Questions to community & devz

No one in the community can answer the lobby questions because ICO has changed a lot since beta 4 so I'll field it:

We track a lot of stats on every player and we've been using it for months to help us balance the game. We haven't decided how much of this will be exposed or how else it may be used but you will be able to see the wins and losses of a player. The stats could also be used to determine how players are ranked, how they are matched up in an automatic matchmaking algorithm or we could provide detailed analysis through website access to key stats.  It really depends on which way the community wants it to move after release and if the demand warrants it. In the meantime our efforts were best spent creating a robust lobby which is something we know everyone wanted and would use. So w/r to that you can do everything in #4 and more along with parts of #3 but #2 and #5 we'll wait and see where people want things to move. (As of another direction we may move: a lot of people expressed more interest in something like a meta galaxy conquering online mode instead)

-Every single game you play (single and multiplayer) is automatically recorded and can be shared with friends.

-We've been quite active about squashing exploits with the communities help since last march and we will continue to do so in the future (we currently don't know of any major ones).  

Wow, very upfront and quick response.

I am humbled there are even devs like that anymore.

Keep up the awesome work.

Thx for the answers.

Mega thanks to you Mr. Fraser

All sounds great but i hope you wont mind me adding personal 2 cents to the whole thing...

Ladder, any ladder, just for the ladders sake is bullshit and i rather not have any if its poorly designed or servers no purpose - of course...

However - robust, well designed, player / clan ladder can do miracles in regards to community and overall fun aspect and competitiveness of a game!

If its possible to for you guys to create such a thing then count my vote as YES for it - otherwise, as you said, there are better and more important things out there to worry about

Great news about replay! ++++ mark here

No major exploits also means - job well done! While i hope "minor" once will be sorted out via patches

Now only what remains is one of Beta testers to answer my first question i believe

eeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Then let me take a crack at it

Generally, there is no "winning formula". There are several paths available to every race (though some races are better at specific ones than other races) and all are viable and largely depend on your opponent's strategy and the map you're playing. For example, you can set up an economy so great that you can pump out however many ships without blinking, but then in the time it takes to set it up, your opponent may just be researching combat techs so that even though you can have more ships, his can be upgrades and still give your fleets a run for their money. Things like that

In my experience, a lot of the more traditional RTS games have one because extremely quick and crippling rushes are possible, and so whoever knows the optimal way to rush usually wins over the player who doesn't.

In Sins, this really isn't possible. Obviously, some build queues and research queues are better for some maps than others (for example, you wouldn't spend resources on researching ice/volcanic colonization if there are no immediate ice/volcanic planets you need to colonize), or you wouldn't spend lots of resources on building lots of trading ports if you're playing a very small map because the investment doesn't pay off.

It *is* possible to "rush", although in Sins terms that takes more than 5-10 minutes as in the more traditional RTS games (Starcraft, SupCom, Warcraft 3, etc), and an effective rush carries a lot of risk to it. Basically, to win you need to bombard planets to destroy the enemy colonies, and you either need specialized ships for that, or lots of capital ships to do it in a reasonable amount of time (the single capital ship you start with in the beginning can take over 10 minutes to bombard the home planet by itself).

So basically, it's very possible to be militarily active quickly, but it's not easy to win a game with a "quick rush". Obviously anyone experienced will be able to beat a very green player without too much hassle, but I do feel that Sins does a good job of giving people time in the beginning of the game to get it rolling and not lose in the first 5 minutes due to a rush and get left with a "Well WTF just happened?" feeling.

Awesome post!

Exactly an answer i was looking for - many thanks man

If there are any more takes / versions or indeed if some of testers disagree please dont hesitate to post... More opinions on this very important issue the better...

eeeeeeeeeee

You're welcome I think many more people will agree with me than disagree

I would agree with Annatar on that.  Bounty is also something to take into consideration as last night I did a poor job of it and another AI player (who was left free to its own devices) stormed in and wasted me. Totally my fault cause I got caught up in watching battles and didn't pay enough attention to running my empire.

Oh good point, I forgot about bounties! It's fun to either a) Piggy-back on a pirate fleet for a double blow to your opponent, or sic the pirates on another opponent so he gets kept busy while you take care of someone else

Bounty aspect certainly sounds awesome so any chance you can explain in bit more of a detail how it actually works...

Bounty placed by player A on player B is acceptable by player C or indeed just AI controlled pirates?

If you can spare 5 minutes explaining it properly would be great

Basically, there's a pirate NPC faction present on pretty much every map (sometimes with more than one base), which you can manipulate with the oldest form of manipulation possible - $$$$. You can put bounties (anonymously!) on other players to try and get the pirates to attack them instead of you. When the pirate fleet launches (you get some warning of when that is, but it's not always accurate), they go after whoever has the highest bounty on their heads. The pirate fleets (especially in the early/smaller games) are hardly pushovers, so getting them off your back and onto someone else's can be a great advantage. Because of that, it's not uncommon to see bounty wars right before the pirates head out to search for fresh blood!

