Soft Capping National Size

Summary:

Bureaucracy as a stat

Soft Capping National Size

Craig Macomber 18 Jun 2008 06:32

We need to prevent players from winning. To do this we need a national size soft cap. To go with the story, large nations suffer from internal divisions. This could cause emigration, and loss of population which as a nation grows counters out growth slowly. Another option is to raise the cost of collecting labor (see this thread).

One idea I particularly like is bureaucracy as a stat. Basically, the more stuff you control (mainly planets and large colonies), the more it costs to hold your empire together and govern it all. After a particular point, planets low in resources stop being beneficial to take because they cost more to govern than the resources collected are worth. This forces players to seek out the best planets and battle for them while protecting new players. (The other options also cause this benefit)

Re: Soft Capping National Size

jamoe 24 Jun 2008 13:16

i was thinking that you would base the rating off of the taxes, the cost to ship a person from each of your colonies to your largest (or something similar), the rate of representation your people have in government, and the overall population of your nation.

something like
(P*T)/R+S

P= total population of nation
T= tax rate
R= 1/R (represents 1 out of how many people?)
S= total shipping costs to ship a colonial representative to the capitol (or something similar).

this is pretty rough, as it is tough to define real life corruption/bureaucracy amount through mathematics.

Last edited on 24 Jun 2008 13:17 by jamoe Show more

AlfonzFred (guest) 10 Sep 2011 01:19

Limiting player growth by harsh in game rules will dampen the end-game experience. Whats the point of striving for victory if you have nothing to gain except limitations? There are few games out there that I've seen that can really boast a persistant world, in combination with an RTS, and MMORPG. The main reason is usually the devs wish to create an environment persistant with a linear story. The main draw back of which is obviously ''How can we integrate an RTS into a story''. So they dream up ideas to limit player interaction to skirmishs, agreed PvP, or non-effectual (but fun) large scale encounters. I can't say I've read deeply, thus far, into your game, but on the surface it appears you're heading in that direction, so I chose to reply to this article in particular.

In my opinion the best solution to the problem of player limitation is either to constantly expand your universe, which can be done through quest packs etc.. which you could possibly charge for, or better just reduce the concept to a round based game, which in and of itself would introduce some other fun aspects into the works.

Imagine setting various variables as far as planet types, nebula, asteroid fields, distrobution of resources, NPC factions, quest hubs, black holes, white dwarves, what have you.. that you might like to see in a universe, setting a list of these variables and building a randomising program as opossed to a static universe would free you to make a complex and varried universe, yet completely different each round.

The over arching story can be the same, certain factions may continue, but it gives the players a chance to sieze land, build empires, and actually play the RTS factor of the game without being limited to instancing.

As far as questing, trading etc.. you could even integrate a randomisation of quests.. say only 30% of total quests created will appear in any universe generation, and factions may change in strength, wealth, or even personality.

Just some thoughts as it seems you guys are right at the start up phase of operations, and I do hope I didn't offend anyone.

-AlfonzFred-

Craig Macomber 10 Sep 2011 02:56

I should mention that the game is not currently under active development. That aside, this is still an interesting topic.

Our game has no quests, NPCs, and no rounds, no factions. There is no wealth, only budget (no national debt of surplus allowed here!). We are not going for a linear story (sure there is a back story, but you could say there is no front story), its a pure strategy game.

The power of a player (in FG's context, it would be the usable output resource wise of their economy AKA, the size of fleet they can support) in any game follows some mathematical model. In the simple level based RPG realm and in RTS before hitting resource/pop based limits, a player generally tends to improve in power exponentially (growth rate proportional to their power). In an MMORTS, that would mean that if you doubled your power every 30 minutes (thats super slow paced for an RTS), a player who started only 1 day before you would crush you in a second, and be about 250 thousand times more powerful than you regardless of how long you play. Fail. If you could afford one unit after 30 minutes, after a day the server would be killed by one person's fleet if they choose to make low cost units. There is no strategy in unlimited growth; playing longer always beats being smarter. This is an RTS game, thus it can't have unlimited growth.

Basically we need a non exponential power function. The obvious choice is a logistic, with a carrying capacity determined by how good of player you are. I'd aim for a short time constant so your nation grows (or falls) in the matter of a few days (though it would depend on the server). Its true a non convergent but less than exponential power function could work, but I don't see a good way or reason for it.

The design is simple: some places are better (produce more resources for the extraction costs) than others. Your carrying capacity is higher if you can hold better planets. Unless you already have the best several planets in the game (making you the top ranked player), there is always a better place for you to go, but taking+holding it may be more expensive than the gain, in which case you will start to lose forces and lose some planets (likely your new better one). Planets slightly better than yours will tend to be held by players slightly better than you, and those planets will afford them slightly more resource for a slightly larger fleet. Its really just a PVP ladder. There is no real grinding/leveling. Its a strategy game: longer playtime should not make you better than someone assuming they have had enough time to stabilize their nation. In effect, everything after the first few days until your nation stabilizes out in the bad/uncontested planets is endgame.

For this to work, you simply have to prevent taking hundreds of bad planets from being an effective strategy. The only way to do this is to have some cost to having more planets that grows with the number of planets you have. My proposed explanation is bureaucratic cost, but the explanation really is a minor issue.

Last edited on 10 Sep 2011 02:59 by Craig Macomber Show more