Remove base hulls and shipyards from game

[Oberlus]

the other alternative would be to have the other shipyard lines have a significant base cost.

Again, that will not work:

Increasing the PP construction cost will not work, since that always hits the same wall: either it is too expensive early game or too cheap late game. You always reach that point when PP output is enough to consider inexpensive what was expensive.

[Ophiuchus]

the other alternative would be to have the other shipyard lines have a significant base cost.

Again, that will not work:

Increasing the PP construction cost will not work, since that always hits the same wall: either it is too expensive early game or too cheap late game. You always reach that point when PP output is enough to consider inexpensive what was expensive.

Not talking about PP.

[Oberlus]

the other alternative would be to have the other shipyard lines have a significant base cost.

Again, that will not work:

Increasing the PP construction cost will not work, since that always hits the same wall: either it is too expensive early game or too cheap late game. You always reach that point when PP output is enough to consider inexpensive what was expensive.

Not talking about PP.

Then, could you elaborate?
Currently, only cost for shipyards is PP. Particularly, base cost is measured in PP.

[Vezzra]

To clarify: I'm well aware that the current implementation/balance does not meet the design goals for shipyards I described above - at all.

One way to address the issue with the current (more or less pointless) Basic Shipyard is to remove the thing, but that's not what I prefer. I think even the Basic Shipyard should remain a strategic investment/asset throughout the game, and not just for military ships, but for all ships. Even the so-called "shitty" ships should not be possible to build everywhere. As long as it makes a difference where a ship (regardless how "shitty" it is) can be build, it makes sense to restrict the location. If it makes no difference for certain ships later in the game, restricting the location doesn't hurt, but still keeps things simpler and more KISS.

However, Oberlus has correctly pointed out a fundamental issue: we simply cannot do that by trying to balance build costs, because what's prohibitely expensive at the start of the game becomes practically negligible in late game. This isn't an issue only with shipyards, this issue has been plaguing us practically every time we want to make something you should be able to acquire/build in limited amounts. And every time we are forced to resort to often ackward/not ideal workarounds/other solutions.

The fundamental issue behind this is (as I've been pointing out again and again in the past) the way resource income increases over the course of a game. It's broken, plain and simple. And with it everything that builds upon it.

A 4X game like FO basically works this way: Acquire/produce a set of basic resources -> convert those resources into assets, which help you increase acquiring/producing more of the basic resources. That's the fundamental loop, so to speak.

If the increase in basic resource production is unbalanced, everything else will be unbalanced too. IMO FO gameplay has been suffering because of that for a very long time. And it's biting us again. Why don't we fix it?

[Ophiuchus]

If the increase in basic resource production is unbalanced, everything else will be unbalanced too. IMO FO gameplay has been suffering because of that for a very long time. And it's biting us again. Why don't we fix it?

Very good post. I thought the general plan would be to ensure a linear curve of influence growth along turns. So a logarithmic growth of influence with the number of colonies. For that one would need the exponential growth of an undisturbed empire (and RP/PP).

[Ophiuchus]

could you elaborate?
Currently, only cost for shipyards is PP. Particularly, base cost is measured in PP.

I meant whatever cost will be. If things turn out like I imagine base cost would be a mixture of influence and PP. Maybe hook influence upkeep only to the basic shipyard.

Advanced shipyards would have then only a base cost. PP (and maybe influence)

[ThinkSome]

How about requiring shipyard upgrades in order to repair ships in dry dock? I.e. require energy compressor+drydock to repair energy frigates.

[Oberlus]

I think even the Basic Shipyard should remain a strategic investment/asset throughout the game, and not just for military ships, but for all ships. Even the so-called "shitty" ships should not be possible to build everywhere. As long as it makes a difference where a ship (regardless how "shitty" it is) can be build, it makes sense to restrict the location.

I have no trouble with that. In fact, that is my preferred choice.
Just to be sure and clear up any possible confusion:

As long as we have outpost ships and colony buildings, when trying to colonize a new system, there is no trouble in having to look for the closest shipyard, enqueue a ship in there and send it to the desired new system, right?
I mean, the following comments are not about that, right?

