Some thoughts:

-When you win important space battles, you come  out stronger, the enemy weaker

-When you take a planet, you usually dont sacrifice anything long term, and gain power, the enemy gets weaker

-When the enemy has no fleets, you can easily dominate him, and he has to watch a slow demise

Premise:

-Counter the positive feedback loop, where the victor sprials into gain, while the defeated sprials into loss.

(Think of mechanics like in an arcade car racing game, where the car that is behind gets a small speed-boost to catch up, and to keep the game tense and exciting)

Ideas:

-Fleets that won a battle, but took damage, cannot move fast.

-Losing a planet gives all other planets a major morals boost (FOR THE REICH, WE MUST NOT FALL)

-Winning a planet requires you to keep strong fleets there, as the planet is not happy and needs to be surpressed for a while, until the population accepts your rule.

-Think of ways where battles are not "one winner, one loser, winner takes it all", but something where the loser can react and minimize his losses, slowly giving away ground, conceding to the winner, but at the same time making it harder and harder for the winner to push on.

(The same philosophy you have in the truce mechanic, which is a very good idea imho, as it makes war not an all-out "WIN OR LOSE" thing, but instead you gain a bit territory of the enemy, and then he has a truce to recover, or you pay a lot of influence to continue the war).

2cents

So you want to reason with "real war" in a game about space trees building supermarkets to become happier, where we build giant metal arcs out of essence and live on a flat earth...erm.. flat galaxy, I mean... :)

Like, srsly? :P

I'm just saying that that's just how it works. No people would have a morale boost from losing a system which housed some percentage of the empire population.

But I agree the system could be better with military rushing empires crushing you with 3 fleets while you only have one because you're focusing on other stuff

Hehe, gottcha, just found it a bit funny.

We already have several systems doing such things. Having a large empire will be likely to drag your empire's happiness down, and getting more territory means you have more borders to protect. Plus, ongoing war with one empire easily becomes an opportunity for the others.(although AI seems not that good on grasping it)

One of the key elements of strategy games is uncertainty. So, I agree that there has to be some challenges to emerging empires. But, I think it should be expectable to some extent and escapable at a cost of something else that is less lethal. In this perspective, I think your options are too punishing. Defeating an empire only to get more disadvantages seems to be not logical. Of course, we already have some bonuses when losing territory like happiness and I don't oppose it, but I don't believe making a system that exists just for giving benefits to losing empire is good idea.

Besides, discerning an actual loss from not that serious one is not that easy. What if someone deliberately bring lots of sacrificial fleets in order to give panalty to enemy fleets by making meaningless attacks to give a very small damage? Doing so will drag the losing empire's main fleet even further down on the main battle. What if you calculatedly lose a not-that-important-system and get a morale boost, then crush the enemy's fleets at once? What if a leading empire on the galaxy declares Galaxy War I on the others and beat them one-by-one with the main fleet while holding others with war dragging mechanism? There will be plenty of ways to abuse war-losing-side-bonus.

I think there need to be some indirect ways to make balance. Starting from AI tweaks, giving them more opportunistic behaviors and some jealous attitude to emerging or winning empire, maybe making Mutual Defense Treaty could be helpful. As a pre-step to alliance, add a mutual defense treaty and limited war for the implementation of the treaty. This could be a way to incite some small wars between empires and good casus belli without hurting relationship with each other excessively.

Look, I do admit that this game lacks uncertainty at the late-game phase and need to take steps on it. But ES2 is strategy game, where the planning, uncertainty, and causality between them coexist. So, ideally, what we need on this game is moderate uncertainty accompanied with acceptable disadvantages. Giving a goal and taking it away as soon as player achieves it is simply punishing the player. If one achieves a goal, then giving a new challenge or making the player focus on the contenders would be a less-punishing approach.

