I like the recent increases to fuel costs although I haven't quite adapted successfully (yet). I hope it will lower the confusion threshold for newcomers to the game. For most people, our natural base-building instinct (based on standard business logistics) is to avoid shipping things too far. This should make for more compact colonies where it is easier to figure out who's territory is who's. Howerver, with the current game mechanics, I see a few balance tweaks that might be in order:
1. Robot factions are undully penalized by their relianace on power for fuel. In 1v1 games they are nearly unplayable because they cannot produce anything far away from their base without producing extra power (extra claims they don't posess). I suggest giving them a 50% reduction in shipping power costs (their fuel cost).
2. Expansive factions are over powered now in 1v1 and FFA due to faster shipping = reduced fuel (in addition to their cheaper offworlds, geos and upgrades). I suggest the dropping the cheaper offworlds since that benefit is the most drastic and will have the least impact on FFA balance. Most people tend to be cautious about being the first to put up an ofworld in a FFA.
3. Scientific factions are significantly over powered in FFA and slightly over powererd in 1v1. I think a slight penalty to their free base resource scheme might be in order. Since other factions are shipping things across the map and paying fuel costs, maybe science should get the base resources free, but have to pay a little fuel for each tile producing secondary resources to make the choice of founding science a little more difficult?
4. In my opinion, you absolutely have to work on more homogeneous dispersion of map resources if this game is going to be enjoyed long-term. This current tournament should confirm that choice of founding location is WAY too important. The game is not fun if you have lost because you have chosen to delay founding for 30 miliseconds later than your opponent and then must suffer another 25 minutes in probable loss.
30 milliseconds? In the first match, I felt that both of you deserved to lose completely because you founded so late, it was such a horrific start. 21k debt and 1 claim trade for a vastly superior position? You're willing to pay 20k debt for a new claim, and an extra tile at level 1 is worth ten times as much as an extra tile at level 5, so how much is that founding position worth? First player gets the only aluminum, only water, a brilliant steel triangle, and some water adjacency, so at least 60k. Not just that, but scavenger founding after the scientist appears, and no claims on the market. To have the same BM effect, the scavenger spends twice as much money on the black market, has significantly less cash as a scavenger, and has hardly any carbon monopoly benefits in a 1v1.
Having much of the game decided in a single instant is unpleasant because it introduces more luck, but uniformizing the map will make games uniform, since there is minimal hidden information. There's no replay value in playing the same map over and over. In a 1v1 at least, the beginning auction can be lengthened to fix the rapid thinking issue, but the map is very hard to improve after it is generated. The point of the founding auction is that if you found reasonably, the difference between your founding positions should be around 5k of debt. If you found one tick late, you only give your opponent a 1-3k debt advantage, which is nothing to worry about. But if you let your opponent have a 60k debt advantage, there's nothing that can be done other than to found 60k debt earlier.
Fuel costs right now are an essential part of OTC because Soren has decided to allow instant claiming in the early game. The fuel cost prevents cross-map found ganking, so there is a critical synergy here. If this ganking were removed, then maybe fuel costs could be lowered. But only then, and not now.
Actually, I think it makes a lot of sense to slow the game down during the found phase. Each second in founding involves far more thinking than a normal game second. Why not give more time in recognition of that fact?
Just curious... do you actually play this game or just postulate theories here anonymously? If you are one of our more recognized players... why not do the commuinity a favor and post with a nick-name that indicates you have some real experience playing with the veteran players rather than just trolling?
1. True. Robo's are somewhat underpowered
2. It can be a little bit overpowered late-game through there are many ways to counter Expansive.
3. Scientific is alright
4. True on sentence #2. (Soren told me he is working on map gen)
Also you play a faction which is best for the map. You don't go and say I am going to play Expansive only. And I have seen enough decent spots for Expansive/Scientific/Scavenger and you could play Robo too but robo just suck imo without godtiles. But there are still like 1 of the 4 maps I get is just awful which should be dealt with.
