We have found that players are not upgrading their planets past an average tech level of 230-240 because the Max Credit Limit starts to increase beyond a point where it is profitable to upgrade. This is one of the reasons some players are building many planets. They can gain credits faster with many 230 level planets than they can any planet over that tech average.

The scaling for Maximum Credits you can store on a planet has been changed to make it easier and more profitable than before to upgrade. The new scaling starts at tech level average 229. From tech level average of 229 and higher the maximum credit limit will be lower than before. All of the program code including the Upgrade Templates have been updated to reflect the new scaling. It is a jury rigged fix but the best that can be done with the exponential value increases used by the current code.

The following is a Table listing the New Maximum Credit Limits and Old Maximum Credit Limits for all tech levels from 220 to 599. In theory a player could get a planet to an average tech level of 600. As you can see there is a HUGE difference between the maximum credit limit for Average Tech Level 599.

599. - New Max Credit Limit: 46,472,691,990,840 || - Old Max Credit Limit: 38,464,749,050,920,624,455,680

This should allow the builders to make some Uber-Powerful Planets while retaining good credit production.

Vote PJ for Builder's president... "Yes we can"... (quote: Bob the builder and a man living in a colored house )


The effect of this change: Now the builders can continue boosting credits when they securing (read: upgrading the level on) the planet.

what ^ said

As a builder, I like this change, but as a player, I am skeptical. As it stands right now, with much fewer planets, I would be able to make the planets impossible for a normal attack by another player. I know the other builders are going to hate me for this, but I think if the change is made (All of my planets are still at 250 with 5.5T credits, so I don't know, some people have said this has already taken effect, I haven't seen it yet) then you need to remove the +20 level bonus for based planets.

In addition to this, I'm not exactly sure I would want to spend 25T to upgrade a planet to 350 and not hold but 45% of that amount on the planet itself. I think the change could be a good one, with a little more thought put into it.

The 20 point based bonus for defense is a SCALING bonus that gets reduced as tech levels go up. It is based upon each tech level of a planet and NOT the average. A Shield tech of 225 would get a 5 point bonus while a Fighter tech of 300 would get a 0 point bonus. It scales to lower values as the tech level goes up. At a tech level of 300 there is a 0 point based bonus. At 150 you only get a 10 point bonus. At 225 there is only a 5 point bonus. This has been in 0.3x since it was released.

BTW, there are already ships owned by certain players in the game with average tech levels over 330.

Also, in a few hours anyone with planets at an average tech level over 240 will be getting the money difference between the old and the new limits deposited in their ships. Some players will be getting trillions more than they actually had on the planets at the time. Don't go upgrading your planets to try and cash in on this because the database was downloaded at the time of the change and that is what will be used to determine compensation.

Just thought I'd chime in to see what happens

I know I'm always raining on your parade, but this is what the change will do:

Same production for the same number of planets. If you want to make 70T a day and it took 100 planets before, it will STILL take 100 planets now.

More well defended planets.

But... now players can't build very many planets or else the indy problem becomes unbearable EVEN IF they spend all their time legitimately tending planets.

So you get better defense in return for fewer planets and therefore less production. It's a crappy trade off. You're getting gipped.

Further, the increase in security is meaningless. During the first phase of the round it'll be some help because it'll be easier to defend planets, but past the one third mark or so, the cost of novas becomes pretty trivial. Attackers can buy them by the bucket load. The increased defense is, again, meaningless (with the small exception of the early round).

And the point where the production hot spot is is STILL below the point that most upper level attackers can attain with their ship. I mean, people might be building around 280 now instead of 230, but any attacker on the first page can STILL take that without novas. So you get nothing.

This is a cheap trick to make the builders think that there is some sort of compromise going on with them losing planets and gaining protection, but it's not worth it. Anyway, we all know that the only way to defend your planets is with SD, not planet tech levels.

So anyway, that's right, in summary, I quote the brilliant Willy Wonka line. "You get nothing".

I was unaware of how the base bonus worked then, but if that is the case, I don't see a problem.

