Posts by psychlops

Quote from Golden Buddha

still some time to answer the question

in basic there is one answer which we should talk about. conditions stated as in the first post.

waiting for you calculations and explanation how you got to it.

The correct answer is already posted, if you dispute that, why not post something that shows how you see it different? Stop playing games where you pretend/think you have the answer but in a few days you'll either be wrong, change the question or post that the correct answer was already stated. You've already edited the original post 3 times (including changing the timeline which is annoying) how about you explain the point you're trying to make since virtually everyone who has bothered to read this has already pointed to the same simple math. If we're not understanding what you're asking please add to the conversation not just bump the thread with inane nonsense and edit the original post to move back the day where you "shine down your radiant intelligence and enlighten the little people".

Quote from Hastings TNT

Wow, I never consider this, there is not ANY way to manipulate corruption that I have ever heard of I believe corruption tops off at 15% but been so long that I paid any attention to it I would not be confident it was not changed in one of the patch note / updates we see monthly.... there are not any directions on how to combat corruption...I have scoured these Forums, since old forum was POOF gone and this new library created... it is tough especially in 500 maps if you have not saved some capitals to harvest in the late game... and the SAGA continues

I always save capitals because I've almost invariably got the most land at some point in the game but even with a few capitals if you have to be the guy to get 40-60 % of the points for the coalition this is going to make it even harder. Meanwhile the players doing the least to help the coalition win will be getting impacted the least.

I think this is the final straw in pushing my enjoyment level below the annoyance level for me. I'm in 2 games now, I don't think I'll be starting any more. Over the last couple days I've found myself reading the rules/descriptions of a couple different games. The grindy-ness factor was already massively frustrating in the end games for me. I sometimes could barely bring myself to log in on a 500 player map that had been over for 2-3 weeks where I still had to keep making fortresses on 800 provinces in order to get the game over. I stopped playing 500 player maps after the game where I had no choice but to capture 1100 provinces. I spent a month trying to keep my coalition from quitting even though I was doing 90% of the work. The distance penalties are simply too great (25 cap would make the game much more enjoyable/playable) on the 500 player map. It makes me wonder if anyone has EVER won that map solo. I guess if everyone went inactive and you could limit your wars but I always find myself at war with an entire coalition down the stretch and so the -39 and the -25 combine to make things brutal in the end game.

It's a pretty painful proposition to imagine having to control 2500 provinces on that map given the distance penalties. you certainly can not do it if Europe is not part of your land mass because Europe has the most province density and thus the lowest distance penalties. There are provinces in Asia and Africa that are larger than the entire 8 province starting positions in Europe. Without any access to data I would bet a lot of money no one has EVER won on the 500 player map without being in the coalition that controlled most of Europe.

Quote from Furry1

I suspect you're talking more about Supremacy 1 but it's bleeding over into Sup1914 too. Yesterday I took a city over and stationed 11 troops (high morale, btw) in there. Day change comes along and it revolts with 8 men being killed and 3 men switching sides. The ONLY silver lining is that it was to my coalition member. But still, that is freaking ridiculous.

I have never played S1. I'm only referring to 1914.

I have another thread on this subject (revolt percentages greatly increased) and one of the staff (freezy) posted that the numbers were going to be revised again back towards what they used to be. It used to be that 7 men was 0% revolt with a new province (25 morale) and 6 was 1% but now 11 men is 3-4% and 15 is still 1%, the major problem with this is it massively slows down offensive operations in a game where offensive operations are already pretty slow. They seem to be making change after change that make the game even more grindy and I suspect this is going to have a negative long term impact.

I joined the front line pioneers a few times when I first started playing because I assumed there would be some opportunities to help with issues like this before they became part of the mix but I've never once seen a front line pioneer game offered and the game kicks you out of the pioneers after 24 hours without being in a FLP game. It's one of the most annoying things I've ever seen being tossed at potential beta testers in a game system in 45 years of gaming.

