I've kept the commentary in the post above to a minimum to retain its use as a reference. In this one I will go through some of ideas behind the changes.
The parallel attack turns change came about from the feedback that sequential turns offer factions intrinsic advantages against each other. E.g. if the turns go A -> B -> C, then A can attack B to cause B to miss its own attack phase. This is not something A can do against C, which makes for a weird asymmetry. There are a few things to try, but the simplest would be to make all attacks happen in parallel. This also somewhat solves issues around players turning up at the wrong time, and having to wait 40 minutes for their factions attack phase.
The main problem we wanted to solve was the effect of activity and skill mismatches throughout the day. Or relatedly, that PW over-encouraged staying up all night to win. A healthy regular PW is one that doesn't kill the most hardcore players through lack of sleep. There are quite a few ways to do this, but we decided to try adding per-player limits on constantly attacking via the attack charges system. Parallel turns just happened to become possible with the introduction of attack charges.
Attack charges should reign in the ability of one faction to steamroll the others through overwhelming activity. There is a bit of a balancing game being played here.
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There has to be a benefit to a bit more activity than the other factions, otherwise the winning (or at least not-losing) play might be to refuse to act, stalling out the game.
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Attack charges lag behind changes in activity because they take effect after the other side goes to bed.
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If they take too long to passively recharge, then players might get stuck not playing, or factions might be able to stall out the game. If they don't take long enough to recharge, then hardcore players will be able to stay up all night spamming them.
Attacking being more enticing than defending is a persistent problem that attack charges attempt to solve. We considered something like a more traditional matchmaker, or making battles symmetric in that players would fight over IP on a pair of planets, but the systems sounded a bit abstract. There is something powerful in the simplicity of the PW attack system: you click a battle to attack, then if no defenders respond, you get a big win. It's a system that is geared towards making games happen in an understandable way.
The attack charge system may break down in a few ways. We might even find a way we didn't think of. One thing at the back of my mind is that an attack always costs X charges (across players), but can only ever generate at most X charges for the defenders. If a defense is understaffed, then fewer charges are generated. We won't completely run out of charges, because they refresh, but it is still a worry. I am encouraged by the observed high frequency of battles of the previous PW though, because that means most attacks are likely to be answered by an equal number of defenders.
We kept the large-attack system of the previous PW test, and polished it a bit so it doesn't just allow multiples of the planet player threshold. The other systems discourage sending more players than you need (eg each has to spend an attack charge), but to me this is the right approach. I'm very happy for a few pivotal battles to involve a large number of players, but I would like to keep most battles relatively small. It makes for a different kind of ZK to TAW, and many smaller battles are less prone to large scale imbalances than a few large ones.
The homeworld capture victory condition was removed because it encourages the top two factions to each try to gank the weakest one. This is the opposite of a stable FFA system, where the two weaker factions should gang up on the one that is about to win. It also feels like the last several PWs have ended this way, after people remember that homeworld capture exists, and it has tended to be unsatisfying. Holding and powering Artefact worlds should be a bit more interesting, as both the other factions can be involved in trying to take them back from a leader.
I've heard some pre-feedback (feedforward?) that players like the thematic elements of a last ditch stand at your homeworld. Losing your homeworld might be something that comes back in the future, but there are a few too many mechanics tied to it for the game to not simply end when a faction is de-homeworlded. For example, the battle metal bonus is based on distance to homeworld, and we have no way for a faction to reenter the game if all its worlds are conquered. So if we were to, say, change homeworld victory to controlling all homeworlds (not just one extra), we would need to deal with some edge cases first.
The bomber change follows one of our general ideas: that the galaxy game should direct and enhance the actions taken in the battles, not make them irrelevant. Being able to make enough bombers to cancel out an entire battle violated this idea, and the lack of battle effect was even reported as a bug initially. An invasion can still be fended off for a little bit with bombers, but eventually the planet will be turned neutral with continued use. This might nerf bombers too much, or it might just mean we'll see a lot more planets bombed to neutrality and then invaded.
A lot of the above is speculation. I'm not really going to put much weight on anticipated feedback, i.e., feedback people (or myself) might have just reading about the mechanics. It will be a lot more enlightening to see how the systems work in practise.
