Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I've been playing some solo games, and I think I've decided that the Ancient Race racial trait is just too powerful for its price.

In the first turn, you can:
1. Identify the home systems, homeworlds, planet types, and atmospheres of ALL opponents, including neutral races.

To do this, look for medium planets with resources of 100% +/- 5%. If races start with more than 1 home planet, you can even distinguish neutrals from the others (neutrals always start with just 1 planet). The only hitch is the possibility of 2 races close together both on Rock/Oxygen--you wouldn't be able to tell whose planet was whose--but normally they are spread far enough apart to tell.

This knowledge allows you to:[*]plan your expansion/growth/system claiming/empire borders[*]plan a defensive front or early-game offensive attack[*]plan your early trading partners, especially for other colonization types, and even send scout ships straight to their home systems

Obviously, these are all huge advantages.

2. You can also identify every planet in the galaxy with Ruins.

My first colonization ships are always to colonize planets with ruins, even if it takes the ship far away from my home systems. Not only can you get some very cool unique techs, but you can get a huge advantage in early research, getting a big jump in some main research areas that, at this point, would take you many turns or years to develop.

My current solo game (SIEV Gold Demo), I think I've colonized at least 8 ruins worlds, and I'll get at least 5 more once I get Ice Colonization (and its only turn 20!!) I have 4 different unique ruins techs, Gas AND Rock colonization (from ruins, not from trade), and received some great research boost in Physics, Organic Tech, and a couple of weapons areas.

(One ruins planet, incidently, gave me nothing. Was there a unique tech here that I already had? Or was this a bug?)

Proposed Solutions for discussion:[*]Make the Ancient Race more expensive. 2000? 2500?[*]Hide the details of planets. Either until you actually colonize them (don't know if I like this idea), or until you actually get into the system--"sensor range" (other people have made this suggestion: put an "As of 2402.5" -- either the date you Last visited, or some arbitrary "historical" date for Ancient races, but things might have changed since then...)[*]Make the other homeworlds less obvious. With 1 homeworld per race, you're pretty much stuck, but with 3 or more, you could do some averaging. How about a Large HW at 110/92/87, a Medium HW at 88/107/94, and a Small HW at 97/101/108? It averages out, especially if you simply shift research centers to account for the difference (instead of shifing mining facilities)[*]How about: have homeworlds (or maybe ALL colonized worlds?) MISREPORT their %'s - this would be a quick and easy solution to the "find everyone in the galaxy" problem[*]Don't reveal ruins on planets until colonized. (or maybe just until you get into "sensor range"--similar to idea above) or[*]Show MORE planets that HAVE ruins, but FEWER that have any cool new tech to find. Maybe 1/3 have advanced techs, the rest just have stone relics. (I don't know if this reduces the advatage of an Ancient race, it simply reduces the effectiveness of Ruins planets)

What do you think? Maybe the counter argument is as simple as "Well, for the same 1000 pts, you could have THIS racial tech, and look what kind of advantages THIS has..." Any other techs that give you this kind of INSANE advantage for 1000 pts?

[ 23 January 2002: Message edited by: MegaTrain ]</p>

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

For 1000 points, you could:

-add 1 speed to all your ships
-add facility space to all your planets (two different abilities for that)
-cut your ships supply needs by 25%
-add substantial bonuses to any attribute

Any of those. IMO Ancient Race is balanced. Some of the other traits- like Emotionless- seem a bit out of wack though.

Phoenix-D

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I think in general the ancient race trait has advantages that make sense, but I would prefer that all views of "known but not currently observed" systems to only show the Last known data. Ancient races could be given the data as of before homeworld placement.

On the other hand, it kind of makes sense that ancients would know where the ruins and other races homeworlds would be.

The effect can be reduced by turning off the "homeworlds have the same size" option, but this can lead to advantages for Gas Giant empires.

As for ruins, I definitely think it would be neat (at least optionally) to have ruin location be less immediately visible. I'd like to have to fly by or colonize a planet to detect them. In my Proportions mod I made it so many ruins actually don't provide any technology, which partly helps. Unfortunately I didn't find any way to mod it so that ruins were actually invisible until colonized.

The main reason I rarely use Ancient though is because I think it's a bit less fun not to have to explore.

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I normally play with large (255) quadrants and find ancient race useless.
Knowing systems in the other side of the galaxy only makes more confusion, and will make it harder to use the send colony ship function (in the planets window).
I normally find some friendly ancient race (like the Eee) that signs a partership at least for a while, so you get to know everything without wasting your points in ancient race.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

OT sorry: why is emotionless out of whack? Too good or too expensive? Too expensive considering -50% happyness?

