Posts by TheJoker

Well. That sucked. Failed with my FS alarm, got caught up in some work. C'est la vie.

As I messaged in game, "Spend the res wisely".

I'll admit, I'm not paying enough attention to Thuban given the size of this account, and it's not fair to my team to not be super active. Still discussing, but I'll likely be passing this account off to someone worthy, and rejoining Thuban with something smaller (Have some old pre-LF accounts sitting in Graveyard, hopefully GO's will be helpful getting them enabled for Thuban)

GLOTR to whomever plays this account next.

Fast rebuild to both. Hurts to see losses to a teammate, but nice to know it was intentional, and took out a good size threat in the uni

Dominatrix, can't wait to see your next hit

I fully expect this to be controversial, so let me start off by saying I do not recommend these changes for existing universes. This suggestion is aimed towards prolonging the life of newly created universes, and make older universes (started with this system) more appealing to join.

Secondly, don't tie me to any specifics / numbers here. I present this primarily as a thought experiment, with details to be determined, and I'm open to any suggestions for tweaks.

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Universes have a well understood lifecycle, broadly described as:

1. Young Universes, freshly opened with lots of players scrambling to become #1

2. Middle Aged Universes, where there are fewer players, but enough for alliances to compete and have energy

3. Dying Universes, where minimal potential targets remain, and most players go into vmode, waiting for a merge to generate a Middle Aged Universe

I postulate that the primary reason universes transition to dying universes is that players give up. They decide it is effectively impossible for them to compete against the largest players, or they are being picked on by the largest players, and they would prefer to play in a new universe or give up the game entirely.

Assuming that is the case, the best way to sustain universes for longer is reduce the point distribution within the universe, and make the smaller players feel more competitive. However, this must be done carefully, so that the most dedicated players, who drive the game's health, feel they are being treated fairly.

One way to achieve this might be to give boons to smaller players, but this fails on two fronts. Firstly, it feels unjust to a dedicated player who has committed thousands of hours of gametime, that another player who just started can reach a similar level with significantly less effort. Secondly, it just makes the smaller players more juicy targets - the dedicated players can and will take advantage.

Another method would be to cap the maximum size of the largest players. This cannot be a hard cap - a dedicated player wants to keep going, and an artificial ceiling will be disappointing. Thus, I suggest the implementation of "degradation" mechanics that increase the effort necessary to sustain large fleets, increasing the maintenance of "untouchable" accounts.

The general idea is to apply a "tax" on ships and defense. Every day, or every flight, results in a small percentage of ships / defense becoming damaged and inoperable beyond repair (aka, lost). As the size of a fleet or turtle increases, the loss to this tax also increases, and players must earn more resources to sustain their fleets.

This could be implemented in a tiered system - up to a certain number of ships / defense, losses are at 0%, then up to a higher level, it increases to X%, then Y% beyond that.

This tax would also be applied through vacation mode - while your fleet might be safe from attack, it won't be safe from atrophy.

While I'm sure nobody will be excited to lose ships by default, it provides benefits to all levels of players:

- Less sophisticated players will have more appealing universe options, where they feel they won't immediately be dominated by a rank #1 with trillions of points.

- Dedicated players have even more reason to be active (and/or spend money), as by being more active they will be able to maintain a larger fleet than a less active player, who will be "capped" lower

- Turtles will naturally be whittled down and less effective, giving fleeters more targets

- More fleets of similar sizes will make alliance / ACS strategy significantly more important

I haven't thought these numbers through particularly well, but perhaps a starting point to work off of:

- 0 - 10kk points OR sum(ships + def) < 100k: 0% / day

- 10kk - 100kk points AND sum(ships + def) > 100k: 0.5% / day

- 100kk - 1kkk points AND sum(ships + def) > 100k: 1% / day

- 1kkk+ points AND sum(ships + def) > 100k: 1.5% / day

- 7+ day inactive: +1% / day to defense

serverData.xml is not valid per the serverData.xsd schema.

I've updated serverData.xsd to fix the inconsistency, and be more explicit with the meaning of each field.

IG account: The Joker (Thuban EN)

List of days I wish to participate: 2 - 3 - 5 - 7 - 11 - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 24

Total = 10 tickets

Extra 5: 4 - 9 - 16 - 18 - 22

Your #2 needs to be more clear whether you mean the pull-er or pull-ee when it says "the player has less than 2Bn eco points", but otherwise no objections.

