I registered my corps the day of the first show of the season. With the -20 penalty for both staff and members, it put me at a huge disadvantage and, even with the best staff and a full membership I placed second to last.

Just wondering what the rationale here is. I fear retention to this site will be bad with this harsh penalty?

This is a known "issue".. but exactly why we are doing a test season!

I was thinking of changing it to have no penalties for members after joining until they compete in their first show. What are your thoughts on that?

Why are there penalties at all? What's the rationale?

it was mainly to prevent people from earning money from a show and then firing and cutting staff/members after every show to stack them. This is meant to be a long term semi realistic drum corps tycoon, so it’s all about budgeting and growing your corps slowly season after season, and not being able to stack your corps all in your first season to dominate everyone.

I am working on a fix for late joiners

@director - I'm coming over to this after wayyy too many years playing FMA. In my view, I'd be happy with "locking in" staff each season rather than a penalty system. In real life captions rarely, if ever, change mid-season so I think other players coming in wouldn't have any issues with that kind of thing. "Boosting" from season to season would really be hard-limited by your idea of gradually improving funding over time, ensuring players are stacking up staff as well as they can at the start, but not forgetting their budget for players, shows, fundraising, etc either. FMA players are already used to a fair bit of permanence with their choices anyway.

I'll add one more note since I'm already here - is there a Planned Features page, forum or roadmap? (E.g. caption scores after each show to adjust sliders for rehearsals). I've curiosity about a number of things and I see DC: TG being able to facilitate some really cool things, as I imagine maybe you are already thinking of!

Thanks for the great new way to play DCI! :)

I realize I cannot edit my existing post - oh well! As I'm thinking on it, I wonder if instead of penalty, it'd be a combination of what I mentioned before and also a cap on the effectiveness level of staff that can be hired. If you're starting 2 weeks into a season, we could imagine that would put real life corps in a position to hire "whoever is left". Carolina Crown not having camps and only hiring staff in June would mean the greats like Harloff might be taken off the board by another corps scouting ahead of them, for instance. It still grants a sort of handicap to players coming in mid-season, so the incentive is still there to be there at the start. Maybe there's a good middle ground where players agree that starting mid-season means you can only hire effectiveness less than 80 or something without paying significantly increased costs for the higher eff. staff? Just riffing.

Locking in staff is a good idea, I can lock staff in after the corps’ first performance and get rid of the penalties.

There is a planned features, changelog, roadmap, and error reporting page if you click on the blue feedback bar on the side of the site

In there please feel free to add any recommendations (or in the forums). I’ve already added a few recommendations people have asked for

I also just added site referrals in your edit account page, where referrals will give you and the other person money for your organization. I haven’t announced that yet

FYI you are actually doing something (possibly) I was hoping people would not do, and was trying to think of a way to prevent people from doing it. I’m guessing you might know what it is?

The late penalties have been removed. Now directors (new and old) will be able to add/remove staff and members until their first show. (for this season, all users can now manage staff/members until tomorrows show, which then everything will be locked in. You will however always be able to add staff/members after your first show, you just won't be able to remove any. This should solve the issue for new members joining mid season

@director Awesome! And I guess just like a lot of folks I also missed the Feedback ribbon, lol. Thanks!

Using landmarks as the corps location - maybe? I find that kind of funny!

After sitting on posting this for a while, I did wonder if there is a system for generating players that refreshes each time you go into "hire" them? If that's the case, I didn't realize what was going on tbh, but I can understand where that could become an issue to stack your corps in pre-season. Hire 100/99s > Refresh > Hire, repeat. If that's not what you're talking about then I'm a bit at a loss for the moment. I've done a lot of recreating the corps logo and some bio updates but outside of that, I've not managed the corps a whole lot yet.

There is a system for generating members and staff, but not every time you refresh the page. Members and staff get randomly generated whenever somebody creates an account or if you go to a member or staff page and there are not enough members or staff for you to hire or accept. On the member or staff page and you refresh you will probably see new people in there, but that is only because it only shows you a small number of people at once. It is done that way to give everyone a chance to hire different people and to see staff or members it also helps prevent people from picking somebody and then somebody else selecting that person first.

As far as somebody potentially hiring or accepting 99s or 100s and refreshing the page to try to get better people, I will probably add a max number of refreshes per season. But that would only affect hopefully a small number of people who are trying to gain the system. It also wouldn’t really be a factor until later in the game if somebody has enough money to actually only hire or accept people with those kind of attributes because they cost more money.

To prevent people from taking all the money and moving it like you did, I was thinking of maybe only allowing half your funds to be transferred or some way to regulate it because it definitely games the system and was something I was worried people might try to do. Maybe the money each corps gets every season will factor in things like how much money was spent vs transferred

@director That makes sense now. I thought that the members thing was what you were referring to but I am totally surprised to hear that moving funds to and from the organization like that wasn't intended. I definitely did that thinking I'd need reserve funds and had no idea how much I needed upfront on staff. I'd seen a couple of posts about bankruptcy before I really got started on hiring so I was conservative with the funds. I didn't think putting back 10% of the total starting amount was too much but I could be uninformed on that.

