Planetwars design considerations

[GoogleFrog]

Here are the main unresolved points from the test so far.

1. Bombing your own planets after a failed defense can entirely wipe out the progress made by the defense. This seems bad, one of the general rules is that people who put the work in to play the games shouldn't be invalidated by faction heads pressing buttons.
2. Turn order is very important. If the faction turns go A -> B -> C, then if A attacks B, the players from B cannot immediately take part in a counterattack on A. On the other hand, if the defender timer is long enough compared to game length, then players from A that attack B might have enough time to join a defense against B at the tail end of the B turn.
3. People have remembered that taking a faction HQ ends the game. This just seems bad as it leads to a quick round of "beat up the weakest faction". The ideal of 3-way PW was (probably) that the two weaker sides could team up against the stronger one, but that does not seem to be on track to happen. HQ-rush has happened before and looks set to happen again.

[GoogleFrog]

Here are some incomplete ideas for some things to try.

For 1.

Perhaps we could nerf the IP destroyed by bombers. An alternate approach is to limit how far they can bomb, perhaps a bomber cannot send the IP of any one faction below 25 (the remaining 25 is "dug in" somehow). This would leave the attackers in range of taking the planet with a flawless victory, but might still be bad as partial victories could be wiped out by bombers. This might be something we can balance just by tweaking bomber rates and perhaps boosting them vs structures.

A very simple approach would be to disallow bombing your own planet, or perhaps, to make bombers indiscriminately reduce IP (or, say, reduce your own IP for half the amount). I like reducing your own IP for half the amount because it means the planet will quickly turn neutral if bombers are overused. An attack that is bombed away will still have the effect of reducing the IP of the defenders, because the defenders will hit their own IP.

[GoogleFrog]

For 2.

The first thing to note is that the advantage of being after another faction may flip based on the balance of attack timers, or just on the situation. In any case I don't think we can make the advantage reliably small enough for nobody to reasonably complain about. The advantage was a lot less present in non-parallel planetwars because you would often have more players than could join any single turn. This meant that the order of turns mattered a lot less.

Parallel attacks

One rework-style solution is to have all attacks and defenses happen at the same time. Basically:

• On the attack phase everyone is served the list of planets that they can attack.
• The squads are made as usual for the attackers, but now every faction is sending squads.
• The defense phase serves everyone with the list of planets that need defending.
• People who are slated to attack cannot join a defense.

This idea has several issues.

• Ideally factions would hold back some people to do defenses, but this is against local human behaviour (i.e. click the Do Stuff button ASAP).
• If factions fail to hold back defenders to counter incoming attacks, then we just produce auto-wins, which is boring. People don't get to play and the victory feels cheap.
• If a faction anticipates incorrectly and holds back too many people for defense, then those people feel cheated out of the oppotunity to play. This effectively teaches people to click the Do Stuff button ASAP, which would make player behaviour quite unstable (or just converge to always attack).
• In inactivity times, letting everyone attack could make the turn timer too short.

Random turn order

Another approach is to randomise who takes the next turn. By doing so we remove the inherent advantage due to a fixed turn order, because the turn order would randomly flip around. This could be implemented as some sort of varying probability of being the next attacker. If a faction last attacked three or more turns ago, its chance of being the attacker for the next turn is:

• 2/3 if it last attacked three turns ago.
• 1 if it last attacked four or more turns ago

If the faction that has not attacked for three turns does not become the attacker, then the faction that attacked two turns ago gets to attack. The faction that just attacked last turn never gets to attack twice in a row. There are many issues.

• Not being able to plan whether you will get to attack sort of sucks.
• A faction can be attacked twice in a row by the same faction, just by chance.
• A high probability of being able to attack in three turns means that the system will flip turn order less often, but if turn order is an advantage then long stretch may be bad. This trades off against local uncertainty.
• This approach feels weird.

Manipulation

Perhaps factions bid something or make some sort of time-themed superweapon to flip the turn order around. Idk, feels a bit tricky.

[GoogleFrog]

For 3.

• General feedback from other rounds is that it feels cheap to have one of the other two factions beat up the weakest one.
• There is a potential dynamic where one of the stronger factions defends the weaker one, but there is always the risk that the defending faction will see an opportunity, break some treaties, and go for a HQ win themselves. It is hard for the weaker faction to prevent this from happening.
• The weaker faction can end up in a kingmaking situation by its choice of where to expend its stretched defensive resources, as it is attacked by two factions at once. Kingmaking is always a potential concern in a 3-way game, but it is accentuated by making the weakest side the focus of attention.

My proposal is simply to make the HQ planets unattackable and untargetable by any abilities. I think it would be good to run a PW, probably a test but maybe a round, where we don't have this option, and see what happens if we let artefact victory play out.

[GoogleFrog]

Here are some other notes.

Neutral defense on a front

It is possible to bomb a planet to neutrality on a front between two factions. Ideally the two factions would be the ones involved in any fight over that planet, but as it stands, I don't know of anything that stops the third faction hopping on the neutral defense and throwing the battle.

My suggestions is that, when a planet has too many defenders, the tie for who gets to defend is first broken by whoever has the most IP on the planet. After that ties would be broken as usual by PW-WHR. This would naturally let the faction with nearby planets take control of the defense, as long as their wormhole are spreading a bit of IP, which seems likely.

[Pockets-byte]

the ability to coodinate is inherently tied to your presence in unofficial chats or just simply through #zk
planetwars could probably come with default faction irc chats that are automaticaly joined based on your presence in a faction in the client, this would make coodination a lot more natural and less reliant on external sources that may even feel like cheating to some players

[GoogleFrog]

Players are already automatically joined to the faction channel.