As the title suggests when you hit the sort-of end game, like owning a lot of planets and your fleet has 100+ ships in it.

How will the AI Pilots/factions compete with you?

Can the AI Pilots/factions even win against you?

Should the AI Pilots/factions get stronger as you do or always be a little stronger than you?

Because it would be incredibly boring as a mass planet/fleet owner to fight pirates/factions etc.

Perhaps a civil war might break out if you get too powerful ?

or perhaps your opponent would just resort to gruella style warfare.

or... maybe fleets of 100+ ships isn't that uncommon ?

oh, or maybe many small factions band together to take down the huge threatening empire ?

You may enjoy this magnificent thread, courtesy of our very own Hyperion.

I've always thought that it should be handled via the way you've grown your fleet.

If you're a huge fleet and have warships, or a lot of ships with many guns, the AI may see this as a 'looming threat' even if you're not hostile. If so, then they may band together to try and eventually take you down with force.

However, if you have a huge fleet of trade ships and freighters and control systems via infrastructure and rails, then you may become a target of corporate espionage from other traders wanting to get a cut of your action.

I think it would boil down to these simple ideas;
1) The player is successful to the point that other AI is not successful
2) The AI wants a cut of your success
3) The AI will try to sabotage you or take you down in order to restore their ability to be successful

Almost as if 'success' is derivation of power analogous to chaos theory; the more success is in one part of the universe, the more the universe tries to balance out that success by different necessary means. Not that the universe should ACTIVELY try to restore 'balance of success', but that the AI should find it in its own best interest to achieve balance. Almost like the Nash Equilibrium.

I'll just drop in that there is nothing more disappointing than not being able to curbstomp stuff that gave you trouble when you began your game. You need new challenges and complications to keep the game fun, but your raw power should outmatch weak opponents immeasurably.

Being a preferred target, having increased maintenance and whatnot is all fair game, just don't limit the fun potential of shooting your biggest gun at the smallest fish in a barrel.

Mistycica wrote: Being a preferred target, having increased maintenance and whatnot is all fair game, just don't limit the fun potential of shooting your biggest gun at the smallest fish in a barrel.

some kind of upkeep would surely do its thing, as it would become nonlinear at some point.

build more ships/stations -> have to pay more upkeep -> having to build more economics to pay the upkeep -> build more ships...

at some point it would self balance or result in a balloon of "useful" things filled by support economy.

Cornflakes_91 wrote: some kind of upkeep would surely do its thing, as it would become nonlinear at some point.

build more ships/stations -> have to pay more upkeep -> having to build more economics to pay the upkeep -> build more ships...

at some point it would self balance or result in a balloon of "useful" things filled by support economy.

I just love logistics and its effect on impractically huge and convoluted ideas, be that r&d or production Beyond a size streamlining and standardization is needed to ease the load on the faction's economics I guess, implemented some way.
Add that to a healthy amount of AI paranoia, and you'll always have trouble to solve. It more like needs a way to make not dissatisfying (like GW2 does with level scaling - just no, I want to roflstomp with my supercarrier), and not to make annoying (like Spore does f/e).

I think that after you reach a crazy high level of tech, you would be able to make a handful of intergalactic ships in order to start over in the next galaxy.

N810 wrote: or perhaps your opponent would just resort to gruella style warfare.

or... maybe fleets of 100+ ships isn't that uncommon ?

I like both of these ideas.

I think it was also suggested that as you grow in power, and expand it into more star systems, new parts of the game universe would be generated that contain factions big enough to continue to challenge you.

That's a kind of level scaling. But it won't keep you from curbstomping former local opponents.

Actually, though, I suspect the real limit to competitive play in LT will be, not the size of your empire, but running out of interesting things to research.

Imo the universe should generate factions of all sizes, regardless of your standing. Starting in the midst of two 50-system megacorps? Exciting! One single huge corp that noone stands against yet? Still exciting? Civil war of succession of a corp, coupled with an opportunist uprising of small neigbors? Yes please! The same goes for any point of the game, everything offers a new experience, and that is what keeps a procedural game going, after all, variety. I wouldn't like artificial 'gamey' scaling at all. The AI smart enough to flee or instigate revolts or team up on a bloated player faction, naturally that's fair, but I wouldn't like the engine deciding what loot and opponent I'm worthy for. Scaling absolutely destroys the 'kill dragon in underpants with fists for mad loot' and 'squish little bug planet' feeling that is oh-so-fun for many.

