Clean Slate Cosmpiercer Thread

RocketCat

Let us reflect upon and bury the sins of yesteryear and come together once more to discuss Cosmpiercers. They recently received another pass which has improved matters immensely, but discussion still rages on. First, some guidelines:

This is a place to:
   - Provide feedback on the current mechanics of Cosmpiercers.
   - Discuss potential coded improvements to the system.
   - Be respectful and keep clean.
This is NOT a place to:
   - Import or export IC or OOC drama.
   - Call out other factions for what they did or didn't do in/around Cosmpiercers.
   - Force the awesome dev team to wade through mudflinging to find legitimate feedback.
  
So here goes:

The recent changes definitely put things in better shape. TOWREQUEST means you don't have to put 30-60k of ship supplies on the line when you lose a ground fight. Commodity Credits are very flexible and a great reward to incentivize participation. The conflict channel is a nice QoL thing. The new mechanics of COSMPIERCER WARP mean that we have the possibility for proper 3-way fights, and space battles over the generators have already occurred.

Once the ground fight starts, the experience is an intensely pure group PvP experience, which I personally love. We live, we die, we live again.

The main outstanding issue for me is just how boring the experience is when there are no defenders around to prevent the capture. I don't really think it's a problem that people do this, since it can be a good group-building thing to fly out and do something together, especially when including people who haven't done many Cosmpiercers before. But the main cause for my previous burn out was the ceaseless back-and-forth sweeps of defenseless Cosmpiercers, which had us claiming and reclaiming day in, day out, with nary a pk death to be seen. I've wracked my brain on this and this is the only solution I've come up with, and I can't tell whether it's clever or just straight-up foolish:
   - When a Cosmpiercer is claimed, the hour on which it was claimed becomes the time of day it always becomes vulnerable. The vulnerability window begins at 2 hours, but then the longer a Cosmpiercer remains in the same faction's hands, the longer the vulnerability window becomes, until the Cosmpiercer is vulnerable 24 hours a day.

The second issue I have is the 10 minute timer between hacking attempts. This makes it extremely difficult for lower pop factions to have enough hackers interested and available to make an attempt on Cosmpiercers ranks 6-7. Perhaps a 5 minute timer would be more suitable.

The third issue is that PROPS ARE FUN AS HELL and there are none in Piercers unless you bring a Scoundrel and have some time to prep. Join the chant: PROPS IN PIERCERS. PROPS IN PIERCERS. PROPS IN PIERCERS. (Climbabes, too!)

The fourth issue is less pressing, but a QoL thing would be to get the map to render on Nexus, even if this means giving Cosmpiercers  layouts (each having a different random layout, of course, but now it does not change every day, and still does not need to count towards Exploration). This could also make it possible to develop tactics for particular layouts ahead of time, which could add some depth.


And now for something completely different...

The Ishvana sure is silent these days... I freaking LOVE Ishvana from a lore perspective. It's been a long time since I finished the epic quest, and the Ishvana's been out of the Piercer game for a long time, so I'm not really feeling the whole 'deep Sector-wide existential threat' thing out of the Ishvana. So yeah, I think the Ishvana could get back in the Piercer game and offer up some diversity and spice. How? Well, an idea @Rhindara mentioned in the previous thread would be having the Ishvana return to reclaim Piercers. I disagreed at first but it's been on the back of my mind ever since.

My proposal here would be to break the Cosmpiercer game up into cycles. Every 3 or 4 RL months, the Ishvana launches a massive invasion, reclaiming ALL Cosmpiercers. This invasion is so threatening and total that it cannot be countered by any means. It's just a hard reset. Factions then claim from the Ishvana the old way: by plowing through a series of rooms with Ishvana guards to get the terminals fast enough. Play continues as normal, with factions taking Piercers from each other normally. The Y'saari have been around long enough to understand that a sweeping Ishvana counterattack is inevitable and track their total payout amounts to each faction since the start of the cycle, offering up some special reward for the faction that has the most 'points' by the end of the cycle (perhaps a vanity something-or-other for the faction station, or some material or marks reward).

Possibly the Ishvana could also make mid-cycle attacks. The longer a faction is holding a particular piercer, the more likely it becomes the target for an Ishvana assault. This could come in the form of an extremely difficult Incursion which, if not fully fought off, causes the Ishvana to reclaim it. The faction would get some warning, maybe a full day's notice. And of course since Piercer zones are Open PvP, this would be ripe ground for a pretty darn fun and messy space battle where another faction is disrupting the defender's attempts to ward off the Ishvana. Hell, maybe they're even helping the defending faction in order to get at the juicy cargo and captaincy xp.

