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Imperial Forum → Feedback → Let's Fix Fleet Morale
This is long overdue. What works? What doesn't?
We're here to listen, so you guys take it from here. Let the gripe-fest commence. There are no wrong opinions, so give us your brutally honest feedback in all its unfettered glory.
Let's do it!
Id like to start with, agents/wizards should be there own stackup. Not mixed with morale.
I also hate the name, bring back fleet readiness:)
Yay for fleet readiness. Just the name that is. With dumping morale as a name for the system you could as well dump the morale planets. FR and latter morale are a system i like to think is to make a bit of a balance between bigger and smaller fams. So morale planets just work contraproductive in that system. Bigger fams have more planets and more chance to find morale planets.
Wizards i associate with mana. The supernatural force or energy that exists in all things. That is if spells need more limitation then a set number of spells a day for balance reasons. If needed would be nifty that it would be entirely seperate from ops and attacks.
Agents could have something like Intel readiness if needed for balance reasons there.
It makes no sense that a fam that has more planets than you, but a very low nw can attack you 100 times, while you can only hit back 6 or 7 times. My fam was pretty much paralysed last round. It became better when dropping 160 million pop, but still the research nw was killing morale. At least drop morale loss when in war.
In sn morale discourages attacking bigger opponent's. The moment you jump, morale cost get so high you cannot do enough damage anymore to be decisive. The cost of saving is not worth it and while saving you waste morale by not using it.
To win size morale is the limiting resource. When it hits 100% I'll just hit some random small guy to gain spread and not to waste morale. When it hits 100% I feel forced to attack someone (lost last round with 3 planets difference..)
...I feel forced to attack someone (lost last round with 3 planets difference..)
Hell, I lost by only 385 planets. I must have been in 3rd place. 
do we really need it?
Morale 3% At the moment I do 
personally i see the current system as a nice blend... however there should be an upper limit to morale loss... say 10 or 15% for the big players as like everyone mentions you get hit (realistically) 30 times or so by a small fam and can only hit back at most 3 or 4 times. and in most cases it is only 1 as 100% morale to attack one planet is a joke.
This would also allow for more active big fams to get more involved in retakes (IE: bankers can be enabled in retakes as well as attackers of the larger more active fams to level the playing field against the advantage that the smaller fams have in morale.)
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in relation to attacking maybe the morale system isn't too far off. it does stop big fams raiding smaller ones for all their p's in one go.
to balance it out for big fams, maybe implement something where if a planet has been taken, the morale loss to retake is hugely less(or even next to 0?) than what it would be to take a new planet.
then the main problem would be deciding for how long a planet is a 'retake' till it becomes a 'new' planet. maybe 24hrs, or 48hrs?
as for agent/wizz ops they should have their own morale system.
p.s. i much prefer the sound of fleet readiness too - since when did morale and morals come into play when you are effectively wiping a planet out and starting a fresh!
any word on what/how you are changing the fleet morale issue yet? or are you keeping us in suspense? Also (i know you're busy) would be nice to see your reaction to some of the posts above (not just mine, but yes, mine! ha)
Sure!
I have read your guys' feedback, but haven't had time to respond to specifics yet. The input is definitely helping though.
As for the details of the change, the big obstacle is no longer the fleet morale numbers, it's the presence of fleet morale itself. The way it was written makes it difficult to test and risky to change.
What I'm doing to improve that is isolating/ripping out that specific code so that we can swap different variations in and out without having to mess around with other related code that it currently touches.
That means when it is time to change things, it's far less likely to break stuff and/or introduce other bugs. The other big gain is that we can adjust the details on a per-galaxy basis, and even run tick-less simulations to help get a sense of how the numbers play out without actually having to play entire rounds.
The end goal is to allow us to find a balance over the course of weeks if not days, instead of months.
Fleet Morale isn't the only thing that will be affected by this either: this new change will allow any aspect of a galaxy to be configurable. This means eventually the mods can help run things with less dev involvement and less code changes needed in the long term.
