[Discussion] Biggest Current Multiplayer Design Problem - Galaxy generation - Endless Space

[Discussion] Biggest Current Multiplayer Design Problem - Galaxy generation

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Photon_Ventdesdunes

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Photon_Ventdesdunes

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 7, 2012, 11:35:55 PM

The fact is even with some less randomness in multiplayer, who can guarantee the planet where you move first will be the one you can colonize with a wonderful jungle world ? Who tell you it's not the system at the opposite way ?

It will be always luck at the beginning.

As I said, devs will find solutions to avoid the big problems like the screenshot shows as example, but normally, you already have any type of planets around you and you just have to find them. In my game, I colonize at turn 15 because I searched the wrong direction.

I don't want to be sure finding at least one good planets in each systems around me at the beginning. I want to find them. It's the first X, explore.

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CybrSlydr

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CybrSlydr

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13 years ago

Jun 7, 2012, 11:32:32 PM

BINGO! And we have a winner! Step up and claim your prize, sir!

Saranea wrote:
What I find really funny:

All of you seems to think in a multiplayergame (with more then 2 humans) you need to do all by yourself.

Do you guys and girls forget there are other players you can bond (temporary) together, trade techs, resources and so on?

Am I the only one who will abuse this against the "leading" player?!

In a Multiplayer a start can give advantages or disadvantages - but the lower half can help each other out.

But the longer I look here, the more I think everybody thinks like the cravers - "I'm a one man army which needs nobody and I can do all by myself".

Please stop thinking that way, else MP with you will become very dull or you are the frist to get eliminated because you have no (secret) allies.

Sincerly

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davea

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davea

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 18, 2012, 3:36:27 PM

Does the current galaxy generator give any "hooks" for this type of rebalancing? For example, can you hook in to see where the starting positions are, and then change the type/size of any planet? This is what my program (link above) does, but since it is an external program which reads the xml, most players would find it too complicated to use.

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Nitroglycerine

Survivor

- Nitro https://www.youtube.com/c/Nitroglycerine

Nitroglycerine

Survivor

13 years ago

Jul 16, 2012, 10:57:33 PM

agreed. I've seen some ridiculous starting positions before.

For example, there was 1 game where I had a system with:

6 planets.

1 large garden of eden arid

1 medium garden of eden jungle.

1 lava

1 arctic

1 asteroids

Needless to say, by turn 60 or so, this system was churning out an awe-inspiring 450 or so production (I've had higher, but never that fast).

Another game, I saw a 4 planet system which consisted of: 3 jungles, 1 terran.

WHen you get that kind of advantage in a system, the game is over before it even begins, barring a large difference in skill. And it makes games more like a waste of time since it was decided entirely by luck of the system you have.

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nosavynada

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nosavynada

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 15, 2012, 6:38:30 PM

In general I have to put myself in the camp of making it the same or near the same is not desirable in a competitive MP game. Here is why. Part of being a good tactician or stategist is your ability to overcome / adapt. In many types of competition it is not the competitor who brought the most OP build for a particular or plain vanilla situation but those who brough builds that are balanced enough to win even with adversity in terrain or situation. Many of those commenting about fairness in map generation seem to me to be those who focus on winning through colonization and science. If you are dealt a very bad start then that build and that strategy it is true will be severely handicapped. But it can be overcome and I have - the option for that situation is go straight for wormhole travel and prepare to have to take some systems by combat to overcome.

It is also true that it is possible to get a very very imbalanced start. I have on a medium map for instance had a player start with a single system with 5 planets (only 1 Tier 1planet in addition to homeworld) and 4 wormholes - no warp lines out of the home system (this was yesterday so not an early build problem.) Now for most of the players it seems that would have been the kiss of death and we did proceed with a restart in fairness. But for a Hissho or Craver - not so sure even that would have been a severe setback. It just means they can focus on prepping their invasion fleets without pirates and putting their colony ship back onto the homeworld for that extra little boost in research / production.

I do support the option and or a community mod. The freedom to choose is good in most cases.

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Stalker0

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Stalker0

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 14, 2012, 8:25:43 PM

Midge wrote:
isn't it the uneven distribution of resources that drives conflict?

you have it, i want it!

