Some Quick Fixes to Improve Game Balance

[Anthropoid]

Haven't read the whole thread but . . . why play on Extreme difficulty? Moreover, if you are playing on Extreme difficulty, how could you possibly have anything useful to say about "game balance?"

I would think that the game is "balanced" if it offers an average user (meaning not an expert like yourself Icemania) a fun challenge but a reasonable prospect of victory on Normal Difficulty.

Difficulty settings like "Extreme," and "Insane" and "Masochistic" are there for folks who have 'beat' the game a few times and want extra challenge.

ADDIT: sorry man, your first post is a bit hard to follow. Are you basically saying that "Extreme difficulty" is not hard enough? and moreover that: (a) it shouldn't be so easy to invade homeoworlds early in the game; and (b) sell Techs, because it makes the game too easy?

If that is the case, then my previous comment is not so salient.

I have to add here though that, part of this is how a player approaches a game. Some players like to approach games they play with a "How do I beat this" attitude, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. This playstyle lends itself to playing at higher difficulties, and making clever use of game dynamics to achieve rapid non-linear effects, like exponential tech growth or crushing military victories. After I spent many hundreds of hours playing Civilization, I slowly evolved into this style of gameplay. In fact, some of my most warmly remembered moments of gaming were times when I executed this style of gameplay in play-by-email games. There is nothing quite so satisfying as taking your human opponent _completely_ by surprise and crushing him in the span of two or three turns and bringing a long multi-month PBEM run to a decisive end! Sadly though, what this style of gameplay reflects is that, the player has truly and fully "mastered" the game. The ecology of the game is so fully intuitive that it is mundane to achieve victories that might have felt like major challenges when you first started.

Another style of gameplay that I _highly_ recommend if it is not something familiar, is the 'laid back' 'getting my monies worth' style. Whenever I buy a new game, I always tend to play it this way for as long as possible, for a couple of simple reasons: I enjoy it (which if you don't you shouldn't force yourself to play this style), it maximizes my utility of each game I own.

I've noticed that this style of play seems to be a bit foreign to some younger gamers or else gamers who did not start out from a strategy gaming background, though that may just be anecdotal. The real key to this style of game play is to strike a balance between three factors: (i) staying 'in-character' relative to the tone, style and content of the game in question; (ii) learning the games ecology, including developing an intuition for all the quantitative interactions in the game (e.g., in DW that would be ship parts, ship design, colony economies, technology growth rate, fleet ops, etc.); (iii) trying to 'win'

[Icemania]

Antropoid, balance applies to all difficulty settings. As you say, on "Extreme", I want extra challenge, at the moment it is far too easy (unless you setup a game where the others are so advanced you die in 5 minutes which is not balance). In contrast I lose about 20% of games on CivV Emperor difficulty and mostly get crushed on the higher difficulties.

The purpose of this thread isn't to debate difficulty setting preferences. There is a thread I started a few months ago on Shadows Difficulty Settings which partly tracks my journey from Normal to Extreme. In this thread I'd like to explore practical ideas that the developer may realistically consider in a patch to balance higher difficulties.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
ADDIT: sorry man, your first post is a bit hard to follow. Are you basically saying that "Extreme difficulty" is not hard enough? and moreover that: (a) it shouldn't be so easy to invade homeoworlds early in the game; and (b) sell Techs, because it makes the game too easy?

Yes. I normally stop myself from doing early game homeworld invasions and selling because it is so imbalanced. I believe a better solution is to continuously improve game balance particularly when they are easy to implement. Every now and again I'll play a game with these allowed for some fun and a laugh (like my current game).

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
I have to add here though that, part of this is how a player approaches a game. Some players like to approach games they play with a "How do I beat this" attitude, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. This playstyle lends itself to playing at higher difficulties, and making clever use of game dynamics to achieve rapid non-linear effects, like exponential tech growth or crushing military victories. After I spent many hundreds of hours playing Civilization, I slowly evolved into this style of gameplay. In fact, some of my most warmly remembered moments of gaming were times when I executed this style of gameplay in play-by-email games. There is nothing quite so satisfying as taking your human opponent _completely_ by surprise and crushing him in the span of two or three turns and bringing a long multi-month PBEM run to a decisive end! Sadly though, what this style of gameplay reflects is that, the player has truly and fully "mastered" the game. The ecology of the game is so fully intuitive that it is mundane to achieve victories that might have felt like major challenges when you first started.

Another style of gameplay that I _highly_ recommend if it is not something familiar, is the 'laid back' 'getting my monies worth' style. Whenever I buy a new game, I always tend to play it this way for as long as possible, for a couple of simple reasons: I enjoy it (which if you don't you shouldn't force yourself to play this style), it maximizes my utility of each game I own.

I've noticed that this style of play seems to be a bit foreign to some younger gamers or else gamers who did not start out from a strategy gaming background, though that may just be anecdotal. The real key to this style of game play is to strike a balance between three factors: (i) staying 'in-character' relative to the tone, style and content of the game in question; (ii) learning the games ecology, including developing an intuition for all the quantitative interactions in the game (e.g., in DW that would be ship parts, ship design, colony economies, technology growth rate, fleet ops, etc.); (iii) trying to 'win'

I play games in various ways depending on what else is happening in life. At the moment I consider Extreme a "laid back" game. When in "How do I beat this" mode I go back to Strategy games that I played well before Distant Worlds and for far longer. I'd like to include Distant Worlds in this category hence this thread.