The obvious downside is that it takes more time than just flat out swapping in changes and calling it a day. It's worth it in the long run though, as it will allow the game balance to be adjusted without messing in the code.
Maybe we can go back to the old morale system until its fixed?
It honestly wasn't THAT bad
it was just pmode, size differential, vacation mode that made things unfair
so lets look at why moral was changed.
- help smaller fams, decrease farming.
Did it do that. Yes but i think the issue is it shifted power to much. At the end of the day we don't want to punish small fams but we also don't want to get to a point where large fams can't attack smaller fams. small fams have figured it out and have way to much power.
One question - what is a reasonable amount of moral to lose per attack. I know that it is not 47%. I think the most you should be able to lose per attack is 10% (two ticks worth of moral) maybe 15% but definitely not higher than that. I don't think the problem is that small fams lose less moral 1-3% thats fine but when its 1-3% compared to 47% it just doesn't add up. If I'm attacker i want to attack more than three planets a day - i want to be able to test for figs - i want to be able to test for a god damn defence system.
Ops / wiz. I wouldn't mind doing an IP or a PI myself 5 points is ok. But when you go to PFF and it costs 36% its a waste to be a pax. I did like the 7 and gaining one a tick i didn't see anything wrong with that.
so lets look at why moral was changed.
- help smaller fams, decrease farming.Did it do that. Yes but i think the issue is it shifted power to much. At the end of the day we don't want to punish small fams but we also don't want to get to a point where large fams can't attack smaller fams. small fams have figured it out and have way to much power.
One question - what is a reasonable amount of moral to lose per attack. I know that it is not 47%. I think the most you should be able to lose per attack is 10% (two ticks worth of moral) maybe 15% but definitely not higher than that. I don't think the problem is that small fams lose less moral 1-3% thats fine but when its 1-3% compared to 47% it just doesn't add up. If I'm attacker i want to attack more than three planets a day - i want to be able to test for figs - i want to be able to test for a god damn defence system.
Ops / wiz. I wouldn't mind doing an IP or a PI myself 5 points is ok. But when you go to PFF and it costs 36% its a waste to be a pax. I did like the 7 and gaining one a tick i didn't see anything wrong with that.
I understand why the morale changed, I am arguing that the morale change reason is not totally a good idea. In these types of war type games, you cannot and should not remove the inherent competitive advantages. Good active players should not be penalized for their contributions, and bad unactive players should not be rewarded for their inability. If bad players don't want to be attacked, then learn to play better or adapt to your situation. The game has created other ways in which smaller families can defend against bigger familys. Smaller fams can punish bigger fams with Ops, with more DSes, and (what we had before) already have a huge morale change.
Now saying all of that, I don't think that all changes to protect smaller families should be abandoned, and this discussion gave me some ideas.
I do think however, the old system was not that bad. It allowed everyone to be competitive, and allowed those who wanted to succeeded to do so.
I could not agree more Trans. And if you do want family networth and family size to be a part of the formula, just add something like this to the old morale formula:
Square([Relative Family NW]) * Square([Relative Family Size]) * Morale loss
Morale loss is calculated by old formula.
*** How much would it penalize? ***
Fam A with 1.5m nw and 1500 planets and Fam B with 1m nw and 1200 planets (square relative nw is 1.22 and square relative size 1,118)
Fam A would spend 1,364 times normal morale (say 7 morale)
Fam B would spend 0,733 times normal morale (say 3~4 morale)
Fam A would be spending 1.86 times as much morale as Fam B! That's more than enough punishment for attacking someone close both to your nw and size, no?