Quote from NarmerTheLion

BB's can stillbe named (for now...) Bytro just defeaturized supremacy (as they often do) so they no longer show up in bombardement or even in the regular unit view as they should... Next Revamp consider Naming Units gone as that's how revamps work...

It's a poor choice unless there's a reason like the naming of units was putting unnecessary load on the database and if that's the case why not be transparent about it. We're carrying some weird legacy code for ammunition but can't afford a small text field on a unit type that's not built all that often.

Bytro seems to be making a lot of changes that penalize "winning" and make the game even more difficult to play effectively. I'm beginning to wonder if some of these changes are not driven by some obtuse effort to force more GM usage to be won.

First the changes to revolt percentages which slow the game down and make it harder for anyone to actually go on the offensive. making what is arguably the worst part about the game (the waiting) even more interminable. Additionally this made the game feel even more grindy which is the number one reason I have heard people complain/stop playing over other than GM usage which obviously is a necessary evil to keep the lights on.

It also makes me wonder if anyone at Bytro is actually playing the game or doing any math before making these changes. I currently have provinces with 87 morale that are losing resources. It's often impossible to get your morale up to 100 in far flung provinces because if you're winning the game you often have multiple enemies and if you combine -30 for distance and -20 for wars you're in a deep hole morale wise and so the overall effect is to make expanding the economy more and more difficult.

-12% corruption? seriously? the distance penalty to morale is already creating this effect, corruption is just a redundant penalty that is ONLY penalizing people who are playing hard and trying to win. If you have 80 provinces all within a -8 to 10 morale penalty distance from your capital this will not harm you that much but if you're conquering land on other continents (which someone has to do if your coalition wants to actually end the game effectively) these penalties are destroying the ability of the people who are winning from growing. 70 morale break even point is pretty steep. 87 and still being underwater is ridiculous. Who is analyzing the math here? Is no one playing the game? You can't have -30 morale penalty (or worse -39 on 500 player maps) and apply this corruption penalty as aggressively. The morale penalty is an interesting twist to the game (very abstract and mostly nonsensical in a lot of cases because Boston doesn't have any higher morale than LA or San Francisco but corruption (which is a mechanic in many games) is already accounted for in the distance morale penalties. having both is redundant and the combined weight is oppressive in the worst possible context.

Is corruption and how to combat it even explained in the rules? Are you adding a "state capitol" or courthouse building? It feels like someone stole the corruption mechanic from civilization without actually understanding game design or the abstract concept of "distance morale penalty" you already have going on here.

Is the point to say "you must spend GM on morale or else winning will be so grindy you'll stop playing?" If that's the logic here just come out and say it so I can be done playing. Someone at bytro need to take a course in game balance and/or look up the term "unfun" in the context of game design. 90 morale as the new break even point? Sheesh, who is making these decisions?

The other side of this argument is every game I ever played here except one was over long before it was ended. I've been on a 500 player map where I personally had to capture 1100 provinces (with enormous morale penalties for distance) in order to lift my coalition over the 1500 point mark.

these games end slowly with a a lot of grinding more often than not. sometimes to avoid the grind i recruit a player or two to join my coalition even though they definitely did not deserve to get a win. This is only made worse by the fact that in the games where i have to get 800-900 points while my 4 allies get 600-700 combined we all get the same reward. The coalition victories ought to include a bonus (or at the minimum GM for your points) for the players that carry the team.

Disclaimer: I've never bothered with an alliance battle. I figured it was way more apt to draw lots of ego's and thus GM use. That being said:

I have two separate points to make on this topic so I'll make two posts.

If this is really a problem, the real/better solution is to punish players who go AFK at any point. EVER. Many games do this. This game has a problem in that many of the most attractive stats are not "ELO" based but just pure counting stats. There are likely some players who start dozens of maps and quit most of them. They score some points for counting stats on all of them and cherry pick the most advantageous for their efforts.

There are numerous ways Bytro can punish/discourage this behavior. First add a stat for percentage of games completed. It's a lot hard to find allies if you quit half your games and on top of that if I know you're a quitter I'll be much more likely to attack you. This would allow the community to self regulate by adopting behaviors that punish quitters.

