in discussion Fragmented Galaxy / Game Play » Soft Capping National Size
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.
