same amount (or more if they can build faster) of territory as a player with the Ancient Race trait. The ancient race player might have an initial boost in production, but the other player catches up once they start filling out their interior systems.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I think the ancient race trait cost should stay as it is.. Although 1500 would be okay, because of it's advantage. But 1000 is already on the top side of what I'm willing to spend on it.

As for Natural Merchants, that should not be made cheaper. it's an incredibly useful trait, IMHO. It should not be given away 'for free'. 1000 makes it an investment.
500 is waaaay to cheap for it.

In one of my current games I'm trying without natural merchants, and I'm deeply regretting it. It's an investment well spent if you got it.

~Myrath

I'd definitely agree that it's easy to find another thousand or two of racial points from picking low impact negative traits. And with racial traits aside, I think there are certain economic traits which are picked by almost all players. I wonder what scope there is for traits with interesting negative side effects that could make empires vary more from each other than they do now? I also wonder what magic Kwok has brewing in this area for the Nova mod...

Assume systems have an average of 8 planets. On average, 1.6 planets will be breathable (20% distribution of atm types). Lets ignore the effect of tiny moons and assume that planet sizes are perfectly distributed, leading to and average size of medium, with 3 or 15 facility slots. Thus, in our average system, we have:

1.6 breathables * 15 space / breathable = 24 space
6.4 non-breathables * 3 space / non-breathable = 19.2 space

total 43.2 facility spaces

(Note that if we had assumed a higher number of planets per system, which might be more accurate for the stock game, the picture will only get worse for the NM trait. I chose 8 to discount the 1-2 tiny moons in stock systems, to make the math easier.)

The Space Port represents only 2.3% of the total space. From an economic viewpoint, building one more miner improves one resource production rate by 2.3%.

The 3 turns of build time is irrelevant in the long run; with every passing turn, the value lost potential production of the first planet or two in the system gets closer and closer to 0. Unless you regularly colonize every planet in a system at the same time, the microscopic short term gain of having a miner or 3 producing before the spaceport is built matters very little.

The protection against having the space port planet bombed is a red herring; if your planets are being bombed you've already lost the system. If you manage to fend off the attack, the recovery time of building the space port on a planet that now has a SY is 1-2 turns, depending on population. Thus, assuming you don't lose the entire system, the production hit of not having that spaceport for a turn or two approaches 0 over the long term.

Thus, the only real gain of NM trait is the 2.3% increase in production for a single resource/research/intel type.

Now, lets say we purchased Mining Aptitude and Smart traits instead, giving +5% to mineral and research production. Compared to losing the slot to a spaceport, one of those bonuses drops to 2.7%. We are still way ahead on production here, however.

Thus, is the short term advantage of 2 turns of resource production in new systems and the short term protection against losing all production a few turns earlier in a dying system, worth the loss of 5% mineral production and 2.7% research production in the entire empire? I would say no, NM trait actually harms your empire. It might, however, be worth the loss of just 2.7% mineral production, if the NM trait cost 500 instead of 1000.

NOTE:
In Balance Mod, the NM trait actually becomes even more worthless (exponentially, in fact). The Mining Aptitude type traits increase production by 10%, meaning that NM is an even larger high-flow toilet down which to throw points. In that mod, you give up 10% mineral production and 7.7% research for the short term gains.

NOTE 2:
Once you start making planets breathable (usually trivial in PBW via trading pop with other races), the resource effect of the single slot gain for NM trait becomes very small (1 / (8*15) = 0.83% in the worst case), making the trait even less useful.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

Agreed. I don't use it for precisely those reasons. I'd rather pay for something like the +1 ship speed trait.

You don't even have a fleet to defend all that territory with. Thanks for bringing the giant target of your empire to my attention...

~Slimbo

Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design...

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

LOL, he's bringing some PBW game banter into this thread We're 12 players and Ender's in the lead by a rather large margin. I have yet to meet Slimbo in game but I wonder already how his (mothballed?) forces could possibly pose a threat to the Chosen Ones' growth.

----------
See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.