I guess the only thing I have now, is that some of my planets will take a good bit of money to upgrade them to a level that would give me the capacity they had been at previously, and I'm not sure how economical it will be to do the upgrades to get them back there.

Actually it does help. I rarely build past 50 anyways. But I can bump the planet so A the col totals can go up and I will make more credits.

Val quit being a naysayer. Although I miss harassing you

I agree, it does help with production, due to increased colonists, but only to a point, after a while it becomes cost-prohibitive to upgrade planets, so you are pushed to either just hold a lot of money, or drop it into your ship. Since building ships are worthless at this stage, that means putting it into an attack ship.

What I would like to see, however, possibly in addition to this change, is higher colonist limits. Either make the colonists added per tech level an exponential, like all the other things (Cash, price, capacity) or do like was done on one of the tournament servers, and increase overall colonist limits per tech level by about ten times. I'm not sure if this would cause problems with the game, but I don't see that it would due to it being the same number of database queries and such (And here we show my lack of ignorance with programming, just insert some technical jargon here, and it should make sense) just higher numbers in some of the functions. I actually think I would prefer an exponential increase in colonists, due to it encouraging planet upgrades. This is actually the main reason many planets are preferable to few with the current setup. I can make hundreds of level 200 planets for the price of making one level 300 planet. Obviously, one level 300 planet holds 16b colonists, while a hundred level 200 planets holds 2.1T colonists. Assuming 60% colonists are set for credit production either way, you can see that base credit production on a level 300 planet is just over 140m credits per tick (That would be higher based on how close to max credits it is at, of course.) But the base production of a hundred level 200 planets would be over 18b credits per tick. Even assuming that the level 300 planet would be closer to max, the smaller planets would get closer to max with every tick, making up the difference. If we had exponential colonist growth, it would make upgraded planets more valuable, and lower level planets less so.

If you took the generic XXX * 1.04138^Tech as the colonist limit, with a base of say, 10b colonists. Do the formula as (10,000,000,000 + (100,000 * (1.04138^Tech))) = Maximum Colonists (The bracketing is not necessary if you know math, but it helps people who do not understand the order of operations) Then what you would have would be something like (I trimmed the numbers when I did the powers operation, since I was getting a lot of numbers of the wrong side of the decimal, which was causing my calculator to crash):

Level 200 = 10,332,500,000 colonists
Level 300 = 29,176,500,000 colonists
Level 400 = 1,115,841,900,000 colonists

Like this, there would certainly be more numbers for the server to figure out, but if I understand correctly, the numbers inside the queries aren't the issue, it is the number of queries (I am probably sounding so stupid here, but I don't know what they are, and a query sounds as close as I can think of at 5am) Thus, having a number of smaller planets would not be as profitable as having some larger, more defended, more populated planets.



P.S.

