Balance Suggestion for next turn
Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2021 17:37 UTC
Hey All,
I wanted to follow-up on my previous balance thread with my suggestion for how I think the balance of the game could be improved to make it more fun. I'm certainly not pro at this game so happy for any feedback.
What makes games fun:
- Feeling like you have lots of different credible options
- Not feeling like you're being overly punished for bad decisions
- Feeling rewarded for taking actions
Problems with current game balance:
- Compound interest is clearly the best way to accumulate wealth/score
- The game is likely solvable in the sense that there is an optimal way of playing which is maximizing trading/loans early followed by banking. If you don't follow this exact path, you will lose.
- Once you follow the optimal path, the accumulation of score is driven by the ticks of the clock rather than specific actions, meaning subsequent actions have less value and that it is virtually impossible to catch up to a player who's ahead of you unless they themselves make a big mistake.
Right now the choice between building planets and banking are fundamentally broken. Referring back to my previous forum post, colonists are barely worth more than the credits needed to obtain them, and probably convey a negative value add once you account for sector defenses and lost opportunity cost of equivalent trading. If you engage in planet building in this game, you will fall behind, and you will never catch up to a player who simply trades and keeps all of their credits at a single bank planet system. While an argument could be made that planets are needed to secure trade routes, there are currently too few players to make securing routes particularly critical, and also there's only a limited window where it is both feasible to construct many planets, while it is also profitable to keep trading. By the time you can secure enough trade routes for it to convey a strategic advantage it's no longer worth trading, and your investment will largely be a waste of time as you've now fallen behind the player who just banks their money.
Furthermore, trading is also broken as it is not a viable long-term strategy. Once you hit level 18, you will actually accrue more wealth trading at that level and letting the level 19 upgrade cost accrue interest as compared to continuing to upgrade. One could argue that hull upgrades would count towards planet building, however I would refer you back to the previous paragraph. Trading is only an annoying stepping stone rather than a viable strategy.
So, how do we make the game more fun:
- More credible options:
The important factor here is making sure that there is an equivalence between various strategies. These strategies, generally speaking are:
Trading
Banking
Planet Building
In order to "balance" these things the rate at which they generate value should be ordered and be proportional to the effort needed to engage in that activity and risk of doing so. This is the opposite of what's described above, since the safest option (i.e. only having a single well defended bank system) is also the most profitable. The best way to change this is to rebalance the production rates accordingly. Noted from previous post that there was concern that too many credits were being obtained too quickly, therefore I would err on the side of reducing production rates rather than increasing.
I would suggest the following:
Planetary interest rate should be reduced to 0.005 and IGB should be 0.002.
This would have the following impacts:
- Hull upgrades and trading are now economically feasible up to Level 30 rather than current Level 18. It continues to make sense to upgrade your ship hull purely from a trading standpoint, which opens up the possibility of planet building.
- By allowing trading to be feasible it creates an incentive to build planets because people will still be interested in trading later in the game, and holding territory and being part of clans will be more valuable since port degradation will start to play an effect.
- A fully loaded planet is now worth a maximum of 4.5B, or approximately 45 credits per colonist. This means that the investment in building planets actually pays off as well.
- By making planets valuable, and incentivizing many players to have planets, this will require that people invest resources in keeping planets and incentivize players in building/securing planets. This will make the game more dynamic and strategically deep and open up avenues for minor victories and defeats which can swing scores.
- All of the above shifts focus of the game on actions which take turns.
Those are my 2 cents. Eager to hear your thoughts.
I wanted to follow-up on my previous balance thread with my suggestion for how I think the balance of the game could be improved to make it more fun. I'm certainly not pro at this game so happy for any feedback.
What makes games fun:
- Feeling like you have lots of different credible options
- Not feeling like you're being overly punished for bad decisions
- Feeling rewarded for taking actions
Problems with current game balance:
- Compound interest is clearly the best way to accumulate wealth/score
- The game is likely solvable in the sense that there is an optimal way of playing which is maximizing trading/loans early followed by banking. If you don't follow this exact path, you will lose.
- Once you follow the optimal path, the accumulation of score is driven by the ticks of the clock rather than specific actions, meaning subsequent actions have less value and that it is virtually impossible to catch up to a player who's ahead of you unless they themselves make a big mistake.
Right now the choice between building planets and banking are fundamentally broken. Referring back to my previous forum post, colonists are barely worth more than the credits needed to obtain them, and probably convey a negative value add once you account for sector defenses and lost opportunity cost of equivalent trading. If you engage in planet building in this game, you will fall behind, and you will never catch up to a player who simply trades and keeps all of their credits at a single bank planet system. While an argument could be made that planets are needed to secure trade routes, there are currently too few players to make securing routes particularly critical, and also there's only a limited window where it is both feasible to construct many planets, while it is also profitable to keep trading. By the time you can secure enough trade routes for it to convey a strategic advantage it's no longer worth trading, and your investment will largely be a waste of time as you've now fallen behind the player who just banks their money.
Furthermore, trading is also broken as it is not a viable long-term strategy. Once you hit level 18, you will actually accrue more wealth trading at that level and letting the level 19 upgrade cost accrue interest as compared to continuing to upgrade. One could argue that hull upgrades would count towards planet building, however I would refer you back to the previous paragraph. Trading is only an annoying stepping stone rather than a viable strategy.
So, how do we make the game more fun:
- More credible options:
The important factor here is making sure that there is an equivalence between various strategies. These strategies, generally speaking are:
Trading
Banking
Planet Building
In order to "balance" these things the rate at which they generate value should be ordered and be proportional to the effort needed to engage in that activity and risk of doing so. This is the opposite of what's described above, since the safest option (i.e. only having a single well defended bank system) is also the most profitable. The best way to change this is to rebalance the production rates accordingly. Noted from previous post that there was concern that too many credits were being obtained too quickly, therefore I would err on the side of reducing production rates rather than increasing.
I would suggest the following:
Planetary interest rate should be reduced to 0.005 and IGB should be 0.002.
This would have the following impacts:
- Hull upgrades and trading are now economically feasible up to Level 30 rather than current Level 18. It continues to make sense to upgrade your ship hull purely from a trading standpoint, which opens up the possibility of planet building.
- By allowing trading to be feasible it creates an incentive to build planets because people will still be interested in trading later in the game, and holding territory and being part of clans will be more valuable since port degradation will start to play an effect.
- A fully loaded planet is now worth a maximum of 4.5B, or approximately 45 credits per colonist. This means that the investment in building planets actually pays off as well.
- By making planets valuable, and incentivizing many players to have planets, this will require that people invest resources in keeping planets and incentivize players in building/securing planets. This will make the game more dynamic and strategically deep and open up avenues for minor victories and defeats which can swing scores.
- All of the above shifts focus of the game on actions which take turns.
Those are my 2 cents. Eager to hear your thoughts.