The Strategic Value of Trade Ships....

I could be wrong here, but I would have expected income as listed in the money dropdown is just an automatically calculated average that assumes that all of your trade ships make it to their destinations over a longer interval, and is directly affected by arrival times of one station's tradeships at other trade stations, and the trade route length multiplier.

An experiment if you really want to know if this is the case: measure your exact income rate with zero trade ports, then build a couple tradeports, and watch that income rate closely again. See if it goes up an occasional 50-credit "bump" (less your supply penalty, of course) specifically when a trade ship arrives at a port, or if it always smoothly climbs but at a slightly faster rate.

(BTW, trade ships also award any open bounty when slain, so they do make a slight difference by depleting bounty.)

-- Retro

Hi Retro,

I suppose it's possible that my income WAS dropping, it just wasn't being displayed in the Credits infocard due to the way those numbers are calculated.


But that would be a really tough one to figure out. It's tough one to eyeball because the income goes up due to all sorts of different values at all sorts of different times. And creating a map that isolates trade income would be a tough one to engineer because we'de have to figure out a way to turn off tax income and a whole host of other factors. Furthermore i think it only updates every several game tics, so determing that this 50 income came from this trade ship hitting this trade port would be hard to do.


But we wouldn't be having this discussion if someone from Ironclad or Stardock could tell how how these things work. I'll just ask nicely.

Dear Frogboy: Could you please explain to us in more detail how trade ships work? And what the impact of destroying them is? I would be very appreciative.




It's true you do get bounty for killing them, but that's hardly an incentive to mount a strategy around harassing traderoutes.

It just seems counterintuitive that a determined (and sucessful) effort to attack trade ships would have no effect on an opponents trade income. I think there's something we're missing. So I think what we need is more specific information about the game rules.

Thanks.

Here's something that WILL have an impact - destroy the trade station that's in the middle of their longest chain. That cuts their bonus for every trade route by as much as .3 or .4 per second per trade station they have, depending on the map.

Almost impossible to do, mind you, because there's no way to determine what their longest trade route actually is...

P.S. I know you're trying hard to be nice about it, and you deserve major kudos for that, but it might be best to not expect someone from IronClad or StarDock to answer every one of the many posts and questions you've popped up with lately. They're pretty busy guys, and the fact that they show up on these forums AT ALL makes them kind of special. Don't hope too much that you'll get an "IronClad" official answer (pun intended) - people in the community are people too, even if their answers aren't the perfect statistical analyses you're looking for.

...but THIS one is a really interesting question. Maybe somebody's already answered it in the Strategy forum at some point?

Cheers,

-- Retro

*edit - double post.
P.S. *edit - double post.

If you're testing this with controlled scenarios, one way might be to set up enough new colonies that haven't had their civilian infrastructure upgraded that the only income you get is from Trade Ports. Then set up a chain of 4 or 5 TP's and turn the pirates loose and see if the money you actually get over a set time is what you should have gotten.

Th reason the trade ships are so slippery is that they are all piloted by descendents of one H. Solo.

You know, sometimes I impress even myself.

Okay, i went to Mod school and modded the game to remove tax income, therefore isolating trade income so I could run some experiments.

Here are some things I discovered.

As I expected, trade ships function the same way that Caravans do in Rise of Legends. They provide a constant stream of income regardless of where they are or what they're doing. So there is no insta-deposit when a trade ship hits a trade port. They serve as money factories just by being alive.


We already have a pretty good idea about how this income rate is determined. They provide .25/sec (rounded up to .3 in the infocard). The trade port itself gets a .075 bonus (rounded up to.1 in the infocard) for each node in the longest trade route (i dont' know whether this is technically divided amongst the 5 trade ships or not, it doesn't really matter).

What was news to me is that this Logest Route determines the value of all your trade ports throughout the galaxy. So even trade ports that aren't part of the longest route, or are in the same grav well as other trade ports get the benefits of this bonus. They just don't add to it.


Now for the interesting part:

When a trade ship is created it begins generating cash immediately. The number in the infocard hops up as soon as the trade ship appears on the map.

When a trade ship is destroyed, it CONTINUES generating income for a very long time. About as long as it takes to create a new tradeship. This is very important. This means killing a single trade ship will not affect the enemy's economy at all. If you kill two trade ships simultaneously, his economy will suffer the affect of being down 1 trade ship while the second is being constructed.