Although, the last clarification covers it pretty well

Quote from Krumme

Undeniably. Thats very bold. In an uni like Thuban Id be scared shitless someone just popped my moon for fun. Im aware 100k plasma dont break just like that, but you never know.

Well, they were queued in Quad, where I had a better handle on things. Merge was inconvenient. For the record, the queue was 870 YEARS long

Quote from Peg

Yes, it was a moon queue specifically so production would be infinitely long essentially. It was the best way to hold off production, carrying significant risk if Joker ever lost the moon - hence the PT.

A few things I did to protect them:

- Only 4 people knew about them

- When they were queued, I was incredibly careful to hide the res. Nobody saw anything out of the ordinary

- That's not the only moon with 100k Plasmas. I built up a couple others specifically so that one wouldn't stand out

Quote from Peg

A sim after the fact showed that just 150k rips would have taken out the 14m cr, but at that point I think Joker just wanted to finish the queue so he can finally move back to slot 8 and be done with it lol.

Yep. Lots of potential upside going from 7k to 207k RIPs, but when someone is attacking 150k RIPs, suddenly finding 50k more doesn't matter as much

The new rule is great, but unnecessarily complicated. I recommend the following phrasing, which I think follows the spirit / intent of the updated rule, while being easier to understand:

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5.b Pulling

Pulling is defined as a stronger player sending resources to a weaker player with no expectation that equivalent resources will be returned

Pulling is permitted under the following conditions:

- The universe is at least 2 weeks old

- The amount of resources sent by the player does not exceed 500M (Metal + Crystal + Deuterium) for any Monday 00:00:00 - Sunday 23:59:59 period. This limit is calculated collectively, NOT per pulled player

- The player being pulled has fewer than 2Bn points, including unspent resources

Exceptions:

- Moon attempts from stronger players to weaker players are not subject to the Pulling rule and can be carried out in addition to the donation

- Profit-sharing during a group attack/defense is not subject to the Pulling rule after operator validation (API and sharing must be provided via ticket)

Clarifications:

- Player A sends 500M to Player X, Player B sends 500M to Player X (Allowed)

- Player A sends 200M to Player X and 300M to Player Y (Allowed)

- Player A sends 500M to Player X on Sunday, then sends another 500M on Monday (Allowed)

- Player A with 3Bn points sends 500M to Player X with 1.9Bn Points and 1Bn resources (Allowed)

- Player A provides Player X with a moon, then sends 500M (Allowed)

- Player A with 1.3Bn points sends 5M to Player X with 1.5Bn points (Not Allowed)

- Player A sends 500M to Player X on Tuesday, then sends another 500M on Thursday (Not Allowed)

- Player A sends 500M to Player X, and 500M to Player Y (Not Allowed)

- Player A with 3Bn points sends 500M to Player X with 2.1Bn Points (Not Allowed)

- Player A with 3Bn points sends 500M to Player X with 1.99Bn Points and 15B resources (Not Allowed)

Note: After the end of a ban for this reason, the player has 72h to return the exceeded resources to a Game Operator.

This update fields like UI design by engineer. and that always goes poorly.

If Gameforge had anyone hired for UX, they would have tried to understand HOW their customers play their game, any use AGR and other extensions. We probably wouldn't have gotten something that looks pretty but is completely unusable.

Please GF, ya gotta revert, and fast

Quote from Phoenyx

Would have been much easier as one fleet.

Yeah, part of the reason I had it split up

My side of the story is boring, stupid mistake by me. Just got a new computer, forgot I hadn't set up FS's in AGR yet. Needed to go, so quickly FSed everything and ran out the door.

Apparently the default FS behavior in AGR is to send everything to planet. Feature request for RiV: Make the default behavior at least a dirty esp FS to slot 16

You didn't quite get everything, you left a few planets with some cargos, but no significant res.

Good hit, Not a huge setback in the grand scheme of things.

Quote from foxove5154

You may think the value formula is weird. For example, you may prefer the naive value = metal + crystal * 2 + deut * 3. This difference is hugely important -- the naive method says a Rocket Launcher is cheaper than a Light Laser, and my method says the opposite! The reason my formula works well is because it estimates the time taken to gather the resources. Under this assumption, a pure Battlecruiser fleet is value-inefficient, because in the time taken to gather 40,000 Crystal, you could also have gathered 80,000 metal -- now you're sitting with 50,000 metal unused! Obviously, if you use the Merchant often, then the naive formula could be better. Your choice.

