Galatic War Relaunch

[Sir Prize]

I updated the form to clear some confusion as to what Clan Factions might mean. I changed the name to 'Galactic War Companies'. You can imagine it as a clan for GW, but let's name it as 'company' for now.

The idea is to allow players to form companies themselves. These companies could potentially control their own little piece of land. They could form/break alliances with other companies as well. They would be rivals to other companies and would fight for supremacy in the galaxy. Lone players might join companies that are recruiting.

So basically Eve Online sov wars, but with FA instead of 4000-man 20 hour lagfests? Does this include inter-faction alliances or factional civil wars? No idea how hard it would be to implement but as a (currently inactive) Eve player I really like the idea.

One thing I would suggest, as someone who joined the last GW very late, is measure demoralisation somehow. No one fought the UEF at the end, they should have been able to roll planets really easily. If there's a way to use attempts to defend/attack and successful fights to create an index that can be used to speed up the timers that'd be good.

Would also be good if there was clear alerts that your side needed a player to join a team or defend a planet. I never saw a chance to bag a fight in my few weeks of being enlisted but I think they were still happening every now and then. Maybe auto-logging people in to GW and having a popup similar to someone ladder searching for your faction needing people to join in? Or an IRC ping of some description?

Oh and I would prefer auto-generated maps or GW-specific maps used exclusively. And, long term, using Nomads as a civilian/AI/5th player faction would be great, better than using them as part of the standard FAF mod and for ladder.

[Iszh]

The Problem was that once one faction is enslaved there is no way anymore for other factions to do something. Thats why (understandable) other factions stop to play mostly. There was a Plan that Generals would get the possibility to make an uprising. But something alike this was never realized and would maybe lead to chaos. Maybe it would be the best if the Players of a defeated faction can join the faction they want. But this on the other hand would maybe lead to a mass joining the not winning forces (which could demoralize the before strongest faction). The positive effect of defeating a faction would be still to get their tech. No idea to many things to think about

I see a bigger problem in low player numbers. There should be more reason for people to play this. Mabye something like when you join gw you automatically get a mini faction avatar looking like the normal faction avatar but very very small in the big cube. If a universe is ended the first 2 Generals and the supreme commander should get a nice avatar. I think at least that getting avatars dependend on playing activity would improve the traffic there.

The next thing is that the supreme commander was fixed all the time to the first one who has done it. There should be some kind of way to change this. Maybe the most active person can take over the title with most of won games. The former supreme commander will be general again. For making this work there should be also somewhere the information how many victories you need to be the sc. Means the number of the person with most of victories should be visible for everybody in this faction.


Another thing there was a huge discussion what to do about the ranks, because after some time not good players have been generals and presented thousends of credits for the enemies. Autorecall was to strong so i for example offered different solutions for this like autorecall can be bought only after a victory. And the higher the rank the more victory it costs. So basically like getting for every victory something like victory points you can use for shopping.
Other people like zep prefered to make autorecall dependend in different factors in game. For example it works only when you are close to your own base. No idea thats a difficult topic.

Autorecall topic: viewtopic.php?f=50&t=6532

So let me summarize a small todo:
(The solutions mentioned in here are just examples!)

1. Ensalving system for late galaxy - players can spread
2. Low player number - maybe avatars can help
3. Supreme commander fixed to inactive people - possible to take over if you have more victories
4. Autorecall - a lot of solutions different kind
----not mentioned----
5. Player number on each faction for not equal - maybe number of player in each faction should be shown when chosing. But there was absolutely no solution for this since maybe they would join the faction with most players which makes no sense since they would have no enemies ...
6. Mappool - in the end the mappool was ok but the idea of random maps even if not perfectly fair all the time is amazing
7. Depots - Zep wanted to implement depots (built by generals as planetary defense) which can help creating more stable area in universe (all connected planets faster reinforcements or something like this and no influence loss on connected planets)
8. Planetary defence - was already improved but the mass of the towers was removed. Maybe would be nice to get wrecked turrets to shop small mass for the beginning which would be better for big maps. Of course must be more expensive than towers.
9. reinforcements - to add sacus is ok after some minutes but please never ever add ai because they need times more cpu power and check the costs of units.

