Two-tiered simulation, and trait overhaul following dynamic economy

[Kamo]

The Two-tiered simulation

 

Right now Avorion is broken up into four simulation levels

• Player-active sectors
  • Realtime sim

  [*]Loaded sectors

  • Almost-realtime sim
  • Ships can attack/be attacked, move precisely around the system, and trade, among other things

  [*]Unloaded sectors

  • Nothing happens, but at least the sector data is saved

  [*]Ungenerated sectors

  • Not yet generated

That suggestion would shuffle a little those simulation levels' abilities.

• Player-active sectors
  • Realtime sim

  [*]Loaded sectors

  • Almost-realtime sim
  • Ships can attack/be attacked, move precisely around the system, and trade, among other things

  [*]Unloaded sectors

  • Ships can move abstractly with vector-based movement, allowing action times to be calculated without anything "ticking" or any space be "drawn"
  • Ships can trade and move on a sector per sector basis
  • Ships can mine and scavenge: tally of asteroid resources is precalculated, substracted from, and asteroids/wrecks are destroyed when sector is loaded.
  • AI ships can battle in a crude simulation, though the sector will load with priority. When player ships are engaged, the sector auto-loads.

  [*]Ungenerated sectors

  • Still not yet generated, but the oldest unloaded sectors may de-generate if not enough disk space is available (a low disk space prompt will appear).
  • Galaxies may also have a savefile size limit, to help people playing on multiple galaxies and games.

 

Faction differences

Following dynamic economy, some faction traits will have new effects such as:

• Intelligence
  
  • Ship plan generation: dumb difficulties making good ships, otl
    • Very Dumb: Will use useless hull/armor blocks.
    • Dumb: Will replace edge blocks by half-sized full blocks.
    • Neither dumb nor smart: Will use edge blocks.
    • Smart: Will "optimize" more than 4-cubic sized edge blocks into two edge armor blocks protecting an additional block (usually a thruster or integrity field).
    • Very Smart: Optimization is increased to 1-cubic sized edge blocks, some ships have stone or reflectors instead of armor to resist electricity and lasers !

    [*]Other things (number and size of ships due to strategic micromanagement abilities)

    • Very Dumb: Won't use modules, -40% number of ships, +60% size of ships, CIWS and disruptor ships replaced by boarding and ramming ships, -4 Tech Levels.
    • Dumb: 0 to 2 random modules per ship, -20% number of ships, +30% size of ships, CIWS ships replaced by boarding ships, -2 Tech Levels.
    • Neither dumb nor smart: 1 to 4 fitting modules per ship.
    • Smart: Half of slots filled with +1 rarity modules, +20% number of ships, -15% size of ships, and very rare "hero" ships with "Very Smart"-type abilities, +2 Tech Levels.
    • Very Smart: All slots filled with +2 rarity modules, +40% number of ships, -35% size of ships, +4 Tech Levels, some special AI-only advantageous ship roles/abilities like firing when cloaked, passive stealth, transporter bombs, strategic ram ships (enjoying reduced collision damage), etc.

  [*]Honor: Honorable opponents are fettered but stronger, while opportunistic foes send sneaky raids from unexpected vectors !

  • Very Honorable: +150% ship HP/size, won't use stealth, stealth detection, torpedoes and point defense (hence huge ship HP boost, they'll take those torpedoes to the face while grovelling), will send to you number and composition of their attacker fleets in faction wars.
  • Honorable: +50% ship HP/size, won't use stealth and stealth detection (heace ship HP boost), will warn you in advance of their faction war attacks.
  • Opportunistic: +1 hyperspace range to send attacks from, more stealthed and boarding ships.
  • Very Opportunistic: +3 hyperspace range to send attacks from, more stealthed and boarding ships and "far attacks" will be always stealth-based or boarding-based (or both), may "feint surrender" in faction wars.

  [*]Aggression: Peaceful factions get defensive, and may invite more allies to defend them in wars.

  • Very Aggressive: As usual, plus 2 additional ship per headhunter squads, some headhunters are sector patrol-sized, sector patrollers may pursue their quarry.
  • Aggressive: As usual, plus 1 additional ship per headhunter squad, headhunters may pursue their quarry.
  • Peaceful: +25% sector patrol ships and 1 additional guard ship per station per station defense squad. Increased chance of defensive pacts against faction wars.
  • Very Peaceful: +25% sector patrol ships and 2 additional guard ships per station defense squad, some station defenders are carriers. Greatly increased chance of defensive pacts against faction wars.

  [*]Wariness: Brave factions are proud warriors and will punch their enemies instead of firing in ships !

  • Very Paranoid: As usual.
  • Paranoid: As usual.
  • Brave: more boarder ships, more security in stations and flagships, increased ramming behavior.
  • Very Brave: boarder ships come in squad (three for one), stations and flagships have ridiculous amounts of security personnel, greatly increased ramming behavior.

  [*]Generosity: Greedy factions skimp on nonvital crew to get bigger ships, while Generous factions spend more on smaller ships...

  • Very Greedy: As usual, and +15% ship size but -50% security personnel.
  • Greedy: As usual, and +5% ship size but -20% security personnel.
  • Generous: +20% monetary mission reward, -5% ship size but +10% crew.
  • Very Generous: +40% monetary mission reward, -10% ship size but +30% crew.

