[SteemNova] Adjust randomness of Expedition mission return

This is last Expedition mission type commit description and detailed information how the Expedition system works in SteemNova also.
Players complain that randomness of Expeditions in game is not fair. It was considered as high risk high reward gambling because of positive events chances equal to negative encounters. People were definitely right at this point. The usability of Expeditions were in question.

Issue

Original 2Moons engine have Expedition missions kindly simplified. Every event has 1/9 chance of occur.

This is in simplified form:

1/9 to find new resources

1/9 to find dark matter

1/9 to find find new ships

1/9 to encounter aliens or pirates (fight)

1/9 to fly into black hole and lose all fleet

1/9 to extend return flight time

3/9 nothing happen

This may look good but while playing it seems that sending expedition fleets are huge risk huge reward. We may gather additional amount of free resources or new ships or just lose whole fleet in a black hole or in a fight versus pirates. After dozens of flights player goes out equal, just wasting his time.

Proposition

The proposition was to adjust randomness to match vanilla ogame formulas.

Here is what states classic game:

Find Dark Matter: - 9% of the expedition. The experience show you can find: small package: 300-400 DM medium package: 500-700 DM large package: 1.000-1.800 DM

Find abandoned ships: - 22% of the expedition finds ships

Find resources ships: - 32,5% of the expedition brings resources 68,5% metal 24% crystal 7,5% deuterium.

Find pirates: - 5,8% of the expedition meet pirates. They have you combat technology -3 (If you have technologies 10/10/10, they have 7/7/7). Normal pirates fleet are +/- 30% of your structural points, large pirates fleet are +/- 50% of your structural points, x-large pirates fleet +/- 80% of your structural integrity points.

Find aliens: - 2,6 % of the expedition meet aliens. They have you combat technology +3 (If you have technologies 10/10/10, they have 13/13/13). The size of the aliens fleet are between 40% to 120% of you structural integrity points.

The fleet has delay: - 7% of the expedition takes 2, 3 or 5 times of delay.

The fleet back early: - 2% of the expedition come back early

Find nothing: -18,6% of the expedition finds nothing.

Black hole: - 0,33% of the expedition the whole fleet or in partial can be lost.

http://wiki.ogame.org/index.php/Guide:Expedition_guide

Issue#16 with proposal

The code

As soon as I got to know what does each array means and how the code works I start to rewrite MissionCaseExpedition.class.php.

To improve precision I decided to operate on promiles than percentages

I have verified each return case if it already match http://wiki.ogame.org/index.php/Guide:Expedition_guide. Every case's chance were rewritten to its promile value. Some reward values were taken from http://owiki.de/Expedition and some from 2Moons original fork.

In the end encounter chances were changed to:

Find resources: 32,5%. Values from http://owiki.de/Expedition

Find Dark Matter: 9%. Values from 2Moons

Find abandoned ships: 22%. Values from http://owiki.de/Expedition , took 80% data.

Find pirates or aliens: 8,4%. 50/50 pirates or aliens.

Black hole: 0,3%

The fleet delays or return earlier: 9%

Find nothing: 18,8%...

Tests

While testing I had send 30 flights of 2 Large Cargo Ships + 50 Little Fighters. The results are:

free resources: 12 (40%) - positive
nothing found: 10 (33%) - neutral
free ships: 4 (13%) - positive
encounter aliens: 2 (6%) - negative
delayed fleet: 1 (3%) - negative
dark matter: 1 (3%) - positive
black hole: 0 (0%) - negative

Information

steemnova/steemnova project is fork of jkroepke/2Moons Open Source Browsergame Framework. The goal is to fix bugs and develop the engine in the direction of maximum Steem integration.