Supplies that really limit fleetsize

[mimesot]

posted on October 6th, 2009, 3:40 pm

Last edited by mimesot on October 6th, 2009, 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hi all!

As we all know there is no limit to the amount of units in FO. It was said, that the supplies should replace this in a way. Well, I never really saw that way, as the first bying of new supplies just delays the expansion of the fleet for some time, but in general it behaves just like the other resources.

A larger fleet usually is a great advantage in terms of supply-economy (well, concerning any resource), as you, in a fight with an inferior fleet will loose less materials; you will have less ships to rebuild to finally win further confrontations.  So why not abandon the idea of "larger fleets --> less costs" and make it "larger fleets --> more supply  sustenance".

My idea of making the supplies a soft limit to the number of units, is to have units drain supplies from the pool. Depending on the amount of crew on EDIT: the usability of a ship a constant number of supplies is taken from the pool in certain timeintervals. Probably a better way to do it is to calculate the whole crew in use and calculate a constant drain, but thats technical stuff.

EDIT: As there is the risc that the ship with the lowest supply drain for the usage will be spammed, the supplyrate needs to be directly proportional to the usefulness (e.g. via a formula Supplyrate = ( Off + Def + 1/3 Sys )/1000 per minute). There should be no best ship in this regard, so no spamming of destroyers or battleships!

If your fleet is too big so you cannot sustain it, crew shoud begin to die after a while, or that ships that are too much could renegade, or anything you like.

To maintain that system you will need some supply sources. Though it would in principle suffice to have the supply bying button with adjusted costs, I'd say it would be more handy to use this only in case of emergency and have a steady source insted. I believe that the main base should at least be able to provide enough for constant running of a good handful of vessels. Additional supplies could be bought, perhaps manufactured in a facility, or been erned through trading. That would include the reintroduction of tradestations and cargo-vessels as many members suggested before.

EDIT: To overcome the problem, that the finite size of the map prohibits an infinite size of the fleet, I'd suggest a limitation of the trade-stations of 2 and instead the ability to upgrade these stations infinite times, with growing costs (like the conduction martix). Same thing goes for Incubation centres and the kethrathel mining operations.

If you keep the additional supply-incomes low, it will be difficult to have and hold a really large fleet. The balancing of the game sould profit from this, as overgrowing of one player becomes difficult. Spamming would be no option any more, as it will be earier to rise the quality of the fleet my mixing classes than to strengthen your supply souces. Nevertheless its no hard limit and ultralarge fleets are possible.

Since some races have a slightly higer crew-rate (borg), the suppy costs per crewmember should be adjusted for each race, so one peace of suppy has the same value for every player. Neverthelless there may still be different ways of geting supplies for each race, especially I would hold the dominions way of prodicing supplies.

EDIT: To avoid a excessive fortification of the bae with turrets it is necessary, that turrets use up supplies too.

Further I would say that the new construction of a ship still needs supplies, as they are not only consumer goods, but also equipment, furniture and so on.

What do you think about this proposal?
Kind regards
mimesot

posted on October 6th, 2009, 4:25 pm

i think its great, similar system to other real time stratergies like Sins of A Solar Empire, great game.

im sure the devs could implement this by adapting some of their current code, the base is already there such as collective connections taking resouce, could just implement it on a ship by ship bases but would need to add additional code to make crew die...

posted on October 6th, 2009, 5:30 pm

i think its great

+1

posted on October 6th, 2009, 5:38 pm

reminds me a bit at the warcraft3 system, which was quite good at that sight.

how about naming it maintenance cost?

posted on October 6th, 2009, 5:58 pm

Wasn't something like this already suggested, for Ketracel White?

posted on October 6th, 2009, 6:03 pm

@Acitium

I believe maintenance costs would fit properly, but whe the maintenance cost is proportional to the crew, than why even give it a name.

@Tyler

I can remember your suggestion. I supportet your idea too.

posted on October 6th, 2009, 6:16 pm

I believe that limiting fleet sizes are against the dev's philosophy for the game. Being that "fleet" = large numbers of ships. I personally like the 'no limit' philosophy.

On "hard caps"
Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - Waiter, Hold the Spam Please!

On " maintenance cost"
... I swear there was a statement by the devs against this... but I can't find it

posted on October 6th, 2009, 9:15 pm

Yeah, I'm not too big of a fan of this... Essentially it is a hard cap, even if you'd like to call it a soft cap because on small maps you would still be limited. If you can't afford to keep a fleet beyond a certain size due to lack of supplies (due to lack of increased resource margins), you are limited to that size of a fleet. I've already put my 2 cents in a few other times though.

posted on October 6th, 2009, 9:23 pm

Yeah, I'm not too big of a fan of this... Essentially it is a hard cap, even if you'd like to call it a soft cap because on small maps you would still be limited. If you can't afford to keep a fleet beyond a certain size due to lack of supplies (due to lack of increased resource margins), you are limited to that size of a fleet. I've already put my 2 cents in a few other times though.

you say that right but i think it clearly makes ships more useful and would stop major spamming on so many levels and make other ships more useful...

one example...

fed excel spam, lets say the good old fed ship with sensor black out cost more then 3 excel but essentially it has more worth than an excel thanks to its special ability, but your supply's dont let you build that and a whole hgue fleet of excels your forced to decide what is really worth it, a small group of excels that are expensive to maintain or a few excels with a good support ship boosting their ability in battle?

