FATES and Hardcore Gaming

FATES: Carpe Moerae will be a hardcore strategy game at its core.

What does this mean?  This means that if you lose all of your planets, you will be out of the game.

However, there will be some nuanced mechanics that will help to alleviate the impact on new and developing players to prevent them from being abused by larger and more developed player empires.  I want to discuss some of these mechanics in broader scopes and discuss how they are intended to work.

The primary way that new players will be protected is through the federation system.  There will be statistical mathematics in place that will very strongly incentivise federations -- especially the larger and more powerful ones -- to recruit in lower score players.  This mechanic operates on the basis of comparison of the score distribution of all of the players in a given federation and the score distribution of all players on the server and grant the federation a bonus to resource collection, taxation income, research, production, and construction based on how closely their federation player score distribution matches the servers'.  These bonuses will be the largest in the game -- around a maximum of +30% -- greater than all other factors.  This will discourage federations from stacking all of the best players into one federation, as doing so will yield a bonus of less than +1%, where as balancing a federation with new players and more experienced players will yield larger bonuses.

The second mechanic that will assist new players in developing their empires more quickly is a server birth time-based bonus that will slowly scale upward as the server ages.  This bonus will help to accelerate new players who join later in the life cycle of the server.  This bonus will decay over the span of a few weeks as the new player gains experience and develops their empire.  The server age bonus will allow them to catch up and help to alleviate the disadvantage of starting the game after the server has launched.

The third mechanic that will help to prevent new players from being abused is the galaxy placement algorithm.  This algorithm will seek to place new players as far from well established empires as possible and near any friends that they have indicated ahead of time through friend sharing links.  The galaxy placement algorithm will put some raw distance between new players and large empires giving them more time to develop their empires, awareness and knowledge.

The final presently planned mechanic that will aid new players is the Galactic Council diplomatic immunity or protection treaties.  These treaties will be voted on by a simple for-opposed vote and will take effect if the for votes outweigh the opposed votes.  As such, this mechanism will require the new player to have a sponsor already established in the Galactic Council -- and not have enemies also in the council, and can either be stand alone initiatives or part of larger negotiations.  These treaties will also be temporary and will be enforced by the CETU armada.

 So, while FATES: Carpe Moerae will be a hardcore strategy game by nature, there will be various mechanics in place to prevent new players from being abused.  All of these mechanics will be tested out in beta test phases and are always subject to change.  Hopefully, this post will allay the fears which some players have expressed to me already.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.