Clean Slate Cosmpiercer Thread
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:
- 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.
Hi, I'm Ata. Oh and maybe some other people, too. 
Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.
Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.2
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
- 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:
- 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).
- 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).
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.