Planetwars Testing

quote: 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 effort to save the day. They failed, but they were a good way to end PW.

Victory points have a few purposes:

• They act as non-snowbally objectives that can be contested throughout the game.
• They put the game on a clock, preventing it from dragging forever.
• They should add some choice regarding near-term benefits and long-term goals.

In a more active and coordinated planetwars round I expect taking an opponents HQ to be a very difficult task. The planetwars round to extend for a long time and turn into a long grid with large infrastructures. The artifacts give the round and ending point and, more importantly, act as focal points to fight over. They need powering and defending so gaining VP should come at a cost to other aspects of your economy.

A good balance point may be one where gathering VP looks like a waste of time at the start of the round, compared to general expansion. The artefacts can be more expensive to power and we could require a larger number of victory points to win. An alternate system could be one that requires a certain VP lead for victory. Perhaps the first faction to get 200 more VP than either of their opponents would win. In any case, VP should become important towards the middle of the game.

quote: you seem to say there's a do no harm thing you guys got going on, where a newb who plays shouldn't disadvantage their faction. Here's an idea: add chicken missions. deep in allied territory, let players who aren't pvp-focused or firendly to the idea of PVP fight chickens on allied planets like 2 jumps from boarder worlds with allied faction influence >80%. put some minor rewards and something at stake too.

We've thought about things like this. Unfortunately they tend to run up against another restriction on the design, the one where we decree that winning should be fun. By this I mean that the actions you take towards victory should be fun. We have learnt over many rounds that some people can take PW very seriously and, if given the opportunity, will consistently perform unfun actions just to win. If new players can literally do no harm by playing chicken games then it is a benefit with no downside. The hardcore players will grind out many quick chicken games to farm these benefits. They've done worse things to win in the past.

quote: 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.

I feel like this is just a failure of organization. Many dropships can be produced for free each turn. A faction should expect to receive enough metal to make a warp gate around every 6 turns, on average. Sure, if they are producing other infrastructure and rushing structures they have less to spend on warp cores. The point still stands though, if they have 'finished' their infrastructure development then a faction could launch warp attacks much more frequently than one every 50 turns.

quote: Victory points have a few purposes: They act as non-snowbally objectives that can be contested throughout the game. They put the game on a clock, preventing it from dragging forever. They should add some choice regarding near-term benefits and long-term goals.

Counterpoint: Victory Points are really really boring.
Vicory points shouldn't exist for the same reason the "I win" button was removed from the game. There are much more fun ways to achieve these goals.

How does the main game achieve these goals? Superweapons! So the solution is simple - turn artifacts into ancient broken repairable superweapons!

Superweapon balance sits on a sliding scale from slippery-slope inducing to an I-win button with little good in-between. What works for Zero-K does not necessarily work for Planetwars. Zero-K, like most RTS, embraces the nature of games in which you capture territory to make units with which to capture more territory. In Planetwars we have to be very careful about the impact of slippery-slope mechanics because such things can quickly make the actions of the people playing the PW battles irrelevant. The planetbuster superweapon meant that a faction could effectively win Planetwars on the galaxy level without any particular coordination or prowess within the battles themselves. Planetwars should be about the battles.

There are probably some good superweapon designs but they are hard to find and expensive to implement. We've looked towards Euro(board)games because they tend to be rife with comeback mechanisms that attempt to keep games somewhat even until the end. Come up with something to fight over in the space between the starting territories with the following properties:

• Is not worth rushing early in the round.
• Cannot be ignored. If a faction is ahead in controlling this then they must be dealt with.
• Does not improve the factions ability to retain control. Ideally it would even slightly reduce their ability.

I've been thinking that defenders have all those cool ingame weapons like free drone spawners or advradar (garrison and interception grid respectively), and income from the eco buildings.

It would be cool if attackers also had some weapons, but those were distinct and not usable for defending.

So here's my idea: Local offensive weapons

These are structures that you can build. Each has a targeting option like the old planetbuster, etc, but they can only target planets in limited range - say, at most 2 links away.

Game mechanics wise, these project threat, but don't help defend. So they are excellent targets for preventive defense warp sorties.

When activated and targeting a planet, they place a "token" similar to dropships in orbit. This can look like a bomber if icons are rare, because currently bombers can't be in orbit anyway.

This token is used up if an attack by the token-owning faction happens on that planet, and replenished on the next economy turn (or maybe once per several turns).

There can only be one token per structure, but e.g. if you have a stack of similar structures targeting the same planet, you could get multiple activations of their ability, or use it several times per turn otherwise.

If an attack happens while the token is present, the attackers spawn with a Comms Beacon structure that allows them to use activable abilities depending on the type of the token in orbit. If there are multiple tokens, the Comms Beacon provides access to them all. Mainly this is for implementation and UI convenience; the abilities could just as well be global.

The ingame abilities should have cooldowns; that is. if you have a stack of several tokens of the same type, you can't just use them all immediately. I imagine these cooldowns being on the order of 30s to 3 minutes. Abilities could be pre-charged, or have to charge from zero.

Losing the Comms Beacon means the abilities cannot be used anymore, all tokens are wasted.

Examples of ingame abilities that i imagine accessible this way would be:

1) Scanner Sweep. Upon activation, a target area is revealed for a while. This already exists in code, so should be easy-ish to wire up.
2) Orbital Bombardment. Upon activation, a reasonably slow-moving projectile impacts a target location anywhere on the map. I envision this having about Concussion Shell or Shock Rifle power. At most a single (but precise) Bertha shot.
3) Supply Drop. Crates of reclaimable metal shipped to desired location. Minor damage may occur to units in target area if it's not cleared.
4) Biopod. Drops a bunch of chickens somewhere on the map, with some spread. Chickens attack random things, like usual. They do not reproduce. (or do they?)

Offensive abilities will have to be an idea for another time, as we're focusing on getting this PW bugfixed first.

What is broken there?

There should perhaps be a button for joining planetwars that puts you in an automatically selected team for those who doesnt care which faction they end up in. Or perhaps some other balancing mechanic, because there sure seems to be an uneven distribution of commanders for whatever reason.

I mean in addition to being able to choose your faction, some players arent going to care which faction they end up in. Perhaps just some text encouraging players to choose the faction with the least players.

but if they have joined as spectator dont they know everything.. cant they see it all?