Ishvana Piercers wouldn't have vulnerability timers and WARP would only work for the attacking faction.

I think this could be a fun way to get the best of both worlds: PvE Piercers that many loved back in the day AND PvP Piercers that are loved now. Hard resets on the Cosmpiercer field keep things fresh, and would generate a flurry of activity around the reset days.

Rhindara

We haven't had any action for a little while, so I haven't thought too seriously about things lately. I did think of a minor gripe about something that's been an issue since generators became a thing, though.

Whenever you leave a cosmpiercer after it's been captured/defended, your ship can no longer dock, regardless of your affiliation. For people who didn't fly themselves, this means that if they for some reason don't board before the pilot leaves, they might be stranded. Back when we had guards, it was as simple as attacking a guard and eating a death (if you didn't have ship return/bring or a wormhole available with another engineer). I'm not exactly sure what the fix is here aside from just being more vigilant/patient on the side of passengers and pilots, but something that doesn't require divine intervention would also be cool.

Zhulkarn

To be honest I enjoy the slow changes on conquest map and a hard Ishvana reset would really make it seem more like a tournament mode rather then a conquest mode. Perhaps call me a traditionalist but I kind of enjoy keeping the claimed territory! And the color changing gradually from one color to another with new colors added.

But I do have an upgraded proposal regarding mid-cycle Ishvana idea. Why limit ourselves with Ishvana? After all other factions use Y'saari marks too and they might want to get a piece from the cake itself. Since the Sector has many other players then current player factions and any of them should be able to capture a piercer at slow frequency. That would even give a PvE cosmpiercer mode a variety of mobs to deal with. Selassians, Nabians, Ironcorsairs, Vonikin Krel etc. with different mob and ship behaviours. 

Rhindara

Quick request: 

• Let there be an alert on the conflict channel when someone attacks an Ishvana cosmpiercer, not just when it's taken, so that there are chances for big three-way fights in neutral ground.

RocketCat

Another request:

- Cosmpiercer power COSMPIERCER ABANDON <piercer>, to relinquish control of a piercer back to Ishvana, in case a faction starts suffering for crystals.

Azlyn

First, uhh, please update HELP COSMPIERCERS. Like, the first "Capturing Cosmpiercers" bit, because I was very confused. But cool hotfix on the capture timer starting when you actually land, and I like the overall concept of tying this in with cache stuff.

So I'm finding it kind of hard to comment because I don't think I fully understand the energy mechanic. Is it correct that the energy formula is TotalRanks*(50-2*[TotalRanks-20]) ? In this case, I think your optimization point is 22 or 23 TotalRanks; more or less gives you less energy. This is where I get confused: "controlling more than a half of total cosmpiercer ranks means that the maintenance cost exceeds the actual energy production of additional cosmpiercers". If my formula is correct, the point you go negative is 45 TotalRanks... which isn't "half", and makes me think my understanding is incorrect. I think someone said the absolute total is 132, which really means there's a gross excess when you consider the optimization point at 22/23, multiplied by three factions. I'd be happy to comment or give suggestions with some further clarification, because I'm hoping CPs are competitive/desirable to hold, even if that's reasonably curbed. But we all shouldn't just get the max and sit on it (or have to choose to grief the other factions).

Also I'm not sure that the higher ranked ones are worth the extra effort to compete for. It'd probably be nice if the energy formula wasn't just linear, and the higher ranked ones were worth more. But yeah, hard to comment right now.

RocketCat

@Azlyn I was going off the assumption that the formula for cosmpiercer energy is more like: sum over set of owned piercers: 50*rank-(totalRanks - 20)*2, rather than rank*(50-2*(totalRanks-20)). But we should be able to test which is correct soon enough.

A QoL thing for COSMPIERCER ENERGY: a Total Ranks field and a Crystals Required field.

RocketCat

RocketCat said:

sum over set of owned piercers: 50*rank-(totalRanks - 20)*2.

They did the studies and revealed this to be the case.

RocketCat

Cosmpiercers, the mathening:

Let's talk crystals, energy, and power maintenance. I don't have any feedback yet, I'm just putting some thoughts out there.

Piercers cost 2 crystals per rank. There are 132 ranks worth of piercers, so the maximum crystal cost for powering them all is 264. Caches seem to net around 50-60 crystals, and seem to average in at a 3 hour cooldown. Ideally this would net 400 crystals per day. In reality we're seeing about 5-6 per day, let's say 300.

With the energy formula above, the max energy output scenario is 2452 energy with a rank count of 86 and a total crystal cost of 172/month. I think it's unlikely that a single faction will have it in them to reach this scenario, farming 172 crystals EVERY DAY sounds like a fast track to burnout.

