For the value of ships destroyed in points, I am having some problems figuring out the lowest cost way of getting experience on a ship. I do not want to make points for killing ships be equal to the highest cost way of doing something, or people will use a lower cost training technique to arbitrage and will run up points artifically in ways not expected.

Since points are based on ship cost plus some factor for experience, I need to determine the lowest cost way of getting experience for any ship.

For assaults, training is costly and experience will be the highest cost to obtain for any ship, so assault experience is not relevant for the purposes of finding lowest cost way of getting experience.

For fighters, you can get experience by building a transport without defenses and killing it in one shot.

For transports, you can get experience by attacking with a minimum attack fighter with maximum defense.

For fighters and transports, what is the minimum cost to gain experience in terms of resources used to get experience points?

__________________________
"Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."

Until I am absolutely convinced that there is no way to arbitrage a change in points for killing ships with experience, the experience part of the current ship kill points will remain unchanged.

So points for killing ships will be primarily based on cost of resources used to build the ship, and experience based points will remain as it is now, at 50% of the % of experience of the killed ship in terms of additional points awarded for killing ships with experience.

In general, the points formula will increase the value of killing untrained ships by 3 to 4 times the current formula for ships with large defense or attack strength. The value of killing ships with greater experience will be unchanged, and the value of killing small ships with no defense or offense for training purposes only will increase only slightly, based mostly on ship volume.

Even under the most extreme assumptions, I believe that points for training ships will not be greater than points for crashing fully trained assaults on HWs for the value of resources required to be spent to get a fixed amount of points in return. However, a good ship to ship fighter in multiple duels may well be able to get a lot of points with little loss of resources if he is able to keep most of his fighting ships alive. This might bring more action in duels to the battlezone, as the overall cost of resources used will be offset in general by the gains to at least one of the players involved in combat activities.

__________________________
"Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."

Cheapest way is killing other's property for sure

Transport exp cost depends on fighter exp cost. Cheapest way to train fighters (and cost) depends on market prices and fighter modification (therefore players aren't posting here). Currently 1k I + 500G is more expensive than 1k S, so it's more efficient to destroy ships with high deffence than many smallest assaults/transports as it was some time before. Also you can train 17k/0 fighter cheaper than a one with less attack due to current market prices.

Currently i can train a 200exp 51k/0 fighter for about 96k T. Quite complicated way so we can say it's 100k T or 500 T for every exp point (though with prices mentioned the cost of additional exp at variuos amounts of it is not equal as training assaults). Fully training a transport needs two smallest trained fighters or 388 fighter exp in total. It would be 500*388=194k T. Actually training a small fighter exp is a bit more exp plus resources to build two smallest fighters and we can say it's 200k T to fully train a transport or 1k T per every exp point.

Fighters: 500T/exp.p.
Transports: 1k T/exp.p.

__________________________
I will defeat you. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, i'll be waiting.

Thanks RBA. I will be looking more closely at points for experience. For now, 200% experience on ship gives 100 points more than untrained ship, and that will only change if I am confident that there is not a "cheap" arbitrage opportunity to get points by training at low cost and then killing trained ships for the extra points value of experience for those ships.

I do not want to have points from ship training and massive killing of your own ships to ever be cheaper than capturing planets for points.

Of course, I am quite happy with killing OTHERS ships and taking their resources being better value than destroying trained assaults against large HW attacks. That would be a good outcome, and in fact, the value of taking expensive ships has ALWAYS been undervalued in the forums in the game. The revisions a year ago increased the value of attacking and killing large value ships, but not enough to make ship to ship combat an important part of the game. I hope that my changes at this time will shift the balance more towards fighting skills in battle zone being fairly compensated relative to the costs and risks involved in participating in such activities.

__________________________
"Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."

Points are actually too low for killing transports and trained assaults only - greatest ships in the game that die very rarely.

1 point per 500 volume is what i offer for all types of ships. Since exp of assaults is significantly more expensive than exp of other ships 25 points per exp point could be added only to assaults. So points for volume killed only plus points from exp if assault is killed.

Current exp system actually works fine. Killing fighters (wich are cheap) is awarded with exp more than with points and that's ok (killing a trained fighter brings over 150exp).

At the moment i don't know the exact formula and i guess very few persons really know the true one. Could be a simple system. 5k points for a 2.5M transport killed and 10k points for a trained assault killed. Optimal numbers considering price of attacking hws, no one will kill ships for points. Killing fighters would bring very low points but we already gain enough exp for killing them. Just warp should be really chaned to inspire players use their best fighters instead of current 1k/0 ones. And people will feel it killing fighters is already awarded enough.

__________________________
I will defeat you. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, i'll be waiting.

"1 point per 500 volume is what i offer for all types of ships. Since exp of assaults is significantly more expensive than exp of other ships 250 points per exp point could be added only to assaults. So points for volume killed only plus points from exp if assault is killed."

RBA, 1 point per 500 volume would not work. Let's say somebody has a 1,000 volume figther, and it has 200%. I destroy it, I only recieve 1 point? That could have cost me a lot more to destroy than it is worth. We can't do it by exp points, because transports rarely have experience.

So which would satisfy all ship types?

The higher cost the ship, the higher points you should get for destroying it.
Take into account the cost for experience of the ship, as if you were training it manually.

