Grid Fixin' Brainstorming

[Dubber]

This is the beginning of the brainstorming that I know about - with ideas to "fix" the grid.

3 main needs for the Grid were identified:

1) Remove farm-cheesing
2) Remove mega-perming
3) Scale the economy back a bit

{eta: the initial posts by me is just the brainstorming and responses I know about -- there are likely several other threads of ideas running in parallel & I hope those end up in this thread, too

[Dubber]

Io's solution, while it does to some extend solve at least 1 and 3 of the items, it also ends up scaling the economy back a bit too far - the effective soft-cap ends up only producing ~1k income/turn, which pretty much effectively cuts Wizards from being feasible.

The direction I am thinking instead is based upon having farm/city costs be dependent on the current count of what is on the square being built, only. This will pretty much automatically solve #1, as the cost would be consistent, regardless who builds.

However, I believe the current build costs may be too low in this scenario, and it would end up breaking #3 goal by effectively scaling the economy back to the millions a turn price.

Two main ways I can see to accomplish all three goals:

1) Hard cap the number of resources allowed per square (to something like 50-100 TOTAL across cities/farms). With this, the price probably doesn't need to be adjusted.

2) Change the pricing, so that effectively the price ends up causing a soft-cap as far as efficiency. One cost formula I have been considering is cost = 100 * 2^([# farms/cities] /

3). This would actually make the first couple farms/cities cheaper than status quo, but right around 50, it starts scaling pretty fiercely and I doubt we would see squares much larger than 50/50.

If you have other thoughts for solutions for this problem or think the goals should be changed (although Succat and I both are pretty much in agreement with the three goals above) let me know.

[Dubber]

Ancient history to set the stage:
Way back when, Farms and Cities used to have a fairly complexly simple interrelationship (F&C counts across all of a player's sqaures, iirc.

• Farms produce Gold: more farms would produce less Gold per Farm as the farm-count grew larger (I think that is what ioi's solution is premised on)
  
• Cities cost Gold to maintain: the more cities a player has the less Gold per Farm ends up in the player's Happy Hour Income
  
• again, iirc, there was an optimal F/C ratio balance: 1 Unit costs 10 Gold, 1 City cost 100 gold (and doubled in cost per built city) so a city sort of "paid for" itself in 10 turns... *but* as Unit Count increased, Gold income per turn decreased to maintain the Units
  

Basically what I am describing is emulated in the CivII engine.

At some point, if one does not manage one's resources well, Cities would build enough Units that cause *all* (and more) Happy Hour Income to be consumed.

However, those calculations (I suspect) are what turned Happy hour into a process that was heavy on processor time and led to instabilities.

The fix there would be to have Happy Hour calculated over the seven minute timer *on the holdings recorded at the immediately previous Happy Hour* -- it's another table-space or array needed, but the calculations would not need to be done on the fly in the middle of a massive update process.

i'm not sure of the calulations needed, but here's one way this could happen:

• Snapshot taken just before happy hour process
  
• Base per farm income @ 1 farm = 55 (as is the current base, right?)
  
• Base cost per Farm when $farmcount>=10 total farms for $player = negative .07 gold per farm
  
• Base cost per City (to maintain City) when $citycount>=10 cities total = negative .14 gold per city
  
• effectively Cities cost twice as much to maintain as farms - though really 3x might be more realistic in economic terms
  
• Base costs per Unit (to maintain Units) each Legion (say 5,000 Units) costs .01 gold to maintain - to be paid out of on-hand Gold just before Happy Hour (or immediately after, but before the Gold is disbursed into on-hand status)
  
• If on-hand Gold is not enough to maintain all Units $usercount for each square is reduced by 10% (.1)
  

The server would have 7 minutes to space out the calculations (to reduce load spikes) -- no idea how to code that, but if it could be done it might help with load

Another thought about total F/C counts per player... if it were done *per square* (or per square held) instead... say if player held 10 squares and all (or most) of the F/C were on one square there would be a negative amount assessed in Gold per Farm based on the standard deviation between the counts on each square?
This would encourage semi-even distribution of farms/cities and it would increase incentives to hold more, and more evenly balanced squares.