Another option is to limit the number of maps players can play simultaneously. This is the case in many games I have played. All the way back to play by mail and play by email games they only allowed players to play on 1-2 maps until they had "finished" a certain number and then gradually increased the "allowed open games" based upon a proven track record of finishing. You could add another game slot for every 3-5 games you finish and subtract another slot for every game you quit. Finish 30 games without quitting and you can play in 12 at a time. Finish 10 but quit 4 and you're only allowed to play 1 at a time.

If there's an incentive to stay, more people will stay. Some play by mail games even stopped charging for turns when you dropped below a certain power level and offered a free turn in a future game for completing the game so that even countries that were being killed had a reason to continue and no vested financial interest in quitting. It was obvious in some games that people quit when they were definitely doomed because who wants to pay $3-5 a turn for the last few weeks while you're already obviously dead.

Does archiving the game make you inactive right away? If that's the case, get rid of that. Don't give people a way to "protect their k/D" by quitting. Alternatively you could saddle people with deaths for every unit that was already created before they went inactive. This would potentially increase the impact to the point players would rather fight (and get some kills) than go afk and take the stat drop.

The accounts here are full of players who have played 100 games and won 2 and only captured 600 provinces in 100 games. There's nothing good about that for the game or the community and way beyond the grindy-ness of finishing the maps there's definitely room for improvement in this arena. The question for Bytro from a business sense is how to make more people finish without impacting the bottom line. I would argue that more people playing the games to the end might actually increase revenue in the long run since the games would seem more fun and more competitive and this might keep more players interested for a longer period of time.

Quote from South Paw

I name them stuff like that Frank. "Howdy, how are ya?" Wanna make a campfire?" Things of that nature. Makes it fun in the paper when it comes out. Folks smile I suppose.

I often use names that warn my future enemies of my intent "Hello America", "Europe or Bust", or sometimes if someone is being really annoying I'll just name them his country name directly. "Hejaz1", "Hejaz2" etc. In one game when I was Ireland and had captured all of UK but I had made a deal with Germany to split part of France with him but then he made another deal with Spain and Italy to push me out of France both Germany and Italy were upset when battleships started popping up with names like "remember Rennes" and "Rennes revenge".

i'm in a game now where my ally is named "the cat in the hat" and we have a doctor suess themed flag so we currently have battleships named "sam I am", "I am sam", "the grinch", "redfish", "bluefish", "thing1", "thing2", "the lorax", "whoville", "cindylouwho", "green eggs" and "ham"

hastings mostly covered the most effective uses of GM though I would argue that healing mech units is probably the worst use of GM in the game. it's very efficient but it's the 'lowest' most unbalancing aspect of the game. If your battleships and bombers can not be killed there's no longer much of a game and now we're just down to who will spend the most GM. It's a bit like winning a console game with the cheat codes enabled. Invulnerability is not something I actually want for my units because I want the game to have some level of challenge.

All the golden spy options feel like cheating to me. You can get reveal all armies by paying for normal spies and getting some luck but simply buying the locations of all the enemy units sort of seems pointless in the context of a game. Not much strategy if you always know where the other guys has every unit. Same thing with reading messages. I really like the mechanic that some of your messages can be intercepted but simply buying access to my mailbox feels unbalanced.

One thing I would change about hastings original post is that rushing mech units is not much different than rushing cav on day 1. It costs 23,000 GM to get 3 guns on day 8 or 6 guns on day 10 and either of those is nearly game breaking. normal progression to guns is day 12 hour 15 so if one of your neighbors has 6 guns for 2 days and 15 hours that you can not respond it's unlikely you'll be in a position to survive.

Quote from Hastings TNT

Furry1 of all ppl here in Forum Buddha is the one that explained in detail and gave directions on how to use (flower defense) so that newbie players could deploy and use it...clearly stated many times the reason that HnR is not reliable exploit despite entire community clinging to it as the ONLY acceptable exploit...the main reason he always states is that it is 'activity based exploit' and that it can not accurately be timed with the 'time LAG' in 500 player maps...however he has also shown the nano seconds delay for each unit on the map and has investigated based on units in any given map the exact "time LAG' so even that can be calculated...

