New Galactic War Map

[everywhere116]

I had an idea for a new Galactic War map. One of the things I always found....wrong with the galactic war maps was that they were always unbalanced. The first one encouraged A lot of UEF-Cybran conflicts and a lot of Aeon-Seraphim conflicts but not much else. The second one was better but it was still unbalanced, in fact the Cybrans and Seraphim used the unbalanced nature to their advantage by forming an alliance and permenantly cutting off the UEF and Aeon pods off from each other, something the UEF and Aeon couldn't do. This map fixes both those problems.

To understand it though, you have to think a bit three dimensionally. Think of each large hexagon like the hexagon of a soccer ball. Soccer balls have tetrahedral symmetry and it's easy to make each "point" in the tetrahedron the capital of a faction and then have each faction radiate outwards from there. The result will be a map that is identical for each faction and one where each faction has the same size border with every other faction, guarunteeing conflicts between every single faction with each other.

What this map does is then takes the soccer ball and cuts it in half and spreads out the surface so it can be seen in two-dimensional terms. But the edges still retain their borders, which is represented here by the numbers, so the hexagons that both have the number 3 by them are adjacent to each other along that edge, etc. But in terms of raw gameplay and map positioning every faction's position is still identical.

This could be taken a step further by adding a couple features. If you're, say Cybran, and don't want to see your area of the map split into two parts, you could hit a button and center the map with they Cybran capital in the middle, and moves the other factions around to compensate. As long as the map's chirality was maintained you could do that for every faction. Or you could separate it and view each hexagon and the surrounding systems as a whole, and when you want to look at another hexagon you just hit a button to move to that one. Both of these might be hard to implement though.

[Hawkei]

Very interesting map. You must have put a lot of effort into making that one!

Yes, I agree that a different map is required for the layout in the next Galactic War. The problems which I saw with the most recent Galactic War (2 years ago ) is that there were too many planets and regions to control.

I would prefer to have some level of simplification where particular maps are unique to a particular planet, or planetary system. Each planetary system would have multiple different battle spaces, with larger 4v4, intermediate 2v2, and small 1v1 maps to represent them. Where an effective planetary assault would require dominance in all of the battle spaces simultaneously or sequentially. So that all of the battles on all of those maps would collectively combine to determine the overall control of that planetary system.

What that means is, for example, the Seton's Clutch map would be featured on a particular planet, and it would be unique to that planet only. It would also be combined with 3 or 4 other maps, of varying player counts. All of which would need to be fought over and dominated to secure control of the planet.

In turn, this would allow for the GW universe to be represented by possibly fewer planetary systems. Looking something like this:

and with a more complex quantum gate network, on a 3 dimensional map, running between the planetary systems. The higher level of interconnectivity would prevent the problems the OP was describing with certain factions becoming "Land-locked" and unable to face each other.

In this manner. A faction wide assault on an enemy planetary system would be initiated by a ranking officer within the faction. Once the assault has been declared, it would be like charging up (or configuring) the Quantum Gate network for an attack from System A to System B. Everyone would have visibility of this event. A planetary assault is something which could only be initiated once every day or so, with a large cost in credits, and would essentially mean that individual players on the team could launch attacks for a reduced (or zero) credit cost within a certain time window.

Individual soldiers from both the attacking and defending factions would join the battle, for solo or team combat. It would also be possible for a 3rd, or even 4th faction to join the attack. Which would result in the possibility of a 3 way, or 4 way, FFA style battle on the designated map.

[Apofenas]

I would like it to look more similiar to what we see in mission intros of campaing. But this one still looks awesome.

One thing i'd like to see is sector capitals. Capitals would provide some small bonuses in their sectors and prevent enemy to launch attacks from their sector on other hexagon untill they get captured. That means single player would be capable to effectivly slow down a progress of 10 enemy players by holding the single planet. But if capital got surrounded, the defender would lose ability to recall and save his avatar.

[Morax]

In addition to Apof's idea revolving around "capitals" I would like to add that perhaps "sector dominance" to the faction that doesn't hold the capital get a small bonus to offset each and keep balance.

Nice, Apof!

[Brutus5000]

Please keep in mind, that this map somehow needs to fit into some sort of coordinate system. Otherwise it is very difficult to store it in a database or render it.
In a 2D world you usually have the classic square-grid and the hex-grid. When I look at your image I am not sure, whether this can be mapped in a hexgrid, due to the "weird" edges of the bigger hexes. The connection beetween the hexes can be stored anywhere, but you need some sort of system, which tells you "where to paint which planet".

[everywhere116]

I don't know much about how the old GW map was drawn, but did it use either of those systems? It seemed to me like he just plopped the planets down onto random coordinates and used an algorithim that drew a Voronoi diagram around them to make the planet sector borders. The coordinates didn't really seem to follow a specific pattern. However, if they did and they do need to be on a hex-grid or a square grid, then the map can easily be rendered like this:

[Ze_PilOt]

The system that is implemented in the client allow any kind of arbitrary shape, and is indeed based on a Voronoi diagram for drawing the frontiers.