For the Map gen there should always be like 2 Good enough spots on the map. (maybe make it so that you code it like:
(A good enough spot):
Scavenger: 2 lows 1 medium carbon together (and atleast 1 low/med/high alu in the range of max 20 tiles)
Expansive: 1 high 1 low together iron ( and atleast 1 low/med/high alu in the range of max 20 tiles)
Scientific: 3+ lows iron + 2+ water/sil ( '' '' )
Robotic: 1 high iron and 1! low iron-alu together.
and have it so that Every Mapgen has atleast 2 of theses in every mapgen (random ofcourse) The list above should be the minimum of what should be on the map but It can be better than what I wrote above ofcourse as example: Scavenger 1 low 1 med 1 high carbon together
I would rather be able to view the map before finishing to load. Just a simple map that can be loaded instantly and thus be displayed first while the map itself loads before the debt even starts ticking. I could live with slower debt ticks, too.
Wut-wut? Mapgen rebalance?
Till then I really liked DT/Yerand's idea about asking for a reroll pre-found. Unfortunately, at the moment this is the only way to overcome mapgen shenanigans which are almost unbearable in FFA let alone in 1v1. As I mentioned many times before I also think our perception of scientific OP'ness is skewed by sci god spots on every map. Let's talk about it once the frequency of their appearance becomes more reasonable.
I'm not convinced that unbalanced mapgen needs a fix. On any map the 1st best found is usually better than the 2nd best. By how much it is better depends on what the map looks like after the 1st found is made. The value of the 1st should be reflected in the amount of debt people take on. Unbalanced maps test player's map analytical skills.
I would however appreciate a slower debt ticker. the 8k debt ticks are brutal.
It's easy to say that when you're watching from home. you get a full view of the map with commentary whereas the players are scanning, checking the black market, and checking offworld prices pre-found. I didn't know it was at 20k because the debt counter is a lot faster than in beta 10 than in beta 9 so i'm used to more time to make a decision. My first time playing beta 10 consistently was yesterday. I didn't know it was at $20k because it ticks down too fast. I was checking all the aforementioned boxes when wino beat me to the found on the same spot. It was a good call by him and a lapse on my part. Of course that claim was worth more than $20k but it went from 50k to 20k a lot faster than normal and i didn't realize it.
Also saying "i can't believe that player founds scavenger and surrenders the best tiles on a map" is a little silly. There was only 1 patch of iron on the map so if you're opponent beats you to the best found you have no other choice. It was dictated by wino's quicker found.
I'd welcome some 1v1 if you're interested and I'm sure wino would as well. It's easier than it looks when you're a spectator and I've fallen into that trap myself watching other people's matches and wondering why they did what they did. In real time you may find that we're a bit better than we looked.
Now regarding wino's original posting:No love for robotic huh? I disagree with robotic being underpowered because of your ability to manipulate resources and minimize fuel costs by only needing iron/aluminum and 1 other tile nearby (say water or silicon) to make a good run.
Regarding scientific - if the factors are right this is still the strongest found because you can ALWAYS make money with scientific. Having the cash at any given time is key for 1v1 especially when you're exploiting resources your opponent doesn't have. I agree that this is normally the strongest found a little overpowered.
I personally like difficult maps because they force you to make intelligent decisions. I had no problems with any of the 3 games last night. Not founding sooner was my own fault on the first game and a credit to wino for founding and then following up with repeatedly shutting me down.
^This. Not quite enough time to make decisions in the current state. I agree with cubit about mapgen.
People complain about awful map generation but in honesty i think they're not looking at the map correctly. 2 adjacent low iron is enough to support 3 steel mills which will do just fine if you supplement it with other tiles. Is it better than overproducing iron with a high and low? no. is it worth it to take 2 low iron and found near other plentiful resources? absolutely. Also everyone has perfect information with reveal map so it's a matter of valuing a good spot correctly. It's hard to value it correctly though with 8k ticks of founding debt. If experienced players struggle with it being that fast just imagine how new players will feel.