[Anthropoid]

Ah okay! I gotcha [;)]

Totally reasonable to argue for better balance at the high end of the difficulty scale, if that is what your experience has led you to observe.

I myself am still just a fledgling DW player

So I'm curious, are these two 'exploity' things (Bum Rush on the Homeworlds; Tech Mongering) a problem in normal difficulty?

ORIGINAL: Icemania

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
ADDIT: sorry man, your first post is a bit hard to follow. Are you basically saying that "Extreme difficulty" is not hard enough? and moreover that: (a) it shouldn't be so easy to invade homeoworlds early in the game; and (b) sell Techs, because it makes the game too easy?

Yes. I normally stop myself from doing early game homeworld invasions and selling because it is so imbalanced. I believe a better solution is to continuously improve game balance particularly when they are easy to implement. Every now and again I'll play a game with these allowed for some fun and a laugh (like my current game).

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
I have to add here though that, part of this is how a player approaches a game. Some players like to approach games they play with a "How do I beat this" attitude, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. This playstyle lends itself to playing at higher difficulties, and making clever use of game dynamics to achieve rapid non-linear effects, like exponential tech growth or crushing military victories. After I spent many hundreds of hours playing Civilization, I slowly evolved into this style of gameplay. In fact, some of my most warmly remembered moments of gaming were times when I executed this style of gameplay in play-by-email games. There is nothing quite so satisfying as taking your human opponent _completely_ by surprise and crushing him in the span of two or three turns and bringing a long multi-month PBEM run to a decisive end! Sadly though, what this style of gameplay reflects is that, the player has truly and fully "mastered" the game. The ecology of the game is so fully intuitive that it is mundane to achieve victories that might have felt like major challenges when you first started.

Another style of gameplay that I _highly_ recommend if it is not something familiar, is the 'laid back' 'getting my monies worth' style. Whenever I buy a new game, I always tend to play it this way for as long as possible, for a couple of simple reasons: I enjoy it (which if you don't you shouldn't force yourself to play this style), it maximizes my utility of each game I own.

I've noticed that this style of play seems to be a bit foreign to some younger gamers or else gamers who did not start out from a strategy gaming background, though that may just be anecdotal. The real key to this style of game play is to strike a balance between three factors: (i) staying 'in-character' relative to the tone, style and content of the game in question; (ii) learning the games ecology, including developing an intuition for all the quantitative interactions in the game (e.g., in DW that would be ship parts, ship design, colony economies, technology growth rate, fleet ops, etc.); (iii) trying to 'win'

I play games in various ways depending on what else is happening in life. At the moment I consider Extreme a "laid back" game. When in "How do I beat this" mode I go back to Strategy games that I played well before Distant Worlds and for far longer. I'd like to include Distant Worlds in this category hence this thread.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

Ah okay! I gotcha [;)]

Totally reasonable to argue for better balance at the high end of the difficulty scale, if that is what your experience has led you to observe.

Very cool ... appreciate the dialog!

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
So I'm curious, are these two 'exploity' things (Bum Rush on the Homeworlds; Tech Mongering) a problem in normal difficulty?

It's been a while since Normal but a homeworld rush should be easier as they have less troops and you can afford more earlier.

Technology Selling can also easily provide a lot of cash on Normal. However, as the AI's have less money on Normal, it can arguably be exploited more on higher difficulties. That said, with the latest patch, the AI uses more spare cash for ship building, so seems to have less money for technology selling. Either way my experience is that it provides heaps of cash.

[Fenrisfil]

I have noticed a lot of strange things going on with the AI of other factions when starting from pre-warp:

Often they have a tonne of ships with no warp capabilities (before and after they've researched it). This is probably because the AI builds too much too early.

Other times they build hardly any military ships (often none at all) and far too many civilian ships.

Occasionally a faction (often one that actually has energy/construction focus) will lag insanely far behind in researching the warp bubble. This seems to be due to a failure to explore their own system properly as usually spawning them explorers around the appropriate ruin will help solve the problem.

Finally if you run on fully automated and watch what the AI researches from pre-warp you'll notice it doesn't prioritise very well. The AI will ignore standard fuel cells for ages, not bother with target tracking (even if you have that as a priority in the policy file) and obsessively try and reach stealth technology as quickly as possible (even if the faction is never going to use it) and it always researches troop/passenger transport first thing (as if it has anything to do with those elements prior to having a warp engine anyway. Oh yeah the AI loves it's warpless troop transports). It is painfully slow to get around to researching certain unique technologies, often researching a more advanced vanilla version first and almost outright ignores the race file/policy setting for "Raw Power/Efficiency/Speed&Agility" choices. I've had a race set to Raw Power in both and the AI researches all the "Efficient" options in Energy/Construction before going for the "Power" ones. With the AI doing such a poor job of research, it is always at a disadvantage against a human player.