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Too expensive (IMO).

Dropping happyness to 50% gives you 800 points; that means the total cost the the trait is 2200.

Is having happy population (NOT jubulent, note) really worth 2200 points? Troops are good pacifiers for planets that have the space; any kind of standing fleet does the same. For that price you could have any of the racial tech areas, Advanced Storage Techniques AND Ancient Race, propulsion experts AND advanced power conservation, etc, to say nothing of the regular traits you could buy. IMO it's not worth it at all.

Phoenix-D

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

the thing that bugs me about ancient race is that any time during the game you open or close a warp point they know about it. The maps update accordingly. And their Allies get this information as well. And anyother stellar stuff.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by tesco samoa:
the thing that bugs me about ancient race is that any time during the game you open or close a warp point they know about it. The maps update accordingly. And their Allies get this information as well. And anyother stellar stuff.<hr></blockquote>
True, and a bit anoying to me as well. And you dont even have to be ancient race, just have visted both systems at some point during the game.

Geoschmo

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I assume this is true of all stellar manip, no? Planet and storm destruction and creation, etc?

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Ancient Race even gets to see if a player changes the name of a world, if they think to look. Good for long-range communication - you can send a message to an ancient race!

Perhaps we just need to change the name of the ability to reflect the constant updates and immediacy of the information

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Perhaps this should change.

There should be an option to turn that stuff off.

Or Ancient race and our maps should not update the new info until you have done some intel on that system or visited it again.

That would make sence. ANd would make that intel alit more important.

But right now that is just too unbalanced. Free knowledge without a price

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Again, isn't this true of all system knowledge, not just that gained with Ancient Race?

To have each player keep their own Last seen view of each system would require the program to store that for each empire, and I don't think it does that, does it?

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

That's right. All sytem knowledge is the same.
Selecting ancient race is a waste of points.
Most knoledge of far away systems is completely useles, you normally only care about nearby systems, and exploring them isn't difficult.
Identifying homeworlds is not as easy as you describe, espacially in a large quadrant you'll find too many would be homeworlds.
It would only be a nice advantage if you select the option to make contents of all systems visible.
And you can get all advantages of ancient race without exploring the whole quadrant by signing a partership with someone that has it for only 1 turn.

The "As of 2402.5" exploration memory would need some deep hard code changes but it sounds to me like the best solution.
I had suggested it sometime but don't know if I was the first.
You could make it not only remember the planets and racial points, but even alien colonies, and not sure about ships (keeping track of Last know location of every enemy ship would be too much).
I hate not remembering the location of an alien homeworld I had already found but didn't bother to write down.

The more ruins but fewer with useful tech suggestion sounds good. I would avoind the ruin hunting strategy and give it a more random effect. It should be relatively easy to mod.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

A few comments:

Races which choose Ancient Race have spent 1000 on something which everyone will get eventually. Ancient races can't go into higher levels of alliance, without giving their advantage away to other races.

The ability to get extra tech from ruins is part of what they are paying for, and having more tech is part of what makes them an "ancient race" in my view.

You could of course mod your system generation to put more ruins "behind" hidden sectors - as I am doing in my mod as the "research" element. (This mod WILL be finished and released one day, soon, )

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I think everybody has made some good points: Having Ancient Race does confer some big initial advantages, for colonization and strategic defense if for nothing else. I don't think its actually useless; but as Andres pointed out, the rest of the players can achieve the same thing eventually, and then its useless. Basically, the advantages it confers initially are offset by the fact that its a one-off thing. You can save money on explorers, know where to send your colony ships, etc., (as well as using your starmaps as diplomatic bargaining chips) but 500 turns down the road so will everyone else, and they'll still have Organic tech or Advanced Storage while you have bumpkus. I think that's pretty balanced.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

and the fact you know about every update to the map.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Off on a tangent if I may.

This is a perfect example of a point that many people forget during discussions of balance in SEIV. The fact is that most racial traits and techs have strengths and weaknesses that will change in relation to others over the course of a game. Theese advantages can appear unbalancing in a very specific point in the game, but with a long term view, they are not.

I always like to equate SEIV to a giant, highly detailed game of rock, paper, sizzors. I can imagine from the perspective of someone who plays paper, sizzors would seem highly "unbalanced". I mean, no matter how many times I face sizzors, they always cut right through me! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Many people will hit on a particular tech or racial trait and take the view that it is unbalanced and start calling for changes to the game. The fact is in almost every case it turns out they were missing some key point of view that would have allowed them to see the overall balance. Whether it's research cost, or in this case the limited time value of the ancient race attribute.

