Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 12:39 am
Downsizing covert power will have no effect on the alliance rankings in the long run. Eventually the exponential factor will catch up with the downsizing multiplicator, causing covert to take the lead again. It's just the simple laws of mathematics.
I've already put forth a suggestion to fix the alliance rankings, which will work in a way that doesn't bias covert power. Instead of adding up each membes attack, defense and covert score into one big alliance power pool, the different stats should be separated. Add each members attack to get the alliance total attack value. Same for defence, covert and mothership (cause they should be part of the rankings as well). Then manipulate these in the same way the normal rankings work. Highest attack gets rank 1 attack. Add the ranks for each stat and the alliance with the lowest sum of ranks gets rank 1 overall. That way offense score has no bearing on defense rank, covert score is only 25% of the equation, and lo and behold, motherships are counted for 25% as well.
As to Wolf's idea on multiple levels of spies, it won't work the way you described it, or at least it's very difficult to implement. At least that's the conclusion I came to when I first came up with a similar idea. You see, once you start to take spies of multiple levels, you need a separate database column for every level, or store the data in some other elaborate way. Extra columns is a poor choice because levels are infinite, so you would have to keep adding columns over time. Extra rows to store multiple level/#ofSpies combinations would cause a lot more difficulty in calculating total covert score, and increase the number of database transactions. This would slow the game down in places, which is undesirable.
However, there may be a way to fix this. Instead of keeping spies of any levels, you could keep spies of levels relative to your covert level. So your rookie spies would be current covert level -3, adepts would be level -2, experts would be level -1 and masters would be at your current top covert level. Whenever you raise your level, all your spies still improve automatically, but they're not automatically at your maximum level. And cost of spies should indeed be based on covert level. Maybe include a factor of 1.25^level, so the cost doesn't increase as fast as level costs but still gets more expensive pretty quick.
Maybe you could even have features like master spies killing enemy spies on succesful missions, or something like that.
I've already put forth a suggestion to fix the alliance rankings, which will work in a way that doesn't bias covert power. Instead of adding up each membes attack, defense and covert score into one big alliance power pool, the different stats should be separated. Add each members attack to get the alliance total attack value. Same for defence, covert and mothership (cause they should be part of the rankings as well). Then manipulate these in the same way the normal rankings work. Highest attack gets rank 1 attack. Add the ranks for each stat and the alliance with the lowest sum of ranks gets rank 1 overall. That way offense score has no bearing on defense rank, covert score is only 25% of the equation, and lo and behold, motherships are counted for 25% as well.
As to Wolf's idea on multiple levels of spies, it won't work the way you described it, or at least it's very difficult to implement. At least that's the conclusion I came to when I first came up with a similar idea. You see, once you start to take spies of multiple levels, you need a separate database column for every level, or store the data in some other elaborate way. Extra columns is a poor choice because levels are infinite, so you would have to keep adding columns over time. Extra rows to store multiple level/#ofSpies combinations would cause a lot more difficulty in calculating total covert score, and increase the number of database transactions. This would slow the game down in places, which is undesirable.
However, there may be a way to fix this. Instead of keeping spies of any levels, you could keep spies of levels relative to your covert level. So your rookie spies would be current covert level -3, adepts would be level -2, experts would be level -1 and masters would be at your current top covert level. Whenever you raise your level, all your spies still improve automatically, but they're not automatically at your maximum level. And cost of spies should indeed be based on covert level. Maybe include a factor of 1.25^level, so the cost doesn't increase as fast as level costs but still gets more expensive pretty quick.
Maybe you could even have features like master spies killing enemy spies on succesful missions, or something like that.