Maintenance Formula

[sapperland]

Does anyone know the formula for calculating ship maintenance cost?

[LintMan]

There's a setting in the Settings.txt file that lets you set the ship maintenance cost percentage. Unfortunately, it may not be working...

The default is 25% of the ship's original cost, per turn. I tried to adjust this to 10%, but the game still seemed to be working off the 25% figure. (Last week sometime I posted a message about this is some detail; you can still find the post if you look back a ways.).

The other factor in the maintenance cost is that you can use racial points to raise/lower your maintenance. It appears that if you pick a 10% maintenance reduction, the total maintenance percentage is reduced by 10% of the base percentage. So instead of 25% maintenance, you would have 22.5% maintenance cost.

As a side note - isn't that maintenace cost horrible? The 25% a turn means that maintenance costs for a ship add up to 250% of its build cost per year. If you won't need a ship for more than 4 turns, it's cheaper to scrap it and build a new one when you need it!

[Talenn]

Lintman:

I believe the Upkeep amount is so high as a play balance mechanism. Personally, I think its about right. Operating a fleet is a VERY expensive operation TODAY. Who knows what the future will bring.

That said, do you have problems in your games with resources? I always seem to have resources falling out my ears. I have custom data set in which I reduced the amount of resources that facilities produce AND I've upped the cost on many ship components and hulls. Even at that, I find that I am usually hovering around the 50k mark in all three resources.

I just rarely need to maintain a large fleet. The AI tends to be extremely passive and treaty happy. By the time it starts getting uppity, my Tech levels are so far ahead that I usually need very few ships to overpower them.

If the AI was more aggressive, it might force me to keep a larger fleet in being and thus slow my exponential growth. I am currently fiddling with the AI to accomplish just that.

Talenn

[Seawolf]

Lint,

2 suggestions, 1) mothball ships when not in use to reduce maintaince. 2) in the begining of the game you should build storage facilities. SInce you hardly use all the production in the first turns build up your reserve.



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Seawolf on the prowl

[Taqwus]

Heh. I must have a more violent, impatient playing style -- involving both rapid expansion and peace through superior firepower. If, say, you try to colonize one planet per turn (on average), and meanwhile try to build them all up, and then add ships for patrolling your borders, finding systems to colonize, and removing threats in the form of neighbors... it gets expensive. I've been spending just about every Last mineral on building facilities. I do need to scrap some of the older mining ships, 'tho.

In my present game (the one in which by sheer luck I got all three colony techs very VERY quickly) my construction expenses are pretty obscene, exacerbated by the fact that I put points into construction rate, and that I've got multiple conquered planets to population (had been fighting for most of the game, including turn 1. Conquered something like 2 neutrals, plus the Terrans, the Hive, the Xiloti (sp?), and the Pindons (sp?) so far, at least, of which the Terrans and the Xiloti both surrendered only very recently. These races were also quite fond of mines, meaning that a decent number of minesweepers was needed to make sure that my warships weren't obliterated on going through warp points.

In the meantime, I've also been pushing hard on research (working towards *good* phased shields, dreadnoughts, quantum engines and what-not), and trying to ramp up intelligence (because it'd be a shame if an AI managed to capture one of my prize CAs -- I've had the BC and BB techs for quite some time but haven't seen fit to build one yet; am waiting to get better tech to put in 'em). I could probably put together a nasty carrier, but I'm waiting for heavy carriers and better cargo tech. Why settle for only ~120 Large Rocket-Pod III Fighters?

(Hey. It's in character -- given that my portrait is of Vader, and the Empire wasn't known for tiny fleets of small ships. )

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[LintMan]

I agree it's a play balance issue, but given my love for large fleet clashes, it makes that a bit tough. I also think it hurts the AI sometimes (see below).

I also agree that real-life fleet costs are expensive, but it couldn't be 250% a year! The would imply that a $20 million jet would cost $50 million a year to maintain, or a $500 million aricraft carrier would cost $1.25 billion/year!

I'm not really hurting for resources, and am able normally able to keep 50K+ of reserves, while doing heavy colony expansion/development. But I'm in a peaceful mode with almost no fleet to speak of. But once I start putting together a few decent fleets (not unreasonable for an empire with 30-40 planets in 20+ systems (I'm playing a huge 255 system map)), my production and expansion capacity will go to nil.

That's really not that bad a thing for me; I almost expect it, but I think it hurts the AI a lot. I think in a game like mine where there is a long period of buildup before contact and war, the AI drains a lot of its resources building and supporting ships that goes mostly unused and become obsolete before they're needed. If the maintenance was less, it could have used those resources to expand and research and maybe it wouldn't have gotten so far behind.

[Talenn]

LintMan:

Hehe...yes, well, Carriers are probably close to that in terms of operation costs. Also remember that the maintenance costs also include the whole support infrastructure (planetside) that having a fleet would entail. I just view these costs as abstracted into the cost of the individual ships.