The game could use some galactic menaces in the late game to keep dominant empires on their toes. Nothing takes the attention off the little guy like a giant space monster eating away at the big guy's empire from the opposite end of the galaxy...

hera35 wrote:

If talking mainly about single-player I think improving AI behavior would be the most fun and fair solution to snowballing rather than further artificial game rule limitations, not to mention it'd probably make single-player experience a bit more in-line with multiplayer experience as well.

Currently the main problem is that the AI doesn't try to take down a score leader nor does it seem to aim for any victory conditions itself, or if it does it's extremely slow and bad at it. Once you take out two or so immediate neighbors and thus snagged enough land and infrastructure to outproduce every other faction (even with the AI's FIDSI cheats on highest difficulties) you've pretty much won the game already because nothing is ever going to oppose you. The outcome is clear and there's nothing to really do other than slowly crawling toward a victory type of your choosing without interacting with the rest of the universe in any way, so there is no endgame tension to speak of.

Even if by sheer luck one AI ends up snowballing like the player does, the former can't intelligently target key systems like capitals or built victory wonders to prevent the player's immediate victory. Same applies to big AI-only alliances that quite arbitrarily seem to choose which foes to attack. The only victories I've ever seen AI close to are Economic and Conquest, former only because of their FIDSI cheats (AI is actually really bad at placing trade routes for Dust generation) and latter if they get extremely lucky steamrolling over several other AI factions and thus acquire more systems, but even then I've never seen them make the final push by colonizing a handful of non-owned systems.

Hera, I dont think improving the AI behavior would work. To create a effective AI for a grand strategy game like ES2 is very difficult, because there are lot of factors the AI need to consider in order to be an worthy opponent. Because of that, any AI the devs create will have immense amount of flaws, in which only a real player can fit in the spot to create a great battle. 

That is my vision of things... But well, returning to the theme, I dont believe making disvantages for winning people would be a good idea. The problem is, there isn't only penalties for expanding your empire alot, and not only that system is abusable... But, i feel like, there is another option that you seem to have forgotten. 

A empire that is losing on war can forge alliances whit other players (Dont even think AI in this case since he should be very dumb for it) and that means, if you have the right alliances to defeat your opponent, you won't even need to cripple the winner empire to gain a lead, you can rely on others to help you win those battles. 

Also, an empire doens't really need a "small movement thruster" to defeat an empire. Have you forgotten how long it takes to plan the capture of a single system? Sometimes it takes over 20 turns for me to create the right fleet, retrofit them to counter to the enemy strategy, and move them to the system, and THEN starting a invasion , wich may take 7 turns sometimes...

Now imagine, if i played against unfallen in a vined territory, where my speed is halved when i go trough anywhere at vines, and i lose even more movement speed just because i won a battle? taking even more time to plan my things and conquer the territories?

I think this won't make it easier for losing players to catch up, it will make it easier for losing players to DESTROY the winning competition, since they will get some bonuses to defeat the foes for it. 

These are very interesting game design issues and we actually spent a fair amount of time debating them internally :)

It's a fine limit between mitigating positive feedback loops and creating a Mario Kart "blue schell syndrome". This is why we have limitations in ES2 that may feel arbitrary to some.

If we were to ever do another 4X, the "end-game drag" and "make losing fun" would be very high on our list of things to tackle.

We're of course open to ideas for ES2 :)

Daynen I think you sum it up best.

I was stuggling with this topic as I feel that win/lose spiral isn't great in any game and in ES2 the slope is at a high angle.

But on the other hand punishing a player for winning isn't also a way to go. If you win then you win and should be ahead.

The "lame duck" syndrome is what is most frustrating and can be seen in the game very often.

It would be great if this would be more like in chess where you may lose a few figures but that doesn't mean you lost.

Translating that into ES2 isn't an easy task but I think a good way to start would be the space battle system.

If a smaller fleet has a chance to win with a stronger one with good/lucky tactic choices then things would remain interesting a lot longer.

I personally feel the best way to tackle snowballing mechanics is giving whoever is ahead more challenges to tackle and the ones behind less, whether it be AI behavior or some outside force to deal with, atleast in all human player game you can actually communicate with the players and most people will understand that whoever is closest to victory needs to be dealt with and if they can't do it alone alliances are formed.