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on October 6th, 2009, 9:50 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on October 6th, 2009, 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Turrets and Starbases would all then have to be inputted into that system.

But back to the subject at hand...
So what happens if your opponent has fortified their base and doesn't attack you but just builds up a turreted base with a few support vessels? You are stuck "outside" with your maxed out fleet and all you can do is continue battering away at turrets, then rebuilding, then battering away again. Turrets would have to be nerfed again (as they would just be too cost effective most of the time).

EDIT: forgot one thing. What if you build the wrong units out of the limited number that you can (say you want that Canaveral instead of that extra 2 Excel that you already built)? I guess you could decomission them if that was changed to be better... or will you send them on suicide runs and risk leveling up your opponent's fleet? I think the Devs were going for a little big of spamminess, as not everyone can use support units as well as others, but making it so that you have to design a "perfect" fleet to maximize supply usage seems fairly limiting to me.

[mimesot]

posted on October 6th, 2009, 10:20 pm

Last edited by mimesot on October 6th, 2009, 10:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Good points dominus.

The first one...

Essentially it is a hard cap, even if you'd like to call it a soft cap because on small maps you would still be limited.

... can easily be overcome by making the tradingstation upgradeable like the conduction matrix, which would allow a practically infinite size of the fleet, while still being a cap, as it could get more difficult to afford these upgrades, the higher you upgrade it. If you limit the number of tradestations per player this will not be map dependent any more. 

Concerning the turrets you are right, that this is a severe problem.    This will cost me a sleepless night.

EDIT: Well all stations use up consumergoods, which need to be supplied, and turrets need at least Antimatter, which has to be supplied too. Everyone needs supplies. Supply costs on crewless objects could be calculated from offensive value and shield-capacity. So fortyfying in a base ill not be an option. Isn't that a proper solution?

posted on October 6th, 2009, 10:30 pm

Probably a far simpler way of limiting fleets would be to increase the supply cap (aka, instead of 1450 being the last, add one or two more until you get to a stable final amount). This is just a suggestion... which I don't really like to be honest (as the amount of ships and fleets you can build right now seems ok to me--then again, I'd like to wait to see the balance changes for 3.0.. Dominion would still be limited by resource costs potentially, and Borg would be limited by the unique way in which their own supply system works. In any case I think that balancing this aspect of gameplay will always be horrendously difficult: on the one hand, you could fiddle with supplies to drive up the cost of later game units, or do what you say, which, if given that each vessel consumes different amounts of supplies over time, could potentially result in people spamming as many of the lowest costing vessels as possible... or if all vessels consume the same amount, this would result in people spamming high tier vessels only. However if you drive up the cost of later game units, or change build times for later game units, you could end up with 3.0PR again... where battleships and many cruisers were practically useless: everybody just spammed destroyers and won.

[mimesot]

posted on October 6th, 2009, 10:53 pm

Last edited by mimesot on October 6th, 2009, 11:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As I see it we currently have no cap. Infinitly exponentially rising the funds for new supplies (asides from totally unbalancing the dominion) would result in a soft cap on the total number of ships to be built in a whole game, not in a cap on how many ships you can have at any moment. This means that towards a games end it would rather be a last man standing than a death match. My suggestion aims to ease recovery, whereas this one allows practically no recovery in endgame.

The only thing about this game I dislike is, that the game decides very early and then becomes boring because the end is obvious and only a big mistke of the stronger fraction can change the tide again. Further if the fleets are limited in size - only temporarly, as you can evolve your supply generation - you will much more concern about the quaity of your fleet, than about its size. Spamming would become the less effective strategy, what is the main aim of my suggestion.

If you correlate the suppy costs with the usefulness of a ship, the choice will not depend on the supply costs any more. So balancing the supplydrain for each ship can surely be used to avoid spamming the lowest priced ship.

[Anonymous]

posted on October 6th, 2009, 11:08 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on October 7th, 2009, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am against fleet caps, other than special ship cap, such as the tavara cap, and the repair ship cap, and most definitally the miranda II cap.  However, there is a demo mod for A2, called Tacticle assult, which has a cap on virtually every ship.  It is nice, in some instances, but It means that your biggest fleets will alwayse be the same.

The only way I would support this is if it allowed for more customization. e.g.:

If you had say three ships of each class, like three destroyers, and three battleships, all of different design, different streignths and weaknesses, but you had a cap, like say 10.  So you could have a galaxy(1 slot) an achilles(2 slots) and a sovereign class(3 slots) to pick from.  So at a max, you could have 10 galaxys (just an example) , or 5 achilles, or 3 sovereigns, Haveing an exponential decrease in availability, based on size, or streignth.  The same could be done with destroyers, but the cap would be say 20, then each ship would again take up a specific number of slots for its specific class cap. 

Now I'm not saying we need 20 sabers runring around, but it would allow for more customization (More ships) but would limit spamming of powerful ships. 


My point is not to make this more of a game only based on stragity, but to stick to the Armada mass of fleets mentality.

[Greatgreengoo]

posted on October 7th, 2009, 12:40 am

Last edited by Greatgreengoo on October 7th, 2009, 12:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

What about an incremental increase in price for building each specific unit beyond the first. So your first excel would be base price but the 20th one you build would be +50% more in the cost. Would prevent spamming of single ships and if you loose ships of the same type the price falls again.