Anyhow, I doubt the thread was forgetting LAG but rather teaching players HOW to do movement calculations....LAG is an issue when doing HnR more so than calculations of 'movement time' when planning the maps and what you reveal to opponents IMO

The very nature of what causes lag means it can not be calculated. Anyone who believes this does not understand latency, ping, server loading, concurrent threads, database connections, nor client side considerations. Lag will be different for every player so even if it could be calculated it would be an individual calculation and nearly pointless to the masses.

Lag really has almost nothing to do with this answer. It's 8th grade algebra "a train leaves the station..." with a couple of extra considerations speed on enemy land vs normal speed and the delta between the client and the server on firing times.

Oil had the correct answer from a straight algebraic standpoint and buddha seemed to be implying it was not correct so I threw in the server/client delta. He said he would be giving us his correct answer on Monday which came and went which is par for the course since trying to lord information over players is part of his enjoyment here.

It's not a good question to determine much about new players skill (as he implies when he throws in "to determine who he should communicate with") because in reality the player who is running can turn and fire at any point so if you think you've calculated this to the second and stop paying attention to the game the likely result is you will not be the player who fires first.

Additionally this game has almost no "logistics" in actual game play. Logistics is an abstract concept here, probably simulated to some degree by - morale penalties for enemy neighbors and upkeep costs for units. Neither is something you have to actively control. There are no "supply lines" or supply units that need to be accounted for and they can not be interdicted. Even surrounded units are not penalized. This question is about unit speed and understanding movement penalties on enemy land which is just mobility. If you've been in the actual military you'll certainly be aware that mobility and logistics are not the same.

It's kind of a fun mechanic to be able to name your battleships/railguns and then see them perform in the paper. Unfortunately other than the day they are built all the locations where the tiny bit of customization appear to have been removed from the game. It's clearly not a huge deal but game players rarely like having things taken away from them.

I do miss seeing the notices in the paper or when you review a fleet it used to tell you the names of the battleships in that fleet. IIRC even when a ship was sunk or when it killed another battleship I believe there used to be a notification. I can only assume that some players where abusing the names in a way that breaks the rules or was just too vulgar but effectively you're punishing the group for the actions of the worst behaved. Why not just put a notice on the naming screen that offensive names will result in the ship being removed from the game or something along those lines. Harsh but effective and punishes only the offenders.

you're an hour from shooting so the gap you're closing is 25km, you're closing the gap at 16.25km hr (.65*25) which works out to be .27083 km per minute. 25km/.27083 = 92.30769 minutes which is close to 1:32:18 and you can typically shoot about 10-12 seconds before you're in range so right around 1:32:07 (92:07 if you're trying to be specific about just minutes an seconds)

incidentally this is not logistics it's mobility and the way you write, even in this forum is always so very condescending.

Quote from LordCommande

PERHAPS
an easy fix,

would be that planes and range attacks do damage in an area, not specific unit.

So if the enemy splits into a million different pieces, the damage would spread among those millon different pieces

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It already works like this.

The range of damage is 5km iirc and any units inside this damage radius are effectively treated as one stack. That's why sometimes you're trying to target 2 artillery by themselves but your 8 guns fire and all the kills come off the huge stack of infantry standing near the arty.

I never noticed a decrease in morale when passing fighters or guns and we used that trick on many occasions to load up one player in the coalition with a huge fighter squadron so we could take down an enemy coalition.

if the units took damage it would definitely change the valid uses to make them less worthwhile but still reward the multi account player.

Their are two problems with gifting units, the first it gives multi accounting even more power and second it allows a group of friends to share artillery/battleships and potentially have the same stack of weapons being operated 24/7 in away that is very difficult for a regular human player (who has to sleep) to deal with.

I really liked being able to gift units but the upside was not as great as the downside of having people exploit the mechanic.