Want it is nice, but if your planets don't give you the FIDS to take it then you are out of luck. If my planets are better, letting me field a military to fight yours AND do other things, then my victory is a matter of time.

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davea

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davea

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 14, 2012, 3:47:33 PM

At least one modder is working on modifying the galaxy generator for balance; you could go to that thread and encourage him:

/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15815-balanced-galaxy-generator

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ruonim

Path Finder

Best signature ever!

ruonim

Path Finder

13 years ago

Jul 14, 2012, 12:59:05 PM

Balancing could be made inside constellations. Make constellations have same amount of planets. Next phase would be resources, making them too similar numbers. Then anomaly pass to make sure there is same amount of positive/negative in each constellation, like you get 5 positive then you get 5 negative, you get 2 negative you get 2 positive.

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Astax

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Astax

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 14, 2012, 7:44:31 AM

If you look at Master of Orion 2, the original (pre player mod) version is totally ridiculously unbalanced. Many players spent lots of time coming up with ways to make the game more balanced in multiplayer, and they have. But unfortunately the way to balance the map lead to a lot of things being removed from the game. Usually now every player starts with exactly the same starting system (arrangement of planets is picked so as not to give any possible race an upper hand), and all surrounding systems have 2-3 planets, no gas giants or asteroid belts, no tiny planets, and gravity mostly optimal. This kind of hard tweaking was necessary to provide more leveled playing field. Even thou it is not perfect, it is much better.

Now when I think of this game, it would be lovely if there was a way for the devs to make systems with 1 planet not such a worthless waste of space when compared to a system with 5-6 planets. It would be great, but will they? And if so how? While it sucks to have to settle such a system early on, I don't know if I'd be ok with a bland galaxy of always x planets in each system... They could, of course, add things to make these empty systems become closer to multiplanet systems over time (capturing rouge planets and anchoring them to the system with empty orbits, constructing new planets or ringworlds that would require maybe 3 empty orbitals). But even then, it would still not fix the problem in the short run. So this needs to be considered carefully.

Easiest solution for now would be set maps for MP. They don't have to be mirror or identical, but have equal distribution of planets per arm, etc.

Now the starting heroes are another thread all together.

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Fishman

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Fishman

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 13, 2012, 8:14:03 PM

Life is like a sandwich. Some days you eat the sandwich, other days the sandwich eats you.

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ruonim

Path Finder

Best signature ever!

ruonim

Path Finder

13 years ago

Jul 13, 2012, 2:08:15 PM

Once i got:

Heroes:

Corporate/spy ; corporate/pilot ; corporate/pilot

systems:

4 including starting.

Home system: 3 planets : 1 gas 1 asteroid belt

1 system: arid + irradited; desert ; lava ; asteroid ; lava

2 system: desert + syndrom ; desert + poor soil; lava ; gas giant ; lava

3 system: asteroid ; gas giant

4 system: asteroid ; lava ; barren ; barren

Guess outcome of match.

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Igncom1

Craver

Infantry win firefights. Tanks win battles. Artillery win wars.

Igncom1

Craver

13 years ago

Jul 13, 2012, 12:54:27 AM

With there being no ranking system, or ladder thing i really don't see the point.

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Jereo

Newcomer

Jereo

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jul 13, 2012, 12:08:52 AM

I totally agree that the randomness of the starting position is a problem.

Each I played a MP game 1 or 2 player leave before turn 5.

This should not happen.

I thought of one simple solution :

No colony ship at the begining but instead the start system should have 3 tier 1 or tier 2 planets.

Increase the cost of the colony ship.

This solution has 2 major advantage IMO :

1) the start system is suppose to be important in the game as a victory condition requires to conquer all the native planets.

As it stands now this first system usually ends up pretty weak in mid/late game compare to other system you might colonized that have more planets or bins.

This should help to give more importance to this system.

2)It will offer players more possibility in the early stage of the game.

If you have good systems around, you can build a colony ship early on and start expanding.

If you don't you can concentrate on your native system and you should be ok for a while.

The increased cost of the colony ship should assure that players who choose this option will have disavantage early to have an advantage later.

