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Post by succat on May 20, 2011 22:26:07 GMT -5
MikeEB, if you feel that missiles are too powerful because they can wipe out offline players, what do you propose be done about it? Should the price of missiles go up? Should missiles only be able to fire at online players? The problem with missiles is that they make conquering a territory without them obsolete. If I try to take a square by invading it repeatedly, anyone can wait for me to bash it below ~10 and then use missiles to steal it. Mike, I hear your concerns, and this is what I have done: Missiles will no longer be able to conquer another square. They will only be able to deal out damage to another square, but not take it over. This way, no one can steal a square away by missiles, but 2 allies working together would be able to defeat an enemy square if one ally attacks with missiles to lower the number of units on the targeted square and the other ally invades normally from a nearby square. There is still the problem of an abandoner abandoning his square right before he's about to lose his square to an invader (since now he can't be bombarded with missiles, losing the square that way), but I think this isn't really a big deal because the abandoner can't abandon until there's only 1 unit left, and at that point it's somewhat of a toss up between the invader killing off that last unit before the abandoner can abandon it.
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Post by deleted on May 21, 2011 18:16:02 GMT -5
Taking another square when we both have hundreds of units is very very tedious. Could you change the missiles so that instead of loosing effectiveness as the inverse square, they get more expensive as the square of the distance. So to attack a square right next to you it would cost 1 gold per unit, to attack a square 2 away from you it would cost 4 gold per unit and so on. The amount of force you would be able to apply would trail off as the inverse square quite naturally this way.
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Post by succat on May 22, 2011 14:03:13 GMT -5
deleted - Yeah, I'm already looking into something like that so that close-range battles can move along quicker. Update: A farm-square can now have 250 units * the number of farms on that square. So, if you have 4 farms on a square, that square may have up to 1000 units on it with no gold penalty. However, units may still taper off of that square if the max-units per square has been exceeded, but at least people can now protect their farms better. Eventually I hope to add Bases, so that a square can have up to 10,000 units on it and not have units taper off. This would be really handy if you had a square with 40 farms on it (god forbid) because you could put a Base on that square and have up to 10,000 units there and not be penalized.
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dys
Ronin Warlock
Posts: 4
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Post by dys on Jun 7, 2011 19:17:20 GMT -5
I have come to join in the discussion, thanks for the link OurJake I'm guessing I can't promote the grid on this forum??? Bad joke that... Is it ok to ask about this stuff... 1. What exactly does Clout add into the mix when in a battle?
Solved; your number of clout will add that same number of troops to your attack force. so if you have 10 clout and 100 troops on a square, that square has the same power as 110 troops.
Can we make it so 1 clout = 10 troops?
2. How exactly does the gold pool work when handing out rewards?
Any chance we can make this give back all the gold and no troops? it would be an optimum way for the higher level players to save up cash rather than annexing (would need like 40++ farms for this to be effective though)Also, I think the idea of "base" squares with 10,000 units that don't delete is a great idea! But make them very expensive Edit: My easy to code suggestions for the game are:
1. Choose your colours from a pallete/ type in numbers, not random rolls 2. Some way to sell farms and get them off the grid permanently 3. 1 click for 100 attacks, or something, or pick how many attacks you want to make with 1 click, possibly have this only available if your opponent is ONLINE, if they are asleep your stuck with 1 attack per click.Here's a far fetched idea of mine, I'd love to see something like this on The Grid...I know this is probably too much work to implement into the game, but I believe this is the way to go, I'll try and give more of a vision... I love the idea of getting a nice list of stats on every players square: Attack and defense stats,Everyone loves upgrading stats You could even give each level of defense / attack a name and have it written on the square. EXAMPLE OF A BEGINNERS SQUARE: DYS 20 $43 | @0 Atk: L1 Slingshots Def: L1 Camp EXAMPLE OF A SEASONED PLAYERS SQUARE: DYS 1250 Atk: L17 Imperial Cannons Def: L15 Spirits Keep These kind of upgrades should apply to every square and be kept forever whether you win or die, like clout. I know this will never happen, but I do music for some games developers and they usually like my idea's, so I thought why not Right now I'm concentrating my thinking on something to make this game much nicer for new players, they all make a square, get confused then never come back...