If the idea is really to only use a certain portion of funds each season toward new fundraising then I'd personally be interested in some kind of percentage or time-delayed cap on that. If the aim is to simulate (or mostly simulate) real fundraising, then could it be worth looking at having like a Fundraising staff member (Development?) like we do with the Health staff which has varying effectiveness and has an associated hiring cost to get some kind of ROI (% based on total invested)? Corps then have to make smart decisions about how much they want to spend on staff and members in the current season vs. putting away for future gains/"giving" it to the fundraiser to store for the season (and get a % return on the amount invested at the start of the new season). For example, say a corps decides to spend 900k on staff and members and gives 100k to their fundraiser who has mediocre stats. At the end of the season that fundraiser has taken that unused 100k and returned 112k to the player to be used in the next season (12% ROI due to mediocre stats). Another player decides to spend more on staff upfront including their fundraiser and only gives 60k to the fundraiser to "invest" but hires a fundraiser who has a better stat, so their ROI % is a little higher. They start the next season with 73k (~20% ROI because of the better stats). If it'd be % based like that, there would need to be a cap for sure on what a "100" fundraiser looks like, maybe stopping at 20-30% ROI since modern markets really don't go much higher than that YOY.

That same Fundraising/Dev staff could have a dollar limit on the amount of funds they could work with each season (like $100k-$1mil or some other number that is decided to be a good stopping point). I'd think of this like the board of directors deciding how much the overall budget is for each year since DCI is largely non-profit. What to do with excess funds if they remain? Save them for next season for hiring (well, you can't invest past x dollar amount, so might as well). FMA does this now and folks don't have many issues with having large $ values just sitting there once things are upgraded.

I think if it was the same limit across all accounts that would make sense. FMA has a system where rehearsal points have to be used to "acquire" funds over time. A set limit on a staff member like that would allow corps to grow at a more steady rate, and those who return each season to "invest" into that fundraising can in turn gradually grow their overall funds to spend on members and staff (but with the same cap on "invested" funds) much like we see with corps today. The longer they've been around, the more likely it is to have a set base of fundraising and even get some kind of lowish ROI (like say, <10% per season). In the long-term a system like this would see returning players usually at the top, with a chance for new players to eventually catch up and be in finals, semis, etc with perseverance.

The biggest issue I see with a system like this is ensuring players don't "cap out" in terms of what they can hire for members and staff each season. I see this now with FMA where some players can max out their staff (after like 10 seasons) and find themselves scoring 99-100 every subsequent season with little effort. To prevent that, there might be a few options but first that comes to mind is ensuring there is dynamic scoring at the top levels where players scores are compared to each other and not a maximum attribute/value. I'm not completely sold on that though either as a solution. But people like rolling dice, right? xD So maybe throw in a d20-esque system where the narrative is played out by the "GM"/director? Give prelims, semis and finals a unique rule where each caption is set into a bracket with a range of potential scores then let them play out in a Pass/Fail system on whether one element of the show really shines through in one competition vs. another? Someone rolls a d20, gets a nat 20 on semis and their brass caption really scores at the top of their bracket? They roll a 10 on the next one, so they score middling results but more or less in line with how they've performed in previous shows? I wonder how something like that might work and if it'd hold water after many seasons. In concept I like it, but players do like to have autonomy also and I'm not sure the feasibility of something like that.

I could go on but that's a lot for now. Thanks again for all your work and attention!

I need to read this again when I have more time lol, but one of the things that helps keeps things in check is that each staff and member have loyalty points, and that will help dictate if that person stays with the corps or moves on after the season.. so even if you spend all your money on staff and members that are all 100, there's a theoretically possibility that every one of them could leave the corps the next season.. but you also have members that will age out or choose to not compete anymore, and staff will also choose to retire just because or once they hit the age limit.. so putting all of your money into a top stat corps might be good for one season (if you can afford it) but it might not be good long term. Instead getting younger members might be better long term financially and also because they have a better chance at staying with the corps for more years.

Another thing with the fundraisers is that they all have a risk. Some methods will only see profit or break even, some will have a lot higher chance of a profit but also have a higher chance of losing money. So how you want to budget is part of the game.. do you invest more money at first for the long run hoping that you can earn a lot of money to build your corps, or do you try to stack your corps from the beginning and grow from there, or you do start out slow and try to build up over the multiple seasons?

The way it's currently set up (and I'm still tweaking the scoring algorithm) is that every corps has an overall max score they can obtain based on all of their attributes. their score can go up and down throughout the season, and there will also be a small amount of randomness in the final score.. so you might be maxed out at 100 on everything and still not win.

So basically the corps and attributes will always be changing from season to season and theoretically it should help prevent certain corps from always winning.

You can new see the recaps from each show be going to the show page