quote:
Originally posted by Tomgs:
Even without mothballing the tactic would work fast if you build bases (50% maintaince) and took a maintaince boost at start up. You would be able to build up bases and a few scout ships and still require the AI to surrender very fast. This tactic is very boring but it would work.
Yes, but if you use the maintenance as the base for the score you will also get only 50% of points for bases. That will eliminate that tactic.
quote:
Even without mothballing I very rarely have to slow down or stop building ships because of lack of minerals. The only time that happens is when I build a lot of stellar manipulation ships or bases all at once. That is much later in the game than you are talking about.
Well, the scoring system that I suggested won't change anything in there. The AI will be building a loads of ships too, now that the problem with AI construction queues has been found AI will be on more-less even ground with human in building area. Also, you can overproduce the ships in early game just by building a large number of Base Space Yards, which are very fast to build and low on maintenance. That would make it a issue in the early parts of game too (you just need to build a large number of BSY and then build and mothball ships, it can be done very fast).
quote:
You can also adjust the score that the AI's accept surrender on if you think they surrender too easily. I do think that if exploited it is too easy but if you have a fleet occupying their homeworld and all their ships are destroyed, unless they are xenophobes, they should consider surrendering. I do think however if you have "glassed" one or more of their worlds they should fight on a lot longer unless they are an extremely pacificist race. Right now the different races aren't that much different in the way they react (without mods) except the Xenophobes do take a lot longer to surrender.
Well, I have disabled surrender for Xenophobe Sergetti and Xi'Chung, but the non-xenophobe or non-honorable races should have an option open to surrender if there is no hope left. Of course, that can and should be addressed in more then one way (like improving AI diplomacy ability, giving huge political penalties for genocide of race - atrocities, etc.) but at the moment, AI only looks at scoring when he decides on diplomatic actions. The scoring at the moment has a huge impact on the game, surrendering been just the most obvious part, but AI looks at score for all of his actions toward another empire. Score influences things like trade, demands, threats, requests, etc. - basically all of the diplomacy. It has a huge effect on game and simply needs to be accurate.
IMO the scoring has to be a way to determine empires true power. And that power includes both economical and military power. However, if you have an empire that has 100 mothballed ships and can support only 10 of them, then empire's true military power is these 10 ships it can support. The fact is that you can unmothball ships faster then produce new ones but you still need to pay resources to unmothball ships. You can't just unmothball a number of ships, throw them into battle, lose them and then do it all over again - you need to gather resources necessary to unmothball ships first. So, if an empire doesn't have these resources all of its mothballed ships are going to just sit useless. The empire may have the resources to unmothball all of it's ships, but then again it may not - it makes a world of difference but this is not visible by the number of mothballed ships. An empire that has 100 mothballed ships that can unmothball them all and the one that has 100 mothballed ships and can't unmothball any of them, at the present scoring system would have the same score - and that IMO is not right. So, the scoring of mothballed ships doesn't accurately represent the true military power of an empire. The true military power IMO is just the amount of ships that empire has (active) and can support.
The scoring system I propose will have an effect that if you are not at war, you will probably mothball ships in order to save resources and that will reflect your overall scoring. Also, if you want yourself to be seen as a great power, you will have to have some active ships - just like in true life. Also, it will make you much less likely to become an MEE during peacetime, which is also realistic IMO - you won't be seen as a military threat if you are peaceful(it opens up a new tactic to mothball your ships in order to avoid MEE status). At peace time the economic power will have the biggest impact on scoring which is also right IMO. When the war breaks out, you will use your full military potential and that will also reflect in your score - which IS your true military power in that situation.
The maintenance simply reflects this very accurately and should be used as scoring base for military power.
quote:
I guess what I am saying is yes mothballing can be an exploit but it makes the game too easy and so you will become bored easily and so will not do it very often. If you enjoy taking a lot of the risk out of it I say go ahead and do it till you get bored and then do it a different way. For multiplayer this could hurt your opponent if it is abused but it really isn't much faster if you can build ships nonstop in the beginning anyway so I don't see any great harm.
Well, I don't use this because this really isn't interesting way to play game, but the fact that you don't want to (ab)use a flaw in the game, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be fixed.
[This message has been edited by Daynarr (edited 07 February 2001).]