Teeny tiny maps

[Rossthegreat]

Soo... only one blackhole each seven turns? I'm not afraid of blackhole anymore now.

[jdmillard]

Soo... only one blackhole each seven turns? I'm not afraid of blackhole anymore now.

My values for a, b, and c were quick and arbitrary. I picked c (asymptote) without much thought. Values for a and b were picked such that the first two values would be 30 and 20 because I didn't want the first two numbers to be 5000 and 50. It was an example. If you want to change the example so that a 1-turn cooldown is easily reached, I don't care. I wouldn't mind if a 1-turn cooldown is easily reachable, I do care that the current system provides a HUGE advantage to the faction that attacks first and takes a lot of strategy out of the game by encouraging cheap wars that last 1 turn.

Sorry for hijacking, this black hole talk deserves it's own thread.

[SephiRok]

I'd like to follow up on this. Somewhat.

I think the black hole suggestion is interesting, but I'm not convinced. Having weapons of mass destruction should be scary. I think the strategy is who builds them first and how you react. You can build them both defensively and offensively. And you have time to go after someone before he gains a wmd from the building. It creates pressure and well, mass destruction. And its the last tech, so the game really ought to be over. I don't disagree however that there could be more diplomatic repercussions. The issue is likely most common on big singleplayer maps.

This brings me to my other point. After the gamespot review, I'm thinking of temporarily removing the huge and large sizes until we have more factions. Or at least add very explicit warnings. It plays really badly, and newcomers are too likely to be extremely disappointed if they play that first. We kept sizes low on release because we knew what modes provide the best experience, but we carved in to player demand when we made them bigger. After silly reviewers appearently played it on what I consider absurd settings, it was probably a mistake to even have them.

[boulugre]

I think the black hole suggestion is interesting, but I'm not convinced. Having weapons of mass destruction should be scary. I think the strategy is who builds them first and how you react. You can build them both defensively and offensively. And you have time to go after someone before he gains a wmd from the building. It creates pressure and well, mass destruction. And its the last tech, so the game really ought to be over. I don't disagree however that there could be more diplomatic repercussions. The issue is likely most common on big singleplayer maps.

Black holes and nukes are fine, but as you said they need to come with more consequence to the user. The way I can think of to implement this is one (or a mix) of the following options

- Make them very costly in term of diplo relationship
- Make them longer to construct , or a one off usage, meaning you have to rebuild it each time you fire it.
- Give more defense to field units against them and / or a building with a fix % chance of intercepting it.

This brings me to my other point. After the gamespot review, I'm thinking of temporarily removing the huge and large sizes until we have more factions. Or at least add very explicit warnings. It plays really badly, and newcomers are too likely to be extremely disappointed if they play that first. We kept sizes low on release because we knew what modes provide the best experience, but we carved in to player demand when we made them bigger. After silly reviewers appearently played it on what I consider absurd settings, I think it was a mistake to even have them.

Yeah that make sense IMO, I would also put a warning on marathon speed games, despite the last change on alien aggressivity vs AI faction in the last patch, AI faction still often gets wiped out by aliens ( It happens when there is an early war between 2 factions, the involved factions often get alien wiped because they wasted all their troops during the war. I just gave up a marathon speed game because 2 faction got killed early on) I think you need to adapt the alien quantities and spawn rate according to speed of game to fix this.

A quick fix to make large map playable while waiting for more factions could be to raise the growth rate of cities pop, so you would be able to plant more cities and cover more of the map. Tech costs and production costs would need to be adapted to keep the game balanced. Could be really complicate to implement though.

[Rossthegreat]

If you remove the huge map, then I won't update my copy of pandora until whatever update returns them.

I hate small maps that much

Oh and I discovered a interesting problem, when I suddenly expanded alot very fast with alot of new cities being built...
My growth stagnated, taking 40+ turns to reach new population for some reason, so Cloning labs came to the rescue xD

I managed to get over that stagnation point and started to grow very fast without help from clone labs.

[greatUnknown]

Check the components of your growth. You may find a high emigration rate overbalancing the positive growth factors. Sometimes increasing the morale improves this significantly.