Now, let me preempt this by stating that what I'm about to say is all based on observation of gameplay videos for a game that is not released yet. This post may well be too soon, but I feel I need to put this out there.
From what I can tell we have an issue with tech rewards for the players and the pace of the game. As I see it the pace of the game should go as follows: game phase 1, expansion, by the end of it average expansionist empires should have finished most of tier 1 of 3 techs while a typical tall empires will be finishing the tier 2 techs. This is not the case, most players have all 3 tiers done before expansion is even finished. That's way too fast. 2 Things can and should be done about this. 1. POP impact on research rate should increase from 1% per 3 to a 1:1 ratio; 100 POP should double the tech needed of the base price. 2. The amount of research completed should also affect research rate. Tier 1 should increase by 1%, teir 2 by 2%, and 3 by 3. This should slow down the game by an adequate amount, but also yield the rare window of opportunity for an empire to get a lucky draw and b line for a tier 3 research line early game. A lot of variety in tech level and area can come out of this model.
2nd point. Tech advances in ship components are largely unrewarding to the player. For example the dps for the tier 1 and 2 base missile techs on small are as follows: tier 1: 1.81 dps, tier 2: 2.09 dps. Now I know that missiles are the lowest of the dps rates of the 3 base weapon types, but the number difference is still way too small. A little over .2 dps. Why bother researching it at all, I'd rather pick up infrastructure techs every time when they come up even as a hyper aggressive military species. It should be closer to double about every tier; 1.8 to 3.6 to 7.2, maybe not quite that high, but it should be much closer to that than what it is currently.
The last complaint I have is the actual ship components themselves. In terms of gameplay impact, there really isn't much difference between them, between either size, tier, or type. The largest difference we see is between range, which isn't that effective, and penetration power. In terms of base damage, accuracy, and cooldowns they're all practically the same and it hurts. Players should be rewarded for the different decisions they make in terms of ship components, they should have to plan their ships and fleets around their choices. As it stands though, it doesn't really matter what they put on, aside from counters, they all do the same thing in just about the same way. No real difference, near carbon copies. To bring back missiles as my example heres something I really want to see. Currently the cooldown rate across the board for tier 1 missiles is 5.35. Let's scale it better so maybe small has 5 medium has 7.5 and large has 10. This would really affect how the player composed their fleet given the strategy they wanted to go with. Let's say they wanted to use large missiles to do big burst damage, with damage as high as maybe 100; really strong early game. But with a 10 second cooldown those missiles would be real easy targets to shoot out of the sky. The player would probably tend towards a strategy that parred ships with large missile components with a lot of really small fast ships and smaller missiles with faster cooldown timers because with a lot more things in the sky the chance your big missiles getting shot down plummets. But with the current 5.35 cooldowns across the board here this nuance is non existent in the game. And this is just on the tier 1 missiles. This loss in nuance also exists between different tiers as well for all weapon types. There should be a real reward for how a player creates his fleet base on the techs he has researched for them, but as it stands there is not.
I would really like to see these changes and attitudes implemented by you guys, it would really help improve the gameplay in terms of rewarding players decisions.
From what I can tell we have an issue with tech rewards for the players and the pace of the game. As I see it the pace of the game should go as follows: game phase 1, expansion, by the end of it average expansionist empires should have finished most of tier 1 of 3 techs while a typical tall empires will be finishing the tier 2 techs. This is not the case, most players have all 3 tiers done before expansion is even finished. That's way too fast. 2 Things can and should be done about this. 1. POP impact on research rate should increase from 1% per 3 to a 1:1 ratio; 100 POP should double the tech needed of the base price. 2. The amount of research completed should also affect research rate. Tier 1 should increase by 1%, teir 2 by 2%, and 3 by 3. This should slow down the game by an adequate amount, but also yield the rare window of opportunity for an empire to get a lucky draw and b line for a tier 3 research line early game. A lot of variety in tech level and area can come out of this model.
2nd point. Tech advances in ship components are largely unrewarding to the player. For example the dps for the tier 1 and 2 base missile techs on small are as follows: tier 1: 1.81 dps, tier 2: 2.09 dps. Now I know that missiles are the lowest of the dps rates of the 3 base weapon types, but the number difference is still way too small. A little over .2 dps. Why bother researching it at all, I'd rather pick up infrastructure techs every time when they come up even as a hyper aggressive military species. It should be closer to double about every tier; 1.8 to 3.6 to 7.2, maybe not quite that high, but it should be much closer to that than what it is currently.
The last complaint I have is the actual ship components themselves. In terms of gameplay impact, there really isn't much difference between them, between either size, tier, or type. The largest difference we see is between range, which isn't that effective, and penetration power. In terms of base damage, accuracy, and cooldowns they're all practically the same and it hurts. Players should be rewarded for the different decisions they make in terms of ship components, they should have to plan their ships and fleets around their choices. As it stands though, it doesn't really matter what they put on, aside from counters, they all do the same thing in just about the same way. No real difference, near carbon copies. To bring back missiles as my example heres something I really want to see. Currently the cooldown rate across the board for tier 1 missiles is 5.35. Let's scale it better so maybe small has 5 medium has 7.5 and large has 10. This would really affect how the player composed their fleet given the strategy they wanted to go with. Let's say they wanted to use large missiles to do big burst damage, with damage as high as maybe 100; really strong early game. But with a 10 second cooldown those missiles would be real easy targets to shoot out of the sky. The player would probably tend towards a strategy that parred ships with large missile components with a lot of really small fast ships and smaller missiles with faster cooldown timers because with a lot more things in the sky the chance your big missiles getting shot down plummets. But with the current 5.35 cooldowns across the board here this nuance is non existent in the game. And this is just on the tier 1 missiles. This loss in nuance also exists between different tiers as well for all weapon types. There should be a real reward for how a player creates his fleet base on the techs he has researched for them, but as it stands there is not.
I would really like to see these changes and attitudes implemented by you guys, it would really help improve the gameplay in terms of rewarding players decisions.
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