Let's take a 500k 200% assult trained on a x10 planet (most efficient planet)
It would cost 1,132,695 Troops, 500,000 Iron and 500 Gold.
Convert that all to credits (using the market prices at that time) rounding accordingly, would equal:

Troops: 26 credits (1,132,695 rounded down = 1,100,000)
Gold: 7 credits (500 rounded down = 0)
Iron: 11 credits (500,000 = 500,000)

500k I = 5 Units
1.1M T = 11 Units

(11*26)+(5*11) = 341 Credits/Trained Assult Destroyed

So what can we do with 341? Would it be reasonable to make it 341% exp for your ship? Yes, because as RBA said earlier "Points are actually too low for killing transports and trained assaults only - greatest ships in the game that die very rarely. " So for one 500k 200% assult trained on a 10x planet, you max out your fighter with experience, why would it not?

As for points, we could round it up to 3.5K points. The only flaw with this is it may be hard to program based on the market prices, and the points for destroying a ship would change frequently, and maybe players can influence it. If you were a die-hard BZ kind of player, sell a lot of rescources on market (In this case I or T) more expensive, to make the points go up, and hence players recieve more points per ship killed. If another new update attracted people to the BZ, then many people will do this, and market prices will rise. Which would cause all the market to rise, which I think they are too low as it is.

Or, we could make it very blunt and say 2.5M Tranny = 100% exp for your ship, and 10k points, and do that for every ship model possible.

My 314 Cents.

__________________________
A storm is coming, a storm is coming in..

20:48:19 | Professor planet 0 from paladin
20:20:21 | Arcanix planet 14 Arcanix 01

Diplomacy & Trading Forum Moderator.

No, points won't change with market prices. I have a good feeling for long term market pricing ratios between resources, and will use those ratios in setting the relative value of different types of resources in being destroyed. For example, iron has been within 0.4 to 0.6 of the cost of troops for most of the history of the market. It is lower now, but that situation might change if people start making more ships for ship to ship combat (hint, iron might be cheaper than it will be in the future on the market right now).

Also, not all Trannys are 2.5M and not all assaults are 500k.

Finally, the way points for killing ships works, you have to have a formula based on volume, attack, defense, and experience. There is not a factor right now in the equasions for type of ship, and adding that would be a pain in the neck to do at this time and might result in me making some mistake of some sort. Thus, we have a simple formula based on volume, attack, defense, and experience.

The old formula, in place for the past year, was:

Points = volume / 2000 + attack / 1000 + defense / 4000 + exp / 2

The new formula, which was going to be a secret, but I will publish it here anyway, is:

Points = volume / 500 (thanks RBA) + attack / 250 + defense / 1000 + exp / 2

This still gives less points per resource destroyed for killing ships than attacking planets, but when the "value" of having a trained fighter from cheapest training is factored in, and the points from having that fighter killed (assuming 50% win rate in trained fighter duels is used), then training and combat with fighters comes reasonably close to 80% of the points you can get from attacking HWs (including the points from training assaults as well as fighters in the equasions).

This formula may be adjusted downward if someone can show me how it is possible using this formula to earn points for less than the cost per point of earning points via attacking large HWs with crashed assaults (assuming no turrets).

Speaking of turrets, you WILL start earning points for killing turrets at the same rate as you would for killing another ship, and planets defending with turrets will also earn points for killing fighters while defending. So, both the attacker and defender will earn points for resources destroyed of their opponents, just as with ship to ship battles.

__________________________
"Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."

Ah right, I misread it.... Too complex for me.
And with what I implied, market prices would determine the points and experience your ship gains. This would help everything tie in better, and get more people to use the BZ and market.

The new forumla looks great though, forget what I said.

__________________________
A storm is coming, a storm is coming in..

20:48:19 | Professor planet 0 from paladin
20:20:21 | Arcanix planet 14 Arcanix 01

Diplomacy & Trading Forum Moderator.

Smaller transports and assaults wouldn't bring any problems in my suggestion. Though the new formula is fine for fighters and transports - i can't find manipulation opportunities (atleast yet ) and points are reasonable.

But awards for killing trained assaults will still be very low. We'll get 1100 points for destroying a 500k T 200 exp assault that is worth 1.3M T and we'll get over 5000 points for destroying max transport that is worth only 800k T. No fair. We'll actually be able to get those 1100 points investing about 250k T in training fighters. 1100 points are of course much better than we do have now, but that won't reflect ship cost at all. Since value of exp for assaults differs significantly from other ships, there can't be any common formula for all ships reflecting ship value in points gained..

__________________________
I will defeat you. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, i'll be waiting.

True, RBA. It has always been like that.

I think we should change the exp in assults up more, to where the exp is equally the same, so we could finally say that for example

1% on an assult = 25% on a fighter, or something along those lines

Or, we could finally make it 1% on an assult to 1% on a fighter are equal, making fighters way stronger. Then turret strength would need to be higher, more costly possibly, to hold the same ratios to the stonger fighters, and the fighters now.

__________________________
A storm is coming, a storm is coming in..

20:48:19 | Professor planet 0 from paladin
20:20:21 | Arcanix planet 14 Arcanix 01

Diplomacy & Trading Forum Moderator.

meh i cant be bothered to read it all cuz im a "air head"