News: Blacknova Traders

[jankuwalski]

Another question:

 

-

3) if ALL planets are corporate, anyone could have changed your settings to produce credits.

 

IF ... but some weren't and also energy production WERE at 0% (no planetary apocalipses in log)

 

so once again i wonder about BUG (if anyone got it) or (maybe) Hostile intentions ?

[NiteShdw]

I thought I had posted a reply, but it looks like it didn't show up.

 

I was working on fixing some minor bugs in the code, and looking into making some minor improvements. I believe that my tinkering must have caused some unintended side-effects. I've reversed the changes for now. If anyone suffered because of this, I'll gladly do what I can to fix it. (i.e., trade credits for energy)

[S0V13T]

haha my score right now is 3,113,337. Wich looks like ELLEEET. I'm so leet at this game, they call me "Senior El Leet"

[Megalith]

lol S0V long may you continue at that score hehehe

[Megalith]

Silly Ass of the week award has to goto me having lost my ship i rebuilt it and neglected to buy either an escape pod or emergency warp devices lol the shame of it. I really need to stop playing this game at 6am lol

[mupi]

so when's the next reset?

[NiteShdw]

so when's the next reset?

 

This weekend.

[Megalith]

My ghost is back and haunting the galaxy.

 

A few things have come to light, i noticed yesterday the increase to 1,000,000,000 population limit and so spent a lot of time turns and credits populating my new worlds to the 600 million limit however this morning i noticed a 10 fold increase on my worlds which meant the vast amount of credits i spent was a total waste of time and resources :( i guess that the only people this free 10 fold increase actually benefited are the Illuminati as also the 50% decrease in planetary interest does lol well i mean if they have twice the resources than someone else then now they have 20 times more :(

 

surely it would have been fairer to have just changed the limits without the 10 fold increases for free which serve only to benefit the players with more planets i.e. the ones with the better rankings. as it transpires i got about a 2 fold increase and would have benefited a lot more if i had put 100 mill on 6 worlds than the 600 on 1 that i 'thought' was the best thing to do.

 

Fortunately tho the universe is going to be reset in a few days so i wont have too many gripes about it, but advance notification of planned changes would be a better way to go about these things, or better still leave changes until the reset.

 

Tyoch's Ghost. feeling ripped off and considerably worse off than i thought i was when i went to bed last nite

[TetsuoShima]

The changes done won't really affect the alliance balance anymore imo.

 

The lowest illuminati member, me, is still 2 million ahead of the first other player.

 

The only thing I can still see happening is Kenji dropping to third spot and maybe even NiteShdw climbing to 1st spot, though he still has some catching up to do towards S0V13T.

 

Myself and Kenji have not been playing very actively lately, so with that in mind I was kind of surprised that I still managed to take 4th spot...

 

As for this change in rules, I did find it a bit strange, but in all honesty I have to say that this is indeed to your advantage. I won't go into the details why, but it really is!

[Megalith]

well ok i'll explain why i feel it isnt:-

 

i have only a few worlds and yesterday i put 600 million on each one (60%) now other players had left the values at around 100 million (10%) a 10 fold free increase means i have missed out considerably on this free bounty and as i said it would have benefited me a considerable amount more if i had 6 planets with 10% on than 1 planet with 60% on. (advance notification would have helped here)

 

the halving of interest, a player with 100 planets producing 100 billion for example gets a 10 fold population increase and a 50% reduction in interest ie a 5 fold increase in credit production or 500 billion, whereas a player with 10 planets gets the same upto 10 times increase and 50% decrease and gets 50 billion this means that now the second player gets 450 billion less per turn rather than 90 billion

 

Admittedly the cost to upgrade goes up 2 fold while the advantages gained by the upgrade are 50% but this still favours higher players as the 4 fold factor is lower than the 5 fold factor now in place

 

so i cant see any reason at all how the free colonists thing is fair, a fairer way to have done this would have been free credits for players to spend on new colonists etc.

 

The increase in population limits i think is a good thing i must add and i think the new limit should be introduced at the start of the next game. but the interest decrease is perhaps not such a good thing as it now makes no sense at all to put money on planets as the banks rate is the same.

