Port upgrades and defenses - solution idea

[Infinity]

So I talked to some smart people on this after FE got lots of cash from lvl9 ports, then I did some math, draw some diagrams, busted some low lvl ports too, and following would be the solution suggestions.

Let's start from low level ports, first thing to be done is to make upgrade money on the port dependent on both bought and sold goods, so buyer ports upgrade with same pace as seller ports (or if you want, so that they upgrade at all). Current situation is that only if port sells you something that money is used for upgrading, so high multiplier buying ports accumulate lots of cash while their level or defenses don't change, meaning raiding gives reward but there's no loss involved, which most of us consider imbalanced.

So...

UpgradeMoney = 500 units * 1000 credits for every transaction made on the port (cargo gets limited to 500, if price per unit is higher than 1000 credits, money going to UpgradeMoney also gets rounded, if not it's whatever 500*price_per_unit gives).

This should be reset every time the port gains a lvl. This way, for example, a heavily traded port for excavating that buys PM and Ore (heavily = drained once every day) would collect over 30 mils of traded cash (as it is now) meaning it would, with this change, in a month reach lvl4, therefore slightly altering the routes in it's close proximity.

Money on ports would still be total traded money, which would be also reset every time port gains a lvl. On a lvl9 port there should be no money cap (explanation bellow).

Possible anomalies - lvl7 or 8 ports that buy 1 or 2 lvl3 goods might have lots of cash on them before they actually upgrade to the next lvl, I did some math and the cash could go up to 2B if the said port has very high multipliers (I calculated it for 20x). However, most of the racial or ports in neutral galaxies would rarely get higher than 500mils traded money this way (this is only if nothing else is traded on those ports) so I think that ports like these would rarely be found in a regular round, tho it leaves some space for alliance built ports and a bit of abuse, but seeing that blue bar never works properly, it would be pretty hard to determine when is the perfect moment for the bust.

As for upgrading ports in planet galaxies it would take a minimum of 4-5 days to get the port from lvl1 to lvl9, with 2 and after lvl6 even 3-4 people trading the port in most organized manner, minding which goods first, which goods to restock, if buying for how much money etc. SC costs are roughly 300-350SC from lvl4 to lvl5, then about twice that for lvl5 to lvl6, etc. It would take team effort to upgrade the port as fast as possible, while the upgrade time is defined solely by port restock rate.

Once the port reaches lvl9, defense upgrade would depend on total traded money (which is once again reset when the port gets to lvl9). Idea is that busting such huge ports becomes tougher than it is now, which basically comes down to taking pods in a bust and how ever big the money on the port is, gain/loss ratio would be between 3 and 3.5.

Port should become deadly at 2B total traded money when it gets the maximum of 2000CDs, making it deadly as a lander planet. Port's shields (and armor) continue to grow with traded money, ensuring more and more pods for the opping fleet on their way to port's cash.

Added_Shields=2600*(TradedMoney/10^9)^1.29 (same for armor)
Added_CDs=402*(TradedMoney/10^9)^1.315 (maxing out at 2000)

These are continual tho, Page might want to make them step-functions.
I'm gonna throw some numbers here for examples and finish this post....

Roughly, 2B on port, 1-2 to pods, ~16k shields, 5.6B on the port, total of 40k shields, 5 pods taken; 10.8B on the port, 72k shields, 8-9 pods; 20B on the port, 130k shields, 15 pods to get the money.

In calculating, ship cost 400mils (not all have all ship size etc), average shield damage shot on the port 8.6k (10 ship fleet with total of 36 death rays with 40% accuracy).

Oh... except for the part with upgrading port level (while lower than 9), this other part could actually wait till some round where we have higher alliance cap, as I don't see big port raids (or planet busts for that matter) as a possibility next round.

[Swagman]

Kinky, nice post.. and nice confusing calculations... lol.. I feel so dim... I even had to look up what ^ meant.

As I'm not a maths genius, this may be a stupid question, but.

If the drones max at 2k, and only the shields and armour increase past a certain point, what is producing all the pods ?, are the turrets increasing as well ?

if all you have to encounter is 20 turrets and max 2k drones, and your all in mammoths or another big ship, will there ever be a pod.. ?

Or have I read it all wrong

[Infinity]

[14:38] <@Kiky> Swag
[14:38] <@Kiky> port drones do 2 dmg
[14:38] <@Swagman> ahh, ok
[14:38] <@Swagman> hehe
[14:38] <@Kiky> 2k = 4k dmg
[14:39] <@Kiky> so you raise shields to make bust longer
[14:39] <@Kiky> more shots to get to drones = more pods
[14:39] <@Kiky> each shot is more or less a pod

[Edgecrusher]

Nice suggestions, and I need some time, a calculator and some coffee to comment on it, but initially I have one big problem with it:

Port upgrade should not have anything to do with money, but with the amount of goods traded. Why do ports upgrade? Well, for the same reason a real life shop upgrades: business are going well, a shop owner sees opportunities for new markets and he has the money to upgrade. It's not as if a shop owner has one rich customer, and then decides to upgrade: he or she will go bankrupt when the next customer comes.

