Planetwars Ends In Ceasefire

The most recent planet war ended in mutual ceasefire just over an hour ago. Humanity Rising took an early lead with three artefact planets, but could not quite clinch the victory before the other factions rallied and dislodged them. Then Free Machines had a surge of activity which saw them expand their territory while carefully curating a large bomber fleet. Finally, the Synthetic Hegemony rose up and struck the other side of the galaxy, briefly controlling all four artefacts, but could not power them before they were pushed back.

In the end, after 49 hours and 375 hard-fought battles, the faction heads settled on a ceasefire, citing the massive bomber stockpiles, exhaustion, and the rapidly approaching working week. I would like to thank everyone for taking part and forgiving the issues we encountered while beating the design into shape. We learnt a lot from this round and made quite a bit of progress.

I want to see lots of experiences, opinions, and feedback, on the forum or on Discord in the planetwars channels. I was not awake for the full two days and could only directly see the Machines experience. I have a general idea of how it played out, but the more we know about what worked and what didn't, the better the next round will be.

For reference, two feedback threads appeared (organically), so listing them here in hope there will not be a 3rd one somewhere else :

https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/39702

https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/39705

This ending is kind of anti-climatic. I understand that players were feeling tired and ,seemingly, there was no end in sight. However I feel it would have been better to pause this weekend, make some tweaks to fix the issues and then continue later. This would have allowed PW to end naturally and we would have been able to see an actual winner. This is just my opinion though, and I can certainly see the opposing argument of starting over cleanly again.

Some additional thoughts:
1) I think PW could benefit from video tutorials that would give players a direct understanding of PW. The wiki provides detailed information but it might not be appealing for everyone to read through 5 or 6 articles. Videos are much easier to understand and are quicker to learn from. The wiki could benefit from having a lot more images so players can directly see what is being referred to in the text.

2) In some games there were very large maps that are unsuitable for 2v2's or 3v3's. I think it's better to have smaller maps for small team games. In 1v1 MM, I recall there were occasional google forms circulating to see which maps were the best and I think something like that could be beneficial here.

3) Many games were very unbalanced. I played 8 PW games and only 2 were remotely balanced. This might especially be annoying to lower rated players who had to constantly fight higher rated players.

4) There was a lot of waiting time between games. After selecting to attack a planet, you had to wait atleast 10 minutes before the game started. Also once your charges were used, you had to wait a long time before you got another one.

5) There was also the problem of PW not ending, that was further complicated by the timezone differences.


All that being said, I genuinely enjoyed this experience and I was excited to see how this event would unfold. I look forward to playing more PW in the future.

I for one am really glad Planetwars ended in mutually-agreed ceasefire. I was almost worried after the first day, when our forces of freedom liberated half of the galaxy, that after I want to sleep, we would just quickly win. I would be writing comments about how planetwars is too easy to end if that had happened.

But I have to say, everyone put up a good fight. This was mostly down to luck, but the factions themselves ended up really well balanced.
So after many hard fought battles, the ceasefire felt like a climactic ending to the war.

I have to say, I enjoyed Planetwars perhaps too much. It felt like playing Zero-K for the first time again. There isn't much higher praise I can give it. I think I have had enough Zero-K games for this year.

I'll write more about my (perhaps too extensive) experience with Planetwars later. There were some problems of course, I'll write about those too.

Which might be a valid strategy in some games, if for example you have 3 purples fighting 3 brown dwarfs and a new defence phase starts, it might be better for one purple to leave to join the defence. But I am not even sure if this works - would PW system prevent you join another battle if you leave one before it finishes? It would be great if rules would be more explained - like when you click resign in PW game it should "resign (you can join another defence battle; you can join another attack battle if you have an attack point, for the current battle the attack points are awarded when the battle finishes)"

Machines made fairly extensive use of that mechanic, not just FFC and Rallehop. We sorta had to, given the limited population.