The key issue is making innocents move or giving the phantom some reason to expose himself to everyone. Currently how i play the game whats my incentive to go out right aggressive? I'm not the best player and some innocents can out eco me even with the extra resources so i find it productive to be tactical.
Initially, this is how I played as Phantom as well. I'm still not all that good at FA, but I've picked up a bit about Phantom along the way.
Due to the way Phantom is structured, you either play a short aggressive strategy or a very long drawn out deceptive one. If you want to stay hidden, you're pretty much forced to throw away a good portion of the extra mass/energy that you get. So, you really can't leverage the Phantom bonus unless you play agressively. In addition, you get a better bonus once someone breaks with you (this is an incentive for innocents to remain allied with everyone, otherwise some people would just break at the start).
I can usually take out at least one innocent (sometimes two) right out of the gate (because people still don't defend against tele-mazer, my favorite attack strategy). So within the course of a minute I can take it from 4 on 2 to 2 on 2. Those are much better odds. from that point Phantoms go 1v1 against innocents and will usually finish the other two off. Taking out the other phantom is the tricky part. I'll usually plan an appropriate point and stab the other Phantom in the back just before I (or he) take out the last innocent. The bottom line is that it's easier to win a short game if you have a good strategy for playing it.
The long games are much harder to manage. If you play slow to hide that you're Phantom, any good innocents will have just as good a base as you do by 45 minutes in. Even 1 on 1 can be difficult in that scenario. The only option then is to play the innocents against each other or go for a superweapon and try to fend them all off (that rarely works). Playing them against each other can sometimes be done, but it always dependent on who is in the game (i.e. you never know what you're going to get). I've seen some long games go really strange ways. If you can sucessfully get them to attack each other, (and maybe get one or two taken out) it can get easier. That being said, you've still got to play very carefully. If you blow your cover at any point along the way you can still end up dead in a hurry. The other disadvantages of long games are that they take a LONG time and everyone in the game needs to have a good PC (long games always turn into Simcity contests). People aren't always up for playing a 1.5 hour chess match with the sim speed at -2.
With either strategy though, you still have to be able to kill the last player standing. If you don't plan for that, you'll lose almost every time.
new to phantom or fa they don't use the resources to their advantage and can often lead to abuse upset games unsure of what they need to do, this can be partly the fault of innocents for not attacking. This kind of phantom never wins, not sure someway to better define the phantom innocents roles to new players?
You're right. I should probably write a post explaining the basics of Phantom-X.
although reducing the amount of your allies could be considered penalty enough
Yeah. I don't think any further penalties are necessary. You've just killed one of your allies and you probably lost at least a third of your army doing it. That's penalty enough.
Hmm if you get a bonus for killing phantoms or phantom vs phantom bonus, I'd like to see a wild card basically if you do introduce paladins when a phantom kills them they get + bonus, but if an innocent kills a paladin they get some kinda penalty like -resource drain(for a certain amount of time?, 5 minutes?) after all he was their champion ^^, The paladin would also get some bonus if he kills a phantom he gets an increase in his amount of resources, but killing an innocent means he loses his bonus income for a time period like a penalty box...
I don't really see where any of this is necessary. The bonus for killing a Phantom is that he's now dead. The penalty for killing an innocent is (see comment above).
With Duck_42 being the only one I know with the rare combination of time, motivation and experience to actually code any proposed changes, I'd suggest prioritizing what is easy to implement (kill bonus and/or paladin). Changes should be incremental so they can be easily tested for balance implications until consensus is reached.
Motivation...yes 
, Experience...sort of 
, Time...uh no, not really. 
.
The type of changes we're discussing will need to be play tested before they are fielded to FAF. That means some sort of seperate mod file, and some people who want to play test it 
. I'll probably need to integrate the scripts with a map to make it work right (regular mods can't have lobby options).Statistics: Posted by Duck_42 — 13 Jul 2012, 01:21
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