Isn't it much much easier (in terms of coffee needed to understand) to create some kind of tax? For each level 1 good sold or bought, the port owner has to put 100 credits into the upgrade fund, each level 2 good gives 200 etc. Then, when the upgrade fund reaches a certain limit, the port gets upgraded and the fund gets emptied again. Hence, if you raid a port that just upgraded, you get nothing, because all the money was invested in a port upgrade. That also caps the amount of money you get from raiding: it can never be higher than what is needed for the next upgrade. Plus, it adds to port busting dynamcs, cause you can't just go busting any port (by looking at the green bar you know what money a port will have) Simple and elegant solution and it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

[Infinity]

Hmm...


Thing is, I had all the numbers about money, dmg in raids etc. and on the other hand it was easy to balance out the cash you get with the ships you lose in a PR. Generally, it was the easiest and most logical way to create a defense upgrade model.

Port upgrade should not have anything to do with money

is in contradiction with

when the upgrade fund reaches a certain limit, the port gets upgraded

Or at least it looks that way.

and the fund gets emptied again

you need more coffee::

This should be reset every time the port gains a lvl.

Money on ports would still be total traded money, which would be also reset every time port gains a lvl.

That also caps the amount of money you get from raiding: it can never be higher than what is needed for the next upgrade.

What was the idea, is that money isn't capped (after port reaches lvl9, not for lower lvl ports) so that port raiding exists as something that with a certain loss can make a profit to an alliance. A reason to op, a reason to have full CPL and higher activity. (before you got more people into FE, we busted ports for making another route in another planet galaxy, just so that activity of the alliance doesn't die, as we didn't have anything else to do, opping is kinda healthy for the game). However, there is that one possible loophole I mentioned about lvl7 or lvl8 ports, but huge money could only be obtained on an alliance built port, and this could be solved by simply dividing the total traded money with 2 (those 500 mils on a racial port would become 250 mils, which is not some significant money gain, it's not even one ship, it wouldn't even affect the defense upgrade model for lvl9 ports as their defenses would still grow with that money, only the gain from a PR would be smaller and there would be less pods taken).

Isn't it much much easier (in terms of coffee needed to understand) to create some kind of tax?

Isn't 1k per good for cargo cut off at 500 holds just that? Maybe I'm seeing things wrong...

However, I can redo the math, ofc and make another model, depending on whatever we agree on, I just hope all this math won't scare away the rest of the beta team

One other thing that was bothering me, is how much money would actually be on those really big ports that gave 4.3B.

Thanks for reply Edge

[Edgecrusher]

My estimation is that there was 100s of billions on there, at least at your port in 5932.

I admit I have a coffee problem (I am Edge and I am an addict), but it's not as bad as you put it. When I meant it was not about money, I was talking about player actions. The players actions leading to an upgrade have to do with 'trading', not 'buying'. Of course the port has to have some integral economy, I'm just saying that a player shouldn't be able influence that directly. What comes in, must come out, but that means the port's money should also decrease when selling something. As the buy/sell ratio of a port is not balanced, that is never going to work absolutely, but the idea is that we try to make it look like a real economy as much as possible, imho. Your formula's balance out the money vs the pods in a port raid, but you can throw all the numbers you want at me and my coffee, but I think the starting point is wrong.

Now I can think of a complicated economic model if I can find my university literature somewhere, but the point that it's more than mathematics.

[Infinity]

Can you think of a simple economy model?
Just don't expect me to do that, I have no knowledge of economy, not even basic as the subject never interested me enough. I even have hard time dealing with my own money... Ofc, you can count on me to build the math behind it for usage in the code if you give me a good description. Just bare in mind we' d like to keep PRs as a source of activity and some gain for the alliances.

What I wanted to make, well not my self solely but nvm that now, is that building an alliance port takes time and team work (which is mostly based on your observations in this thread: http://smrcnn.smrealms.de/viewtopic.php ... de#p100831 ) and that one alliance won't slaughter the map in one night for (too) easy (and huge) cash (which is again based on your actions ).

So this::

The players actions leading to an upgrade have to do with 'trading', not 'buying'.

is, in a way, here::

first thing to be done is to make upgrade money on the port dependent on both bought and sold goods

My estimation is that there was 100s of billions on there, at least at your port in 5932.

Hmm... that would be fun to see but 100s of billions... hardly, we'd have more money in savings then, far more, but solid 20-30B for sure. The port defenses were beefed up, artificially, the number of CDs didn't come from regular trading.