April 2014 FMR review - fleet maintenance

[Whis]

Thir month's FMR review will be on

<drumroll pease>

Fleet maintenance:
This issue has recently come up with lengthy discussion(s) about the need to make new and non-competetive accounts competetive. I ask we avoid the "do we need" discussion and focus on how fleet maintenance could be implemented.

As before:
A few simple rules:

1). Any derailment of a thread will be considered spam and treated as such.

2). Don't debate someone's ability to add input, debate the topics. If this happens I will consider it spam and treat it as such.

3). Don't just link an old thread; if you link a thread, be sure to give a description of the arguments, both pro and con. The more thorough the better.

[Whis]

Reserved for space if I need it.

[Ferdoc]

Fleet caps based on structures/base numbers/tech or combination of the aforementioned. A straight cost to maintain fleet, taken out of your hourly income or daily from your credit total. Add in the variety of limitations and drawbacks, from reduced power/armor to outright deletion of fleet. That covers about 95% of the ideas I've seen.

[Firefox]

Well.... we could use what we already have and link a hard cap to CCs in addition to fleet control or change (number of fleets) control to (amount of fleets) control. Turn it into a death spiral solution, the more fleet you want to build, the more CCs you need which then eats into the area you use for production, so basically the bigger your fleet becomes, the less production you have relative to someone with less fleet. This makes use of the area/energy soft caps that already exist to slow down your fleet growth in tandem with your base expansion.

Of course, the cap level needs to be balanced, high enough to not need huge amounts of CCs for a decent amount of fleet, yet low enough that you can't just get by with 3 CCs on 21-22 worlds. This part is a bit beyond me, you need to account for fleet numbers on Alpha all the way through to Pegasus and find a balance, something I can't give a hard number on.

Biggest flaw I can see to this is that free accounts get hit the hardest, they are already area constrained and they can't expand past 9 bases to spread the pain around. If we did the CC cap, we might have to push the free astros limit to 15(?) which I believe might have more benefits than just mechanics balance. People get bored if they can't expand, letting them go > 9 would suck them deeper into the game, but that's a side topic.

[domin8or]

Fleet caps based on structures/base numbers/tech or combination of the aforementioned. A straight cost to maintain fleet, taken out of your hourly income or daily from your credit total. Add in the variety of limitations and drawbacks, from reduced power/armor to outright deletion of fleet. That covers about 95% of the ideas I've seen.

These all seem like really really bad ideas

[LesCrow]

Fleet caps based on structures/base numbers/tech or combination of the aforementioned. A straight cost to maintain fleet, taken out of your hourly income or daily from your credit total. Add in the variety of limitations and drawbacks, from reduced power/armor to outright deletion of fleet. That covers about 95% of the ideas I've seen.

These all seem like really really bad ideas

Elaborate! Tell us what makes these such bad ideas and what would a good idea generally look like.

[domin8or]

Fleet caps based on structures/base numbers/tech or combination of the aforementioned.

Why cap what people can have? silly idea plus spoils the game for people who have played longer

A straight cost to maintain fleet, taken out of your hourly income or daily from your credit total.

Why would you need to pay credits to make it then keep it? silly idea

and as for a good idea something like what I suggested, the fact you cant just blob, you need to use the fleet, not saying go blow it all up im just saying make it more an actively encouraged thing to fight rather than sim/blob

Good for old servers and new

[Ferdoc]

The Mule had a fantastic credit and income based fleet cap. Probably one of the best concepts put out there.

[LesCrow]

Fleet caps based on structures/base numbers/tech or combination of the aforementioned.

Why cap what people can have? silly idea plus spoils the game for people who have played longer

Virtually every other kind of strategy game has some kind of limiter on units you can have, are they all silly? No limit means no longevity, you pick one and if you pick longevity what people who have played longer want cannot be your priority.

A straight cost to maintain fleet, taken out of your hourly income or daily from your credit total.

Why would you need to pay credits to make it then keep it? silly idea

and as for a good idea something like what I suggested, the fact you cant just blob, you need to use the fleet, not saying go blow it all up im just saying make it more an actively encouraged thing to fight rather than sim/blob

Good for old servers and new

That is a bid too vague. Why don't you try suggesting an actual mechanic for this vision of yours.

Fleet maintenance cost is not about blobbing, it is about preventing winners and older players from becoming so powerful that the server dies.

[domin8or]

Fleet maintenance cost is not about blobbing, it is about preventing winners and older players from becoming so powerful that the server dies.

My idea of making people have to use fleets means a slight prevention

[Firefox]

dom, think I missed your mechanic, I can't find it, can you repost?

Ferdoc, what was the concept for The Mule? Never played it before.

[domin8or]

I shall rework it as per peoples input

[Ferdoc]

dom, think I missed your mechanic, I can't find it, can you repost?

Ferdoc, what was the concept for The Mule? Never played it before.

The Mule isn't a game, he's a poster on the forums.

[Ron Burgandy]

Here we go, my best take on fleet maintenance.

So my idea is to reward the people who use their fleet AND give functionality to an under utilized stat in the game.

(XP*2)+1,000,000=fleet room before credit nerf

After fleet cap is reached:

%of fleet level over fleet cap = credit nerf

Ex:

If your cap is 10,000,000
You have 15,000,000
You have 50% more than your cap
You get charged an hourly fee of 50% your hourly empire income

Yes/no?

[Wlerin]

I think the way XP is gained needs to be revised before we start using it in that manner.