Back in the day, colonizing solely with ships was a major endeavor.

To put it nicely. Personally, I'd use a bit stronger words, like PITA. A PITA that got bigger and more painful the larger your empire grew, for exact the reasons you described...

___________

The fundamental issue behind this is (as I've been pointing out again and again in the past) the way resource income increases over the course of a game. It's broken, plain and simple. And with it everything that builds upon it.

And it will remain broken no matter you do. I've been working on that intermittently for the past months and there is no way you can make PP output be reasonably low if empires grow exponentially. You can't expect that multiplying the number of colonies of your empire by x5 or x20 is not going to cause an exponential growth.

A 4X game like FO basically works this way: Acquire/produce a set of basic resources -> convert those resources into assets, which help you increase acquiring/producing more of the basic resources. That's the fundamental loop, so to speak.

If the increase in basic resource production is unbalanced, everything else will be unbalanced too.

There is no such thing as a "balanced increase of resource production" in this context. If you make that 5 new colonies produce less than the starting HW, the game gets broken in a different way: blitzkrieg becomes the unique valid strategy. The game loses 2 of the 4 X, an becomes eXplore and eXterminate.
If you make that 5 new colonies produce more than the starting HW, you have exponential growth.
Period.

Why don't we fix it?

Because, for some reason I don't understand, it's been decided that FreeOrion will not use actual upkeeps.
What I mean by upkeep, just in case my English is too bad for this:

• Colonies should consume a constant amount of resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings). They would also produce resources, more the bigger and more advanced the colonies are.
• Ships should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).
• Buildings should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).

The patch for the no-upkeep decision, long due, is the future influence upkeeps. Although I'm not sure they will be actual upkeeps or just PP costs with steps (which in the end would hit the same exponential growth wall).

[em3]

Because, for some reason I don't understand, it's been decided that FreeOrion will not use actual upkeeps.
What I mean by upkeep, just in case my English is too bad for this:

• Colonies should consume a constant amount of resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings). They would also produce resources, more the bigger and more advanced the colonies are.
• Ships should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).
• Buildings should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).

If I recall correctly, the main reason was because it was not clear, what to do about existing objects (ships, colonies) when the upkeep can't be paid.
Should the colonies rebel? Which ones? Should the ships be destroyed or mutiny? Which ones?

This is further complicated by discrete supply groups. Should the resource that is paid for upkeep be PP? Then there would be multiple upkeep groups and it would not be easy to determine, which supply group should pay upkeep for each object. If we say that the supply group that the planet/ship is supplied by at the moment should pay the upkeep, then parking ships in an un-supplied space would allow avoid paying upkeep for them. If we say that the *last* supply group to supply the ship should pay upkeep, this would lead to micromanagement and peculiar situations when colonizing or invading enemy territory.

[Oberlus]

If I recall correctly, the main reason was because it was not clear, what to do about existing objects (ships, colonies) when the upkeep can't be paid.
Should the colonies rebel? Which ones? Should the ships be destroyed or mutiny? Which ones?

This is further complicated by discrete supply groups. Should the resource that is paid for upkeep be PP? Then there would be multiple upkeep groups and it would not be easy to determine, which supply group should pay upkeep for each object. If we say that the supply group that the planet/ship is supplied by at the moment should pay the upkeep, then parking ships in an un-supplied space would allow avoid paying upkeep for them. If we say that the *last* supply group to supply the ship should pay upkeep, this would lead to micromanagement and peculiar situations when colonizing or invading enemy territory.

All those are good reasons to avoid PP upkeep.
I'm looking forward for influence (Government) to be merged into master

[Vezzra]

As long as we have outpost ships and colony buildings, when trying to colonize a new system, there is no trouble in having to look for the closest shipyard, enqueue a ship in there and send it to the desired new system, right?
I mean, the following comments are not about that, right?

Back in the day, colonizing solely with ships was a major endeavor.

To put it nicely. Personally, I'd use a bit stronger words, like PITA. A PITA that got bigger and more painful the larger your empire grew, for exact the reasons you described...

Correct on all accounts. I've only been referring to the old days before we had the colony buildings and had to use colony ships for all colonization. We are most certainly NOT going back to that.