Bounty also serves another purpose for players, as well. The bounty is applied to the player as a whole, and destroying that player's ships, structures, and planets will award a portion of the bounty to whoever destroys them (for example, if a player has a 10k bounty, which is really small actually, and they own 3-4 planets, you might get 1k of that bounty by destroying a planet). There are a few techs also that help with pirate dealings - for example, the Vasari have a tech they can research that 'scares' pirates away, making it so that if they attack you, they come with a smaller force.

Sounds bloody amazing!

Thanks again for your insights

Wow

Thanks for the answer guys.

Bounty aspect looks great

Welcome

Feel free to shoot more questions!

If you insist...

Looking at latest screens there is rather interesting image of Research tree - and as part of it there is Harmony section - and under Harmony there is Psi Tech and Perception!

Please talk about Harmony and specifically about Psi Tech and Perception!

I mean i have NOT seen this sort of stuff being covered since Carlos Castaneda and PK Dick not to mention some computer game!

eeeeeeeee

your turn sir - i am all ears in this stelar anticipation

Those screens are actually not from our Beta 4 build but their internal builds, so my guess is as good as yours

Our beta 4 research trees look quite different (read: worse) than the ones in the screenshots, and they're only split into "Military" and "Civic" categories and all the techs are mushed into them, basically. It looks like with the tech tree reorganizations they also created some sub-categories to group techs into a more common sense progression (Psi-Tech/Perception).

Our build is way old (first week or November + a hotfix patch a week or so later)

Ok but hold on a sec...

Are you saying that you (beta testers) do not know what Psi Tech and Perception trees are all about or just that entire thing was mashed together before!?!?!

I mean Perception together with Psi Tech looks huge and very interesting indeed and as such should have been beta tested for sure o0

Sorry but i am bit confuzzled here...

*Neph is calling devs to join this thread and help out*

To add to the confusion, that screen appears to be of the Advent Race, and we have not yet had the honor of playing the advent. In fact we know almost nothing about them. Harmony seems to be the "civic" side of our current trees. I can recognize a few of the icons for metal and crystal productions, and a couple of other techs likely to be shared between races, but theres a lot of stuff there we know nothing about on that there screenie.

Just makes it that much more aggravating, right.

Personally, I'm more interested in what is behind that Fleet Logistics tab. And what labs do you build for those techs, or is it based off of Planet upgrades as it is now?

ROFL!

Ok i am officially in love with this game, community, devs and the whole package!

hahahahahaha freakn genius!

I'm saying that beta testers don't know what they're about, speculation aside I recognize some icons on that screenshot, but not most.

So yeah, an Ironcladian or Stardockian will have to fill in here.

Edit: Kilumanjaro beat me to it! Omgooses

But this is truly genius - and i am not kidding!

Devz had you beta testing the game for 6 months and then they hit you with all this over the head!

Ladies and Gents - we are talking about very special stuff here indeed

I am coming from a game (i wont mention the name) where i was tester since pre-alpha code and game hardly changed at all for final release... Now i am here and listening to all this stuff and it simply makes me giggle - in positive way of course

yeah, well keep giggling. Im tearing my hair out.

This has been a very unique beta test for me because it's the only one I've had in an eternity that actually focused on.. testing Most betas are just public displays to glorify the game and are sort of a 'demo', whereas Sins clients have always been more or less stripped of 'fluff' so we could focus on digging up bugs and system issues. In that regard, the beta community (this includes Stardock/Ironclad posters/devs) has been awesome. The forums were absolutely flooded with bug reports and such for the first month or so of Beta 4, and with every one we'd eventually get a dev post saying "FIXED!".

Around these forums you'll see quite often people saying that the beta is incredibly stable - moreso than a lot of full releases have been, and it's completely true.

Of course, they've also been teasing us with stuff we haven't seen for a long time now, but hey, that's half the fun right?

Well, lets just put it this way...

I am impressed!

And to impress someone with 25 years worth of gaming background means a lot - trust me

Yes, the second best and most annoying part of sins is that we have been playing a stripped version with what we are told is minimal parts of the eventual full game, and it is more fun than most completed games. However, I really want to stress that perhaps the best part of sins is the strong community that has already sprung up around this beta (as you can tell).

Edit: I mean to include the devs and pubs in this as well.

Or a "Can you tell us how you did that?" followed by a "fixed!".

True, but don't forget that a lot of what was "stripped" was stuff they haven't added to the code base yet, or haven't polished... beta 4 is, essentially, 2 to 3 months out of date at a minimum -- as stable as the beta's have been, I'm betting they polish them (a lot!) before they push them out to us.