This is not to say the game is perfect. Of course problems have come up. But the big ones usually get fixed. If they didn't I doubt we would keep playing and caring.

The great modding flexibilty offered by this game allows for almost unlimited tweaking of these "unbalanced" factors. And yet, more often than not when someone decides to take it upon themselves to balance the game through a mod, they find it wasn't as bad as they thought at first, or they even make it worse.

Getting everybody to agree that a particualar acpect is unbalanced is not easy. Getting everybody to agree how it shold be changed to balance it out is almost impossible.

I don't really have a point here, other than this is a better game than even some of us that play it a lot realize.

Geoschmo

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

A lot of great comments concerning my initial post, so allow me to follow up:

I'll concede that the primary advantage of Ancient Race is strongest at the beginning of the game and decreases over the game years, but I think that the effect of that advantage carries across the entire game.

My point is that knowing the full-galaxy layout at the beginning of the game allows you to establish empire borders that greatly benefit your own empire. Let's say you determine (by looking for ~100% medium planets) that another player has a home system a few systems away, let's say 6 systems in between (ME-1-2-3-4-5-6-Him). With normal exploration and colonization at average rates (in all directions), you would expect each empire to expand equally, meet in the middle, and each claim the 3 systems on the side closest to their home. But the first thing I'm going to do is to send colonizer ships with armed escort straight to system #5 above (I'll leave him the extra system closest to home), and claim an extra 2 systems that would otherwise not be mine. How is he going to know I'm far away from home? He simply encounters an already colonized system and (unless he's looking for a fight) establishes his empire border in system #6.

In all the games I've played so far (Ancient Race or not), the key has been Location, Location, Location. The race who is able to expand into the most systems early, build up the most research planets, mining planets, and construction planets has a HUGE advantage for the entire game. Assuming 2 equally-experienced players, the player with the most research and resources is going to win nearly every time.

Other comments:[*]"Don't get Ancient Race, just become a partner with one." Yeah, you first of all have to FIND another player/AI that is Ancient Race, and then you have to convince them to Partner with you (with much less advantage for them). You're talking turn 30+, probably more like turn 50. By that time, empire borders are already established, you've already explored most of the nearby systems anyway. [*]Someone mentioned that it's not that easy to find enemy homeworlds, because there are too many candidates. Not true. Go to the planets screen, sort first by Mineral %, then sort by size (the planet icon column). Scroll down to the medium planets, and then down to about 110%. They key is that homeworlds have all 3 attributes around 100%. Random planets with ~100 on minerals will usually have 26% on radioactives or 134% on organics, a dead giveaway that it's not a homeworld. If you have several planets in the same system or nearby systems of the same type/atmosphere, then that's stronger evidence of a homeworld system. [*]Balance. I know this game is all about balance, but nobody has put forward a really convincing case that "Tech XX" is a much better spending of 1000 pts. I'm sure you guys have your opinions, why don't you tell me what you'd rather spend your 1000 pts on? Maybe you'll convince me....

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

i'll spend 500 on maintenance which gives me 40% more ships and is 50% cheaper :)

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I almost always take Ancient Race. It has enormous value early in the game. Its value goes down with time, but if you used it well, then you will have a huge advantage in resource production over time. As we all know, this game is about increasing your resource production, and that production increases as a geometric rate. So if you can get a small lead early on, it blossoms into a huge lead later in the game.

It becomes even more powerful in Simultaneous games (ie games against other people): In a simultaneous game, your ship stops when it enters a unexplored system. With Ancient Race, your ship moves happily along since all systems are explored. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

So if you want to goto a planet 2 systems over, lets say it takes 1 turn to get out of your home system, plus 2 more turns to get to cross the next system, plus 1 more turn to colonize the juicy planet 2 systems over. (4 turns) Without ancient race, you spend 1 turn getting out of your home system. You sit there for a turn on the warppoint of the next system and see there is nothing there for you. You spend 2 turns crossing to the 2nd system. You sit on the wap point for a turn. Then you spend one more turn colonizing. That's 6 turns. It's only 2 extra turns, but that is alot at the beginning of the game.

And don't forget the fact that you don't have to explore: you can just churn out colony ships and not bother with exploration vessels. That saves you an initial turn or two at the beginning of the game.

And as others have said, knowing where the other races begin helps you plan your initial exploration to maximize the amount of territory you own at first contact. If you see another homeworld near a system with ruins or some nice Huge breathable planets you can send a bunch of colonizers over before the other empire finds them and takes them.