For the singleplayer game the AI needs to start working to go against whoever has highest score and the players who are behind should be very keen on allying to take down the one ahead or anyone ahead of them. Or whoever is in 2nd place might try to ally with another faction to beat the 1st, and after they're first the alliance is broken, and so it goes on. As well the player will have a harder time holding an alliance when they're ahead, not impossible, but the higher up in score the allied AI is, the more likely they are to break the alliance. It atleast makes it near impossible to form a new alliance when you're ahead and the AI will look into trying to bring you down a notch.

This would make it so that there's always competition throughout the game and even if you made an alliance early on to defeat say the spiraling Cravers, now you and the other one are in 1st and 2nd place and the AI on 2nd place feels they have nothing more to benefit from you if they're to beat you. Now I don't know how easy/hard it's to really tweak the AI to behave, but I feel it might be easier than to have AI focus on a certain victory type and to focus on the all around general score and decide from there.

The other issue is battles where the victor will gain more advantage than the loser. One problem I feel for ES2 is that when creating ships there's not much of a mechanic that works to filter against large fleets vs none and that someone who has a big fleet can still create more ships at the same speed as someone who has none. Now you can argue dust is there and that buyout serves such a mechanic, but then the issue arises of buyout cost scaling and that it requires a tech, as well as usually the added dust income after losing a fleet tends to not be enough.

I feel if there was some mechanic that decreased and increased the industry cost of ships depending on how many and at what size, it'd do better to give players who loses a battle a chance to recreate their fleet, whilst also minimizing the winning player from pushing out more fleets quickly. You could also have the scaling work for the buyout as well. I can't think of a very good explanation though when it comes to "immersion" instead of simply being a game mechanic.

That said, I don't know how well such a mechanic would do when put to the test, it's just a mechanic what most other strategy games has except usually when creating armies it takes it from a resource like dust and the upkeep of it, but industry works very differently.

Numinumi wrote:

I feel if there was some mechanic that decreased and increased the industry cost of ships depending on how many and at what size, it'd do better to give players who loses a battle a chance to recreate their fleet, whilst also minimizing the winning player from pushing out more fleets quickly. You could also have the scaling work for the buyout as well. I can't think of a very good explanation though when it comes to "immersion" instead of simply being a game mechanic.

That said, I don't know how well such a mechanic would do when put to the test, it's just a mechanic what most other strategy games has except usually when creating armies it takes it from a resource like dust and the upkeep of it, but industry works very differently.

One thing that could be considered here is that ships don't repair themself but need to dock at a system and industry production is used to repair them.

But that still woudn't address the fack that you can build ship at the same speed regardless of how many ships you already have.

Or you could add a "ship servicing/repair" tax on industry production.
This way the more ships you have the more % of industry needs to be used to keep them fully operational.

Those numbers should be very low per ship and get divided among all systems in a percentage value.

By that I mean that for example if a Carrier class ship would consume 50 industry per turn for operation then this 50 industry gets divided among all systems proportionally to the industry that each system generates.

If you have systems producing 100, 50, 30, 20 industry then they would each lose 25, 12.5, 7.5, 5 industry.

The value could be link with the actual cost of a ship. For example 1% of the actual industry cost.

Would be nice to link this with strategic resources so that you need to spend 1% of them for upkeep also (just an idea).

Dreepa wrote:

Slashman wrote:

The game could use some galactic menaces in the late game to keep dominant empires on their toes. Nothing takes the attention off the little guy like a giant space monster eating away at the big guy's empire from the opposite end of the galaxy...

Master Of Orion did it: Antaran attacks. They seemed to favor to attack the score leader.

Yeah ES2 definitely could use some sort of a galactic menace. But instead of a giant space monster it should be a number of smaller enemies throughout the galaxy. Maybe an event where a bunch of Mavros begin to sell their weapons to pirate fleets across the galaxy? Wait a second...

This is already in the game, you silly :D