Inaugural Voyage VP notes

GodzillaKaiju

Main Findings

I ran 6 Voyages over the course of the first Voyage event to test out some possible methods of manipulating VP. Some of them were run rather short to get enough data for patterns while allowing time for a couple of longer runs. I found the following:

a) Neither ship nor crew bonuses affect Encounter VPs in any way (neither through the raw amount or the multiplier). This pattern was true for varying combinations of crew and ships, though now that I think of it, I'm not sure my 0 bonus crew also had a ship with no bonus. I think it did, but I can't be sure in retrospect.

The VPs for each step of the Encounter are given by the formula
8 * #encounter * multiplier
for at least 12 encounters (the most I ever got to, entailing a 10 hour voyage) without ever failing an event to verify that how the current multiplier at play affected each Encounter step's VP drops.

b) Ship bonuses do not affect loot drop VPs between Encounters.

c) The magnitude of each crew's bonus does not affect the loot drop VPs.

d) Loot drop VPs appear to be awarded via these formulas for encounters 15m and after, where RND() rounds values to the nearest number, except that values of exactly 0.5 are rounded down, and MIN(x,y) is the smaller value of x or y:
RND(5+MIN(#bonusCrew/2+0.5,0)*(#encounter-2))

This formula explains why I kept getting multiples of 5 VP with 0 bonus crew but alternating 11 and 12 with 12 bonus crew. However, I didn't run a voyage with 1 or 2 bonus crew to test this thoroughly, nor did I run enough to generate equations for 1m and 5m Encounters with confidence. As detailed below, I had runs with 7, 3, 12, 4, 0, and 12 bonus crew; the last of these helped fill in a hole in initial data collection for 12 bonus crew.

Recommendations

1) I think a compromise between the beta and initial Voyage event VP would be to multiply all of the initial Voyage VP by 3 or 5. A value of 3 would make getting threshold rewards challenging for half of an event but doable. A value of 5 would be halfway between the stingy and generous VP values.

2) The existing formula for assigning VPs during loot drops only accounts for the number of crew giving bonuses. To make highly bonused crew (e.g., event crew) more valuable, the formula in d) should be adjusted to include the number of bonus increments (i.e., totalAntimatterBonus / minAntimatterBonus rather than #bonusCrew). For this event, minAntimatterBonus was 50, and Wizard Hemmer had 3 minAntimatterBonus increments.

3) Encounters felt like they contributed more to the overall event scores than in the beta, which made them more enjoyable. However, having the bonus crew not contribute to the scaling of their importance at all felt rather anticlimactic. The crit chance being tied to crew traits was a good choice, but I would also like to see a scaling factor of the VPs given for each Encounter step to reflect having better crew - say, MAX(RND(4*totalAntimatterBonus / minAntimatterBonus),1).

That way, crew with more than 4 bonus increments get bonuses to Encounter VP, but those without even that many bonus crew increments still get the base amount of Encounter VPs. I chose 4 here so that you'd have to have at least 1 other bonused crew besides a featured crew to get beyond the minimum Encounter VP (or another bonused crew with more than 1 bonus increment). Different people might prefer different values for that minimum number of crew bonus increments, but this scaling would create additional tension between crew bonuses, crew raw stats, and crew profiencies in selecting voyage rosters. It would also favor event crew rather strongly.

If this strategy is not adopted, Encounter VPs would need to be scaled by 24 or 40 instead of 8 to keep pace with loot drop VPs.

Supporting Data (BC=Bonus Crew)

VP per loot drop after each Encounter time in minutes; no VP were dropped before the first Encounter
BC 1 5 15 30 45 60 90 120 240 360 480 720
09 ? ? 9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81
03 1 2 7 14 21 28
12 ? 4 11 23 34 46
04 1 3 7 15 22 30 37 45 52 60 67 75
00 1 2 5 10 15
12 2 4 11 23 34

VP and Multiplier after each Encounter's step in minutes
En 1 5 15 30 45 60 90 120 240 360 480 720
VP 8 32 72 128 200 288 392 512 648 800 968 1152
Mult 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

guest_1677442946962966

Its awesome you put this together, thank you.


Side note, its a disgrace that benny boy cant be bothered to post a quick FYI on this stuff here at the forum. Business as usual.

DavideBooks

This is good information. Thank you. So it seems that you want bonus crew for the random drops between encounters, but you want a good gauntlet set for the encounters.

(HGH)Apollo

I would have every voyage give 10 points every minute. That would balance the point system better and it would give reason to keeping a voyage going when it can’t hit the next gauntlet dilemma.

GodzillaKaiju

guest and DavideBooks, thank you; I agree that the bonus crew helps with the loot drops, but you don't want to be stuck in an encounter having to build non-Gauntlet crew up from scratch. You also likely want to have a good mix of Gauntlet skills for the 12+ hour Encounters that I heard have bosses with big proficiencies. I enjoyed the puzzle of which crew to use to build up stats needed in the final Encounter step. Having Legendary big stat crew first to dispose of the easy Encounters (often with shuttle boosts that had been lying around unused) made a good start, and skill-targeted Quipped or Gauntlet crew at the end made short work of the foes I encountered.

Apollo, I think that 10 points every minute would end up being a lot less than what is available now if you keep Voyage event voyages running for a while, especially when it's stacked with bonus crew.