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Post by ourjake on Jun 7, 2011 19:57:08 GMT -5
i think base squares would work well with upgrades to offense/defense, but should stay with the square the way that farms do.
should warping let you take your farms with you for an extra price? like 200+200 per farm or something. that might be cool and would also put a damper on all of the "uh oh i'm getting attacked, let me warp off this farm" and then a F5 or F6 square sits around until someone magically get a bunch of money
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dys
Ronin Warlock
Posts: 4
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Post by dys on Jun 7, 2011 20:06:40 GMT -5
Farms shouldnt stay with you in my opinion, the word "Farm" alone just sounds like it shouldnt move, but warping off the square is a big issue and makes attacking someone when awake totally pointless if you want their shiny farms.
The stats should be kept as permanent on all squares, stats for you as a player, to bring more of an RPG element to the game, and the fact that it's so easy to get wiped out when your asleep, you need something thats gonna make you think it's worth returning to the game.
The stats as a permanent fixture on your whole force will also encourage new players as they can see strait away what they have to work towards, it really is totally confusing upon first coming onto the grid, these stats will help immense ammounts, and people love to keep something also, if things are temporary no one tends to actually want to do it...
My #1 idea to get new players to stay is to have a much clearer way of explaining the whole ANNEX + ABANDON system to save up gold. What is a MUST is to make the minimum possible gold 100, this way any new player can always come and annex at least 1 square upon their return.
Having the annex/abandoned system explained, minimum 100 gold each turn so they know they won't have to work very hard just starting out, just come back occasionaly just like they imagine they can. Not come back after 7 mins to see 40 gold, to be gambled and lost, new players can spend hours not annexing a single square quite easily. And the attack/defence stats will INSTANTLY make them work towards that, as they look around the map comparing players stats.
Even if they find out that it's really a couple of farms and a decent unit count that they need, the fact is they don't need to ask anything to get started, they see the instructions for annex/abandon instuctions come up in the YAK window and as a pop up for the first few logins and the stats visible on all squares, should make things slap bang in your face obvious even if you don't read the rules.
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Post by ourjake on Jun 7, 2011 20:19:51 GMT -5
leveling up is always fun.
It would be encouraging also if the first few levels were under 100 so you had a chance of getting them in the first little bit of playing
some way to definitely get a useful amount of gold every turn would be nice. alliances are also a good source of early income if someone is on when you start.
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dys
Ronin Warlock
Posts: 4
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Post by dys on Jun 7, 2011 20:31:45 GMT -5
leveling up is always fun. It would be encouraging also if the first few levels were under 100 so you had a chance of getting them in the first little bit of playing some way to definitely get a useful amount of gold every turn would be nice. alliances are also a good source of early income if someone is on when you start. I agree with the first few levels being real easy. But with this game your gold ammount is always just as hard to work for, so I think once the sliding scale reaches 15,000 it should be capped, so every single level is 15,000 beyond that. This way no level with be unobtainable, just alot of work. I will come up with the names of 500 defensive structures for each level if needed happily I also like the idea of not publicly displaying the level, only the name, and having the level in your private stats. Rather than saying DefL87: Planetary Fortress, , have it so it ONLY say's Planetary fortress. This will make it LOOK like a strategy game, as it will appear as though everyone built a different structure for themselves, but in reality its an RPG element to the game. Having a useful amount of gold at start really is a must, I think guaranteed 100 gold every turn solid and reliable for new players and then minimum 100 for everyone else, the scale for each new farm is more than ok after that, I get between 200-800 gold every turn right now, so thats totally unfair on new players, even if I did work for the right to have that turnover. the work a new player has to do to get 1 farm is too difficult compared to how much work you need to do to get your second and third farm, it should be the other way around.