I just had this pointed out to me. HAHAHAHA

Yeah, that is complete bullshit, and not how any cost calculations work in this game. This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding in the economics of the game

This is your first ever post on the forums, and you are unfamiliar with Lifeforms. How long have you played OGame, with what style of account (Fleeter/Miner/Expo, etc), and to what account size?

It's clear that you put a lot of effort into this, but you are missing so many elements in your analysis:

• Fleets are not just about Weapon/Armor/Shield values. You also need to account for cargo space, fuel usage, other utilities, etc. What value is a fleet if you can't afford to fleetsave it, or you can't capture all of the defender's resources with it, or you can't fly fast enough to hit anything?
• You are completely missing lifeform techs. Lifeform techs dramatically change how good individual ships are, since they can boost a ship's stats by 17+ combat tech levels. For example, Cruisers are significantly better now for super late game players than they were pre-lifeforms, since their stats can be boosted to where they avoid the shield bounce mechanic against RIPs. However, for early game players, without fully developed lifeforms, they are less useful.
• OGame combats are not often evenly matched. The attacker usually has a significant fleet size advantage (or in cases of ninja's, defender does). I suspect ships with larger shields (BC, Destroyer, Reapers) are better than / used more frequently than your analysis would suggest because in overwhelming numbers, the shield regeneration minimizes losses, vs high fodder fleets where losses are guaranteed.
• If I understand your methodology correctly, you are randomly generating fleets, and matching them all up against each other, ranking them. I would posit that the majority of those fleet comps are crap, and would never be built. Who cares if a particular composition is better against a bunch of crappy ones that don't exist in the game - against fleets that do exist, it's likely suboptimal. This is the Meta aspect of OGame and all other multiplayer games - it's not about winning in a vacuum, it's about observing the opponents that do exist and adjusting strategy specifically for them.

Quote from Supernoob

Can't you just relocate your planet with the free relocation that comes from its position being changed?

If there are slots available in your preferred position. If all the slot 8's are full, you're out of luck

Quote from Squaker

You will never have a slot 15 planet moved to slot 1...

I'm aware of that, was just trying to use an extreme example. The real issue is moving away from slot 8

Probably too late for this round of merges, but here's a suggestion for the next round of merges in a couple years...

When merging into a new uni, there is a possibility that a player's planet will not end up at the same coordinates, due to a planet already existing in that galaxy/system/slot. In this case, the coordinates are changed to a nearby slot, and the player is provided with a free relocation boon. If I remember correctly, the planet's temperature is maintained in the new slot (aka, a -169C temp slot 15 planet that ends up in slot 1 will still be -169C), but slot based resource bonuses are lost (aka, a slot 8 planet moved to slot 11 will lose the +35% metal).

I propose that auto relocated planets maintain their original temp AND the metal/crystal bonus of their original slot, in addition to the free relocation. if they decide to use the free relocation to move their planet, they forfeit their original slot bonus and end up with the resulting slot bonus. Note that this can be a negative as well - if a planet is relocated from slot 4 to slot 1 during a merge, the player will not receive the +40% crystal bonus from the slot unless they use their free relocation.

This will reduce the impact of merges on players that have invested time/DM in getting their planets into a particular slot, and end up in a reduced galaxy universe where there are not enough of the most desirable slots for all players.

Distribute officers in Import/Export in a similar manner to how they are distributed in tasks. Accepting the officer at Import/Export should activate it immediately (no new items for purchase) with a duration of 2-3 days. Officers could be gated behind gold+ rarity items to ensure they are not distributed too frequently, with perhaps a "Full officers for 24h" set thrown into the Platinum item pickup pool

These items are only accessible via tasks and shop events. Import/Export is already a mechanism to trickle items out to players who do not use DM, they should be included in the pool.

Reapers and Pathfinders (and Crawlers I guess...) are not represented in the LF tech tree, and there have been a few complaints/suggestions related to that fact.

I suggest another benefit be added to the T18 class tech, that the stats of the exclusive ships are boosted per level. This could use the combat ship tech default of 0.3%/level, or could be increased to 0.5%/level (since it would be the only tech providing a boost, unlike BS, BC, etc, which have multiple techs that each provide 0.3%).

This would provide a minimal benefit for the Collector class, since Crawlers have no base stats to speak of, but might be useful for Discoverer/General players