Basically what this means is it's virtually impossible to affect the enemies economy by attacking his trade ships. To have any noticable impact you'de have to be killing trade ships faster than they can be built, and you'de have to sustain this for a long time.

Trade ships have light armor and very few hit points. So fighters and scouts blow them up quite well. But consider that trade ships can and will be replaced by several trade ports simultaneously and there's pretty much no way to get ahead. Not that I can think of at least.



SO WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRADE SHIPS?!
Well since they can't be exploited to directly affect the enemy economy their relevance must lie in the microtransaction mechanic that's associated with them.

Every time you blow up a trade ship you get 50 credits. Not much, but when you think about how easy they are to pop, it adds up quite quickly. Later in the game, if you take 3 or 4 carriers filled with fighters, and park them in an backwater grav well and leave them to shoot down tradeships for a while, it will generate a fair amount of cash for you.

As far as I could tell there is no microtansaction penalty for having your own trade ships blown up. If he blows up your trade ship, he picks up 50 credits and you don't lose anything. I tested this by watching the pirates blow up my trade ships and seeing if my money counter went backwards. As far as I could tell it didn't, but I could be wrong if anybody wants to investigate this further I would be grateful. It doens't make sense to me, as a design decision, to have no penalty for getting trade ships blown up. That's how it worked in Rise of Legends, but in that game losing a single caravan did make a difference on your economy, and they got costly to replace, so continued harassment of them would start to cause problems.


So what's the purpose of trade ships? Well, it seems that if you build trade ports, you are taking a risk of providing your enemy with a small but easy source of cash that is relevant for a very tiny sliver of the mid-game. Early in the game, sending those 3 or 4 carriers out will be too much of an investment. And later in the game, the amount of money you'll get by popping tradeships will be a pittance compared to the amount you're generating by other means. So this risk only manifests itself for a brief portion of the game.

^That really doesn't seem like much.


The only other aspect that bears consideration is bounty. If blowing up tradeships will give you a significant cut of the bounty on that players head, then it could actually make them relevant, because the amount of money you get for blowing them up will scale with players' economies as the game progresses. In fact, if you got some major bounty from trade ships, it would actually thrust them into the limelight, making them a critical part of the bounty mechanic, and making the bounty mechanic more important in general.




But I don't know much about how bounty is distributed for kills. Do you get the same amount of bounty regardless of the shiptype? Or more bounty for bigger ships? Or do tradeships yeildeven more bounty? Which would explain why pirates like them so much. I couldn't test this because when i put bounty on the AI and then blew up his trade ships, I didn't get anything back. I think that's because you can only get bounty that other players put in, you can't get bounty back that you've put in. If ththat's the case, than for 1v1 this is still irrelevant.


Except the fact that losing tradeships doesn't hurt you directly means there's still something inelegant about the whole thing. Having a bounty on your head means other players will target your trade ships and make a little bit of money. So it's good news for everyone else, but not really bad news for you. It's just neutral news.

It makes trade ships more like another resource to be harvested, but the player who "owns" them doesn't really have a strong vested interest in them. (which is suppose is definitely novel and kind of interesting)




But my questions now:
Where can I find out how bounty distribution is calculated?
Is there really no direct penalty for letting your trade ships get blown up? He gets money and you lose nothing? Really? I find this extremely hard to believe, can somebody please verify this?





PS: While doing all this, one of the loading tips read "By destroying enemy tradeships..." But the game loaded so fast I couldn't finish reading it. This is the only official documentation of tradeships I've come across, so I'de really like to know what it said. Is there anyway to find a list of the loading tips and read them outside the game?

I found this in Gameplay Constants.entity, I don't know what it means, but it suggests bounty awarded is based off of experience points worth.

Trade ships are worth 5 xp.

Which aint bad considering how easy they are to kill, and how many there are. It's a nice, easy way to collect bounty and level up my new capships.

The problem here, is that's there still no penalty for losing them, there's no strategic reason not to shoot down my own tradeships. (The only reason I can't is because the game won't let me attack friendly targets)

But everything else is just too well designed for me to believe this... i must be missing something. Please help.