I agree with magic about robots, although you do need to be ahead on upgrades and cash to manipulate markets efficiently. Also, I'd say that power adjacency is underused - take map 2 from Wino vs Magic - I'd consider founding a robot on Magic's spot and using solar panels to increase iron production to get that annoyance out of the way without overcomitting claims.
The big problem with map gen is that sometimes there just isn't a second best spot and if you are late you have lost the game. In fact, I think map gen is only a problem in 1v1 these days, in FFAs people have learnt to adapt to whatever the map is throwing at them - and the game does allow you to skip steel sometimes.
Overall I'd say we should watch some more games from the tournament - that's kinda the point of it - before jumping to conclusions, competitive play definitely foces you to reevaluate your strategies and opinions on the meta and we've only seen 2 matches.
Blackmagic outlined things quite well.
When founding in 1v1 you have to consider a lot of things, you basically have to plan HQ1 to HQ3 for yourself and the 2nd best way your opponent can get to HQ3 himself. This means you have to put yourself in your opponents shoes and think what he could possibly do after you found to reach HQ3 before you.
The means the method by which you get to HQ3 optimally is predetermined by the time both players found.
The black market can severely hamper a player's ability to get to HQ3. The black market and the map usually eliminate companies from the list of foundable companies. Nukes massively increase the value of scientists, pirates massively decrease any scientific founds not adjacacent to iron/water, mutinies decrease the value of geothermals (and thus, expansives), the absence of geos increases the value of scavs, patches of resources favor scientifics, and so on, and so on, and so on. It takes a lot of practice and study to get these things in the back of your mind. You don't have the time to come to a 1v1 unprepared. You have to get ready to analyze these things before you think about thinking about clicking the 1v1 button.
in a FFA mattters are even worse because you have to find at least as many foundable locations as there are players which takes an even more generic approach to founding than 1v1 does. If there are 50% less foundable locations than there are players, prepare to found 1st and be at the mercy of late founder's black magicking you (because late founder mutinies are basically free and hard to defend against).
An additional problem with extremely unbalanced maps is that you have even less time to realize that the optimal time to found on the only foundable location is at 30-50k debt, but even so I haven't seen 1v1 maps like these in a long time where the 2nd best spot was 50k worth of debt worse than the 1st found.
I would still like i lot to be able to bid on the 1st found through an auction, the opening bid being whatever the debt ticker was at when the 1st found was made and additionally the bid increments would be a little smaller.
Yeah, the way I think about it is - how good is the 2nd-best spot? If it is pretty good, then I don't care if I found first or not. If it is bad, then founding >$40K is easily justifiable.
These days I have to look at the colony too and what it is demanding. If the colony wants chems, I'm more likely to go scav sine the transition from carbon is easier. Likewise if the colony wants power, I'm inclined to go robot, since robotic power tiles are useful in other ways. More stuff to think about, supporting the idea that the debt timer should be counting much slower.
I don't see any reason why it has to start ticking at 200k. This just punishes new-comers. EDIT: Why not start it at 60k (the C debt limit thresh hold) and count down 1k/s. This would give about 30-40 seconds before you reach the region of starting debt that most people found at (20-30k). Worst case scenario, you are in the positive at 1 minute mark. I don't think having a full minute to analyze what you will do for the next 25 minutes of the game is a bad thing.
That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, it is indeed more difficult to make decisions in real-time than afterwards. In real-time watching the stream, I was thinking Expansive in lower right of colony as a counter to the Science at 40k, which means I would also have been crushed by anyone founding earlier. Post-match I went back and decided that top left is a better idea, but still not Scavenger. My issue was that GW claimed that it was the auction system's fault for rewarding twitch reactions, which is the opposite of the truth. The auction system's purpose is to reduce twitch reactions. "30ms" is a misconception created by misplays.
