Schemaverse Gameplay

[Abstrct]

Hi All,

I think this post is fairly long overdue but better late than never! I am looking for feedback on a number of topics to see what everyone thinks of the current game and where they think it should be to make it fun and competitive. Feel free to respond to everything or just pick and choose the part(s) you have some opinion on. 

Round Length

How is everyone enjoying the 1 day round? Do you miss the week long battle? Should it actually be shorter? 

How are you finding resources? I have tried to make it so you can still get everywhere in the round by making resources a lot more widely available but I don't know how successful I have been.

As another option, what if the round wasn't decided by time and instead always a set number of tics. How many tics would be acceptable? 

Language Options

I have had some requests for addition languages to be added for the fleet scripts. Right now the list of languages that I can add seems to be Perl and TCL. Does anybody have other requests for trusted languages (i.e.: a language that does not have access to filesystem or sockets)?

Battles

What can we do to make battles more... possible? Right now it seems like battles are too expensive because you can't get a fleet there. 

How is the ships_in_range view working lately?

How is strength vs defence? Does it need to be easier or harder to kill other ships?

Ship State

Is anybody using the ship state that allows you to set an action and target to automatically occur each tic? Would you like this improved in some sort of fashion?

Items

Would you like to actually see items implement? If so what kind of items would you like to see? How would you like items distributed? Should you just 'find' them all or would awarding items to players who win certain trophies make an interesting mechanic too?

Visualization

There has been some really cool visualization of the games state lately. Anewworth, cbbrowne and pvh have each done some neat stuff (I know I have been checking http://schemaverse.marcneuwirth.com/ constantly throughout the day). Is there anything we can do from the game servers side to help make this easier or better?

Documentation

How is the tutorial? Has anybody had a chance to give it a really good look? Is it missing any key information that would really stump a new player?

Outside scripts

There has been some discussion lately about outside scripts too (as in players who don't use the fleet scripts but instead have an outside daemon playing). Is there anything we can add to the game to improve this as well? Adding another player channel (as in using the postgresql listen/notify system) for game details like pushing a message when the tic changes was the main request but would there be other uses for this as well?

Planets

Does it still make sense to have planets conquered through mining? Is there another mechanic that would make more sense? 

What about building ships? Is there a way we can make it so that players can always build a new ship somewhere in the universe? I am a bit worried we are losing players who start and immediately lose their home planet. 

General bugs and wtf's

Is there anything you constantly see happening when playing that just bugs the crap out of you?

Well that is everything I can think of for the time being. It should be a good start for getting the discussion going. 

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts

-Abstrct 

[Christopher Browne]

On Monday, May 28, 2012 11:28:37 AM UTC-4, Abstrct wrote:

Round Length

How is everyone enjoying the 1 day round? Do you miss the week long battle? Should it actually be shorter? 

How are you finding resources? I have tried to make it so you can still get everywhere in the round by making resources a lot more widely available but I don't know how successful I have been.

As another option, what if the round wasn't decided by time and instead always a set number of tics. How many tics would be acceptable? 

Short-ish rounds is kind of nice in encouraging deployment of scripts that'll "just run."

There seems to be too much resources to spend, so I'd be happy to see it decline back towards what it was.

A thought would be to have each round have slightly differing parameters set, which might "mess with us" a bit...

Language Options

I have had some requests for addition languages to be added for the fleet scripts. Right now the list of languages that I can add seems to be Perl and TCL. Does anybody have other requests for trusted languages (i.e.: a language that does not have access to filesystem or sockets)?

 

I don't notably care at the moment.

PL/R would be the one I imagine would be more interesting...

I don't see Perl/Tcl being all that interesting, as what they tend to enable is doing much more sophisticated "text smashing," and this isn't a text-smashing application.  pl/pgsql is perfectly good at managing the set-based form of the game, and I suspect it's not an improvement to make it "text-y".
 

Battles

What can we do to make battles more... possible? Right now it seems like battles are too expensive because you can't get a fleet there. 

How is the ships_in_range view working lately?

How is strength vs defence? Does it need to be easier or harder to kill other ships?

