FFA Modes

I've noticed people playing FFA a lot more lately. Does anyone have any feedback on it or ideas for improvements?

When I last played FFA I thought that it suffers from a bit of an information shortage. It can be very difficult to figure out who is winning and to convince people to gang up and attack someone. I liked the recent comment by someone that FFA is about "dying loudly", as that gives you the best shot of getting help.

It would be quite easy to add a bit more information to FFA. Sure, this would violate the pure spirit of commanders arriving to kill each other, but it could make the games better overall. Here are some ideas:

• Reveal mex ownership globally by colouring the mex circles outside LOS.
• Add a score tracker that reports the total metal value (storage + assets + partially completed).
• Add an approximate income tracker.

I would only try one mode at a time and I prefer the score tracker that reports total metal value. A large gap in value is one of the clearest ways to see who is winning and I like how it does not reveal the shape of anyone's territory. Of course it could backfire because it makes weaker players less able to appear scarier than they are when trying to ward off attacks. Perhaps 1st 2nd and 3rd should be shown. Perhaps only show players that have more than the average value.

I made this thread because another approach was mentioned by Dissonant on the RTS Discord ( https://discord.gg/BYCYUx ).

quote: On the topic of alt win conditions: One of my favorite concepts I've ever experienced was in some now-dead Starcraft 2 Arcade mod that I believe was called "Conflict Mode". Effectively, every player had a win condition that conflicted with at least one other players' win conditions, and no one knew each others' win conditions (although trying to deduce the other players' win conditions based off of their actions was the primary intent of this mod). Example win conditions were things like: Red: Be the first player to reach 30,000 total minerals mined Blue: Be the first player to reach 30,000 total minerals mined Teal: Be the first player to stockpile 10,000 minerals Yellow: Be the first player to stockpile 10,000 minerals Purple: Kill Orange Orange: Die after 20 minutes Black: Don't let Orange die White: Kill someone before 15 minutes Green: Don't let anyone die before 15 minutes And in a game like this, it's possible for multiple players to win. When players could figure out which other players had goals that did not conflict with them, they could use it to their advantage, striking deals like: Purple telling Red, "I'll give you my 3rd expansion if you send your entire army to help me kill Orange" Green telling Purple, "I'll kill your economy if you attack Orange before 15 minutes, but I'll help you kill Orange immediately after that if you agree to wait until then." I've always kind of wanted to design a game around a similar premise maybe not necessarily an RTS but I first encountered it in a now-defunct SC2 mod

Those goals are examples and perhaps it would be interesting to come up with some that make sense for ZK. What about a FFA game mode where each player is secretly allocated a set of mexes that they have to control by 30:00, and everyone who controls their mexes is declared to be winners. There are also other ideas floating around, such as assassination modes where the goal is to defeat particular players. Lots of crazy modes are possible with lua. People have written capture the flag and king of the hill modes for Spring before.

The alternate game modes sound much funnier to me.

The proposed changes might make FFA more balanced but that would mean it will last longer and not sure if that would make it more enjoyable.

often killing the weaker guy is still viewed as the only chance to win because of the reclaim and mex it will grant.. but your right .. working together is the only hope but because you cant win together its hard to get the other guy to commit a sizable army in an alliance.. if you could form alliances and win with them it would attract the lesser players into an alliance mutual victory

There's a lot of blatant lying and manipulation done in FFA. I always thought the game mode would be better with no chat at all. At least that way, I wouldn't walk away from a game thinking that XXXX player is a no-good lying snake. Although I know that a lot of people enjoy that aspect. Maybe it could be a toggleable option to keep everyone sweet.

Peace:
- Ability to declare peace to the enemy
- Description of the territory by line
- Prohibition / permission of movement during the peace on the territory
- The peace must work on a timer
- The peace cannot be destroyed
- All information about the peaces must be public
- Ability to transfer units / buildings
- The ability to transmit data from radars, reconnaissance

Hide player name and rank:
- null
- the ability to see power points


convenient chat for sending private messages

Top50 ffa players

We should be able to renew peace

Kind of depends who you're with. Being honest about what's going doesn't invalidate the influence lying players have over your wellbeing. Sometimes in FFA you get lucky, other times you don't. Depends on the winds of gullibility and who your neighbours are.

What if you could temporarily share vision in a zone? That way you could give trustworthy information.

Heh, storage farms would start to be the meta then :D

I liked your idea of highlighting mex circles outside of vision. It gives a player the chance to see how well-developed a given player has become and target them without adding screen clutter with graphs or a hotkey to pull up a laggy menu.

It also has the advantage of not actually showing income because of overdrive.


unrelated, but while on the subject of overdrive, I'd really like to be able to see a cable or tether connecting a unit to your power grid, making it easier to spot and take out energy pylons when assaulting power-sucking units like desolators.