I also agree with your AI issues. But I dont see how they can be altered easily. I think the best tweak would be to FORCE the player to spend resources on fleets by having more hostile AIs which would actually use their fleets to harass and annoy the players.

Overall, I'd like to see something like the AI in 'Imperialism II' where you did NOT want to be perceived as the weakest player (militarily). Everyone and their mother declared war on the weaker powers. The AI in SE4 is too rooted on the SCORE. A high score will generally keep the AI at bay (until Mega-Evil level), but a high score is NOT necessarily an indication of military power. I've played games where I was in 1st or 2nd place the whole game with barely a Scout or two for defense for the first 100+ turns.

To me, showing a strong econ and weak military should be a red flag for the AI to attack, attack, attack! These are empires that are RIPE for conquest. Forcing an expanding player to constantly be on guard would go a LONG way to making the game far more challenging IMO.

So, I guess my suggestion would be to more heavily weight the score based on ships and units rather than on raw CPs and RPs. That and even presence on the borders should be accounted for IMO. A strong empire with a weak border should be viewed as a potential target as well IMO.

Talenn

[sapperland]

What I would like is have the prototype cost 3 times as much for first ship built. Make shipyards MUCH more expensive and have ships take a minimum of a year to build. Allow 6 month build time with double cost. Make ship yards have a build tonnage limit per turn, like a shipyard can build up to 500k tons but still only make 10% any ship construction on any turn. This would allow several smaller ships to be under construction at one time a one larger ship or a combination. example,
3 ships at 100k tons and 1 ship at 200k would have 10k tons built on each small ship and 20k tons built on the larger ship each turn.
If you only had one 100k ton ship in the ship yard then you waste 400k worth of build space , and the ship still takes a year to build.

Make the players move resources from systems without shipyards to systems with them by frieghter. The spaceport would just collect all the stuff on one planet in the system so you wouldnt have to visit each planet.
This would open up the ability to do raids on shipping to destroy or capture.

[This message has been edited by sapperland (edited 21 November 2000).]

[LintMan]

Talenn, I think that's a good idea about the AI using military strength rather than score as a decision whether to attack. (One thing though about a strong econ/weak military as being a prime target for attack... I think that was a key factor in Japan's decision to attack the US in WWII - perhaps not the best idea in the long run!)

But does the AI know what the military strength of its neighbors is? Intelligence is quite expensive to get and it risks pissing off your neighbors.

Also, a more agressive AI doesn't help in the situation I'm in. In my jumbo galaxy, there are 8 AI players plus myself, giving huge amounts of time for expansion before even encountering one other race. I'm not an expert player, but by the time I met another race, I already had a very substantial lead over them in tech, economy, population, and planets. I didn't have a single ship with weapons on it built yet, nor any minefields, platforms or setellites. I'm confident though that if the AI went on the offsensive immediately upon discovering me, the fat cat
with no military, I would be able to quickly ramp up my war machine in defense without losing more than a few outlying colonies.

Military aggressiveness would only work if it hit me early on to have slowed me down, or if it was coming from an empire as strong as mine research and economy wise.

Of course, the solution in future games will be to fill it with more players so I will be slowed down, but that doesn't fix the fact that the AI doesn't do peacetime buildup very well.

Well, what would fix this? Well, the AI needs some tweaking to recognize the likely long term peacetime situtation, and go balls-out expansion. And it needs to be smarter about exporting population to the colonized worlds, and building up research. It should build more base space yards so it has the production capacity to quickly produce some defense if needed.

But also, I think if fleet maintenance was less, it would help things a bit even without the above tweaks. It would be nice if the AI (or a player for that matter) could build some ships for defense without needing to pay the high costs.

Some thoughts:

- What if the maintenance cost was lower for the first number of ships, and then grew as the number of ships exceded a certain amount (say, more ships than you have colonies or space yards).

- Maybe maintenance could be reduced for ships that are "local" to you (ie: ships in a system with a colony owned by you and having a spaceport), so ships that are on defense in your systems would cost less to operate than those in a distant campaign.

- Or maybe a variant of something like in Alpha Centauri, where the further ships were from a "headquarters" the more ineffiency there would be and thus the more they would cost to operate. The headquarters would be an expensive facilty that could be built nearer to the action to cut down those costs.

[Talenn]

Lintman:

Yes, the Japan/US war in the Pacific didnt end too well for Japan, but the capacity for large scale annihilation of the enemy's industry didnt exist yet.

I'm not sure if the AI knows your military or not (they say it doesnt cheat, so I'm inclined to say 'no'). However many of it's decision making algorithms are based on a 'score comparison' between the empires, so it at least knows that much.

Maybe two different 'scores' should be kept with a one beign heavily weighted on military. Then the AI could use 1 or the other or both scores in determining its policies? I'm just thinking out loud here...

I've made some tweaks to the AI and when playing on 'Hard' with 'Low Bonus' I've seen it do some really nice buildups. The problems arise in that they fail to inhibit the player build-ups as well. Still, I'm fairly pleased with my current AI in terms of expansion. I just wish I could figure out how to make it more hostile.

Talenn