That single found wasn't the end of the game, there were lots of other opportunities for you to get back into it, and lots of opportunities for you to fall out of it, but overall it turned out the way it is. Cubit has rescued worse positions from the clutches of his opponents, but not always.
I've never played multiplayer, and I probably never will, because of an unusual technical issue with my internet and virtual machines. I can't play most other games in multiplayer either.
I agree with Cubit, there's too much to analyze in the short period of time you have. At best, you can learn from your mistakes for next time to improve your system. I knew Science would found first, and then looked at the Iron and Water, then ruled out Scavenger vs Science after realizing the Iron found was garbage, leaving me with an Expansive with Iron/Steel. By that time, we're already at 40k. I paid no attention to geotherms, the colony, or the BM other than the absence of Claims/AB and the presence of nukes. I hadn't taken into consideration the lack of water other than its distance, the pirates, the far silicon, or the dynamite. That's a lot of stuff for a player to ignore.
I wouldn't want to click on that Offworld tab in founding, that takes a lot of time to look at.
No, 30ms is my completely non-scientific guess at the time difference in who clicked first to found in our 2nd game. I literally watched the expansive HQ being built and thought it was my own base rather than magic's. Maybe 30ms was being too precise, but it's the right order of magnitude
Ok, I understand your position now. You're saying that you took just slightly too much time to think, not that reaction time was the issue, and this small amount of time doesn't deserve a big catastrophe. That's very reasonable. Founding is insanely hard with these timers, which causes the big swings. I thought your starting positions were actually pretty close in that game, +1 claim and some debt for a worse start, you didn't make any real mistake in your found. pb didn't like it, but I did.
Difficult =/= imbalanced. Sure if you have sparse resources and no god tiles everyone is the same shoes, knock yourself out - make intelligent decisions. However, living off two low iron tiles won't cut it vs scientist with adjacent water and iron, who can just sit there and make money from life support for free. And crush your steel along the way. You also can't really calculate the risk pre-found. All you have is a gross estimate. The player who decides the stronger spot is worth 32k of debt is not necessarily less skillful than his competitor that evaluates it at 34k. It goes the other way as well. Taking a lot of debt can make you a genius with a crystal ball when things work out your way or a fool who committed suicide when they don't. Since the actual number has a lesser impact on your overall debt than power, fuel, colony consumption, random events and your opponent's actions combined. There's only so much you can predict. Bottom line - a single OP founding spot is just bad for the game, no matter how you spin it.
Agree with InSync.
A single random auction event can turn a founding spot that you thought was worth 30k into a 20k spot. Eg: going expansive because all the iron is across a chasm and there is only 1 triple iron tile; then teleportation comes up for auction.
I disagree that single dominating spots are bad for the game. On the contrary, I think if more such spots existed, the founding meta would become a lot more interesting.
Every example about "OP spots" seems to revolve around "30ms too late", "32k vs 34k". That is totally missing the point. If the spot is REALLY that OP, then maybe it should be taken at 60k or even earlier. A bad spot at 35k does not suddenly turn OP at 30k. It just becomes a bit stronger. Everyone missing the found by a second and then losing on the spot is just being greedy. If it's actually as OP as you say, you can easily take it 10k earlier than you evaluate it at (lol?) and be in an excellent position still. A difference of even a couple of thousand debt in the player evaluations only matters if both of the evaluations are actually off by tens of thousands!
And following from the previous, surprisingly bad spots become viable once the opponent starts from C debt or worse. Strange maps, when played correctly by both players, are very exciting. They're only boring and one-sided when severly misplayed, as some others have also pointed out in this thread.
Edit: oh, forgot to mention, that I do agree that the founding debt ticking should maybe be slowed just a little bit. Not like cut the time in half, but slow it down a bit. I find the founding part of the game very interesting as a challenge.
All analysis aside...I love how 2 players can look at map generation and see either a problem or a solution depending on their perspective. Awful maps force you to make tradeoffs and make the game unique. You never quite know how to value things and that makes it fun and exciting. It's all based on how well you play things out.