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Post by ourjake on Jun 9, 2011 19:53:27 GMT -5
an addition to the questions that may not be answered: Does your total squares or units have an effect on how much money you get at happy hour? i ask because i've been reliably getting ~220 each regardless of what i spend it down to (i've tried at least one number in each 10's digit)
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Post by succat on Jun 9, 2011 21:27:27 GMT -5
Holy! You guys have been busy! I'll try to respond to some of the comments on here, briefly. OurJake, first of all, that is an excellent question, and my mistake for not documenting this in the Rules of the game. I thought that i had, but apparently I had not. So the reason your update gold is low is directly related to how many squares you own. The Grid looks at all of your squares and decides that you must be a hell of a player to own so many squares and so at update time it dishes out the minimum gold that you can get. I think that in the beginning I was trying to keep one player from dominating the entire Grid too easily before other players could get a chance to join and play. Now, I should probably update the code that handles this. I have a growing list of things to do, bugs to fix, features to implement, etc. It's possible I may not get around to working on all that stuff because I have not been able to successfully promote the game, and so I do not want to spend a bunch of work on a game that only a handful of players will actually use. I'd probably be better off creating a new game entirely, taking with me the lessons I've learned in writing this game, and trying to avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes I made with this game. Number one: The interface is crap. I realize that, but was thinking that it wouldn't be a big deal for hard core strategists. That, combined with the vague 'goal' of what you're supposed to do, the complex rules and confusing game mechanics, not to mention, the slow game pace and non-graphics are going to be huge turnoffs for new players. I've made note of all these things and more so as not to repeat this in the future. Also, the code that I wrote is not very flexible for easily adding features to the game. It should be completely re-written with better abstraction. Number two: too many great players have become uninterested in the game after playing for a while and I attribute at least part of that to the problem that Deleted described early on in this thread: Online players can build and build and build, and offline players can get wiped out and all of their work can disappear over night, and this has happened OVER and OVER and I feel bad that I didn't really plan for this when I launched the game, so all of the original top-level players got decimated through no fault of their own, but by the faulty game system. Dys, the Clout system definitely needs an overhaul, but again, it's not something that's a high priority to me at the moment. The GoldPool system, since you asked, basically chooses a random number between 100 and 100 * NumberOfSquaresOnTheBoard. So, that number could be as low as 100, or it could be over 20,000 at this point in the life cycle of the game. The ideas for defense and attack levels is interesting, but I'm not sure what they would be based on. What factor makes your defense or attack level increase? I agree that things need to be improved for new players just starting out because they are at a severe disadvantage and can only trust in the kindness of more experienced players at this point. Again, this is something that needs a complete overhaul. The whole, abandoning and annexing strategy, was not in the Rules because it was not something I anticipated happening. I think it's cool that players have figured out a way to store money in squares, but that's a strategy the players have come up with, not me. About farms, I considered making them mobile, but for some reason it seemed more realistic to make them 'stuck' to the square they're planted on. I suppose there should be a way to get rid of them as well, or torch them somehow
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Post by succat on Jun 10, 2011 20:56:40 GMT -5
A couple of players emailed me about a player they suspected of cheating and taking over The Grid illegally, so I'll answer here rather than replying back to everybody...
I skim the logs quite frequently and check for signs of cheating and multiple accounts, but in this case I don't see any signs of foul play. I can tell you that he gambled like a mad man, and lost hundreds of thousands. Of course, he won a lot, too, but in the long run I think he lost more than he won. At one point he lost 600,000 in a single gamble. He probably could have done even more damage on the board had he wanted to, but my guess is that he did what he wanted to do and frittered the rest away. I myself have been able to get up to 20,000 gambling, and I probably could have gone higher. I've lost many gambles in a row before (8 or 9, I think), and I've won many in a row, too. If you have the time, there's no telling how far you could go. Also, it wouldn't be hard to round your total amount to whatever figure you wanted to by doing away with some excess gold through gambling, purchasing, or donating. So being at 1 million gold exactly, while hard to do, isn't impossible.