Heh, well... the framework is there for a number of interesting mechanics in this game (not just the trade ships) but the actual functions haven't been fully realized yet. Trust me, this feature isn't exactly isolated in its near-uselessness.

Sorry to spam this thread, but my brain is really munching on this and I keep thinking of things.

I've run a couple of experiments to try to see what it would take to set up an effective trade blockade by setting up a line of planets with a pirate base in the middle.

Turns out i couldn't get the pirate base in the middle of my trade lanes to have any effect on my trade income until i reduced it to one planet on either side of the base, each with 5 trade ports. This way there was a very high volume of ships that had nowhere to go but through the pirate base. Only then were enough ships being destroyed fast enough to have any effect on my income. And even then, i had to let an hour of game time pass (lord praise the speed up and speed down keys) before my trade economy had dropped to even half of what it would have been.


It's pretty clearly that the tradeport/tradeship/traderoute has been intentionally and explicitly designed to be pretty resistant to tampering and harassment. And this is understandable. While it's cool to set up a blockade, by say capturing a planet in the middle of a player's trade route and thereby destroying his economy, it's not cool to have your trade income destroyed because you happent to set up next to a pirate base or an enemy planet.

So if harassing interfering with another players trade was going to be part of the game, we would have to have more control over our trade ships and the routes they take. Which is a can of worms that is understandably better left closed.


However the question remains, if trade routes are higly highly resistant to tampering, then what are these little guys flying between our planets actually doing? Are they just eye-candy? I guess the fact that you can choose not to display them in the options screen would suggest that.

But then again, they have a significant impact on the pirates... which is a mechanic that most certainly is NOT eye candy.


So we're back to the beginning square one, although with a whole lot more information.

What is the strategic value/purpose of trade ships? Can they be exploited in any way (even just a little bit) for strategic gain? Is there anything about their operation that i've missed?

Are they anything more than tastey little money morsels (and XP), waiting to be potshotted by a ravenous opponent?

I think so far the strongest use for them I've come up with is sending a level 1 capship off into a backwater system to shoot down enemy tradeships for a while. Which, hey, isn't such a bad idea.

It actually is a pretty elegant solution to the problem that we'll be creating level 1 capships long after all the creeps have been wiped off the map. Because they guys will be all over the place later in the game.


And what decides if they are worth 5x6=30 bounty credits or 5x41=205 bounty credits? That's a big difference.

Excellent analysis.

You know, I really think the game model would have been better if a trade ship creates a burp of income if and only if it docks with a trade station. The longer the route it travels, the higher the burp, so greater distance phase lanes would generate a little more income because it takes the trade ship longer to traverse it.

I'm really surprised the penalty for having your trade ship blown up is so miniscule.

FYI, I just checked and it looks like base bounty on a trade ship is 30 credits.

-- Retro

Hi retro,

Where did you check to get that bounty info?


That's actually not bad. 80 credits. 50 for trade ship bonus, 30 for bounty. And the're easy to kill en masse.


But yah, wierd it doesn't cost you anything to lose them. (again, i may have missed it, whatever it is. This is the part that I'm least confident about)

mehoo - I loaded a game in progress, started a bidding war between two enemy AI's, and then brought up an enemy tradeship's infocard where it lists the bounty value.

-- Retro

Perhaps it was just a fluke, but in a recent Random-Massive-Single-FFA map I played with "Hard" A.I., I found a neutral asteroid belt in the middle of a large enemy trade route and parked a Kol and a handful of Javelis there. After about 15 minutes I noticed a marked difference in enemy production on the front where my main fleet was assaulting, and my scouts never found a buildup to try and take out my raider fleet.

*shrug*

well Defeaz,

that seems to go against everythng I've documented. Perhaps you could check the replay to see what was going on?

Oh, I just thought of one other important thing:

Trade income does not appear to be affected by allegiance levels at the trading planet. So an AI that spams trade but does not invest heavily in culture buildings should be hurt a lot more by bisecting their trade route as per Dafeaz's scenario above.

Dafeaz - that could easily have been because that faction had an enemy faction on the other side of it that was bearing the brunt of its offensive - or defensive - attention. Even Hard-level AI doesn't make perfect fleet disposition decisions.

-- Retro

Do trade ships fly along the longest trade route?

