Chance to obtain a new Scientist

[Drooly]

First let's assume, for the purposes of this suggestion, that the chance to get a new scientist is 3% per hour.

It could happen that you get several scientists in the same day and that you get none for several days. Over the course of the age, on average, you would still likely get about 80 as mentioned in the age changes (without considering any modifiers or abducts ofc). However, for some province could happen that they get only 60, whereas another province gets 100 instead.

In order to mitigate this effect I suggest that the chance to get a new scientist increases with every passing hour when a scientist has not emerged and to reset this chance as soon a a new scientist is gained.

So for example, if you want the average chance to get a new scientist per hour to be 3%, you can have 1% chance the first hour and +0.16.6% increase for every hour when a new scientist has Not emerged. So after 24 hours the chance would be about 5%. This way the average chance per hour for the whole day would still be 3% per hour more or less. The moment a new scientist emerges this chance would reset to 1% and so on. Obviously this way after 12 game years you would have on average more than 80 scientists, but more like 100, so you can tweak the numbers a bit, but in general this way the total number of scientists per person would be a bit more similar and people would not be so frustrated about not getting a new scientist for several days.

This concept is not new of course, I think in diablo 3 also you get an increased % rarity drop chance for every hour that u have played (or something) until a rare item drops and then this bonus resets.

[Smitty87]

Great idea.

Think it's unfair kd mates have 17 more professors then I based on luck.

[jmiedema]

Yea, this was discussed earlier this age. Something needs to be done to move the system away from being purely random with a fixed chance.

I think your proposed change isn't actually enough. it moves from a 3% pure random chance, to a eventual 5% pure random chance.. that will still have a very broad spectrum of scientists across the board.

My thoughts would be for the spawn rate to be 3%, then every tick that you don't get a scientist your chance to get a scientist increases by 1%. So after 97 ticks of not getting a scientist you would be guaranteed one with a 100% chance.

The problem is, even with this method, going 97 ticks without a scientist still really sucks if someone else got 4-5 in that time. So the idea that "once you get a scientist your chance resets to 3%" isn't quite enough to fix the spectrum.

my thought would be that when you do get a scientist your % chance to get a scientist is decreased by 20-25% (whatever makes sense i haven't run the math). That way if you DO have 97 ticks without getting a scientist and are therefore behind on scientists, you won't reset back to 3%, you will decrease to say 75% chance. If you then get another one next tick you go down to 50%, then 25% etc. so it will help make the spectrum better, as after 100 ticks you have a good likelihood that you will get 4 scientists, and the person that was lucky even with the low % spawn rate also gets 4 scientists.

Not sure of all the numbers, but I think a method similar to the above is the only way to keep a tighter spectrum/range of scientists across all players. i don't think people general care about the NUMBER of scientists they get, because that can be adjusted to be fair. What DOES get under people's skin is when they are sitting at 30-40 scientists and a kd mate is at 60 just because of luck. So lets try and get that spectrum to be as spread out.

[natebane]

Or just drop the whole percentage thing entirely. Everyone spawns a scientist every 16 hours, would put you at 126 at the end of yr 12. And Sages could be 1 scientist every 8 hours, and remove revelation from the game or alter its effects.

[Drooly]

hey, thx for the replies! Just a few notes:

1. The % increase doesn't stop at 5% after 24h, it'd continue growing, as mentioned, until a scientist is obtained (so it could possibly grow all the way to 100% at which point you are assured to get a scientist on the next tick). Of course, as I mentioned, these number should be adjusted to reach the same intended goal.

2. Reason behind it starting at 1% rather than 3%: if you start at 3% and grow as steep as 1% you'd get way higher than the intended 80 at the end of the age. I just wanted to show the general idea and not the exact math, but we can also go a bit deeper into that to make it more clear:

- We started with the assumption that an age lasts 12 years, but my guess is that an age actually lasts 16 years. This is 16 weeks meaning 16 * 7(days) * 24(h) * 3% = 80.64 (on average provinces would have that many scientist at the end of the age as it is right now).

- So now let's see how often were we normally supposed to get a new scientist - 16 * 7 = 112 days. 112 / 80 = 1.4 ,so a new scientist should be gained every 1.4 days as it is now. 1.4 days is rougly 34h (rounded up). So the goal is to get on average 3% for each hour of those 34h and then the chance would continue to increase afterwards so if you don't get a scientist within 34h, your chance would continue to increase slightly over time afterwards. Essentially this means that if we start at 1% chance to obtain a new scientist in the first tick then we need to grow with rougly 0.117% chance each hour and then at 34h we'd have 5% chance to get a new scientist. On average the chance to get a new scientist over those 34h remains 3%, but 34h later, essentially 68h after not getting a scientist, the chance to obtain a scientist would be 9% and so on.

You must understand that people are not supposed to have everything maxed unless they put some additional effort into it. Ideally the other proposed Idea, to get a new scientist every 34h (16h was the originally proposed idea) without chance involved and maybe have Revelation and labs strictly reduce that time with a set % (so instead of increasing the chance to get a scientist by 30% by casting revalation, simply decrease the time needed by 30% (or actually it'd be 25% or something to get the same result). This idea is probably the best, but honestly I think I like having some chance involved and be happy if I am lucky and get 3 scientists in the same day and if I dont get a scientist for a whole day or two it's not that horrible.

[natebane]

Yeah I like that modification on my suggestion, where rev and labs reduce time same as builders boon does for buildings.

[Drooly]

Yeah I like that modification on my suggestion, where rev and labs reduce time same as builders boon does for buildings.

Yeah and now that I've had only 1 new scientist for the past 124 hours (and counting) as a Faerie with Revelation, I tend to like that idea even more and more ...

