Before I start, two important precisions are necessary. First, while there is actual ground combat (which is quite different from previous versions), players have no direct influence over it – everything is based on fleet strategies, and there are no actual ground units. Second, this ground combat system is definitely not the final version, it will be rewritten for M3 when the “real” planet management system is added.

Origins of ground armies

Ground armies come from 3 different sources.

• The planet itself provides a ground army, whose size depend on the planet’s population and happiness at the beginning of the battle.
• Buildings may provide ground armies.
• All ships (both defensive and offensive) may carry ground army drop pods.

Advantage index

The advantage index is a value between 0 and 1 that determines which side has the advantage. It is initially slightly in favour of defensive armies. However, it is affected by ships and buildings on both sides. Each ship increases the advantage for its side by a value that is determined by its fleet’s strategy; of course, buildings provide a fixed, pre-defined advantage increase for the defenders. The closer the value is to 0.5, the less clear the ground situation is – casualties will be high on both sides. If the value gets close to 0, then the attackers gain the advantage and they can inflict massive damage without suffering too much in return. Of course, the situation is reversed if the value is close to 1.

Dropping and extracting armies

Ships carrying armies will drop or extract their armies depending on this advantage index and on a setting that is determined by the fleet’s strategy. For example, in the current simulations, attacking fleets drop their armies below 0.55 while defending fleets drop theirs above .3 (they will therefore defend as long as the situation isn’t too desperate). Of course, this does not apply to armies provided by the planet itself or by buildings, which will always be present on the planet’s surface.

Damage

Damage to ground armies is partially determined by the advantage index. It is also strongly affected by the armies’ size: a very small army will probably lose against a much bigger one, even if the advantage index is totally in its favour – while it will inflict quite a lot of damage to the big army and not lose much at each battle update, it will end up dead eventually.

In the case of ground armies provided by ships and building, any damage to the army will translate back to its “container”, and vice-versa (any damage to the ship or building will reduce the size of the army).

Conquest

A planet is conquered when defending ground armies have been killed. The major consequence of this is that it is now entirely possible to conquer a planet while the battle is still being fought in orbit. I am still hesitating about what to do when this happens regarding the status of fleets – the best thing being to make it a setting.

Next time…

Unless you have questions or suggestions, which you should post as comments, the next post will not appear for quite a while. It will be about the battle computation’s implementation or about the database’s structure in M2, whichever comes first…

Stock market buildings

Of course, in order to use the stock market system, specific buildings have to be constructed. There are two categories of buildings that have an influence on the stock market system.

The first category contains the actual stock market buildings; only one such building can be constructed on each planet. The category contains four “levels”, each level providing higher benefits and lower risks.

In addition to the stock market itself, an economic simulator can be constructed (providing that one is available, of course); economic simulators are supercomputers which specialise in trying to predict the market’s tendencies, therefore anticipating problems and helping solve them. Like the stock market building, only one economic simulator might be built on each planet.

Regulating stock market usage

While the stock market’s output cannot be affected directly, players can control how it is used through two sets of laws. The exact names of these laws have not been determined yet, but the principles are described below.

One of the sets controls the nationalisation or privatisation of the planet’s industry. When the industry is nationalised, the state gets the full benefits from the factories’ production, but the stock market has no influence over these benefits. The higher the privatisation level, and the lower the direct benefits for the empire; however, since the stock market’s value affects the output, these benefits are sometimes heightened. With the lowest level of privatisation and the lowest level of stock market building, the benefits will range between 95% and 105% of what they would normally be; on the other side of the spectrum, the benefits will range from 89% to 135% of normal (the potential loss is higher, but it is more likely to increase the overall benefits). One last option remains – a law which can only be obtained by empires with the “Sneaky” alignment. This law allows the state to pretend the industry is controlled by the private sector, while actually owning it through a set of holdings and fake companies. In this case, the benefits will be between 96% and 145% of normal.

The second set of laws allows players to privatise their planets’ tax collection infrastructure. This will affect the planets’ base income, indexing it on the stock market.

Next time, on the LWB6 blog…

This post explained the basics of the stock market system – how it is enabled and how a player interacts with it. Next time, we’ll take a look at how it actually works.

One of the worst defects in Beta 5 was the “optimal factories” computation – it relied on nothing but arbitrary values and had one big flaw: it was supposed to prevent older players from being too powerful compared to newer players by having a decreasing derivative (yes, as in maths). This had a completely reverse consequence – people would just “whore” the planets and go away, having high population wouldn’t give you enough of an advantage in the long run.

Beta 6′s buildings will be managed in a completely different way. Instead of using arbitrary formulas, the new system will rely on a more realistic computation based on the size of the workforce available on a planet, the amount of jobs the buildings provide and what we call “secondary jobs” – construction, maintenance, police…

Each planet will have a population composed of various species – or at least that’s how it can be. As we already stated earlier, each species has specific characteristics. The first important characteristic (when it comes to employment, anyway) is the activity ratio: individuals belonging to a species may (or may not) be willing to work more than others, or have a longer “efficient” lifespan… This allows us to compute the size of the available workforce on a planet.

But then, species have different abilities – some are frail, some are extremely robust; some are clever, some are brainless brutes… The available workforce is considered to have three characteristics: an efficiency indicator for manual work (manufacturing, mining, construction, etc.), another one for intellectual work (research, medicine…) and one for soldiering (police force, defense…). These indicators are computed from the species-specific indicators and the ratio each species represents relative to the total size of the workforce. A random example would be that, if you have two populations of equal size and with the same activity ratio, one species being awful at intellectual work and the other being extremely good at it, the final workforce will be average at it. While not strictly realistic (as the guys who are good at something would probably have priority for jobs related to this ability), it should work.

Now that we know how the workforce is constituted and characterised, let’s move on to employment itself.

There are two main types of jobs on a planet: primary jobs, which are provided by buildings, and secondary jobs. The latter include construction, maintenance, research, security and a few unrelated jobs (your local Kebab shop, no doubt).

As long as there are fewer jobs than workers, the workers man all available positions completely. However, when the amount of free jobs is greater, the population starts working overtime. To compute this, we consider that people slowly take up additional 8-hour shifts, within a limit of 2.2 shifts (that’s 18 hours a day per worker on average).

However, available positions are never completely filled when people are working extra shifts. In fact, the more jobs are available, the less efficient people are. While this can be profitable in the short term, “whoring” the planets won’t work, as the efficiency will decrease and, at some point, the loss will become greater than the gain (not to mention the hit on happiness, but that is something we’ll explain later). In addition, insufficiently manned buildings will cause more pollution than they normally do, since people are less careful with what they do when they’re overworked.

It is possible to modify the priority given to secondary jobs over primary jobs (or vice versa); if they have a low priority, secondary jobs will always be short on workforce, even if many workers are available. A high priority, on the contrary, will cause these jobs to be fully manned, even if more jobs are available from buildings. An intermediary setting will cause the workers to abandon secondary jobs in favour of primary jobs if many of them are available. While this allows empires to have a finer control on what their population is doing, it is a double-edged sword as the buildings will start degrading if the planet is short on maintenance workers. Changing this setting is not instantaneous either – people slowly convert from one type of job to another, so the larger the workforce, the longer the conversion takes.

Final point – a building’s efficiency is computed from the workforce’s abilities, and from the shifts that are actually being worked. Each building’s output depends on a combination of manual, intellectual and soldiering work.