In the PBW games I have played, I've had better quality planets and alot more of them than anyone else by the time I met them. They always ask me what I did. Usually it is ancient race coupled with propulsion experts. In games when I don't take ancient race I don't expand nearly as quickly.

I played one game in an ancient galaxy so there were not many good systems to colonize. The nearest system to my home-system with a colonizable planet was 3 systems away. Because I had AR, I was able to plan for that and send colony ships straight to it instead of wandering aimlessly through asteroid fields and getting sucked into black holes after hitting their damaging warp-points.

Well, I've rambled enough. Suffice it to say I like Ancient Race

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I'd say I sort of agree with most of the points on both sides, and end up thinking it's balanced enough, although I would really like to see better fog of war in the form of only seeing the Last known information, which would probably be taken just before homeworld placement for Ancient Race players.

Personally, I tend not to like to choose AR because to me it's more fun to have to explore than to know where most things are already. Even purely competitively, I'd prefer to buy advantages like speed, combat, and production/maintenance bonuses.

All in all I think it's an interesting advantage and not generally undervalued, although clearly a player can either make a lot of use out of it, or not.

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

In a game with mix human and computer players the ancient races always live a long life. Everyone gives them gifts etc... until the alliance.

Perhaps our beef with the ancient race is focusing on the wrong area.

The problem is when you encounter a race and instantly know this race has the ancient ability.

So your not going to attack but be-friend.

And then your get the ancient race ability for free.

So perhaps the option to hide racial traits should be added to the game.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by tesco samoa:
...So perhaps the option to hide racial traits should be added to the game.<hr></blockquote>

Yes, and that's not the only reason it'd be good.

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Bman:
It becomes even more powerful in Simultaneous games (ie games against other people): In a simultaneous game, your ship stops when it enters a unexplored system. With Ancient Race, your ship moves happily along since all systems are explored. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif <hr></blockquote>Actually your ship doesn't have to stop when it enters an unexplored system. If you give your ship the command to warp into the unexplored system, and then give it a move too command, then click on the unexplored system in the galaxy map in the lower right, then click in the sector in the middle of the unexplored system in the system map.

If you do this you will see in your orders queue for the ship "Move to (current system name) (x,y), Warp, Move to (unexplored system name) (6,6)"

It even gives you the name of the system even though you don't actually know it yet. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

Now this doesn't work if two things happen.

One is if there is another race in the new system and you still have the box checked to clear orders when encountering enemy ships.

The other is if you click on the wrong unknown system in the galaxy map. Sometimes in a high density quadrant you can't always tell from the position of the systems and warp points which warp point goes to which unexplored system. If you give it orders to go to a sector that you have not explored, and you don't explore it by warping in before it tries to execute the move to order, it will ignore you.

Also, you could find yourself halfway though a system with no other warp points out and have to burn fuel and time getting back, or I guess if you timed it right you could hit a black hole this way, but hey, that's what exploring is all about right? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I agree that ancient race is very valuable in getting a running start in games. For a time I used it in all my multiplayer games. But recently I have have found that I can usually survive past the point where it serves me any purpose, and then I end up wishing I had the 1000 points in maint reduction or something else that is useful for the whole game.

Plus as someone else said, it's more fun to wonder where everybody is. But that's just a personal opinion.

I guess if my life depended on me winning a game of Space Empires IV and I needed to make absolutly sure I did everything I could do to win, I would probably pick Ancient race. But that's mainly because I am better anyway in the early part of the game. I often get bored, or have trouble keeping track of everything in the later part of the game, so I would want to make sure I won as quickly as possible.

But I don't think it's unbalanced. I think that the cost is just right considering the time depreciation of the trait.

Geoschmo

[ 29 January 2002: Message edited by: geoschmo ]</p>

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr> They key is that homeworlds have all 3 attributes around 100%. <hr></blockquote> That seems to be assuming Average planets; I've played games where my Bad homeworld's stats were in the low 80s. You're also assuming all players' homeworlds the same size.

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by capnq:
That seems to be assuming Average planets; I've played games where my Bad homeworld's stats were in the low 80s. You're also assuming all players' homeworlds the same size.<hr></blockquote>

True, that's usually how I play my solo games, and the Online games I've played so far have all used that starting scenario. With different starting choices, I'm sure you could determine a pattern, perhaps all three attributes of ~85% for poor, ~100% for average, and ~115% for good (just guessing, i'd have to play some practice games and see what patterns emerged--but I'm sure it's not that difficult to decipher).

What happens if you allow homeworlds to be different sizes? Will one race have an advantage with larger homeworlds? Or will it only start with odd sizes if it can average the number of facilities over, say, 3 homeworlds?