Did I take on too much debt with that found? Will he be able to expand first and take all the tiles I was counting on (say by founding robotic and expanding immediately)? I'm glad people are forced to play out difficult maps on QM and in tournaments because I learn more about the game mechanics and risk/reward from difficult maps than I do from an "easy" maps. It makes you look at founding locations creatively. I love that.
Veivi,
The problem as I see it not that we can't learn to adapt to some scarcity. There are two problems with map resources being unnecesarilly scarce imo:
The first problem is that it is truly a guessing game how much debt a spot is worth. You don't know what random auctions will bring. If you take on 50k in debt... and a power short event comes up on day 2, you may not be able to recover from the debt spiral. On the other hand, if you took on 40k in debt to monopolize the aluminum market and your opponent correctly went robot... he may be screwed if an aluminum short comes up early in the game.
The second problem is that the new fuel costs require us to collect resources close to our bases. If it is not viable to ship carbon or silicon across the map due to my forced 2nd founding location... then I have lost the ability to react to the market demands, react to my opponent and make strategic investment choices. I am asking for more homogeneous distribution of resources because I don't enjoy the 'helpless' sensation of having no choice of what resources to produce after founding.
I don't think getting severely unlucky with random events actually has anything to do with OP founds. In any evenish game, if the key auctions or shorts favour one of the players at key moments, that player is going to win. How is that surprising? That's a swing that works both ways in the long run, though.
You do have a choice of the founding spot. Your actual problem here seems to be that you cannot realistically evaluate the founds and match them with the proper amount of debt. Talking about random events is just avoiding the actual problem, since they can always either help or hinder you, in any given situation.
If the secondary spot is really so bad as you describe, then found earlier. There WILL be a balance, at SOME amount of debt. What it is, don't ask me, but surely the number does exist.
If you think of the starting debt vs. the relative income potential of the primo spot compared to the secondary spot in a vaccuum, there may be some equilibrium value. However, you should not discount the RISK of random events when taking on debt! If a power short, steel surplus or somthing else that hurts your ability to recover from debt only occurs 1 in 20 games, it has an impact on the viability of your debt evaluation. This is the classic risk of ruin problem in probability theory.
For example, as a poker player, I do not always chose to play in a profitable game (even if I figure I am an odds-on favorite to win money). Sometimes the stakes are too high and I must walk away. As a simple example: if I told you I would pay you $1.05 when a coin flips heads and you pay me $1.00 when it flips tails, you should flips coins with me all day. However, you should not flip a coin if the stakes were your entire life savings on a single coin flip.
The fluctuations of random events can disproportionately affect the person taking on debt more so than the person who does not. The risk of ruin for the early founder makes the founding decision partially based on his own risk tolerance, which is subjective (not objective). Thus for the two players there is this dynamic tango of guessing not only what the found is worth, but what the other player's risk tolerance is, which in turn affects it's worth. I suspect this is a problem for people who study dynamical systems, but it may be possible there is no closed form solution (number).
It came down to 32k vs 34k because you can't found at 60k nowadays. And the necessity to take a lot of debt itself is bad. A single decision whether to found now or wait is what determines the outcome of the game for both parties. How is it good? Please don't tell me (again) that a more skillful player will know exactly how much debt to take because he won't. There are many factors that will start kicking in later and can't be foreseen. Same debt can turn into a brilliant call or a suicide even on the same map with slightly different random events/auctions. I'd rather lose every time because of my misuse of claims, special buildings, black market etc but still have a full game with both players have similar opportunities during the course of the entire game than win every time because I clicked first or avoided clicking and it's game over after first 5 minutes.
If you have problems with specific maps, please post the map seed (and map settings) so I can take a look at it. Reveal Map is supposed to fix most of this, but I am sure everyone would agree there is some limit where the 2nd spot is not worth playing out.
Will do, Soren. That's a good idea! Talking specifics will be much more constructive than theorizing.
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