I don't think the "more money" part has helped.  Defense tends to have a strong advantage, and more money makes it easy to spend vast sums on local defense.

I have to say I haven't properly gotten to offense; I'm still doing some significant analytical work on improving my "empire expansion," as the present logic isn't nearly expansionary enough :-).
 

Ship State

Is anybody using the ship state that allows you to set an action and target to automatically occur each tic? Would you like this improved in some sort of fashion?

It would be interesting to have ships set up to automatically "try to fix a friend," or to "try to attack an enemy," and to try to do so with some randomness.

 

Items

Would you like to actually see items implement? If so what kind of items would you like to see? How would you like items distributed? Should you just 'find' them all or would awarding items to players who win certain trophies make an interesting mechanic too?

An interesting idea would be for some items to help smash heavy defenses.  Getting the balance of that right will be an interesting part.
- If it demolishes defenses *too* effectively, then that may make defending futile
- If the "nuke" is too rare, and too powerful, so it simply biases the game to whomever gets the "nuke", that's probably not good

I think it's potentially interesting to shake things up a bit...
 

Visualization

There has been some really cool visualization of the games state lately. Anewworth, cbbrowne and pvh have each done some neat stuff (I know I have been checking http://schemaverse.marcneuwirth.com/ constantly throughout the day). Is there anything we can do from the game servers side to help make this easier or better?

Having cheap access to CONQUER events would be nice; having a view that gets benefit of index on public events would help that, I'd think.

I have previously tried to encourage having ~3 views on events rather than just 1 integrated one.
 

Documentation

How is the tutorial? Has anybody had a chance to give it a really good look? Is it missing any key information that would really stump a new player?

Probably needs a somewhat better sample script so that people can have a marginally auto-running empire without too much forethought.
 

Outside scripts

There has been some discussion lately about outside scripts too (as in players who don't use the fleet scripts but instead have an outside daemon playing). Is there anything we can add to the game to improve this as well? Adding another player channel (as in using the postgresql listen/notify system) for game details like pushing a message when the tic changes was the main request but would there be other uses for this as well?

Interesting, but not sure, haven't thought about it.
 

Planets

Does it still make sense to have planets conquered through mining? Is there another mechanic that would make more sense? 

What about building ships? Is there a way we can make it so that players can always build a new ship somewhere in the universe? I am a bit worried we are losing players who start and immediately lose their home planet.

Not sure.  I suspect the devil's in the *new* details...

It wasn't particularly intuitive, initially, that "Oh, I need to mine the nearby planet to conquer it."  But that's a documentation issue moreso than indicating anything's wrong with the approach, inherently.

[MassConfusion]

> *Round Length*
I dig the 1 day rounds, but limiting the game by tic may be a better
idea. With the rounds being so short right now it's really more of a
land grab, there would have to be another day or two before any really
serious combat arose.

> *Ship State*
This is still awesome. I like the fact that you can set a ship and
forget it, and not spend valuable script time reassigning every mine
action. Going to agree with cbrowne, it'd be nice to be able to set
one to 'repair' and then have it find it's own somewhat random target
from the ships around it just to have one less thing to worry about.
For that matter, you could do the same thing with attack, and have
them find enemies that stop within range.

> *Visualization*
Not really a suggestion, just want to thank everyone who is working on
these. Although I don't really use it for monitoring/strategy, it's
very cool to visit marcneuwirth for a graphical representation of the
map

> *Planets*
I've wondering about this a couple of times, having lost the original
home planet right off the bat. I think it'd be alright to be able to
spawn ships (say at the original origin point - 0,0) as long as the
player had the funds to do so, that way there's at least a chance you
can get back in the game.

> *General bugs and wtf's*
Going to wedge this one in here, I have to agree with cbrowne again, I
like the fact that money is easier to come by, but it may be a little
too easy at the moment. A small bump from the original would be nice,
but with the vast overflow of cash coming in now it's not even a
challenge to maintain a balance between income and fleet size.

