Planetwars Testing

The Galactic Map needs a legend explaining the various symbols that are used on the planets.

The homeworlds and the artefact worlds need to be designated more prominently. Yes, I see the icons that are on them now, but the planets themselves should be larger than all the others, and the homeworld/artefact icons need to stand out even more.

The faction boxes above the map need to name each faction's homeworld, and need to list any artefact worlds that the faction controls. E.G.

Federation
Homeworld: Sparta
Planets: 26
Commanders: 20
Combat skill: 1405
Artefact worlds:

• Illiad

The planets should be larger, and the controlling faction icon should overlap the planet, like this:



If the purple ring underneath the planet represents wormholes, it would be better to remove it, and instead have an icon that indicates a wormhole is NOT present (or is disabled), so that the common case takes up no visual room and the unusual case is more easily identified.

Animated clan icons (like TheMooseIsLoose has) need to be de-animated on the Galactic Map.

I honestly think a PW round should last 8-120 days (this range includes fun rush strategies and long epic struggles), with a normal round being somewhere around 20-40 days. That said, I haven't had that much PW experience, but I remember all the previous rounds being too fast for my taste.

Federation should have tried capturing Throne .. it was just 1 hop away .. capturing throne = win.

I like them being for a weekend only. This allows players to commit, build a team and focus on the game. Otherwise it'd probably be more of a casual background thing that is impossible to track for anyone who doesn't make playing it his full time job.

DeinFreund - Ten days with two weekends would be a good balance between "get organized and hit it hard during the weekend" and "build up long-term plans run by people who can spend time on it".

You'd get two large sessions with lots of players focused on the game - one session to start the game, and one session to end it - and in between you have a "quiet period" where handfuls of players who can spare the time (or who can drop in once or twice) can keep things going until the big finale on the second weekend.

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I like the idea of PW being a special event. It encourages players (including newbies!) to jump into games, which a) breaks up the Big ClusterF* Game, and b) gets people used to playing matchmaker-style pickup games.

Maybe PW shouldn't allow turns if there's not at least, say, three active players of each faction logged in. Maybe even higher? High enough that you don't get many "no defense" turns, but not so high that you miss out on games that could have happened.

Thanks for playing. I hope everyone had enjoyable games. There is likely to be another test soon to test fixes for treaties and a parallel attack system.

I saw the wormhole activation issue and have tried this:

Now disabled wormholes are a bit larger and adv. wormholes are green icons pointing to the left. This should make it clear when a planet has an active wormhole. I am not too keen on hiding the enabled wormholes from the map completely as then they would either have no icon in the structures screen or have an inconsistent icon. I don't think the position of the faction icon is an issue for clarity, as planets have colour-coded names, but they could be closer for neatness. I agree that the clan icons should not animate.

Treaties need fixing (ticket 2119) as the defensive pact and staging point treaties were found not to work. Some may be removable but I think we at least need a way to aid in the defense of another faction (either one of their planets or all of them).

We've come up with an extension to the invasion phases system which should solve many of the issues that people raised (ticket 2132).

• maackey reported that they felt the need to camp the PW tab just to get into a game. Even if they clicked 'join' fast enough they might not have clicked the first planet to fill. This lead them to wanting to take part in planetwars but often missing out.
• DeinFreund does not like that new players can accidentally 'waste' important battles by clicking the 'join' button first. This is most problematic when attacking or defending warp dropships. DF wants some way to reserve these attacks for their elite inner circle.
• We ( Licho and I) don't want planetwars to move any further towards being an elitist activity which is optimally played by a small number of highly coordinated players. A core of coordinated players should exist in each faction but that should not be all there is. Disorganized new players should be designed as a net positive to their faction and they all players should have the opportunity to play planetwars games. Factions should want to attract new players.

The design we came up with to solve these problems is parallel attacking and defending. In short:

• The signup phase (for both attack and defense) is not terminated as soon as the first planet reaches its quota. This allows people to sign up and fill the quota on multiple planets.
• At some point, all full battles are launched (either sending an invasion challenge or starting a game).
• Players who are not in a full battle when the launch occurs are reshuffled to create full battles.
• Highly ranked faction officials can replace lower ranked members in an already full attack or defense. The displaced player is automatically moved to a different planet.

Read the full ticket for an explanation without any lies-of-simplification. This system should allow (almost) everyone who signs up to attack to launch an attack. Everyone gets to participate and the faction leaders get to step in for particularly important battles. Everyone may not get to participate on defense but attacking is the more glamorous activity so I feel like this is fine. Furthermore, the parallel system does not exacerbate the issue of two players conquering the whole galaxy in an evening because you need more players to launch parallel attacks.

quote: Maybe PW shouldn't allow turns if there's not at least, say, three active players of each faction logged in. Maybe even higher? High enough that you don't get many "no defense" turns, but not so high that you miss out on games that could have happened.

This violates the ideal that disorganized/new players should do no harm to their faction. The optimal strategy in this case is to only have your highly skilled players log in, and then they should only come online in sufficient numbers to dominate. Optimal play in this PW involves (almost) nobody playing any games.

On the question of pacing, we are unsure how long planetwars should last so have some levers in the design to affect the pacing. The two main ones are:

• Maximum planet influence. Planets would take twice as long to conquer if their influence capacity was 200.
• Victory Points required to win.

Ten day planetwars sounds like a fine plan, although it would be hard to aim exactly as it depends on player activity.

Does anyone have any opinions on the metagame balance? In a proper round of planetwars there would be a buildup time during which people can stand for election. Also, the factions would not be cheated 10k metal or be 'run' by test accounts. We may try this system for the next test, although I would still want test accounts with diplomacy powers to test the treaty effects. The only piece of feedback on the metagame I have is that the Artefacts could cost much more energy to activate (600 to 1000?) and could take more turns to activate, since we have the rush system.

I believe it finished automatically. Perhaps it finished and then another battle ended?

There's this issue with VP victory that it lacks a finale, a reward for investing the time.
Think of it like adding a rule to ZK that the first team to make 10k metal will win and the game will just stop (without the enemy units exploding even). That sounds awful.
The fact that battles were still going on (and even won by the other team) after PW was already decided and after it already ended, makes it feel like PW is not about the battles. And PW should damn well be about the battles, we're not playing Civilization.
The domination victory of taking the enemy capital is pretty good. In the previous PW, we made some fun last ditch efforts to save the day. They failed, but they were a good way to end PW.

I have some half-baked ideas of making victory points about victories, rather than artifacts.

In general I feel like the meta-game actions should have higher availability and impact. Every faction received a huge chunk of free metal, yet most battles were still fought without any dropships in orbit. I haven't seen any warp cores being used. Of course a longer war will lead to more such actions, but why don't we increase the usage of those things to one in every 5 battles instead of one in every 50.

So IMO, additionally to any changes to prolong the game, we could easily double each planet's IP max and double the dropship and bomber production.

Another random idea regarding VP, endgame and superweapons: Would it be possible to have a team start with a completed nuke silo? It still costs 3240 metal to actually build the missile, so it's not an instant win as most other superweapons would be. It would give the enemy team some serious worries, so they might have to focus on a CC rush or similar. Still it could probably be raided in early game or defended against with an antinuke of similar price.

Whether this would be some kind of planet defense, superweapon, or bonus for capturing a special planet I don't know. Either way it could be another very clear signalization that the meta-game is going well/badly for you.