A sustainable crystals per day count will depend entirely on a faction's willingness to farm them, but I can say for myself I'd be uncomfortable with needing to farm any more than 80-ish per day. Given this I find it unlikely that players will bother taking all the piercers from Ishvana, nevermind taking Cosmpiercers from each other for any other reason than to fight/deny energy/maybe control the most efficienct piercers.

So let's say I get around 1300 energy for my target of 80-ish crystals/day. That's enough to maintain maybe 4-5 powers, depending on what you choose. Practically, though, you don't HAVE to maintain powers. It seems like you can just let them run to their 30 day timers and then maintain them then and stagger the abilities you want to keep up. Realistically though, I don't think we'll be seeing any more than 5-8 powers unlocked at any given time.

RocketCat

Today I post with impunity.

I mourn the loss of Adjacency Bonuses. Reintroducing them could provide a greater degree of strategy. A suggestion: a) provide a bonus to energy output for adjacency, b) reduce crystal maintenance cost for adjacency, or c) both.

Energy: Instead of the formula for a cosmpiercer being 50*rank-(totalRanks - 20)*2, it could instead be 50*rank-(totalRanks - 20 - numberOfAdjacentPiercers)*2 or 50*rank-(totalRanks - 20)*(2-0.5*numberOfAdjacentPiercers).

Crystal cost: Instead of rank*2, consider rank*2-numberOfAdjacentPiercers to a minimum of 1.

This would create real value for controlling lower ranked Cosmpiercers, which currently are very inefficient. It'd stimulate a lot of fighting especially for the RS brick of piercers as factions attempt to strain the others' crystal cost/energy generation by interfering with adjacency.

RocketCat

Request: An second-in-queue for COSMPIERCER UNLOCK, otherwise the remaining energy on the final tick is wasted.

Azlyn

Thanks for the clarification!

I agree with @RocketCat 's general assessment and a lot of his points. I like the idea of reintroducing the adjacency bonus, but your proposal makes an already complicated function and interaction even more complicated, mathematically. Players should not have to break out the calculator* when deciding whether competing for a CP is a good idea. (*a stupid excel spreadsheet, yeah I see you nerds)

So just to sum up my own take, here's what I like with the current system:

- I think you did a great job of addressing issues/concerns with the old system, regarding rewards, ground combat, accessibility/travel, and so on. I noticed that you put effort into addressing some holes with CP powers, which I think was a neat solution. Overall, I think I had more PK within the first 24 hours of caches than during the rest of the time since Starmourn inception, so kudos on creating an avenue of conflict that's been pretty fun and engaging. 
- Adding a crystal maintenance cost to CPs was a good way to keep us participating in the system. 
- I like the idea of strategy or some tradeoff in decision making, regarding energy production/crystal costs and taking CPs.
- A cap on CPs that a faction should reasonably hold is probably good for the health/morale of the playerbase, to prevent one faction from totally dominating.

So here are my perceived issues: 

- The energy formula should not be so complicated, to the point where it lends to poor/uninformed decision making.

- Low-level CPs are highly unattractive to take, based on the current energy formula punishing against the CPs-owned count. As it stands, I would see factions probably ignoring the majority, and just heavily competing for the 5+. Without changes, I imagine we will just keep leaving a large number of CPs unclaimed. Related: under this system, not being able to eject a CP that is hurting your energy production is a problem.

- There is no strategic value for any particular CP based on location, other than perhaps proximity/accessibility in space. This diminishes the value of CPs to just rank.

- Higher-level CPs are more difficult to wrangle away from factions who already own them. I mean, just to have a chance to compete, you need battleship pilots, multiple high-level hackers, and then possibly a sufficient combat team, all during a small window of vulnerability. The bottom line is that the CP capture mechanic is still imperfect, but within the context of evaluating the energy system, high-level CPs should not be the end-all-be-all for competing.

- The system fabricates too much stress on regular crystal gathering. There's a fine line between encouraging continued participation, and creating a resented chore, especially when it is concentrated within a small playerbase.
- These CP powers are crazy good, which is compelling to compete for, but you run into an issue where the winning team gets access to more tools that perpetuates them winning (the rich get richer).