What hastings said is the real problem, it's a bit annoying that planes on the ground inside a fort fight like they are tanks against invading armies but as he stated if there's an airfield in reality they would be flying and doing much more damage with many attacks per hour given the short range/flight times so it's a trade off that doesn't really change much.

It's far more painful when your bombers are shot down by fighters effectively in crates being shipped by truck or train across country. There is no airfield and as such they are not being flown and giving them the full 4 air attack value is both counter intuitive and a little unbalancing. In effect it means fighters can NEVER be caught on the ground even if there is not an airbase within 2 days march.

Quote from Moldavi

I personally have no problem with the monetization of the game. It allows those of us who are not whales to play what I consider one of the best online games out there.

But, as someone that has played on and off for over a decade, I can say that the quick pay to play option has changed the dynamic over the years. In the past I advocated a maximum GM spend per game, or even per in game day per game, as a way to balance it. The paying players still get an advantage but the others have a bit more of a level playing field.

I have beaten whales in games but it does take a lot more effort and a lot more micromanagement to do so. For the casual player who may spend a total of $5 to $50 per month/year on the game the level of in game interaction needed for this might seem a bit overwhelming, especially in the speed rounds.

This may have been stated earlier in the thread and I missed it, but what would be the harm in a 100k GM limit spend per game or 15k GM limit spend per game day?

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Those limits are bad for Bytro economically. In reality in this kind of game a huge portion of the money almost surely comes from isolated spending sprees not a steady stream of trickling revenue from a high number of sources. The money comes from a few torrential downpours that cause flooding not a daily light sprinkling. The limits you're suggesting would make the flood smaller while not increasing the small sources in any manner and put a big dent in the revenue. When two whales get into an ego war and start spending at an accelerated rate Bytro gets a pay day. The cap you're suggesting would not only lower the need for both players to spend more but would give them time to think things over and decided if $200 on GM was really going to give a good ROI for their entertainment dollar. Even when a single player is trying to buy a win, they typically spend more GM than the rest of the map combined. Bytro needs these bursts of spending to keep the lights on, this model would not survive if it tries to rely on smaller contributions from a much wider set of clients. That model only works for games with a much broader appeal and typically a much higher production value. People pay to play games like eve and WoW on a subscription basis because there's many millions of dollars poured into creating a much richer world and a nearly infinite number of things to do. This game can not hope to approximate that kin of immersive experience, nor should it. It's hard to create a good game with a f2p option but a premium model where the f2p players still have a chance. They've done a fairly decent job here and if occasionally you get steam rolled by a fat wallet remember that expenditure keeps the game available to everyone.

I don't personally understand the joy in winning by spending more money but never lose sight of the fact that the game could not be f2p if that option was not available.

Paulo,

What you're suggesting is impossible. There are 2000 points total in any game. ALWAYS. It's a "zero sum" game. In order for your points to go up someone else's must go down. This means there will never be a game where you have 900 points and your coalition has 1400 points and there is anyone else in the game with 1200 points. There won't even be an enemy player with 600 points in your example. In order for your coalition to have 1500 points the entire rest of the world including all ai's still in the game will have less than 500 points total.

I still agree with some portion of what you've said because I've won a lot of games on the 100 player map (5 person coalition) where I had 800+ points in order to reach 1500 with my coalition. Meanwhile I've got an ally or two with 100 points (or less) and they got the same reward as I did. The very minimum I should have gotten was +800 GM for my points to go with the 3150 for the coalition win (it's 3150 each on the 100 player map) because for another 100 points (going solo) I would have gotten 7000+ GM as opposed to 3150. I've been tempted many times to dump my coalition and go solo but I always just suck it up and deal with the "loafers" who basically rode my coattails to a full reward.

