War Sweeps the Galaxy

Planetwars begun recently between the Empire, Dynasty and Federation. Having gobbled up most neutral planets, the three sides now struggle for control of ancient artifacts with which to dominate the galaxy. Join a side and watch the progress here: https://zero-k.info/Planetwars

As one of the first round defenders of Radius, that felt pointless. Saw Tartar go down giving federation free access to radius from across the map. Radius goes up as defense option. 5 minutes to assemble a team. Attackers are raar and drone and some other guy who im sure is top 10. Defenders are 2 people who are basically on their first planetwars fight(Litterally my first planetwar fight, and non-casual fight), and one guy who has a couple of fights.

Defenders lose, of course. We weren't even sure how to evac the stuff off the planet, or even if we should, since it is the capital. Pushing the evac button did nothing that we could tell. Totally roflstomped.

GG I guess?

Not rly gg, but a great example why planetwars in total needs to be totaly overworked...

Who in the dev team is responsible for planetwars? I would like to know who i need to contact for ideas.

I had fun, wish it would have gone on a lot longer was enjoying it.

Allow me to list the most glaring issues.

- Its purple star rank circlejerk. Literally no one else is even relevant or can hope to compete.
- Dozens of players in #Federation, only 2-3 can play at a time. Does not scale very well at all.
- Noobs that want to play are nothing more than absolute dead-weight, hugely harmful to a faction to have a lvl 5 player who spam 'join'. This encourages leadership raging hard at new players.
- Win condition is literally just capture 1 planet. Very dull and anti-climatic. Empire was doing way better than Federation but we captured the right planet so we win.
- Coming out of a winning battle where we captured a planet, the "attack" list hadn't updated so we ended up attacking a planet we already own.
- Dynasty was a bit of a dead faction so we all had to wait 20 mins every time it was their turn. Not much incentive to switch Dynasty or to care about balance.
- So many people dont understand anything about PW. It's not explained anywhere except wall of text on a wiki page.

Edit:

- Another thing that bother me was the personal ownership of planets felt like very redundant feature. The code will always hand each planet to a player who does not have a planet. If I win 3 battles to capture a planet but ANY of the players in the 3v3 team of any of the games doesnt have a planet then he will be owner. So it's like system is designed to have as many different planet owners as possible. Whats the point of this? The code should always favor the individual with the most personal influence like it used to. In the case of a tie, it should go to the individual with less planets.

I think a lot of people were enjoying this PW and were excited but it ended so quickly and wasnt fun for a lot of people. I hope it is reworked and restarted quickly.

That was fast lol.

quote: We weren't even sure how to evac the stuff off the planet, or even if we should, since it is the capital. Pushing the evac button did nothing that we could tell. Totally roflstomped. GG I guess?

quote: Yeah it needs a rework.

quote: purple star rank circlejerk

quote: So many people dont understand anything about PW. It's not explained anywhere except wall of text on a wiki page.

I was afraid I was the only one out of the loop here; it's nice to hear that I'm not alone.

From the perspective of someone who who didn't (and still doesn't?) know anything about Planetwars:

As far as I could tell (and I really have no idea what I'm talking about here, but that's kind of the point), the main ZK players only want other veterans playing Planetwars, and hate the idea of lobs "ruining" it (quoted from multiple players of the more blunt variety). Which is totally fine. The confusing part is that - again, as far as I could tell - no one wants to actually admit that anywhere, so it's in this vague area where someone like myself has no idea if I should, would, or could be taking part or not.

But - as far as I can tell - a major reason that this situation has arisen may be due the implementation and execution of the current iteration or Planetwars, such that completely clueless lobs can - from what I've heard - actually cause significant damage to their own factions quickly, easily, or without having any idea that they're doing so (again, I really have no idea, here). If this is the case, 2 prime areas to easily fix this would be
1) if we're going to have this situation where noobs are discouraged from being interested in or being taught anything, just make that clear and make it invite-only
2) revise whatever the battle/lobby/tutorial/wiki/forum system is, so that a noob can't actually fuck things up, or must get permission to do so, or is warned first, or is actually educated on how to do things.

For other context, I posted about this in the main thread, but got 0 response from anyone involved. Also, while Planetwars was running, I saw Shaman was in Discord voice alone, so I hopped on and we chatted for a bit. And then a few minutes later he started talking about the game he had started, and I responded. But he got angry and complained that I wasn't the one he was talking to. Even though we were the only 2 in there. And so I left, of course. I'm guessing that he was in some other voice chat at the same time, and not just crazy. From what I can piece together, there's some invite-only mumble server that only the regulars use.

Edit: I actually wanted to see what the battle lobby looked like, so I clicked "join" on a random 0/2 planet, but it turned out there was no lobby, and there was no "cancel queue", nor was their a warning to that effect. So I ended up having to play and lose a match I didn't feel I even supposed to play. I believe it was a close fight, and even though I took the lead on my side early, we were outranked by a blue star, and eventually succumbed to recluse and firewalker creep. I'm apparently still new enough to have thought that I could counter recluses by a raider counter-attack. Boy was I wrong. If I remember right, the turning point was when I lost 22 scorchers in a single push over open ground against recluses without killing a single one.

Again, this is just my perspective. Planetwars looks incredible, like reeeeeeeally incredible. And I am so excited for the possibility of playing it in the future, and be a part of a game-integrated PvP campaign with tactics, grand strategy, and politics that looks cooler than anything else like it.

The noob hating happens because of all the trap units. If you make multiple storages at the start, you hurt your team econ pretty badly right off the bat. Same with trying to rush something big. Idunno how to fix it, but as long as a noob has the ability to cripple his whole team by making some buildings, they will get yelled at.

Except the defense of Radius was composed of 70% noobs, not because we clicked faster but because we were the only options. Raising the bar just would have made the fight uncontested when we couldn't find 3 people to defend the capital.

"- Its purple star rank circlejerk. Literally no one else is even relevant or can hope to compete."

Yep. Capturing a planet like Radius should require many battles happening asynchronously not 3 pro v noob battles. For example, give the planet 1000 HP (i think its influence in PW?) and a massive HP regen so that even if one stack is continuously winning battles against it the planet wont be captured without some other people winning as well. Alternatively, high defense and diminishing returns for the same players.

Furthermore, I think defenders on core worlds should get some pretty massive defenses at least enough to make a rush vs them impossible. The Planetary Defense Grid seems to already be along those lines as its drones have a massive range and do ridiculous damage.

Suggestions:

Each faction has a limited but regenerating number of interplanetary missiles and if there is a very unbalanced game you can click "Call interplanetary strike from fleet" and then just have to survive for a particular amount of time before a CAI starts autotargetting nukes at your enemy.

For extremely important worlds maybe something similar with "Call reinforcements" that gives you some detriments.

So...
Core problems with planetwars:
1:Low skill players are detrimental to a faction. This should never happen.
2:Planetwars is too fast. A faction can go from having a nice border to dead in 2 hours.
3:Current lobby UI for planetwars doesn't help players make sense of the situation.
4:It has some really obscure game mechanics. That by itself is not a problem, but they aren't indicated anywhere.
5:Really bad documentation, wiki is outdated and incomplete, no tutorial, no way to learn PW mechanics in singleplayer.

Anything else?