  [*]Activity: Passive factions are slower but have more momentum, while Active factions spread themselves thin in their multiple endeavors. Note: events include faction wars, though the ship amount affected there will be the faction war pool, not the fleets' composition (it would end in endless defeats for active factions otherwise).

  • Very Passive: +35% ship amount (rounded up) per event, +50% delay per galactic simulation turn and per station defense proc.
  • Passive: +20% ship amount (rounded up) per event, +25% delay per galactic simulation turn and per station defense proc.
  • Active: -15% ship amount (rounded down) per event, -25% delay per galactic simulation turn and per station defense proc.
  • Very Active: -30% ship amount (rounded down) per event, -50% delay per galactic simulation turn and per station defense proc.

[Sir Charles]

Looking good.

 

The game needs ideas like this to feel alive in the long term, tho I would prefer a method where factions (and player alliances) become dynamic, with sectors being modified at reload in relation to the overall strength of the faction.

[RCTFORME]

 

• Wariness: Brave factions are proud warriors and will punch their enemies instead of firing in ships !
  • Very Paranoid: As usual.
  • Paranoid: As usual.
  • Brave: more boarder ships, more security in stations and flagships, increased ramming behavior.
  • Very Brave: boarder ships come in squad (three for one), stations and flagships have ridiculous amounts of security personnel, greatly increased ramming behavior.

 

I feel like the paranoid factions would have more security?

[Shrooblord]

Excellent. I love good ol' lengthy discussions about gameplay and balance. This used to be my bread and butter back when Spore was still relevant.

 

Let's break it down.

 

• Loaded sectors
  • Almost-realtime sim

Actually, no. It's not almost-realtime; it's at about 1/3rd of regular execution speed. I know because I've been doing some synch experiments because of a mod I'm working on. For every game tick in a loaded Sector without player presence, a Sector with player activity ticks 3 times.

 

• Unloaded sectors
  • Ships can move abstractly with vector-based movement, allowing action times to be calculated without anything "ticking" or any space be "drawn"
  • Ships can trade and move on a sector per sector basis
  • Ships can mine and scavenge: tally of asteroid resources is precalculated, substracted from, and asteroids/wrecks are destroyed when sector is loaded.
  • AI ships can battle in a crude simulation, though the sector will load with priority. When player ships are engaged, the sector auto-loads.

OK, before I get into things I do want to point out that I fundamentally agree with you: it would be awesome if we had some "passive" Galaxy stuff going on all over the place; that things were still "happening" when you're not around. Right now, it feels very much like actors moving into position on a stage for the player to enjoy: putting on a show when they're around, and fading into non-existence when they're not. That said, however...

 

The point of not-loaded Sectors is for performance. To have an entire Galaxy's worth of Sectors doing ... stuff ... will take some clever programming to make sure your CPU doesn't melt. You mention quite complex behaviour here that would all be very cool to have, but also mention that things "don't tick". Those concepts are incompatible with each other: to have a ship perform complex behaviour such as movement, but more specifically interaction with other objects ike mining, trading, etc., something must be ticking, otherwise there would be nothing to be calling behaviour on. So to say "it just doesn't tick" doesn't work. That's ... that's magic.

 

I do offer an alternative though: integration. In Mathematics, you can use integration to precisely interpolate the change of some variables over some other variable, for example -- most notably for our application -- over time.

 

We would need a more global "Galaxy Actor" or "Galaxy Entity" that would be constantly monitoring the Galaxy as a whole, loading in distinct "chunks" of Galaxy for a moment to do calculations, then leaving them alone to be non-loaded again, rather than having a per-Sector tick as we currently have, where each individual Sector is its own, free-standing ticking 'entity'.

 

This Galaxy Actor could take a whole region of space -- say 16 Sectors for for the sake of concept -- and do some mean integration over the whole region, taking all Sectors in that chunk, checking to see which have Faction activity in them, making some balance-informed decisions about what those Factions will be doing for the next X units of time, and calculating how that might change the Sectors in that timeframe. This would essentially generate a "formula" that we can integrate over to "slide towards" that pre-calculated end-state over the time it takes from one Galaxy Chunk to be loaded to the next.

 

Of course, this does mean that we either need to

• pre-generate all Sectors in the Galaxy at the start of the game and/or do this whenever the Galaxy Actor loads that chunk of the Galaxy for the very first time; OR
  
• make approximations of what would be in which Sector using some kind of Galaxy Chunk average and perform calculations based on that.
  

 

The benefit to this approach is that you don't need to model or tick any individual ships, but instead move along and modify each Sector on a more global, 'zoomed out' level. You're essentially modelling a simulation of what would happen if a player was around, except you're just calculating the outcome, and not necessarily doing any of the steps in-between such as moving ships, calculating individual pieces of cargo etc., collision detection, etc. etc..

 

Very Dumb: Will use useless hull/armor blocks.

Lol reminds me of the magic orcs flying through space going faster than the speed of light powered only by their imagination that that's what they would be doing. Painting the ship red makes the ship go faster because they think it does. Unintentionally they are the most powerful wizards and psionic masters of the Universe; if only they realised their ability. x)

 

 

I don't actually have much to add about the Faction balance ideas, other than that it would be very nice indeed to see Factions adopt unique personalities based on all those factors, yes.