Issues in a giant galaxy

[MOOMANiBE]

I generally pick "random" for galaxy size and seem to have (un)lucked into a max-size galaxy with buckets of planets. Currently, half of the races, allied with me, are at war with the other half of the races, allied with each other, in what is essentially an endless stalemate as both sides continue to grow and expand faster than anyone can destroy them. This has revealed a number of interesting issues.

A. Growth seems to be exponential.
In a large galaxy with a lot of planets, civs have tons and tons of room to grow. After a while they hit a critical mass where they have the resources to simply produce infinite amounts of colony ships and send them out in massive fleets, completely outpacing other civs and the ability of the player to cope with the insanely large ship fleets that accompany this massive expansion.

Blowing the civilizations out of their systems one planet at a time, or helping with the war effort, is infeasible because by the time you get to planet 3, planets 1 and 2 have been recolonized again by the infinite streams of colony ships. They simply grow forever.

IMO this needs some fixes.
1: Recolonizing the same planet over and over again after it's been nuked is absurd. There needs to be a cooldown before it can be repopulated, ideally a cooldown that increases with each subsequent time the planet is destroyed. planets that are a huge warzone should become barren and scarred and uncolonizable eventually, IMO - this colony ship lemmings game is ridiculous.

2: Large civs need to have a limiter on their growth and production. Right now, the faster they grow, the faster they can grow - this means whoever has access to the most empty systems wins. Games like Civilization have put in place mechanics like corruption to monetarily penalize players who grow too quickly without consolodating their infrastructure, forcing them to wait and invest time /money into new colonies lest they bury themselves in a mountain of debt. An equivalent to this would be well-warranted.

B: Fear Farming. There's no way I'll be able to win the galaxy by diplomacy or conquering, (both sides have seemingly infinite numbers of warships) and my Legend rating is tanked by the war, and so I've been working on accumulating the 900(!!) fear necessary to win the scenario. This is a lot. I've murdered two entire civlizations, destroyed countless planets countless times, gone from Level 4 to Level 14, and after ages of genocide I had only 400-ish fear. So I started looking for more efficient ways:

* Taking a planet gives me roughly 3 fear per ship and 2-4 per planet. It takes a long time, causes heavy damage to me, and wastes consumables.

* Destroying a diplomatic ship, colony ship, or cruise ship gives me roughly 1-2 fear per ship and takes absolutely no effort, putting me in no danger whatsoever - their escorts fade away when they die.

Taking advantage of the endless stalemate, I parked myself near a front-line warpgate and began shooting down every diplomatic ship, colony ship, and cruise ship that came up to it - given the massive production of the enemy civs, this amounts to something like 5 unarmored ships every minute or so. This is BORING, but it's less frustrating than spending tens of thousands of credits on consumables to get almost nothing killing planets, and less time-consuming to boot. Oh, and it rewards me with unending piles of free loot.

This sort of unfun activity needs to be de-incentivized, and doing "scary" and more importantly - challenging - things needs to be rewarded more. As of now it's just a bland grind.

Edit; Here's a fun example of what most ship battles look like these days:

Edit2: GIANT SPACE BATTLE

[Sedlex]

As a Dredmor fan, you should know that some things are just not fair

I'd say the only problem is that the setup screen doesn't indicate that larger galaxy = harder game. This could just be sorted out by adding these difficulty indications next to size:

Tiny (Cakewalk)
Small (Easy)
Medium (Average)
Large (Difficult)
Huge (Painful)

...or something along those lines at least.

Also, larger should probably come with some sort of reward. Here's a simple idea: on victory, award a single item of the player's faction with a rarity level dependent on the difficulty level (on top of the usual stuff):

Tiny - green
Small - green with a 50% chance of yellow
Medium - yellow with a 30% chance of orange
Large - orange with a 20% chance of purple
Huge - purple with a 10% chance of blue

[MOOMANiBE]

Originally Posted by Sedlex

I'd say the only problem is that the setup screen doesn't indicate that larger galaxy = harder game. This could just be sorted out by adding these difficulty indications next to size
Also, larger should probably come with some sort of reward.

Thing is... I'm not sure it's actually HARDER persay. Just more time-consuming and grindier. I've finished that galaxy now and got my pile of fear reward chests (three elite items, woot) and my real memory of the entire thing is sitting there and grinding out Fear bored out of my mind. If it actually -were- harder I'd be happier, but upping the win requirements really just makes it take freakin' forever for roughly the same reward.

So basically, yes, I agree without about the reward thing, but I still think there are balance changes to be made. Harder I can take, unfun I can't.

[demoss]

There's always economic victory.

[Sedlex]

Originally Posted by MOOMANiBE

Thing is... I'm not sure it's actually HARDER persay. Just more time-consuming and grindier. I've finished that galaxy now and got my pile of fear reward chests (three elite items, woot) and my real memory of the entire thing is sitting there and grinding out Fear bored out of my mind. If it actually -were- harder I'd be happier, but upping the win requirements really just makes it take freakin' forever for roughly the same reward.

So basically, yes, I agree without about the reward thing, but I still think there are balance changes to be made. Harder I can take, unfun I can't.

Yeah, you're definitely right that it's no harder per se. Perhaps a more accurate descriptor would have been "longer than I can bear". So tiny should come with "fast games" and huge with "very long" as descriptors rather than difficulty.

My current games only ever involve tiny systems on very fast pacing with six well established races. This gives me plenty of action and a few level ups before I hit the fear or legend counter and bail out.

Either way, the reward is irrelevant: it's not worth grinding a system for the items (chests full of junk - hooray) or for measly experience bonus (about as much as killing a boss, of which there will be plenty when you next respawn a system). Economic victory happened to me only once, and it's more a punishment than anything else. Honestly, I'd put it in the "lose" category. Money reward? Hoooray.

So yeah, I can see where you're coming from.

[Valgor]

Why not implement what a lot of 4X games do; that is, a hard limit to how many ships total any given race may build (with an exception for diplomats, cruise liners and freighters) .

[alstein]

I do the same thing as many other posters- that screenshot looks like it's a long and tedious as a battle in Legend of Galactic Heroes. ^_^

Not sure what the solution is- but there is definitely a fun problem with larger sizes, and a definite problem with things getting to a point where colony ships become infinite and the farming of civilian ships (suggested change, drop fear points on killing those, or have killing those ships give a chance of a bounty hunter coming after you, bounty hunters are a real threat. Also killing a bounty hunter should be at least 2 fear points)

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Valgor

Why not implement what a lot of 4X games do; that is, a hard limit to how many ships total any given race may build (with an exception for diplomats, cruise liners and freighters) .

There are a bunch of limits in there, apparently not enough though.