Now it would be around 15~18 morale for fam A and 2~3 morale for Fam B
My current thinking:
If you are thinking of changing the morale formula, consider going back to the orginal formula, with these changes:
1) With 10 families, I suggest there should be a grid of top 1-3, mid 4-6, bottom 7-10
2) Morale recieved every tick should be different for every player
3) No matter what, if you attack a family 1 rank lower than yours, no morale changes from orginal formula
4) If you attack someone in the lower bracket, the player will lose -2 additional morale for every attack, and if you are in the top bracket and you attack the bottom bracket, -3 additional morale for every attack. This should apply to ops atks as well.
5) Conversely, if a lower bracket family attacks a higher bracket, recieve +1 morale/atk (maybe cap at 5 additional) / tick. Costs for attacks and Ops should be lower.
6) In wars, reduce the the additional morale cost/atk by 1, and increase the morale recieved/tick by 1 for changing brackets. This will allow bigger families to do more attacks, but at the same time, will give smaller fams more versality in defending.
From a roleplaying standpoint, this makes sense as the morale of an empire is always greater if you have bigger victories, and less morale, when you beat up someone weaker than yourself.
I wholeheartedly agree with flipmode that 47 morale for an attack is ridiculous in any scenario. The only way that works out okay is if that attacker has 40+ morale planets, which isn't going to happen. As was said above with good active players being penalized and bad unactive players being extremely defended by the rules, the biggest disappointment in the system is the lack of difference in results between good active attackers and bad active attackers. There is basically no difference since morale prevents testting for DS or being cautious of huge laser traps in wars. You are forced to attack blindly and hope for the best. The whole point of going to war is to make fun of the noob attackers who immediately crash their fleet. Even good semi-active attackers are worse off than bad active attackers since their hands are tied with what they can do to set themselves apart. The morale system does good things to prevent smaller fams from getting destroyed but it sucks that simply being able to do way more retakes is all that is needed to win a war plenty of the time.
Brackets would be tricky since it would likely make it better to be at the top of the second bracket than the bottom of the first. And I also do think ops/spells do belong in the morale system with attacking since it encourages good family communication and can be an offensive option (but maybe give Camaar PI please please).
Point 3 fixes that. Hence #3 vs. #4 no morale change
Right, so families would try to drop just below the family below them when fighting a different family. I prefer things to be objective instead of relative to entirely uninvolved parties. It's not a bad idea but it would bring along a whole cohort of balance difficulties. Maybe making people come up with new strategies is better though. It certainly would punish families with massive leads over the rest of the galaxy a lot less.
I actually don't think that #3 would drop to #4 too often (unless they nw is miniscule), and if they do that, it would make them more vulnerable against fams 1 and 2. You could also add a small incentive for being T3
I think it would be more testing then balancing. Pie should create a galaxy, that is always subject to change to try out new things, perhaps the top 3 fams would be rewarded in allowing to play in it?
Regarding strategies, it definitely would open up new strategies for players, which I think is key. Something that should have been utilized more effectively this round is the fleets of bankers/rezzies, since morale is severly handicapped, having bankers and rezzies attack should have been more of a thing.
Thanks Dusty
I was thinking of what i miss about not actually having moral to attack.
1. test fleets for DS for figs. to test if there are 0 lasers. check if your taking a planet that had no stationed figs so you want to test again start of next tick before you go with a big fleet.
all these are failed attacks.
what if taking a planet with a succesful attack is much different for a failed attack. not just like a difference of a few points - failed attack would never cost more than 3 moral.
I was thinking of what i miss about not actually having moral to attack.
1. test fleets for DS for figs. to test if there are 0 lasers. check if your taking a planet that had no stationed figs so you want to test again start of next tick before you go with a big fleet.all these are failed attacks.
what if taking a planet with a succesful attack is much different for a failed attack. not just like a difference of a few points - failed attack would never cost more than 3 moral.
I like this idea. However, do you think this would make to fig run or ground run people more common?
Yes thats one thing that could happen. But now only small players who jump and catch the big guy off guard are able to run figs. Goods and bads - not sure if that is how it should be.
So you are saying if we keep the same formula, and implement your idea with the failed attacks.
Gotcha. I still think that is a minor change to a major problem.
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