This post will be my thoughts and opinions on the recent Planetwars
I will have some ideas and suggestions, which may or may not be good or useful.
Of course i was a key player for
Machines, which might bias my opinions on some of the following subjects by what worked for and against us.
If you think I'm wrong about something or have a different take, i think you should post and elaborate on it.
Now, wall of text.
Attack Charges (or lack thereof!)I am of the impression the design goal of attack charges was to prevent a weak and understaffed faction from being swept off the board in an inactivity period. From this perspective i would say it succeeded.
Being able to deny your enemy additional attack charges by going on defense only was a valid, if controversial strategy.
When forced into a corner, facing both factions at once with a reduced team, having the ability to slow down the game was very helpful. That being said, i see at least one issue:
Defenses prioritize whoever has the highest PW elo out of all who queue in. One of the biggest issues Planetwars has is how the game design incentivizes stacking your blue and purple stars into the most important battles.
The current defense prioritization + attack charge system means lower rated players are basically forced to wait the full hour to recharge, even in a somewhat active back-and-forth period of attack and defense.
I'd like to see the defender's advantage stay here but i also understand why people think waiting for an hour is frustrating.
Perple Burnout and
Chat-K
Storytime!
It is between 17:00 and 24:00 CEST+2 on the 2nd of May, 2026.
A random lobster opens his favorite video game, Zero-K. Eager to get involved in Planetwars, he enters #Machines and asks how he can help.
He receives bad news: We are on the back foot, having been teamed up against. He is forbidden from attacking either of our enemies, as this will give them attack charges and cause our defense to collapse.
He is forbidden from joining most defenses that pop up, because
FFC and myself need to stack them or our defense will collapse. Now our random lobster is a team player, and actually listens to us.
Neither of us are winning here. For myself and
FFC, we have to play to a lifespan-shortening number of games in rapid succession to prevent it all from coming apart. For our random lobster, he is forced to sit and play
Chat-K, hoping something non-critical comes up he can participate in.
This would have been the experience of every member of Free Machines who booted up the game in this period and actually engaged with our chat.
Never Ending War
The current version of Planetwars without the capital victory condition is far too easy to stalemate.
Victory points being revocable means it's simple to reset progress and prevent a win from being achieved at all. Bombers play a major role here but i will cover them in the next section.
Burnout is likely to set in when there is no endpoint in sight.
Some ideas i had:
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Planetwars has a fixed end-date. The team with the highest victory score at this time wins.
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There is a constant ticking for victory points across all factions. Make these added points irrevocable and add them every X amount of turns to force the game to resolve eventually.
Ultimately the goal here design wise should be for there to be a tangible endpoint.
BombersThe war ended with an outrageous 700+(!!!) bombers stockpiled across all 3 factions. Without doing the math, this is likely enough to turn a large portion of the galaxy neutral if all were unleashed at once.
Bomber usage only really makes sense on defense, or to prevent an imminent victory by neutralizing artifact worlds.
They cannot be used to disable things you might actually want to bomb, like Planetary Defense Grid effectively.
This means stockpiles just get bigger and bigger until all progress is at risk of being erased by a meta layer asset most players cannot control or interact with.
Ideas:
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Stockpile limitations. Use them or lose them.
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Changed functionality. Change the role bombers play on the meta layer to prevent outrageous stockpiling and encourage their use
All in all i think bombers as is are too powerful.
Meta Layer Structures In-Game
The drones from the Planetary Defense Grid warrant some discussion on whether or not they are balanced and fair.
I am of the opinion that they have a right to be powerful, given the high meta layer metal cost combined with the long power-on time + ongoing energy cost of keeping it active.
That being said, on some planets like Maasym, the drones represent a decisive advantage due to the maps layout. On the flip side, planets with larger maps would make for poor PDG planets, as the drones reach would not be sufficient.
The large, hard to destroy radar given by Interception Network is also worth mentioning, as it is a strong advantage on small maps as well, good spawn placement willing.
I'm not really sure what or how to change things to make it fairer, without robbing defenders of having an advantage at all. I like the idea of being able to fortify worlds at great cost on the meta layer, but if it means that winning a battle there is impossible unless you get big skill disparity it could be considered problematic.
Treaties and Their Consequences
In my opinion, this is possibly the most important subject of this entire thread for me. I think treaties need an overhaul.
Treaties being indefinite is simply too oppressive for whoever is the third party being ganged up upon. Being put in a permanent defensive situation like what happened for
Machines on Saturday with literally no end point in sight for when we could expect the pressure to ease was miserable. Simply sitting and hoping the other two factions will decide the other is more dangerous now is not a fun position to be in.
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Treaties should have turn limits, perhaps anywhere from 5 to 50 turns. Guarantee costs should be defined and scale with the length and type of treaty. This would ensure that lengthy ceasefires are costly and should be thought through.
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Some types of lower stakes treaties could still have the option of being indefinite.
In my opinion, the state of the game should be a 3-way war as often as possible, lulls in this should be fleeting.
Odin Rushing
The latest change to command centers unfortunately brought Odin rushes back to being valid and hard to stop.
In
B2417769 8 on Cobalt Dream v1.1 the
Machines team not only knew the Odin rush was coming, we scouted it and began preparing for it and were still far too late. The amount of BP required is kind of difficult to get, when you still also have to put some effort into playing properly.
I was personally able to save the extra HQ, but this was only because the second Odin strike was severely delayed and it became apparent to me the enemy was fully surrendering the battle for the Odin rush.
I think we went a little too far with these changes, we should probably see if there's a middle ground.
Evacuation Mechanic
Ten minutes to charge and an extra minute to actually evacuate is simply too much in small teams, especially if you expect to lose the battle or if you have several important structures you'd like to try and save. It also doesn't automatically evac your assets so it's possible to lose something because you simply forgot.
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Automatically evacuate assets, perhaps priority could be set by commanding player
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Reduce evacuation time, perhaps reducing it extra with adv. wormhole and/or the amount of assets on the planet.
That's all i've got for today, thanks for reading!