In short while the AI may have improved in some ways in Shadows it seems to be worse than ever for managing it's economy and planning it's research objectives. I think if those two elements were improved the game would automatically become more challenging at every level.

[Icemania]

I completely agree Fenrisfil.

With research there is a simple solution where the developer could give each AI race a complete research standard build order that it must follow. The proposed build orders could be published on this forum and comments invited from experienced players. There will be a mix of strategies from those comments that could be reflected across the races but also common themes e.g. pre-warp every empire should prioritise warp research and construction research early, races that prefer Beam Weapons in ship weapons would have those high up in their build order, racial technologies would be researched earlier etc.

Such an approach would massively improve AI research. Only once that is working effectively would you introduce other factors e.g. race build orders adjusted by government type etc.

In those standard build orders the developer could also provide race specific technology purchase and sale prices to sort out the technology selling exploit i.e. vastly reduced from current prices but also aligned with the build order and racial characteristics.

I've also never seen any evidence that AI empires do any meaningful technology trading with each other. If another known empire is getting ahead on research the probability of AI empire trading should increase.

[Anthropoid]

Seem like good suggestions that actually wouldn't be too difficult to implement; esp. if users put together the draft files.

[Trev_lite]

all of the research and ship design logic should be moved into the moddable files so that some genius on the forum can make an uber balanced mod.

[Icemania]

That would be very cool Trev_lite!

[Fenrisfil]

ORIGINAL: Trev_lite

all of the research and ship design logic should be moved into the moddable files so that some genius on the forum can make an uber balanced mod.

Here here.

One of the simplest solutions out there. All we need is a text file with each technology and component and a priority level for each. Put it in a folder and have one per race. Race and policy options would then modify that file (policy more than race so that if you switch from "raw power" to "energy efficiency" you see an change in the AI's research choices. You could probably do it with a universal one, but I figure why not allow full customisation.

It's not hard to tell what is hard coded at the moment, but while some of it makes sense (basic warp, shields, colonisation and energy collection) most of it is in the area where there should be significantly more difference between the races. At the moment even a race that never uses assault pods or stealth will prioritise researching them, while some elements of the tech tree don't even have options to give it any priority in the policy file (unless they are in by stealth, but even then I don't see where it would figure out you want to reduce maintenance costs for example).

[Omena]

Haven't played this game too much yet, but it occurred to me that there might be rather easy solution to this homeworld invasion problem.

The problem is that it's too easy to spam troops with cheap fast transports and effectively bypass all other defences. But what if it were not enough to simply land the troops? What if those stranded troops would receive big penalties for being "stranded" (cut out from supply)? Right now the enemy just receives a bonus of 25% from "space control", but what if the attacker would also receive a penalty? Also, starbases could give defensive bonuses representing their ability to cut enemy supply lines and provide some sort of "aerial" support (missiles/long range weapons/fighters etc.)for the troops.

So invading a planet with space defences without the support of a fleet would be very difficult.

[Icemania]

Omena, good one, I fully agree!

[elliotg]

Thanks for the feedback on this thread.

In the next update game difficulty has been increased on higher levels in the following ways:
- more defending troops at colonies, especially larger colonies
- buying tech from other empires is more expensive for the player
- selling tech to other empires is less lucrative for the player
- relationship thresholds for buying tech from other empires is higher for player (i.e. other empire has to like you more)
- non-player empires build more exploration and construction ships when they are able
- overall difficulty factors have been increased (i.e. each difficulty setting above normal is now harder)

Also, colony populations now defend better against invasions - their defend strength has been doubled.

Thanks
Elliot

[Icemania]

Elliot, a huge thank you for these higher difficulty increases, fantastic!

[ASHBERY76]

To be honest those tech changes should be default level.

[Sithuk]

Can someone reference me to Shark7's original post below?

ORIGINAL: Shark7
One suggestion I might make is that the only way you can trade techs, bases, planets, etc is if you have an MDP with the empire you are wanting to trade with. This I think would curb a lot of the problems. Trading your technology should be something you do with only the most trusted of allies.

In fact, here is exactly how I would do it:

Tech trading criteria:

* must have MDP agreement
* for techs 2 levels or lower than current, relations at +75 or higher
* for techs 1 level less than current, relations at +90 or higher
* for equal level or advanced techs, relations at +100 or higher
* for special techs, relations at +125 or higher

[Icemania]

Shark's OP Reference

[fierceking]

There should be a rule hardcoded so that if a troop transport gets to a certain distance to a planet, that empire should start attacking it, regardless if the the 2 empires are at war or not.

If a fleet blockades any of my planet, I always attack it. Attacking that fleet does not mean you are at war, well according to the game anyways. The game doesn't consider my attack as warlike.

So AI empires should act the same way and treat any troop transport near it's vacinity to be hostile and should be attacked by any ship nearby.

Because currently, you could blockade a planet with a fleet of troop transports and then attack for easy invasion.

So instead of going to war, blockade does the trick without any hostiles attacking your attack fleet before invasion. It lessens the chance of losing a ship before invasion takes place.