With the $usercount and the heavy penalty for being unable to feed the soldiers, there are several strategies available for players to tweak opponents (assisting to cause a 10% reduction across all squares, etc) as well as several defenses available... such as attack (to conquer or not, just to lower unit count before losing 10% of units across all squares, etc)

These changes would cause a more dynamic gamespace, require more active (yet possibly not constant) resource maintenance, and make it both more difficult to take the whole thing while also easier to maintain a steady income and go for wizards once the F/C ratio is figured out along with the "sufficient to disuade attackers while not killing income" unit balances.

There are a lot of semi-conflicting ideas in there - which ones do you like / not like and why?

What would be easier to code and implement?

Should we have this discussion in a separate thread on the regular forum instead of private messaging?

That's what I have for right now...

[Dubber]

While it is certainly a decent concept, and I kind of think associating costs to maintaining a huge army 1) Makes sense and 2) would keep unit counts sane, the plan you outlined below does not really address two of the three core concepts of what needs to be accomplish, as it does not really prevent farm-cheesing nor discourage mega-perming.

With that said, I do believe having unit upkeep costs would be a good gold-sink, but I think it is a thing that would need to be on-top of adjustments to purchase costs.

Also, I do not believe the server could handle a per-square based calculation each happy hour, however I think instead of reducing the units by 10% per turn without enough cash, rather the player's gold on hand could just continue to suffer into negative cash - effectively paralyzing the player as they could not deploy or do a whole bunch until they bring themselves up to the positive. This may need to be capped, however, or else I could see a situation where they become perm. in the red.

I'll probably start a thread (or highjack the normal thread) to discuss concepts - sometimes in the initial phase, however, it is better to gain concepts on a one-on-one basis....

[Dubber]

Without hard caps in place, how do mega-perms get blocked?

The only way I see, maybe, is to make mega-perms result in flat income (as does ioi's "effectively 1,000 income cap" suggestion) ... a mega-perm would need to be too painful to maintain before players stopped building them.

The per-square calculation might be the saving grace there?

Maybe a 10:1 (or 55:1?) Farm:City ratio could be needed to maintain a 500:1 Unit:City ratio and still earn the full standard/55 Gold per Farm on each individual square? And maybe a price jump for hard assets at each order of magnitude jump in $assetTypeCount?

This still doesn't fix the farming cheese. the answer there might be decimation (reducing to 10%) of existing hard assets on conquering a square... and a forced destruction of all hard assets on a the 3rd and subsequent annexations of any square within, say, a few hours of abandonment?

That should help reduce the cheesing?

[Dubber]

On rethinking and posting these ideas, I think that calculation in #2 below might be the best pain point against mega-perming (assuming the calculation were made on a *per square* basis) *but* there still needs to be a way to cut the cheesing of the 1st ~50 of $assetType.

I have philosophical problems with the hard caps (and Succat has said he does not like them as a solution) idea in #1... It's an artificial, arbitrary constraint which will lead to complaints and dissatisfaction.

Two main ways I can see to accomplish all three goals:

1) Hard cap the number of resources allowed per square (to something like 50-100 TOTAL across cities/farms). With this, the price probably doesn't need to be adjusted.

2) Change the pricing, so that effectively the price ends up causing a soft-cap as far as efficiency. One cost formula I have been considering is cost = 100 * 2^([# farms/cities] /

3). This would actually make the first couple farms/cities cheaper than status quo, but right around 50, it starts scaling pretty fiercely and I doubt we would see squares much larger than 50/50.

[succat]

1) Remove farm-cheesing - for this, I haven't thought it all the way through yet, but I kind of like the idea of the more farms that are put on a square, the less gold is gained from them so that you are forced to put farms on other squares to really start gaining more gold - and kind of use the same idea for cities/units. Perhaps there really ought to be a penalty, sort of like a deduction for having too many assets on a single square that would function much like rebels, causing units and gold to subtract from a square - it would be an overpopulation effect or something like that.

2) Remove mega-perming - I think using the idea above for spreading around farms and cities across your squares to get the maximum gain from them will help to solve the perm-hoarding-assets problem.

3) Scale the economy back a bit - I'm thinking of toning wizards down, making embassy extractions 1%, and basing the bless payout on the number of active players because we don't want the bless payout to increase in frequency with more players because that makes the economy get out of whack - we just want it to provide a little random bonus money here and there to help players have some extra unexpected cash, but not so much and so often that it becomes a main source of income.

Havoc is basically useless I've heard so it should probably be adjusted a little too - it used to be THE game-leveler, but with wizards and perms, it took a backseat - maybe it's time for a tweak.