Ancient Race too powerful?

[PvK]

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

[tesco samoa]

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.

[PvK]

quote:

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Originally posted by tesco samoa:
...So perhaps the option to hide racial traits should be added to the game.

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

PvK

[geoschmo]

quote:

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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.

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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.

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?

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 ]

[capnq]

quote:

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They key is that homeworlds have all 3 attributes around 100%.

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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.

[MegaTrain]

quote:

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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.

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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?

[Krakenup]

quote:

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Originally posted by MegaTrain:
What happens if you allow homeworlds to be different sizes? Will one race have an advantage with larger homeworlds?

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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!

[geoschmo]

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 ]

[PvK]

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

[geoschmo]

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...

quote:

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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.

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

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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.

Geoschmo