[Yadda9To5]

Why change a winning formula?

What is more fun than having a random prov being able to run 50% more mod tpa of yourself (just a few more professors to max out thief science) by nothing but luck? Yeah it feels kind of unfair, but ultimately the game is still playable isn't it. So maybe just add some mechanics to even things out. In the old days we had happiness, to a good number of players, it was expereienced as totally random, maybe reintroduce something like this, but make it really random. Then have happiness affect a wide range of modifiers, tpa / wpa / dpa / opa / be, the sky is the limit. Then just like with science, generate a happiness point at random, but unlike science this happiness point can have both a positive or negative effect, and it has to be assigned to some happiness category. And if you make it perfectly random, t will be fair, just like the scientist system.

Sadly, you still can get the short end of the proverbial stick. Still not fair. So let's give players a chance to fix things, let them buy happiness packs in the ingame store. Each packs holds x happiness points, again randomly distributed, both positive and negative, if you're lucky, you could buy a whole set of positive happiness points (if you're unlucky, you are stuck with negative happiness points, but **** happens, then you just have to compensate and buy more packs).

Of course, this would add a whole new mechanic, maybe it's a little too much. In that case, just add more randomness by random gc generation, strip anything that generates gc from te game and give each prov an automated ToG each day, (again you can sell ToG packs ingame), or maybe strip military training, randomize that instead (with army packs for sale, randmly giving soldiers, specs or elites!).

Disclaimer, because this whole science system totally sucked all strategy out of utopia making the game a whole lot less fun to me i started playing some "free-to-play" android games which might have given me the inspiration for this suggestion. (I don't think this scientists system can be fixed, it's not only the randomness that makes it suck, it's also the lack of investment in science, most suggestions that fix both create an awkward hybrid between the original science system and this new one (scientist that generate science points, really?), so i'd say just get the old system back and tweak (not replace) that a little instead. while this whole scientists thing is called science it really has nothing to do with science as it used to be)

[natebane]

Why change a winning formula?

What is more fun than having a random prov being able to run 50% more mod tpa of yourself (just a few more professors to max out thief science) by nothing but luck? Yeah it feels kind of unfair, but ultimately the game is still playable isn't it. So maybe just add some mechanics to even things out. In the old days we had happiness, to a good number of players, it was expereienced as totally random, maybe reintroduce something like this, but make it really random. Then have happiness affect a wide range of modifiers, tpa / wpa / dpa / opa / be, the sky is the limit. Then just like with science, generate a happiness point at random, but unlike science this happiness point can have both a positive or negative effect, and it has to be assigned to some happiness category. And if you make it perfectly random, t will be fair, just like the scientist system.

Sadly, you still can get the short end of the proverbial stick. Still not fair. So let's give players a chance to fix things, let them buy happiness packs in the ingame store. Each packs holds x happiness points, again randomly distributed, both positive and negative, if you're lucky, you could buy a whole set of positive happiness points (if you're unlucky, you are stuck with negative happiness points, but **** happens, then you just have to compensate and buy more packs).

Of course, this would add a whole new mechanic, maybe it's a little too much. In that case, just add more randomness by random gc generation, strip anything that generates gc from te game and give each prov an automated ToG each day, (again you can sell ToG packs ingame), or maybe strip military training, randomize that instead (with army packs for sale, randmly giving soldiers, specs or elites!).

Disclaimer, because this whole science system totally sucked all strategy out of utopia making the game a whole lot less fun to me i started playing some "free-to-play" android games which might have given me the inspiration for this suggestion. (I don't think this scientists system can be fixed, it's not only the randomness that makes it suck, it's also the lack of investment in science, most suggestions that fix both create an awkward hybrid between the original science system and this new one (scientist that generate science points, really?), so i'd say just get the old system back and tweak (not replace) that a little instead. while this whole scientists thing is called science it really has nothing to do with science as it used to be)

You sound like you got your inspiration from 'Freemium' games. The players left in this game seem to be mostly vested in the social aspect of it, and turning it towards 'pay-to-win' will turn off a lot of people.

[Andurilas]

Happiness wasn't random. It was based on factors you could read about in your adviser page.

But I think the fix to the scientist problem is to double or triple their spawn rate and reduce their individual effect. This allows the randomness to even out more quickly.

[Goodgame]

This random science system is extremely aggravating. Everyone learned quickly that Abduct attacks are useless (except when it was bugged at age start) and the system takes skill completely out of the equation for building a strong, science-based province. The new layout is something I like, but the randomness of getting scientists is absurd.

[Thunder TA]

Science probably takes more time and skill now than ever before if you use it like it can be. Getting new ones is slow yes. Abducts seem to be working alot better now as they said from the start that it would.Everyone just wanted it from hour 1 and that wasnt how it was designed .

[Bo To]

Everyone learned quickly that Abduct attacks are useless

It's the opposite. Abducts are really powerful. An active attacker(2 uniques/day) can get 4-8 scientists daily. No matter how lucky you are you can't get that much on your own.

[Madchess]

The real problem is it is hard for t/m's to keep up, but depending of the pick you can go 150% for thievery and magic and thus you'll still hold an advantage over attackers in those areas, you may just be lacking a bit in the ecconomy area as compared to before.

And yes abducts are powerfull which is why some gb protection from abducts might be a good idea, so many attackers are running low def that you can easily get a dubble on two scientists each if you look for the right target.

One other thing they could do would be to remove the cap but decrease effectivity for each new scientist, as it is now they are all of equal worth, making it impossible to max out would challenge people more cause when does the value of each new scientist drop below the cost of capturing him/her? Personly just gooing to max it out as soon as possible as it is now.