Over my pile of ashes...

___________

And it will remain broken no matter you do. I've been working on that intermittently for the past months and there is no way you can make PP output be reasonably low if empires grow exponentially. You can't expect that multiplying the number of colonies of your empire by x5 or x20 is not going to cause an exponential growth.

[...]

There is no such thing as a "balanced increase of resource production" in this context. If you make that 5 new colonies produce less than the starting HW, the game gets broken in a different way: blitzkrieg becomes the unique valid strategy. The game loses 2 of the 4 X, an becomes eXplore and eXterminate.
If you make that 5 new colonies produce more than the starting HW, you have exponential growth.

I respectfully disagree. Having 5 times the number of colonies resulting in 5 times resource output is not exponential growth, that is linear growth, and perfectly reasonable of course.

As you correctly point out, if that weren't the case, if 5 colonies wouldn't give you (roughly) 5 times the resource output of one colony (assuming all other factors being equal of course), then the game would be just as broken, only in a different way.

But that's not what I meant when talking about the issues with resource output increase in FO. In FO you start (roughly) with a resource output of 10. At the end of the game, especially longer games on larger maps, you can get as high as 10-50K (if you play long enough on sufficiently large maps, you can get even higher, 100K, 250K, but you have to be supremely bored to do that I guess ).

That's an increase by a factor of 1000 or more. Which is completely and utterly insane. Trying to balance anything by their resource costs over the course of an entire game becomes completely impossible.

The reason for that is how easily the different boni to the various stats determining resource output accumulate and compound each other.

We have boni applied directly to the output of a specific resource, then we have the growth boni that increase pop, which multiplay all boni that increase resource output per pop, and all that gets again multiplied by the number of colonies you have. It's the fact that these factors do not add up, but multiply each other which leads to exponential growth.

As you also pointed out correctly, that can't be completely avoided. Unless we want a dead boring game where you can only can increase one and one factor alone during the game (e.g. colonize new worlds), we're going to have different mechanics that boost/improve different factors (resource output per pop, pop, number of colonies you can have), which will inevitably lead to exponential growth due to simple multiplication.

However, how steep that curve is and what levels you can reach over the course of a normal game is what makes the important difference. To give an example: if the base resource output of 1 pop is 1 and a rather cheap investment of 10 resources lets you boost the resource output per pop by 0.5, then that curve is going to be quite extreme (especially if this ratio is roughly the average you get from the various sources providing boni). If the base resource output per pop is 1, but you need to invest 1000 resources to gain a boost of 0.01 resource output per pop, that curve is going to be much more flat.

The final levels of resource output after e.g. 200 turns will differ vastly given that two example figures. Of course, both are extremes and need to be avioded, the first because it will create an uncontrollable snowball effect and (as already said) making balancing resource costs over the course of a game impossible, the second because it will make investments into techs etc. which give you boni pointless, and just going out conquering the only viable option.

The objective here is to get the "return of interest" right, and avoid the extremes. FO currently fails spectacularly at that, as current numbers are firmly on the side of the first extreme (hence our persistent issues with snowball effects, difficulties to get production costs right, etc.).

I've suggested it many times already in the past, but one comparably simple measure we could take would be to rebalance the various boni you get from techs, buildings, specials, and massively tone them down. Also, increase the base resource output substantially. For example, let's start with a base resource output of 1 per pop (for pop based boni) for the focus setting. And have pop based boni granted by techs, buildings and specials in the range of 0.02 (very small boni) to 0.2 (very big boni).

That said, you're also correct that that alone will not be sufficient, so another very important ingredient to handle exponential growth is this:

Because, for some reason I don't understand, it's been decided that FreeOrion will not use actual upkeeps.
What I mean by upkeep, just in case my English is too bad for this:

• Colonies should consume a constant amount of resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings). They would also produce resources, more the bigger and more advanced the colonies are.
• Ships should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).
• Buildings should consume resources (modified by certain policies, techs and buildings).

The patch for the no-upkeep decision, long due, is the future influence upkeeps. Although I'm not sure they will be actual upkeeps or just PP costs with steps (which in the end would hit the same exponential growth wall).