I understand the concerns that it might seem like cheating if you've never seen anyone gamble that high before, but again, there wasn't a multiple account used by him to breach any line of defense, and there is no way to 'cheat' a random gambling system that I know of, and the logs prove that he lost many gambles. If he had won them all, then I would be suspicious.
The question remains: Should there be a gold penalty just like there is a unit penalty when the number goes too high? Also, should a player be on the Ranks page even if they have 0 squares, but maybe their gold is over 1,000? That way you could monitor how well a player is gambling.
Hope that helps clear things up...
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Post by ourjake on Jun 10, 2011 23:52:14 GMT -5
thanks for clearing that up. if he gambled that high, then props. it did seem incredibly suspicious. i don't think i've even seen 100k before
if a player is active, then i think he should show up on the ranks page. i assumed you couldn't gamble when you were dead because you can't annex (it says bad square without giving you a chance to input one)
do you get gold at updates still (while dead)? or was he just lucky enough to not ever quite lose his money?
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dys
Ronin Warlock
Posts: 4
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Post by dys on Jun 11, 2011 11:58:47 GMT -5
thanks for clearing that up. if he gambled that high, then props. it did seem incredibly suspicious. i don't think i've even seen 100k before if a player is active, then i think he should show up on the ranks page. i assumed you couldn't gamble when you were dead because you can't annex (it says bad square without giving you a chance to input one) do you get gold at updates still (while dead)? or was he just lucky enough to not ever quite lose his money? you don't get any gold on update when dead. which is why it confuse's me how "thousands" of gambles makes this possible, the whole point with it being 49% and not 50% is that you always lose out in the end, or more gambles means lose more, not more gambles means win more. He must have small had small goals... I.E he started with 30,000. If he just decides to make 500 gold, he can have 5 gambles before he has to stop trying to make his 500 gold... 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 80000. That way is the most likely way of actually raising any money, but that does not work in the long run either as it's 49% and not 50%... Long story short: he's ... lucky???... Anyway, to remove the need for gambling I vote for minimum gold to be 100, and the goldpool to be changed so that its used to get rid of surplus gold, we have proved that having gambling in this system makes the game unbalanced so something has to be done about that in my opinion, either by removing it or making it more of a "gamble".. something like you can only gamble a set amount, lets say 500 gold, and you only get a 0.2% chance of winning 50,000 gold.
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Post by mikeEB on Jun 11, 2011 13:36:11 GMT -5
Anyway, to remove the need for gambling I vote for minimum gold to be 100 This is a very bad idea; the best use of gambling in general is to get that last 3 gold you need to annex a territory/buy an alliance.
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Post by succat on Jun 11, 2011 14:24:12 GMT -5
OurJake, you can now view lurking (0-square) players on the Ranks page if they are active. I'm going to add Farms to the Ranks page as well, hopefully this weekend.
Dys, the 'thousands' should be 'thousands of gold pieces'. I should have said 'he lost hundreds of thousands of gold pieces'. How many times did he actually gamble? A lot. I don't keep my logs after a day or so, but he gambled a lot of times, lost a lot of them, and also had some very lucky breaks. That's sort of the fun of gambling. Even with a 49% chance of winning, you can get lucky a lot of the time, which is kind of the point of playing. He started with a fair amount of money as well because when he lost all of his squares, he had lots of gold invested in abandoned farm-squares that other players annexed and paid him for.
It's sort of like if you have 1,000 gold. You can gamble your way up to 10,000 gold (10 times what you had) without too much trouble if you put your mind to it. Now imagine that you have 20,000 gold. You could gamble your way up to 200,000 gold (also 10 times what you had). At that point you're almost at a quarter million. Sky's the limits now.
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