I wanted to say that the yesterday I felt angry, hurt, betrayed, and confused. I do understand that you guys are balancing the game among other things, and that you have to do things to allow that balance to exist, I feel that making changes in the middle like that should not be done, but whatever changes are made, I will do what I can to adapt. I do not want you to think that I am being ungrateful. It is just that I enjoy this game very much, and I have been working very hard at it, almost like a second job. I have had more nights without sleep, and more nights with an hour of two of sleep since this round started than I have had in ten years. To see all of that suddenly thrown in jeopardy, with only a few hours warning, and no real way to do anything about it (I had to just destroy a hundred planets that I'd worked hard at building. That is rebuilding an old muscle car, and then having to destroy it because of a brand-new clause in your insurance contract that would cost you a million dollars if you kept it. The car is priceless, but you don't have a million dollars in order to keep it, so with heart-wrenching pain, you have to destroy it, after you've spent months working on it.) My point is, we (The players on the game) are glad to offer ideas, solutions, whatever help we can offer, even monetary if that is what you need. All we want in return is for you to think about us when you make decisions. The most important thing, is to give us enough warning for us to get in a position so as not to be annihilated by the changes, and while it sounds selfish, if you are going to cost me 100T credits, plus time lost building the planets and maintaining the dignitaries and tagging all of the planets every night, plus turns spent building a hundred extra planets, if you would just look at our point of view, you would see why we think we should be reimbursed. When Cephus lost some of his defense planets due to the indy cycle, he dropped a full 4m score, which was almost 20% of his overall score. Through no fault of his own. Most of the score was in tech levels that could be gotten back through recapturing the planets. Then, we had to blow up a bunch of planets to get down to 100 planets, which we are told is low enough to not cause problems, and we lost a lot of credits blow up additional defense planets (I don't know what you think we do, but at least Cephus and I had several different RS and SG locations, not just one big massive one like some people think. So we had to get rid of several defense planets that had a lot of money spent on SD techs.) Cephus STILL is lower than his score had been before the indy cycle ran, very few things are worse than you working your rear off and getting into first place, and then someone comes along and takes it away. The only thing worse, is when its not even someone that you can protect against, it is the admin of the game. Even the planets that went indy and we recaptured, we lost a bunch of credits off of, because we had to "rediscover" the credits, even though the stupid planets had been ours for weeks. So we blew up a bunch of planets that had a bunch of credits on it that we couldn't get off, even though we had worked to get the credits on there. It wasn't like we were attacking someone else taking their planets and not able to get the credits they'd worked for. We did everything on the planets, and ended up losing a bunch of credits having to blow the planets up before we could get the credits back (It was either that, or hold them for a couple of days and risk the same thing happening with the indy cycle. Which would have been pointless.)

Ah, yes, you're right about more colonists. So it does help. But it's still not much.

More colonists, increased credit bonuses as your not having to generate near as much cash to get to max. I'd say with the linear progression you will see more cash. I've already noticed planets that I have set for high shields now are making credits faster, so overall its a good thing as far as I have seen.

This single change is a modestly good thing. When considering with in addition to the independent thing is still a killer blow to builders.

A problem with this change. It doesn't seems to be tested.
The game calculates wrong.
When you upgrade a planet's level you get a % max credits before you upgrade. but you return to the planet menu it shows a different one (huge diffence, on the last planet I upgraded there was a diffence between 20 and 30 % in the max credits).

Thanks Big, I will look into it. When I tested everything it was working fine but I may have missed something. Who knows I was working on it until 6AM. Trying many different things until I settled on this one.

One of the things we would like to completely get away from is the exponential progression in costs and items. That is an old hold over from the bad old BNT days that we have always wanted to change. The sad thing is it affects everything in the game. The problem isn't writing the code but balancing the values for the new code on production and prices.

What we are going to have to do is change to a linear progression on everything. Something similar to the new max credit limit but that is just a hack that has it's own problems.

We have to take the current production model on credits and commodities and work out a table that shows the progression in costs for each tech level to the maximum tech. The credit production on each average tech level on a planet at 90% capacity will have to be taken into account coupled with a range of 50-100 planets all at that tech level to determine the credit productivity. This would be used to determine the credits charged for each planets tech level and each ships tech level.

It's a complex and drawn out process. Even after the production modeling work with real code there will need to be REAL GAME adjustments to values. The current game production model is one that has evolved over many years and to change it isn't going to be easy.

Don't worry that is not something we are going to do in the main game. For something like that the beta game will definitely be used.

This type of change would also allow us to make some database load reductions because we could change how some DB calls are structured. The other main reason for this change is it is REQUIRED if we ever want to add the build and research.

The problem Big was mentioning is something I noted earlier, and it has to do with what it shows the percent of credits will be compared to the max when you upgrade tech levels. It is still tied to the old values somehow (I have a screenshot I took earlier) Basically, in the screenshot you can tell I have almost 6T credits on the planet, I am trying to upgrade so it can hold 6.4T, and percent of max that the change will supposedly make brings it to 8%. Obviously 6T is not 8% of 6.4T, but it is 8% of what the old max credits for a 290 planet would be.