 

It would be interesting if the planet interest was increased for the next game, if players feel it is best to keep credits in the bank then why built planets at all, why upgrade, why colonise, the best strategy is to sit in federation space and trade upgrade the hull and sit on the credits till the game ends. :(

[TetsuoShima]

I can see what you mean, but you've not taken some important things into consideration.

 

1. the amount of money allready collected by the high ranking players is so high, that with the older interest, they would have kept on increasing their lead, while doing nothing, just by accumulating interest.

 

2. the amount of turns every player has, has suddenly become more important then it allready was. Again to the advantage of lower ranking players.

 

3. I will admit that your populating the planets manually has put you personally at a disadvantage, but that will not be so for all players. I don't think anybody was notified in advance what was being planned, I wasn't at least...

 

There are still 1 or 2 other thing that I'm not talking about yet, I won't either, but they could have some significance.

 

Anyway, the more I think about it the more I think that it's really hard to say what this will do to the big/small player balance. What I do know is that it makes it easier to make small leaps in position in the scoreboard if you react good to the change in rules. I won't be changing anything though. Neither do I think I will be participating after the enxt reset, I'm still abit bored with it all. :p

[Megalith]

interesting analysis although i dont agree with all the points you made

 

1/ If every player recieved a cash bonus then the interest accumulated would be identical on that amount for all players thus making it fairer

 

2/ yes turns are now more important but lesser players have less turns than the higher players because the advanced players have no need to trade and so the only thing they can do with the turns is to ferry between each planet collecting its credits and using the proceeds for upgrades or banking them in some way or to attack less developed players territories

 

3/ Absolutely, nobody was notified, i noticed that some communal planets had over 100 million and checked the game settings where i noticed the settings had changed. Notification would have been better tho as all players would have been able to adapt to the strategy as it arrived

 

The reasons behind why you wont explain the one or 2 other things are strange to me but i remain with my opinion that this windfall population explosion has given the higher players a huge advantage over the other players and that players with 500 planets now have increased in essence to 5000 planets whereas players with 10 planets now have 10 which is a huge difference.

 

I dont have a problem with the increase in the population limits i think that is a good idea but fairer would have been to give either cash for all players or a fixed amount of colonists. or fairer still no windfalls whatsoever.

[Amnot Borg]

I like the new settings but was as surprised as anyone else when they started.

 

The unsettling thing to me was the sudden attacks by Illuminati considering peace negotiations had been worked out earlier by Darkstar's "leader".

 

Admittedly, it's just a game but as so many of the players are/were newbies from outside this group, one game isn't time to teach them tactics, tricks, and basic rules. Then the game gets rougher out of nowhere and the settings change which do affect scores and rankings.

 

If we play for high score, perhaps we should limit game play to one month, mostly fights. No clones or ghosts.

smaller galaxy, mayhem and chaos rules, you die and you wait until next game, no double players(2-5 names, same guy).

 

If we play for fun, then set a 2-3 month limit to just see what happens, fights and trading included.

larger galaxy, alliances can learn to get along or fight, expand wherever they like, no giants stepping on little guys just like Federation rules, penalties for that behavior.

 

if we play more practice games then we need to let the noobs learn while we sit it out or actively teach them. there are lots of new players coming in from other forum groups and sites that have no skills yet, double players would be encouraged while they learn in case they don't get invited into an alliance and need a partner to learn things like corporation sharing and ship-to-ship trading.

 

no changes during the game unless 24 hour notice is given in the game for those members that don't use the forum.

 

These are just suggestions since we have had several alliances that had different ideas of how to play this game. Some want to fight, some want to trade, some like both. There should be mention of what type game is being played so we know that the general rules are different for each kind. We also should not let newbies join into hostile alliance matches in the middle since they'd have no chance to build up supplies. A lot of the new people showed up in this last month and really had no chance. Either we attacked really weak people or they ran into secure sectors and got wiped out or we tried to teach them and both of us were weakened since we wasted time teaching instead of playing. All those instant kills meant we had maybe 50-70 players that aren't really there any more. They gave up but the ship was still in the game.

something to think about... maybe we DO need more servers for various kinds of games.