If not giving the GM for points scored, then I think there should be some sort of bonus to coalition winners who get the most points for the coalition. Maybe the top 2 on 5 man coalitions and top 3 on 7 man. Or maybe a sliding scale based upon performance vs expectation. In a 5 man coalition it's "expected" everyone gets roughly 300 points. If one player has to get 800 so the others can all get 175 that's more than a little unfair in terms of rewards vs effort. On the 500 player map with 7 man coalitions I had to get 650 points once. I had well over 1000 provinces and it was miserable to control/maintain morale. I definitely deserved more GM than the player in my coalition with less than 100 provinces and about 40 points.

even at 1920 pixels the overlay covers the selected province. If i'm not sure where it is i just close the overlay and then reopen it. It's super annoying.

there are a lot of ways to fix this, the one you said involves some simple math but you could also just add a button to shorten the overlay to one row and then return it to full size when you click the button again. Or even just a place on the menu bar area of the overlay that if you're mouse is hovering over it the overlay becomes translucent or rolls up. They have a translucent effect on the new chat and you could modify that same code to make the province overlay see through. They already make it partially see through just not enough you can "see" clearly. It's pretty easy to change that property back and forth through the DOM.

even just selecting an arbitrary number like 300 pixels and shifting the map left by that amount would be better than always tucking it behind the overlay

I don't think this is actually what happens. In reality there's a random number generator and that affects the outcome not the single damaged artillery. I think there is a superstition that some guns can not hit at all but I've taken 10 guns in a stack that were missing repeatedly separated them all and sent them to fire at infantry to make sure each and every one of them was able to accumulate more kills.

It's very hard to collect enough data or I would probably reverse engineer the formula (or some sort of close approximation) for how the random number generator impacts damage here but casual observation tells me that the damage in 1914 never exceeds the damage potential. My best guess is it's capped at somewhere around 80-90% of the potential. A stack of 20 artillery (in your example) has 30 potential damage and when you add the damaged artillery that potential goes up not down. the damaged unit won't add the full 1.5 so you might have 31 potential now instead of 30 (or 31.5 if everything was healed).

What is actually happening is the RNG has a range and that range starts at 0. It's my perception that the random number is weighted towards the low end of the scale meaning more 0% than 80% (or 100% if there is no cap and I just don't pay close enough attention). The problem is as humans we have a biased filter that fixates a lot more on the times we got "unlucky" than the times we got "lucky". Even though I'm aware of this and I'm really good at math (800 on the math SAT's 8 times) I can not be certain I'm able to logically suppress that bias without actually collecting a bunch of data that is a bit painful to collect. This means the RNG might actually be linear and you're just dealing with a wide amount of variance because there's a huge difference between 31 damage and 0 damage.

So one of the problems here is there is no way to detect the actual granularity on the random number being generated. What if I generate a random number between 0-1 multiple by 100 divide by 25 and round down. Now my granularity is in 4th's and 0% damage happens 25% of the time no matter how many guns are shooting at the target. In this case getting 0 damage twice in a row would be 1 in 16 and would happen many times per game. If you take a straight random number (0-1) and multiply by potential damage then you get 1% granularity. Given how often I see two zero's come up in a row I sort of suspect that the damage is weighted so we're not using a true random number (linear) but computed "random factor" that is weighted or at least has a granularity in chunks as big as a tenth of the range so that double zero would be happening 1 time in hundred.

Back to the human brains bias. Get two 0's in a row and you start to think something is broken. Someone came up with the idea that some of the artillery is "bugged" but knowing a lot about php and programming I'm guessing that's not the case. You're just getting some low rolls which happens to everyone and if it's linear there's simply a ton of opportunity for variance.

All that noise aside, there is something you can do to cut way down on variance. If your guns are not in danger (i.e. taking fire) break them into smaller stacks and shoot at the target multiple times. it's easy for 20 guns to roll a zero and miss that one infantry but break them out into 10 stacks of 2 and that infantry is going to die almost every time because you're not going to roll 10 zero's in a row. You get a lot more "average" results and almost never see the extremes. Roll 11 die 10 - 10 and compare those numbers to a single die 100. One is a bell curve massively weighted towards the middle and the other is a line with a roughly equal distribution and a large amount of variance. Variance is why even if you make all the right moves in poker you still lose a percentage of the time. That's why pro poker players will "run it twice" or let other players bankroll part of their stake in a tournament, to cut down on variance.