davea wrote:
Good progress. For me, the key point is to make sure players do not ragequit early, due to lack of any interesting nearby planets. If this is going to happen, it is usually early, before strategic resources are even revealed. I would recommend to continue on with assigning to players, including the term for shared planets. Tuning the value for resources can be added later, if needed.

That said, for many, judging a constellation's worth is based in part upon luxury resources as well. I'd think the worth of luxury resources but not strategic resources should first be accounted for. Possibly just give them a static value for now per unit of the resource. Davea, I like your point about some randomness in creation and disparity between players and think the attribution of only luxury resources could help alleviate this challenge for now. Since most strategic resources are not revealed for a bit, a player would not know if their system is worthy or not until later on when they have the ability to seek out those resources if needed.



As for player attribution, are we mainly meaning:



Assigning a variable to an Empire id's starting system,

Calculating the value of that system,

Attributing that value to player id's starting worth,

Calculating disparity between player 1 - x,

Regenerating/Fixing systems from that point?

It would be interesting to do a poll on this point ("why do you ragequit?") but in my opinion, few players would ragequit due to limited luxury resources. Lack of any planets in the constellation at all (one or two planets in a constellation bounded by wormholes) or lack of any tier 1, decent tier 2 planets usually cause this. I agree that many more factors "could" go into valuing the setup, but first, it is important to get the second part of the project working: *avoiding* the tiny constellation / no tier 1,2 positions. After the second part is working, we can tune the first part infinitely.

davea wrote:
It would be interesting to do a poll on this point ("why do you ragequit?") but in my opinion, few players would ragequit due to limited luxury resources. Lack of any planets in the constellation at all (one or two planets in a constellation bounded by wormholes) or lack of any tier 1, decent tier 2 planets usually cause this. I agree that many more factors "could" go into valuing the setup, but first, it is important to get the second part of the project working: *avoiding* the tiny constellation / no tier 1,2 positions. After the second part is working, we can tune the first part infinitely.

Sounds like an excellent position. Is my summation of the player system value assignation roughly on par for what Calavoow is aiming for?



And how far does the valuation ripple extend? Do we follow system connections one or two systems out or test within constellations only? I could see a ripple based valuation being decent but not as good as a full constellation check. (Ripple set being home system given 100% modifier, first systems out are checked at 80% valuation and second being 50% etc. just a thought)

The OP has not implemented what you call "ripple" yet. You can see the details of what I implemented in my older thread, linked in the OP:



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

Thanks for your input. My idea was calculating all planets that are within jump range (say 5 jumps) of a players' start planet. The precise implementation of which is yet to be decided. This could be done on a ripple based approach, which, if I understand correctly, is sort of a wave extending from the home planet (like Dijkstra's algorithm). During the ripple I would create lists of system that each player is close to and mark each system with how close they are to players. Then when I calculate each systems' worth for each player I can see if it is a contested system and which player is more likely to capture that system. The points will be split according to this probability.