Battle Overhaul

First of, although Planet Wars is pretty cool, it would be cooler if it had more ingame effects, so that it feels more like an heroic quest to conquer the universe then a succesion of battles in which you try to score points.

I was thinking of a new way to attack planets, for this we will seperate types of planets:
Occupied: A planet in which one faction has most IP, and has at least 10/20%(all numbers and everything open for debate) more than the faction second in line
Contested: Any other normal planet.
Artifact planet: A planet with an artifact

Now each planet would have his own types of battles, these are the ones I made up:

For occupied planet:
--Assault--
In an assault, an opposing faction which has, or hasn't got any influence on a planet (influence will be abreviated to IP from now on) will try landing dropships, trying to take hold of a good spot to build a logistic operation center for further assaults (story wise).
This means that a battle will be fought on the planet in which the attacking team tries to earn IP and lessen the defending teams IP. The defending team will try preventing the other faction gaining IP. The defending team however, can not earn IP.
--Assault ingame--
An assault adds some extras features to the game itself, to be more exact a couple of "buildings".
The attacking team will have a dropship set up somewhere near their spawn, which when destroyed will negate any IP earned (the attacking party can still lessen IP of the opponents though).
The defending team will have 2 Strategic structures, (One near spawn, one near middle), and each one destroyed will result in 25% extra IP damage proportional to what the team would have earned if they won.

Example:
Faction 1 Assaults a planet of Faction 2, looses but did manage to destroy both strategic structures. If they would earn a base IP of 100 if they'd won, so now they still earn 50 IP, but the defending team might make 100 IP, resulting in a loss of 50IP.

--Purge--
In clearance, the planets owner will try and purge anyme units/influence from it's planet. They will do this by attacking potential stronghold of the invaders. In planet wars this means, trying to reduce the enemy IP on planet.
--Purge--
In a purgeneither faction has any buildings, the purging faction can

For contested planet:
--Normal Battle--
Nothing fancy, just win or lose IP

For Artifact planet:
--King of the Hill--
First one to hold the middle for a set time will win the planet. If planet is already taken defenders will spawn in middle.


This new system would mean though that once you own a planet you can not increase your IP, so something new might need to be added for that. Maybe a per turn IP gain on planets you own?

Also I think making buildings should be changed, it should take time in my opion. Time should be measured in turns, but something like, the building only progresses if YOU play in a battle (or maybe only if you win in a battle). So that if someone is trying to build a planetary defense on that planet you want so bad, you can destroy the WIP building before it's finished ingame.

Tell me what you think of this

That sounds good, regular ZK games are getting somehow...linear all the time, always rush, always exploit the most OP units, only terrain gives a little variability. I would also welcome more FFA games.

Maybe we could also make the Dropships actually being a physical thing, that moves around in the universe. Maybe we should add a third variable, being some form of "time" so that everyone can make a max number of moves every day so that the super active people don't have a huge advantage (although maybe with the debt system we can make something so that players that have fought more battle have more "time/turns/movement points" whatever. This might also lead to more strategic play on planet wars instead of a huge activity rush like it kind of is now.

We could then vary the number of turns people get per day to whatever we want. In my opinion planet wars should be something that you might play maybe like one/two battles a day inbetween playing normal games. If we add a turn/time system I think this will also make planetwars battles feel more important. Like it's not just another one, but it's you, leading your factions assault, instead of playing 20 insignificant battles everyday.

There could be a way to force activity of defenders..

There could be sort of challenge/response mechanism..

If you send a dropship to owned planet, planet will be played only if owner and challenger are present and teams split along those lines. Furthermore both sides could "delay" the combat in some way or request "pure clan" match.

But if they fail to play within certain limit (say 48h) both sides suffers big penalties.

Nah, if they fail to show up for 24hours after scheduled time, the battle becomes an auto-lose.