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by MegaTrain:
What happens if you allow homeworlds to be different sizes? Will one race have an advantage with larger homeworlds?<hr></blockquote>Yep. I've played games where I had a large homeworld and everyone else had mediums, and where I had a medium homeworld and the Aquilaeians had a huge homeworld. That was a tough game!

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Even with different size home worlds thogh it is possible to pinpoint the homeworlds with a high degree of reliability. It is just statistically unlikely that a planet will have plus or minus 5% on all three resources, and have the same conditions as what ever your homeworld has. It may take a little longer to narrow down if the planets are different sizes, but it can be done. You may have one or two that you aren't sure about in a large quadrant, but unless it's only a couple players in the game, that still gives you a solid idea of where they are.

What might be better, in fact I think I will suggest this to Malfador, is if you don't know exactly what resource percentages a planet has until you actually colonize it or have a robo miner working it. They could have "bands" like poor, below average, average, etc. The bands could be 20 or 30 % wide. Then it would be much harder to know if a planet was a homeworld. You would be looking for planets with all three recources as "average" or "good" or wherever the bands fall. Which statistically shold be a larger group.

Geoschmo

[ 29 January 2002: Message edited by: geoschmo ]</p>

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

I suppose if the players are really concerned about preventing homeworld-guessing, someone (if the group is paranoid, a non-player) could load a random galaxy in the map editor and then specify (or add, if necessary) ample planets of about reasonable attributes in the map editor as the ones to use as homeworlds. I haven't tried this yet, but I assume the idea is this would cause the game to choose existing (random attribute) planets, rather than building new ones that follow a blueprint.

PvK

Re: Ancient Race too powerful?
 

Pvk,

Your idea would work. In fact you don't even need the map editor. You could start a game, save the map, start a new game with that map, save the map, etc. as many times as you wanted. Each time you started a new game with that map the game will put new planets in for the players. You could have dozens of empty "Homeworld" type planets. In fact you could do this without having a great knowledge of the quadrant yourself, so this is a very good suggestion.

By the way, I sent the follwing to Malfador... <blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Aaron,

I have another suggestion I would like you to consider. There has been much discussion about the Ancient Race trait being unfair. The main complaint seems to be that it allows you too pinpoint the position of all the other races at the very start of the game. This is very easily done by looking for worlds that have plus or minus 5% of all three resources and is the same conditions as your homeworld.

Having starting planets be different sizes doesn't really help because it is still statistically unlikely that all three resources will be in that small range. And different size starting planets has other problems as well.

What I would like to suggest is that you not be able to precisely gauge the resource percentages of a planet unless you have colonized it, or you have a robo-miner mining it. Even being in the same system should not allow you too know it's percentages.

Instead of know the precise percentages, it could be treated much like population happiness, race anger, and planetary conditions in that you have wide bands and the actual number is unknown. My suggestion for bands:

0 - 25 % Poor
26 - 50 % Below average
51 - 80 % Average
81 - 100 % Above Average
101 - 120 % Good
121 - 150 % Very Good
151 - up % Excellent

In this way home worlds that are 100 % plus or minus 5 % could be in either the Good or Above Average ranges in any of the three resources, and this would be a band that is from 81 -120%. Statistically a much larger group and thus impossible to pinpoint the exact location of the other races homeworlds. These bands would also mask planets when the players select high or low starting planet value, because I have value band breaks at 80 and 120%.

Note I am not suggesting you change the way the actual planet value is calculated by the game and so it should not affect resource production. Just blur the players ability at knowing the exact value of the planet.

In fact I suppose you could make it so even after the planet is colonized you don't know the exact percentage of the planet. You could calculate it I suppose by dividing the production by the number of resource facilities, but oh well. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I have not attempted to give you similar ranges for finite resource games. I am not very familiar with that since I don't play them often, but I am sure suitable equivalents could be calculated.

I think my suggestion if implemented would eliminate the main "problem" with the Ancient race trait, and still leave much of it's value in locating good planets for colonizing and finding ruins. Hopefully it would not be extraordinarily hard to code this change. On the bright side it should not affect much other than the way planets are displayed. This actually should help the AI since they aren't smart enough to look for the others by this means to begin with, it will
"level the playing field" so to speak.

Thanks for a game so great that I care to make suggestions over a year after I started playing it.

George "geoschmo" Perley<hr></blockquote>
Now I make a lot of suggestions. Some he does, some he doesn't do, some he doesn't even respond to. He is very busy. But maybe he will do this one. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo