Phoenix Combat Game Improvements

No system is perfect and there are some minor and less minor tweaks that can be made to the game engine to make the game even more enjoyable for players and especially to assist new players in getting more heavily involved in this side of the game.

This will be a longish post but for those less interested in rambling verbiage I shall highlight the specific suggestions in red so peeps who want to come move straight to the suggestions and their reasons.

Current Situation 

Serious combat in game is hard mainly because of the effort involved and the ramifications. The effort is partly game engine and partly players the ramifications are all player caused. One of the biggest player caused issues is an unwillingness to fight unless you have a huge pre-ponderance of force. This leads to a lot of alliances and shifting tactical situations which is actually a good thing.

What isn't is the automatic increase in threat that can happen. Let me provide an example. Affiliation A sends its 20 warships to attack affiliation B who have seized (illegally they claim) one of their Jacium outposts. They take the outpost back. Affiliation B complains to one of the bigger affiliations (anything from DEN/IMP/GTT/DTR etc etc) and that affiliation sees an opportunity for an easy fight so sends a thousand ships in. Affiliation A cannot handle that so backs off. This sort of thing is a disincentive from wars occurring. In the past there have been two attempts (that I know of) from affiliations who tried to reduce the increase in risk from combat. The first came from the FET who announced ALL their ships would follow a naming convention (something like [Player House] - Ship name. If a FET ship from say the 'RedBarons' house did something nefarious against affiliation A then affiliation A would be welcome to retaliate against the RedBarons house and positions with the rest of the FET not getting involved, The idea, I think, was that players could get up to no good but only at risk to themselves. This failed because almost every other affiliation in game basically responded, 'if something from RedBarons house carries out a hostile act against one of our positions then we shall send our combined fleet and blow the crap out of every single FET position we find forever 'warto the death!!'. - We don't know where the RedBarons base are but we do no the locations of other FET players bases'

So that attempt failed. The second attempt went back to when Rob took over the DEN after Syd left the first time. Rob decided every full moon the DEN would go berserk (werewolfy) and randomly attack affiliations including those we were neutral/friendly with. He informed the player base and also said that during that week other affiliations should free to attack any DEN position back and we would not make this a 'war forever with our entire fleet' thing. The idea again being that is allowed local combat without strategic repercussions. The rest if the player base responded much as they did to the FETs suggestion.

One of the underlying issues here is that every player is the hero of their own journey and military players actively want an excuse to fight so 'he attacked one ship? great we can send the battle fleet in protecting the little guy'. A couple of examples will suffice. Years back the FLZ used to be a slave owning affiliation. This is not because the players were KKK or Nazis its just that the tentacly alien overloads were thought to fit a slave owning society so it was done for role playing reasons. But this had geopolitical ramifications as anyone wanting a fight could just say, 'I am against evil,I am a good (man/fish/cat/wolf) I shall hunt down the evil Flagritz as they are slave owners and must be wiped from the universe!'. Therefore the FLZ had more than their fair share of wars rammed down their throats because it provided a convenient way to start a fight. In the end the FLZ voluntarily got rid of the slaves solely to remove this 'excuse' to fight the evil Flagritz. So the game also lost some colour.

Players can (and will) get themselves into all sort of mental convolutions to try and find a excuse to on the 'side of good' in a war and the opposing side will be just as keen to portray them as evil stormtroopers. This is not an issue and is actually preferable to the peace caused by one huge affiliation basically saying ' anyone fight and expect out fleet to stop you' which is much the level of peace the DTR were causing when they were dominant (and one reason I suspect why the CNF joined with the EMP to try to break this up - some of those players can confirm /deny)

One of the ways around this problem was supposed to be 'Flags of convenience' but though these are used it is sometimes easy to guess the owner from the ships class 'oooo a MRC 150 HH direwolf fleet just arrived' or a 'MRC Imperial patrol cruiser fleet'.

The next problem starts with combat itself. The safest way to run a combat is for every major ship in a single affiliation to be controlled by one player. That player then has a huge amount of work to do organising battles (trust me here its absolutely draining and it often happens when Real Life issues mean spending 4 hours an evening on turns is not helpful). Post battle it gets worse as you have to repair the damage done to all those ships and unless they are all templated the same that means ships are handled differently and stuff does go wrong so you have to do it again. It's horrible, very draining and when I was fleet commander I only personally controlled around 250 ships God know what its like for the IMP/GTT/DTR etc. 

This has in game ramifications as well. Because only one player is trusted with the fleet they work with trusted single peeps in other allied affiliations but all other players are basically supporting the war effort but  not really involved in the war effort. This might have changed but I suspect in most major affiliations there is a large strike force of the best warships in the affiliation with a solitary player just because there is less chance of cock up. This has knock on effects as new players don't get to get directly involved in wars so are almost forced to focus on trade/bases which might not appeal to some.

So how can this potentially be addressed. I have several suggestions some of which are simple to code and others which require more work and will probably prove controversial.

A1 - Flag of Convenience Ships no longer show class when scanned so instead of 

'MRC SHIP GREAT WOLF L ALPHA (34567) - {200 Heavy Hulls}

  Greatwolf Class Capital Ship [G] {Light Ablative Armour}'

you would read 

'MRC SHIP GREAT WOLF L ALPHA (34567) - {200 Heavy Hulls}

    {Light Ablative Armour}'

That way it is easier to hide what affiliation the original owner is which means more shenanigans are possible. If FOC ships are more useable then this has knock on to all affiliations. You could see an affiliation patrolling jump rings of a rival affiliations space and defending affiliations countering with patrols. This might be possible at the moment but the ship class is often a give away. PIR and MRC auto hide class and IND and the others could have an option to hide class (why does the scanning ship 'know' the class anyway?) 

A2 - FOC Names - Have an order that sets the FOC name (and track the original name) so when you switch FOC you don't have to think 'hmmm what did it used to be called'. Minor it just makes FOC more useable and those naming conventions could be more interesting than 'Alpha1'.

A3 - Store template last used to refit a ship (or the template used when creating if never changed) on the ship order. That way you can send a group of 30 (or a 1000) different specced warships back to port with a 'refit to template'  you don't have to individually remember what the template was. This removes one of the biggest irritations to major combat in that it stops a player potentially exhausted through having fought a large battle over several days have to battle with the refits.

Players will be more likely to fight if they don't think about the cost - in actual stellars and in time in re-organising post battle. It also means more variations in warship design is possible as opposed to 2-3 specific ones '200 missile' '200 photon cannon' etc etc.       already in game! good news...

A4 - More players need to be involved in the fleets. To give a comparison with bases one player might run 20 bases! but even with a platinum account there is a lot of cost on wages. If 5 players in the same affiliation each run 5 bases then each players political account covers a lot of wages and there is actually a huge financial advantage to splitting the resources in this fashion. But the game equally does not 'force' you to play this way (and gives a counter incentive in terms of increased influence to the 'more bases' player).

This has to be something that affiliations want to do as it helps in battle so my suggestion is that each paying political can designate a single Admiral who can provide advantages to a specific amount of his own ships. This amount increases according to the political level so (as an example) a starter political can have an Admiral who influences 10 ships whereas a silver 20 gold 40 platinum 60. Now how this operates can be open to discussion but for code simplicity sake I would allow that Admiral to apply HIS/HER officer bonus to the ships in the squadron IN ADDITION to any officers on those ships. That way the Admiral (who must be present at the engagement) can provide a big increase in accuracy/dodge/damage control/scanning/stealth. An alternate idea is to allow the Admiral to increase one stat by 2 selected by the player though that requires more code work.

This does not stop affiliation A having one player control the fleet but if he comes against affiliation B who has 4 admirals in 4 squadrons then that second affiliation would potentially have an advantage in combat hence giving an incentive for affiliations to split those resource and get newer players involved in some more exciting plot lines.

To give an example I could see a new player joining Affiliation A and having said he's interested in combat then the affiliation might immediately give him 20 50hh warships and to send him on a raid against a friendly affiliation also training a newbie or on a raid as MRC if really aggressive. The player could be told that winning/losing does not matter just learning how to fight with a fleet. They get excitement and interest and the parent affiliation has a very direct interest in teaching that player quickly so that player is far more involved early on and newbie forum areas are less of a 'this is how to jump' exercise. If the 'training' is successful then the player could be offered a section of the fleet and the chance to get involved in some far more fun plotlines. This takes the pressure off the single players at the head of large fleets and gives something the really big affiliations like the IMP/GTT/DTR to offer a new player that some of the smaller  -will find it hard to match. It also gets players from 'this looks interesting' to 'wow this us great' I need more starbases to pay for the 60 200HHships I want to run. 

A5 Admiral squadron movement orders(only if A4 is implemented). The Admiral could also be allowed to issue orders that are very similar to squadron orders to all the ships under his control. That way you could have 60 ships in 10 squadrons but instead of issuing 10 orders to move to each squadron they could move as one using the Admirals orders. This simplifies movement and allows the versatility of squadron orders for combat when required.

A6 Teleporting is banned during battles - Personal irritation perhaps but I hated this. I hated that there seems some trick to hoovering up battle debris from the opposing side and even if they teleported the same day the other side always still got the stuff. Alternatives to this include 'you cannot teleport from a destroyed ship unless you have a LOS to it (and that LOS could be a ship present with no high speed combat swirling around') If that's too much then I would also be happy with a blown up ship only shows under your affiliations flag the following day and then it gets a DER flag for derelict. You can teleport (in this version) from your own ships or derelict ships but not other affiliations ships. If you can teleport from an opposing affiliation ship then why not teleport all the bloody missiles out of it prior to combat. It's a stupid set up and unfair. The counter argument of 'but you can send a thousand scout ships in to look for the asteroid we used an SA to create the teleport base on in Gamma 15 and if you find it then we are in trouble' but we are trying to reduce combat stress and 'run several hundred combat ships along with even more scout ships' is not the way to do this.

So there are my five suggestions for improving Phoenix combat. Hopefully it has provided some food for thought. The one problem I haven't seen a solution to is how to stop fights turning into fights until an affiliation breaks and players leave. The easy solution is more local wars with rapid peaces and perhaps people not jumping into someone else's conflict. I cannot see yet how anything to help this would not lead to the removal of one of the key strengths of the game so I have left this well alone.