On to my suggestions, with the objective of addressing the above (obviously numbers can be tweaked):
- Change the energy formula to a very simple 30*Rank, plus 10% per adjacent CP. This gives ~4k total available energy across 132 total ranks,  plus more with adjacency.
- Add a hard cap on the total CP ranks a faction can control - let's say 80 (~60% of total ranks). This nets a maximum 2400 energy, plus any adjacency bonus, and this is comparable to the current maximum.
- COSMPIERCER [CHARGE|UNPOWER] <CP> - toggles the daily crystal maintenance. Unpowered CPs do not generate energy or count for adjacency bonuses, but do count against the faction cap.
- Make CP manipulation a faction-invested power, instead of just a faction leader responsibility.
- Maybe adjust the crystal cost to be something less linear, like (3+Rank) instead of 2*Rank. This would make the high-level CPs more desirable for efficiency, but still leave value to low-level CPs overall, with some energy output and possible adjacency.

For future work, preferably after tweaking the CP capture mechanic:
- After initial capture, CPs are taken back by the Ishvana after a period of time (two, three years?). Unpowered CPs get released at twice the rate (month passed = 2 mo lost).

In this, a dominant faction is reasonably capped, and factions are challenged to continue taking CPs with the forced Ishvana reset. However, I call it "future work" and would probably recommend holding off on the releasing mechanic, until such a time that the population increases or the CP capture mechanic is changed to alleviate the need for battleships. I think a lot of people have ideas on that, but I'll hold off until the energy/crystal discussion is over and/or the devs say that they are open to changing the CP mechanic too.

Also as a quick QoL request, can CP be a shortcut for the COSMPIERCER syntax?

Cubey

Sorry Azlyn but I must disagree with a majority of your post. Let's go over your points one by one:

- The energy formula should not be so complicated, to the point where it lends to poor/uninformed decision making.

It's... not complicated. It's simple math that was misunderstood by people who overthought things, but we were quickly shown how it actually works so everyone knows better now. No need to change it - as far as obtuseness go, it's not even in top 20 of Starmourn's mechanics.

- Low-level CPs are highly unattractive to take, based on the current energy formula punishing against the CPs-owned count. As it stands, I would see factions probably ignoring the majority, and just heavily competing for the 5+. Without changes, I imagine we will just keep leaving a large number of CPs unclaimed. Related: under this system, not being able to eject a CP that is hurting your energy production is a problem.

and...

- Higher-level CPs are more difficult to wrangle away from factions who already own them. I mean, just to have a chance to compete, you need battleship pilots, multiple high-level hackers, and then possibly a sufficient combat team, all during a small window of vulnerability. The bottom line is that the CP capture mechanic is still imperfect, but within the context of evaluating the energy system, high-level CPs should not be the end-all-be-all for competing.

That's both two sides of the same coin: high ranked cosmpiercers are difficult to take over, low level cosmpiercers are easy targets. This is not a bad thing. It means the smaller ones are something to fight over with less preparation, or something you can take if your faction isn't very active.

Also low level cosmpiercers don't "punish" your energy generation, they just generate less of it due to diminishing returns. Run the math and you'll see how many cosmpiercers you must own so much so that taking over a rank 1/2/3 will result in total loss of energy generation. Hint: it's a lot more than any faction currently controls.

- There is no strategic value for any particular CP based on location, other than perhaps proximity/accessibility in space. This diminishes the value of CPs to just rank.

That's how things always were. Also don't look down on proximity/accessibility. It's an important factor.

- The system fabricates too much stress on regular crystal gathering. There's a fine line between encouraging continued participation, and creating a resented chore, especially when it is concentrated within a small playerbase.

It's up to faction leaders to assess how many cosmpiercers they can maintain without it becoming an unfun chore. There's a reason CA stopped at 30 ranks.

- These CP powers are crazy good, which is compelling to compete for, but you run into an issue where the winning team gets access to more tools that perpetuates them winning (the rich get richer).

Solved by dimishing returns on cosmpiercer power. The best performing faction has the upper hand, but not so much so that the others can't catch up.

The system has a few "core" powers that are incredibly useful in pvp or just due to general utility and I expect every faction to have those active all the time, what will change is that the ones with more energy generation will also allow themselves for more limited use/obscure powers. That's not a bad thing.

Your suggestions:

- Change the energy formula to a very simple 30*Rank, plus 10% per adjacent CP. This gives ~4k total available energy across 132 total ranks,  plus more with adjacency.

- Add a hard cap on the total CP ranks a faction can control - let's say 80 (~60% of total ranks). This nets a maximum 2400 energy, plus any adjacency bonus, and this is comparable to the current maximum.

- Maybe adjust the crystal cost to be something less linear, like (3+Rank) instead of 2*Rank. This would make the high-level CPs more desirable for efficiency, but still leave value to low-level CPs overall, with some energy output and possible adjacency.