[NiteShdw]

I don't understand why everyone is complaining that you were notified. There is a huge bold purple message right at the bottom of every screen that says that changes were made.

 

Secondly, I only made the change because I announced a reset would take place in less than a week. I was hoping to take away the advantage from those that were just earning score by earning lots of interest. This was just a way to keep the game a little more interesting for the last week.

[Megalith]

although i felt a bit disgruntled at the changes i have to say i have adapted my game strategy to the changes and feel that the popultion limit is a good thing.

 

I would second Amnot Borgs suggestion for running more than one game, we could have a pro version that is reset regularly and a learning game that doesnt get reset and allows new changes to be tried out midgame. is it possible/practical to run multiple copies of BNT?

 

I am looking forward to the reset and i feel that this next game is likely to be a nasty one lol. I for one wont be taking any noobs hand an walkin em thru the game lol. It is good how each game so far has been totally different from the last one and how the strategies and tactics have evolved.

 

As for any changes/settings for the next universe i think the 1 billion pop limit should stay especially if we are going to stick to a small (<5000 sectors) universe but the interest rate should be higher for planets. 5000 is a good size tho 3000 would make it nasty. i still would like to try the game with xenobes on just for target practice tho lol.

 

 

[S0V13T]

Yeah, I also like the idea of having a seperate game for the noobs. I'd rather conquor planets where there had been a fair defence in place, then wontonly dominating all planets that I see.

 

Seriously, in all fairness it really would be more fair to all players (noobs and pros alike) if there were 2 games, one for learning the game, practice, and developing your technique, and another for graduated players to engauge in some serious competition.

 

The veteran players simply don't have time to teach the new players the ins and outs of the game. They have an Empire to build, defend and maintain afterall.

 

Let the more experenced players focus on maintaining their Alliances / personal empires, not teaching ametures.

 

As far as the game rules go, I think we should keep it as it was during the duration of last game. Yes, I do build a lot of planets, and only trade as much as I have to - my style of playing would put me at a tremendous advantage over those that only build a couple of planets - I'd rather play a balanced game, where everyone has a fair shot of comming out ontop, as opposed to anyone that has around 200 planets and dosen't log in for a few weeks automatically has a place in the top 5, due to interest.

[Megalith]

Totally agree S0V how easy would it be to set up a second game? presumably it can be done by copying the game into a seperate directory changing the game settings to point to this location and then creating a home page with links to both games?

 

I would happily participate in both games show the noobs some ropes but leave my real time for the proper game. would you agree that having the learning game rarely if ever reset would be good? there would have to be some restrictions in place tho to stop some power crazed space junkie from takin out people tho lol, not sure how that could be done except by maybe not allowing Sofa runs? perhaps some form of ingame admin run by vets would help?

 

btw did you get space sickness S0V? seems to me like you had space maggots eat ya brains out an drive you to an untimely death sometime today. ;)

 

 

[S0V13T]

ya, basiclly all nite would have to do is set up a few new tables (I imagine the games installer can do that) and set up anew subdomain, like traders1.nitescifi.com and traders2.nitescifi.com or whatever.

 

As for my recent in-game death, I intentionaly attacked one of nites non- alliance planets twice, for the soul reason of killing myself, as he is the only player in tha game that has the ability to destroy me . I figure that that game is getting reset tomorrow anyways, might as well give the other players a fair chance of stumbeling on my vast fortune and inhereting it.

 

That, and I KNOW that it must have made a LOT of players cry tears of sheer joy to see that I got desteoyed when they logged in the day after :) So I feel good about making someones day :)

[NiteShdw]

Sorry about the late reset, I was on the road driving to California, and I'm only online because I found an open wireless access point. I'll get the reset done in the next few hours.

[Megalith]

Reset new universe ahhh the joys of new blood, small universe not enough space for anything except red mist lol.

 

Dont forget we know where you live, and we take no prisoners.

 

I gotta love my evil rating this game lol no more mr nice guy.

 

P.S. noticed a few changes in global settings mine defectors are cheaper Genesis torps cost more and the population limit is higher than at the start of last game but lower than at the end. It all makes for some interesting strategy changes.