Since the only meaningful disruption to trade income is destroying the trade station on the trade route, trade ships may give you a clue where that route is.

ahhh...

that's an excellent point. At some point I have to get back to my life, but i'll see if I can deduce something about Trade Ship routing next time i have a chance.
: )

k...

i set up a couple of different scenarios to try to observe something about Trade Ship routing...

I got nothin'. I can't discern any pattern to the trade ship routing, except that trade ships try to get move to and from friendly trade ports, even if it means attempting to move thruogh enemy owned grav wells.


This isn't something they wanted us to worry about, which is why destroying them doesn't affect the game very much.


But i still wonder if they're worth anything other than eye candy, and why the pirates are so obsessed with them.

I think you can rationalize the pirate obsession with the fact that trade, refinery, and colony ships don't have any defenses and thus make for very soft targets.

That being said, I have a hard time rationalizing pretty much anything else that the pirates in this game do.

I have a theory that there are no actual living beings on the Pirate fleet, and only one malignant glowy-eyed humanoid is at the heart of their entirely cybernetic empire living a bitter existence and counting gold in a tiny office chamber in the middle of the massive pirate base planetoid. It would explain a lot, including the casual way he throws away an entire fleet just so he can score a couple hundred credits of bounty - and sometimes not even that.

-- Retro

You think so?

The deeper I dig into this game, the more I find good answers to questions I've been looking for.

For example, why are trade routes so resistant to tradeship harassment? Because if they weren't we'de have to micro our trade routes, which would probably require the addition of a whole new interface element. Some sort of trade route overlay or something. This would a significant extra layer of complexity to this already overwhelming game.


So why do the pirates behave the way they do? My guess is there's a good reason for it. I mean let's face it. Early on in the game, even a small pirate raid is not to be ignored. Surely you can swat them away with you fleet, but that means taking the time to do so, which will dramatically affect your tempo (if you weren't prepared for it).


Mid-Game... a single hangar bay can keep the pirates spinning in circles, sure... but the seige frigates will still go straight for your planet. And they WILL make a dent. Especially at medium size raids. Severe raids, I'de be concerned about LOSING the planet before my static defenses are able to kill all the pirates. You will have to invest considerable resources in defenses if you want to brush off the pirates completely. THis is not negligible.


Late-Game/Very Large games.... by this point sure, the pirates are probably null. You can defend against even severe raids without batting an eye. HOWEVER, pirates do drain bounty, which could mess with things.


In general, I'm hard pressed to find a reason to let bounty fall into pirate hands when it could just as easily fall into my own coffers. So if nothing else, pirates serve to drain money out of the economy, and throw a wild card into the system of bounty amongst players.


Just thoughts. But I'm starting to find that there is no substitue for lots and lots of ships. Which is fine, it's just like every other RTS in that regard. But there are so many different ways to support your lots and lots of ships that it's very impressive. Pirates are the same. No substitute, but can be used to support in clever ways.


On the other hand, in the mid/late game, just like i'de want to blow up my own tradeships, i'de kind of want the pirates to come to me, because better the bounty on my head go to them than to my enemies.


So yah, still some unresolved wierdnesses. I imagine 1.1 or the expansion will see a drastic overhaul of some of these systems.

Which is why I'd suggest using turrets instead of a hangar bay. Sure, your planet will take a couple of hits but the siege frigates will be gone in short order. As I've said before, 4 turrets at a given planet with, say, two repair bays will repel a pirate raid at any stage of the game, especially since their movements within a gravity well are so predictable. If the threat isn't yet severe (which it won't be early on), you can get by with significantly less.

How about this: Give Trade ships a "truck bomb" ability, where it docks with a trade port, and blows it up (way too 9-11ish, so it wouldn't fly with the politically correct types, but doable nonetheless...)

A better way to do this is when you conquer an enemy planet that activates the REBEL fleet, all the trade ships activate that ability and explode in the enemy fleet (since the rebel fleets are way too underpowered at the late stages of the game anyway...

Oh yeah, about the pirates' obsession with trade ships (the pirate ships have the ability to steal credits from your empire (100 at a time), so sending them through the pirate base to a "trading partner" at the other side of the galaxy, can add up, but not if you are making 100 credits per second from your vast empire