Okay. First off, I'll assume these three ideas are meant to be implemented together as a singular thing - adjusting maintenance costs in the current system would be disasterous for low level cosmpiercers' worth without also implementing the other two changes.

That being said: No. I really, really dislike this. I wrote above how dimishing returns prevent one faction from overpowering the others. It's the best equalizing factor the system has right now. This solution would remove that that factor altogether: you said you don't want a "rich get richer" scheme, but this idea would turn cosmpiercers into exactly that.

A hard cap is a poor replacement for diminishing returns, especially when it's so high that it might as well not be there. The current cap is a soft one and depends on faction activity. That's much better. If there's a hard cap, people will feel like they're forced to reach it.

- COSMPIERCER [CHARGE|UNPOWER] <CP> - toggles the daily crystal maintenance. Unpowered CPs do not generate energy or count for adjacency bonuses, but do count against the faction cap.

Don't like it. It incentivizes hoarding cosmpiercers without actually using them.

- Make CP manipulation a faction-invested power, instead of just a faction leader responsibility.

It already is, though? That's what we did in CA. Maybe Song's faction power code is borked.

The way the system is right now, some cosmpiercers aren't taken due to their perceived lower worth. This may be a problem but I think that opinion misses a key factor: the system was designed to leave room for growth. Not for cosmpiercers but for the playerbase. When the game leaves beta and grows in population, each faction will have more active people who will allow it to sustain more cosmpiercers in turn. When you have lots of people around, crystal generation stops being an issue (I know song reached the 1000 crystal cap already - but that was mostly an effect of a few very dedicated people, who can suffer burnout if made to do it for a long time. When there's more players though, they can take turns). And when crystal generation is not an issue, even a lowly rank 2 cosmpiercer is valuable.

Azlyn

@Cubey, I'm not going to respond point-by-point, but I still stand by everything that I said. Diminishing returns, with CP-count as a factor, reduces the value of low-ranked CPs; it's just a fact. In my opinion, they should still be competed, not just the leftover garbage for whoever wants to exert the least effort.

"Hard cap, soft cap, diminishing returns" - in reality, these are just words, and they achieve the same thing. But let's just be clear that the only true limit, presently, is crystal farming. Nobody wants to overreach for cosmpiercers and drain the well dry. The entire premise of my suggesting that we can power/unpower CPs is to unshackle that fear and conservatism that is preventing us from wanting to engage the system further. We should not have to wait for the day that the long lost Starmourners return en masse to make the system work. Ata's suggestion to be able to return CPs to Ishvana is similar, but perpetuates the idea that many CPs are just not valuable and will be the unwanted leftovers.

So, this is where Song is now. I did "run the math" last week and advocated that we should take more cosmpiercers, we could afford it. People didn't want to take the risk, and even gave me the "What if <insert bread-winner> gets run over by a bus?" scenario. And they're not wrong; every faction is hovering around some 20-30 ranks because of this fear of risk around crystal draining. I hope you realize that, if every faction is happy to take its 30 CP ranks and go home, then we will never fight over CPs, and the Ishvana will have plenty of unoccupied CPs to use as summer vacation homes. By this design, there is no competition for CPs. Furthermore, now that Song has reached its crystal cap, we also have the prerogative to not compete in caches, because we have nothing to gain; just delaying the other factions from reaching their cap or boosting our K:D. Again, by this design, there comes a point where we all don't compete for caches either, because we can get away with minimal participation, whenever it's convenient or when the other sides are too bored to try.

I guess we'll see where it goes from here. But I just want to say that your post begins with "Sorry", and unless that's intended to be patronizing (which I don't), you shouldn't apologize for disagreeing. I'm not a professional game designer, and I can be wrong. I'm certainly not sorry for having an opinion, or for leaving it open to criticism. I think, at the end of the day, we all want to see the game succeed and for the community to have fun, and giving feedback and having discussions are the least we can do to help.

Cubey

I said "sorry" because my posts tend to come off as antagonistic or contrarian, and I wanted to ease off of that impression - being patronizing is not my intention either.

Low level cosmpiercers aren't leftover garbage. Folks aren't taking them over not because they're worthless, but because they don't want to take all cosmpiercers right now and having a few high level ones is easier and more secure than spreading around on the low levels. I repeat myself: this is because of the game's current size. Come larger playerbases, and you will see all cosmpiercers taken over by one faction or another.

You say that hard cap and diminishing returns are "just words" and "achieve the same thing", but that is not true. Diminishing returns, the system we have right now, soften the advantage that the stronger factions have over the weaker. If we remove that and replace it with a cap, as you suggest, then the less active factions will be left in the dust. I don't want that to happen.