Running out of things to do and progressing too far past any meaningful gameplay is a valid end to a save, and content has to go into that, as well as expanding each 'tier' to allow non-progressive gameplay. Tall ladder, lots of wide rungs. Running from single ship to task group to small faction to megacorp, all with their own gameplay elements.

Endgame, specifically: scarcity of exotic resources could be used to halt tech progress until the industry and exploration catch up, and keep the maintenance of an advanced empire something to consider. Rungs can be widened with tweakable applied technology in the meanwhile. After you gave mind to this and can sustain a large, advanced empire, it's up to you to decide what comes next, what you want to use the immense power for. It probably will never be too easy to be boring this way, but it might need some ridiculously hard challenges to occupy players shooting for this level.

Fractal scaling.

As you grow in power, things that were simply terrain before become gameplay.

• For a single ship the zone patrolled by the police is 'terrain' that modifies your behavior. But when you own the system, the terrain becomes gameplay (managing the police, or warring with the faction that pays for them) as you modify the terrain.
• Riding the rails vs building (or destroying) the rails.
• Flying your ship, vs ordering your admirals.

And here is where the neat self-limiting comes in: as you delegate more and more of the individual tasks to the AI, while you handle the big picture, you lose the ability to micro-manage. You can't reload a save when you lose any ship anywhere if you have a thousand... you would be constantly reloading. The individual AI of all your fleets are no better than the competing AI, and can thus be outplayed as normal. The larger your operation, the less advantage you have over the AI because more of your operation is AI.

And the larger your operation, the more AI factions will choose to oppose you for their own benefit. This does not even have to be 'coded'. The bigger you are, the more area you cover, and thus the larger your 'exposure' to the elements of uncertainty and competition.

As long as the AI competes intelligently with other AI, it will compete intelligently with you as well.

That term really sounds nice and encompasses how it should ideally go, lovely :3
Farctal scaling. Cool.

Mistycica wrote:I wouldn't like artificial 'gamey' scaling at all. The AI smart enough to flee or instigate revolts or team up on a bloated player faction, naturally that's fair, but I wouldn't like the engine deciding what loot and opponent I'm worthy for. Scaling absolutely destroys the 'kill dragon in underpants with fists for mad loot' and 'squish little bug planet' feeling that is oh-so-fun for many.

I'm not sure that's the case, though.

When you start to outgrow the star systems you know, and the game generates more, it doesn't have to only generate one other faction (and its star systems) that happens to be a roughly equal match for you.

The game can just as easily create mix of factions in new areas adjacent to your current known worlds. Some would be smaller than you, some would be about your size, and some would be much bigger. As you expand into this space, there'd be some factions you could easily dominate, others you'd have to work at, and a few that could put your lights out instantly. So you'd still have plenty of opportunity to grow and progress, and take on challenges you couldn't previously, even with "artificial" level scaling of randomly generated new factions/worlds.

Again, though, I suspect you'll hit the upper limit on research -- unless Josh has some sort of epiphany about that -- before you run out of new worlds to conquer.

As long as the game doesn't skew with the odds, that's how it should work. Just don't think the game should drop more small factions in the soup if you're small yourself, and shouldn't drop you more worthy opponents if you're good. The world is big enough for you to manage with a healthy mix, just need to hit the right ballpark ratio of average faction size.

Since the world is huge and research is just not practical to make infinite, yes, that's how it will end. Tying research to logistics, industry and exploration will extend that time though, doesn't make a mad rush viable in most cases.

But yea, the save will end with all topics researched to the end, implemented into tech and produced in unfathomable numbers, maintained indefinitely. Won't happen any time soon, but can happen with a persistent player. Even before that, the game needs to offer large scale solo fun before grinding becomes repetitive.