Exploration Failure and Spread

Suggestions Open
1

We’ve been discussing ideas to balance Infinitum, one of which will make random planets re-explorable.

@TIF made a good point however that big families would likely retain control of a system if they still have presence inside of it after the event.

This is because they could simply re-explore immediately.

This got me thinking about IC’s concept of “Exploration” and whether or not players insta-exploring inside of systems where they already have presence actually makes much sense.

On the surface, yeah, you should be able to quickly colonize a neighboring planet. That makes perfect sense. However, within the game’s context that really isn’t very exploratory.

We’re going to introduce a galaxy setting that will change this pattern by 2 simple rules. You can only explore a planet if:

  1. You don’t already have a planet in the system
  2. You don’t already have an e-ship on the way to the system

As a second part of this option, it could be further applied to your family as well so that these must also be true:

  1. Your family doesn’t already have a planet in the system
  2. Your family doesn’t already have an e-ship on the way to the system

We will likely only start with #1 and #2 when this is ready.

This will offer a few significant benefits:

  1. Reduce coring and therefore increase player distribution amongst the systems
  2. Set up for more share wars
  3. Give new and smaller players increased opportunity to expand well after the round starts
  4. Increased shares with other families would increase the need to consider diplomacy and NAPs. Coincidentally, the recent change to support unlimited naps makes good timing for this.

#3 is particularly interesting, because with these rules in place it would be possible that a family could run out of explorable territory even if there are explorable planets that aren’t owned by anybody. These would be indirectly reserved for any family who doesn’t already have presence in the system.

We could end up in a scenario where the only viable inhabitants for an unexplored planet are players from families who have barely expanded at all.

As a variation, the restriction could be reflected as a chance of failure. The “hard restriction” described above would be a 100% chance of failure which would prevent exploration at all, but we could adjust this to be 50% for example and display this to players when they explore to let them make the call on whether or not it’s worth it. As another option, we could also make the chance of failure variable and unknown.

2

The 50% wouldn’t be enough deterrence. Your essentially just double the exploration cost. New planet over weeks will pay this back and more. 33% would be better. A little more costly.

1 Like
3

As noted before however, those families would be instantly cleared upon exploring into a system where others already have portals.

1 Like
4

Yep, we’ll need to follow through with some other features.

Even in the short term though, it’ll be more opportunity than those players currently have.

5

A post was split to a new topic: Exploration Bases

6

So is this being added I think it is a bit much imo

7

I hope it isn’t it’s gonna be bad for the smaller less coordinated families

8

It’s gonna come, but as a galaxy setting.

Alternatively, we can have it as a Galactic Event that happens alongside Galactic Event: Planet Death. A “Distortion Field” type event that would curb larger families’ ability to reclaim lost planets faster than smaller families.

Regardless of either implementation though, the general ability for explos to fail is being worked on.