Overall, great job again :) keep up the good work

[derpfish]

I know I show up with a great deal of infrequency, but every so often I decide it's time to get my fleet script up-to-date. So a couple of questions relevant to the recent (ish) ship limit implementation:

1. Is the ship limit available as a variable somewhere? (I try to parameterize my script where possible.) I didn't see anything in the public_variable view and I couldn't spot anything in the github source.
2. Since there is now a finite bound on the ships you can have, is there functionality for scuttling existing ships? I'm not sure that I would take advantage of this, but it crossed my mind since most board/video games I've played with unit limits there is a method for tossing old units so you can build new ones with a different specialization and/or in a different location.
   

[Abstrct]

Welcome back Derp!

Preparing for the DEFCON 20 tournament :D?

1) Yes, there is a public variable named MAX_SHIPS

2) Yes, you can build new ships if old ones are destroyed (zero health for 3 consecutive tics) 

-Abstrct

[derpfish]

Yep, gotta make sure my script is tweaked and efficient.

1) Hrmmm...
schemaverse=> SELECT GET_NUMERIC_VARIABLE('MAX_SHIPS');
 get_numeric_variable
----------------------
                    
(1 row)

schemaverse=> SELECT * FROM public_variable WHERE name='MAX_SHIPS';
 name | private | numeric_value | char_value | description | player_id
------+---------+---------------+------------+-------------+-----------
(0 rows)

2) Can you voluntarily destroy your own ships? For example, if I've spent the first half of the round creating ships with maximal prospecting, and now that I've got plenty of resource I want to destroy those so I can build new ships with maximal attack instead, is that possible?

[Abstrct]

Whoops, sorry about that. MAX_SHIPS was set to private for some reason. You can see it now.

and yes, you can ATTACK() your own ships to destroy them... This may have a negative effect on your final score though depending how many of your ships you are taking out. Other than that there isn't another way of destroying the ship to make room for others. This could be added but I haven't see the need yet. 

[Tigereye .]

SELECT Initiate_Self_Destruct(ship_id)

FROM my_ships

WHERE prospecting > 100;

;)

Sent from my mobile device

[anewworth]

It seems like the published stat limits for ships are no longer being enforced? I can update max_speed to 800k rather than the 50k on GitHub and on the help docs. Is this a bug or a feature?

Also there is a problem with the convert_resource function still using int instead of bigint, not sure what is going wrong as the code on GitHub looks correct.

[Abstrct]

The maximums are still being enforced but they are not what they are in the github repo. I am constantly changing these values trying to help balance out the game a bit and I don't really feel they require a full commit. Here are the current values:

MAX_SHIP_SKILL=500

MAX_SHIP_HEALTH=1000

DEFENSE_EFFICIENCY=50

MAX_SHIP_RANGE=5000

MAX_SHIP_FUEL=200000

MINE_BASE_FUEL=15

MAX_SHIP_SPEED=800000

EXPLODED=3

MAX_SHIPS=2000

These can all be found in the public_variable view, or you can get them by using the function GET_NUMERIC_VARIABLE('NAME');

I also think I may have resolved the issue with convert_resource(). There was an old version of the function laying around that accepted an integer rather than a bigint. So, if the value you were using as an input was an integer but you had a balance of money or fuel that was bigint, it would have likely not worked too well. Give it a try now and let me know if you are still having issues.

-Abstrct

On Monday, 9 July 2012 16:55:28 UTC-4, anewworth wrote:

It seems like the published stat limits for ships are no longer being enforced? I can update max_speed to 800k rather than the 50k on GitHub and on the help docs. Is this a bug or a feature?

Also there is a problem with the convert_resource function still using int instead of bigint, not sure what is going wrong as the code on GitHub looks correct.

On Friday, July 6, 2012 10:27:57 AM UTC-4, Tigereye wrote:

SELECT Initiate_Self_Destruct(ship_id)

FROM my_ships

WHERE prospecting > 100;

;)

Sent from my mobile device

[Marc Neuwirth]

Cool, need to update my scripts so that hopefully derpfish will have a
little bit more competition this round :)

convert_resource seems to be working tonight, thanks