Turn off buy out option

[aminnichjr]

Neat game. I have a good time with it but............ It's impossible to play for any lenght of time. Within half an hour the AI's are buying me out. It seems most everything can be turned off but that.

[Dreamifi]

Actually it kinda can now, if you enable the "Colony Stock" game mode. Then the game will end after 7 days instead, and the one with the highest stock price wins.

The reason you cannot otherwise turn buying out off is that buying out the other players is the normal win condition. If buying out was just disabled, the game would never end and noone could win.

[aminnichjr]

8 days is to fast. I like a longer game. Maybe an option on the colony stock for 10, 15 and 30 days would be good.

[Bomoo]

What would you do in a longer game? By day 4-5 you should be fully built up with no claims left, and a 30 day game length would be nothing but 25 days of waiting and occasionally clicking "Buy colony stock."

[athelasloraiel]

well, add more interesting things to have after 7 days period?

[tomve01]

I've posted this before, but seem to get no response. One way to increase playability is to not show all the resources with exact quantities right away (within seconds anyway) after setting up your HQ (map auto explores). Instead, show all resources as trace only (the entie map), and each team gets "X" number of exploration teams, where "X" is an easy handicap item. Build more teams with cash or resources (food and oxygen seem appropriate, electronics and aluminum for robotics?). Each exploration team can explore a section similar to the current game, changing the "trace" resources into what they actually are. You can mine an unexplored resource, but won't know what is it until the mine is complete. Maybe it turns out to be trace only. I thiunk this wuld add significantly to the playability of the game. Not sure how you can keep the AI from knowing what the unexplored resources ar, unless you randomize what they are after they are explored or mined unexplored.

[athelasloraiel]

nice idea. you should suggest in subsection so its more visible.

[tomve01]

Thanks athelasloriel. I have posted in the support and early feedback session, along with a post about not being to buy out unless (at least most) of your debt is cleared. They were going to check into that one.

[Xelas]

Originally posted by tomve01:

I've posted this before, but seem to get no response. One way to increase playability is to not show all the resources with exact quantities right away (within seconds anyway) after setting up your HQ (map auto explores). Instead, show all resources as trace only (the entie map), and each team gets "X" number of exploration teams, where "X" is an easy handicap item. Build more teams with cash or resources (food and oxygen seem appropriate, electronics and aluminum for robotics?). Each exploration team can explore a section similar to the current game, changing the "trace" resources into what they actually are. You can mine an unexplored resource, but won't know what is it until the mine is complete. Maybe it turns out to be trace only. I thiunk this wuld add significantly to the playability of the game. Not sure how you can keep the AI from knowing what the unexplored resources ar, unless you randomize what they are after they are explored or mined unexplored.

Great idea! That its almost like real life, you could have areas where it´s "probable to find something" and you had to send a team to analyse the area and then tell you if there is something worth exploring.

[Dreamifi]

There are two aspects to resource wealth though. Having many tiles with the same resource next to eachother is about as valuable as having one tile with a lot of it, since you can get a lot out of adjacency bonuses that way. So I think you would still have pretty clear optimal plays if all showed as trace, it would just introduce a bit more randomness to the game. Granted, it would also feel more like exploring, which sounds nice.

It would also make Scientific better, since for them that quantity on the individual tiles oftentimes doesn't matter as much.

[tomve01]

Dreamity -- that is correct, science would have a benefit of not caring what level it as (I assume they fixed the trace resource creating full for scientific). One way to fix it would to vary the output of the scientific based on the level of the base resource. For instance, placing a L1 steel mill on iron gets scientific 0.5 iron no matter what the iron quantity is (I'm not sure about trace iron though). So change it to 0.25 for trace, 0.5 for L1 low iron, +10% for medium iron, and +25% for high iron. I would like some of the randomness create trace and some be even false resource locations. That would suck for any player to risk a mine on a location only to find out they ges nothing in return (unless they can build something else there).

This would also solve the problem of grouped resources, if some were blanks, no bonus for adjacent mines. This would really put a lot of emphasis on good scouting/exploring.

[Dreamifi]

If you are gonna go that far, you might as well not allow claiming unscouted tiles at all. This is a strategy game, I don't think complete hit or miss gambles fit.

[Fury]

I don't really get the buyout... I thought buying my own shares protected me, but I every time I lose I simply see the "you've been bought out screen" and that's that. How can a company be bought out if the company owns a majority of their shares anyway?

It would be nice to get a better feeling of how you are doing, every time the buyout came as a bit of shock... I almost felt I wasted my time playing the game.

[Dreamifi]

Fury: Think of as you being the CEO, not the owner. Your company owns your stock, yes, but ultimately it is the boards decision of weither or not to sell, not yours. If a good enough offer is made, they will sell, everything has a price.

Game mechanicly it works like this:
Before all the stocks of a company is bought up, any player can buy one tenth of the stocks at a time. Once all are bought up, any player can buy all the stocks owned by other players in bulk, to aquire the company. Buying stocks from other players cost double the normal price, and the money is payed to the player owning the stock.

So buying your own stock does protect you, in the sense that it forces your opponents to pay double for those stocks. It will only help in a somewhat close game though, since if an opponent is making A TON of money, having to pay double will only be a minor obstacle.

As you get a bit better at the game you will start getting a sense of how well your opponents are doing, and then getting bought out won't be such a chock. It is just what eventually happens if you fall behind or aquire a lot of debt (debt devalues your company by several times the amount you owe, debt is BAD).

[athelasloraiel]

it still isnt logical. If I own all the sotcks, how can someone buy me out?Same for 51%.

[Dreamifi]

You didn't buy the board explenation?

Regardless of weither or not it's logical though, all companies HAVE to be possible to buy for the game to work, since buying the others is the win condistion. Otherways the game would stall and never end if more than one company bought it's own stock.