While player who chose to develop their system will have an advantage early but might be disavantage later, so it kind of equilibrate.

I think the colony ship should take at least 7 turn to complete.

(sorry for my english)

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Zankor

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Zankor

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 7, 2012, 11:26:23 PM

There needs to be randomness to keep the game fresh and interesting from one match to the next, but there also needs to be some structure to the generation so that one player doesn't end up with a couple tiny / small / medium of lava, barren, asteriods etc when someone else ends up with like a few perfect systems.

I just played a game of multi-player and in my branch of the galaxy I had 2 quite good systems, one was two good sized oceans one of which with a positive anomaly, and the other was a tiny terran with a positive anomaly and a huge tundra and then 4 other average planets in that system and these two systems were just the backbone of my empire for a while. I colonized both these systems fairly early and it gave me a massive FIDS lead early to mid game, which lead to a large enough advantage to allow me to develop my other planets quicker and snowballed into a massive lead when my opponents had negative anomalies all over there planets and barely any tier 1 planets etc. At one point I had 2050 sci a turn and the two other players had roughly 700 a turn.

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FNj

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FNj

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 18, 2012, 3:28:13 PM

Devs should just put in the OPTION of letting balancing plug-ins that would rebalance the galaxy somehow after it's been randomly generated*. More than one plug-in could be used for rebalancing 1 generated galaxy; they would be applied in an order decided by the host.

This way, all people would get whatever they want, really: You just want the food balanced, but nothing else(quite a bad idea, but whatever)? Sure... Want all FIDS balanced? Why not?! Wanna balance the FIDS to some extent(one plug-in applied) and then rebalnce the resource distribution to comepensate for the differences in FIDS distribution(second plug-in, working with what the first one did, applied)? There you go...

Want to set up a tournament? Make a special balancing plug-in to be used!

Really, the possibilities would be Endless... *wink, wink*

*: The current galaxy generator is currently quite easily and well customizable, but more options/plug-in generator option could be added of course.

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Tiggy

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Tiggy

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 18, 2012, 2:06:06 PM

some sort of minimum starting conditions would be nice that is limited to the players starting constalation, like it must have at least 1 maybe 2 other colonisable worlds not including the homeworld. or are we talking about resources in the general vacinity?

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Leonoux

Academy

Leonoux

Academy

13 years ago

Jun 17, 2012, 9:50:24 PM

Though I agree that fighting out of a hole can be fun and very rewarding I do believe that a level of normalization needs to be used in MP. Having been shafted by the system generator a couple times in play vs ai, I wouldn't mind SOME normalization and I believe that is all davea trying to reach. In order to do this you need a way to measure what is being created for each player, hence trying to assign values to each planet. Then with some threshold assign you can take that 1-3 start system and make it a 4 or 5. And if that is still something that bothers you...we could leave toggle for on or off normalization and post it as a setting for MP.

In case you were wondering what I meant by "shafted." I started as UE with kessler syndrome and three gas giants connected to my starter system. One connection to the solar system...a worm hole. It was fun against the AI in some respects, but jebus...I wouldn't of wanted to play against others humans with that footing.

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davea

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davea

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 17, 2012, 5:52:33 AM

I have written a program which computes a score for each starting position, and it seems to give reasonable results. Please take a look:

/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/9059-evaluation-equalization-of-start-positions

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lmaoboat

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lmaoboat

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 17, 2012, 4:10:56 AM

I don't know why people seem to think it has to either be totally random or completely symmetrical.

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Ebrim

Newcomer

Ebrim

Newcomer

13 years ago

Jun 17, 2012, 3:18:44 AM

davea wrote:
Fun for you, maybe not fun for everybody. Imagine starting a game of chess where you have no queen or bishops and only four pawns.

Valazzar wrote:
Very good parallel.

Not really I think, this game has many random elements, especially if you're playing with more than two players. What that means is that unlike in chess where it's entirely formulaic, situations can change very quickly in this game, it is far more fluid allowing you opportunities in the future which may not have been there at all originally or at least were not apparent. In keeping with that, I think it's entirely reasonable that beginning situations can be very fluid as well, we already have it scripted so that our home systems have no less than three planets.

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