We need proper upkeep mechanics. The specifics are subject of proper design discussions of course, but we most definitely need something along these lines.

To get back to the actual topic at hand: assuming that we can solve the too much resource output issue, using build costs to get shipyards right (in a way that allows to meet the design goals of having them as rare, strategic assets and not a spam everywhere thing), at least as one measure of several, should be possible. And consequently the need for crutches like the Base Hull should disappear.

[Vezzra]

All those are good reasons to avoid PP upkeep.

What can I say - amen to that, brother, amen to that...

[Oberlus]

And it will remain broken no matter you do. I've been working on that intermittently for the past months and there is no way you can make PP output be reasonably low if empires grow exponentially. You can't expect that multiplying the number of colonies of your empire by x5 or x20 is not going to cause an exponential growth.

I respectfully disagree. Having 5 times the number of colonies resulting in 5 times resource output is not exponential growth, that is linear growth, and perfectly reasonable of course.

However, the time (turns) you need to build 5 colonies when you had only one (upping number of colonies to 6) is greater than the time you need to get 30 more colonies with those 6 colonies. And hence, you get the exponential growth I was talking about. Maybe not the right wording, but I hope you get my point now?

Also, we have several sources of linear growth (not only increasing number of colonies, also increasing population per colony and increasing output per pop) that multiply each other. So we get even faster growth. Call it exponential growth or not, maybe just snowballing, whatever you call it, it means that the empire with faster growth will keep growing faster and faster with respect to the other empires. And that is the problem when looking for more balanced games in which neither the winning party nor the losing one gets bored/discouraged to continue the game, isn't it?

But that's not what I meant when talking about the issues with resource output increase in FO. In FO you start (roughly) with a resource output of 10. At the end of the game, especially longer games on larger maps, you can get as high as 10-50K (if you play long enough on sufficiently large maps, you can get even higher, 100K, 250K, but you have to be supremely bored to do that I guess ).

That's an increase by a factor of 1000 or more. Which is completely and utterly insane. Trying to balance anything by their resource costs over the course of an entire game becomes completely impossible.

I understand. That is also my point: trying to control the numbers (in bigger games) so that what is supposed to be difficult (having huge fleets or researching late game techs) is not a cakewalk at some point.

The reason for that is how easily the different boni to the various stats determining resource output accumulate and compound each other.

Not only that, as I tried to explain in the first paragraph of this post:
Even if you remove all population/research/industry bonus, so that base population per colony multiplied by RESEARCH_PER_POP and INDUSTRY_PER_POP are the only sources of RP and PP, you'll get snowballing effect that will get impossible to control unless you balance game for galaxies of a limited range of sizes with a limited range of competing empires (such as in MoO2).

You know I agree current tech/buiding boosts to RP/PP output are too big. But as I'm trying to explain here: just working on those bonus will not be enough to have a nice balance or more fair/pleasant games.

And that's why we need a mechanic to make growing empires pay more for further growth. Actual upkeep, maintenance, is the way to go IMO. Not sure from your post if you agree with this or not.

[Vezzra]

You know I agree current tech/buiding boosts to RP/PP output are too big. But as I'm trying to explain here: just working on those bonus will not be enough to have a nice balance or more fair/pleasant games.

And that's why we need a mechanic to make growing empires pay more for further growth. Actual upkeep, maintenance, is the way to go IMO. Not sure from your post if you agree with this or not.

I do. We need both, proper upkeep mechanics and toning down the boosts to resource output. Either one alone won't be sufficient to fix the current issues with skyrocketing resource output.

But once we have both measures in place, I do believe that balancing things (like shipyards) by their build costs (maybe in addition to other measures) to prevent them becoming spam-everywhere things at any point in a game will be possible. That's what I'm trying to get at.

[Oberlus]

But once we have both measures in place, I do believe that balancing things (like shipyards) by their build costs (maybe in addition to other measures) to prevent them becoming spam-everywhere things at any point in a game will be possible. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Then we are on the same page, at least for starters. I'll put the balance of tech/buildings boosts high on my TODO list.
If in the end shipyards need something else apart from a fixed (carefully balanced) cost, we will see.