(small thing away from this topic titan needs a mini range buff because it is losing even against other factions t2 units mass to mass which is very poor. I am telling this because as a reinfocement titan is a shit as well. loyalist costs the same but is times better because it has this range)

If i can remember more i will tell

[Cuddles]

I can't answer most of the questions because it was too long ago. I simply don't remember. As for the maps, a significant amount were not good enough or had some issue. I think excluding the problematic maps that were not fixed is a priority before reopening GW, because there is already a document to sort out the maps:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... ring#gid=0
Then replacing the problematic ones by new maps (lot of new ones were created over a year, including Duck_42's), and it's possible to keep the last amount of maps Zep stopped at, with only decent maps.

Also, at some point, it would be cool to allow Nomads engineers / units to be hired as mercenaries, or even to inhabit certain neutral planets that would need to cleared (players would have to fight against Nomads AI on some unclaimed planets instead of being able to occupy them without a fight). There could also be some random attacks from Nomads AI / players, since they are a kind of space pirates, to stir things up. Just some ideas, might be complicated to code.

I like this nomads idea. have one normal map and the same map with AI and then just a random chance with which one you get when the game launches. Nomads could also be real players and substituted with AI if none online. I'm willing to help to make some maps with AI bases.

[Iszh]

How is it ongoing here, any news?

[bouznak]

One of the very nice idea that was planned to be implemented is the game enders :
- Each factions can build a major structure on its home planet with devastating abilities.
- Each player of a faction can allocate an amount of his credits in order to achieve the structure.
- The high ranked players or the faction Supreme Commander only can use the weapon when completed.

These rules implies a developed interaction within the faction : the players have to contribute according to their incomes, the faction's leader has to listen other players suggestions for targets...

Some ideas were developed here : http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=3618&hilit=game+ender#p37700

[Gerfand]

just saying, but a thing that could be done is:
after a certain time, or a faction dominate the galaxy the entire galaxy reset and every one pick a faction!

[D4E_Omit]

just saying, but a thing that could be done is:
after a certain time, or a faction dominate the galaxy the entire galaxy reset and every one pick a faction!

Just like the system there is now! Epic!

[theManfet]

I just found this thread and answered the questionnaire. Did not look into the Galactic War stuff for quite a while because there was nothing in the lobby.
Imho GW is really quite fun to play.
But Autorecall took so much out of GW.
Without autorecall GW had it's own playstyle. Many people played very defensive because they did not want to loose their avatar. That gave lower rated people like me (1400 ) the chance to beat much higher rated people because I could win wih an agressive playstyle against them. I had a higher chance loosing my commander but nonetheless a bigger chance to win the game. That made quite a difference.

With autorecall the only difference to the playstly of normal FAF are the reinforcements. Still fun but quite boring and not a real difference.
And everybody even the greatest noobs had Generals as Avatars even though they played quite aggressive.
I would like to see autorecall gone alltogether.

[IceDreamer]

Autorecall shouldn't go completely, without it, higher ranked players will simply stop attacking at all.

Autorecall should become available at rank 4. It should cost 0 credits. From rank 4 onwards, your character can 'spend' victories to buy Autorecalls, the only way to get them. The price of each autorecall is equal to your current rank.

This way, poor players won't be able to reach rank 4 and start stalling everyone out. People who reach rank 4 with a bunch of victories stored have a chance to get higher ranks even if they're not amazing. Highly skilled players who might get ranks more easily are encouraged to attack more to get more victories, but also they have that fallback.

[theManfet]

Sorry but I don't think your reasoining does work.
Your fear is that higher ranking people will stop playing because they have a high avatar rank
yes that can happen - on the other side they should not be worrying about that because they should be able to get to that rank quite fast again. In the first few GWs I was able to go rank 4 inside of 48 hours quite often.

your solution is to give high ranking people, that have shown that they can get 30 victories without loosing their commander once, the ability to buy an autorecall every 4-6 victories... So for the statistic they can buy at least 5 autorecall and probably will not loose one in that time frame...
And in that time they will scare off many noobs of Galactic War by destroying them all the time and if once the noobs have found a way to finally kill off an avatar that has been harassing them for quite a long time then that guy will just get autorecalled - wow... as a noob I would stop playing after that.

If you want to give higher ranks a reason to still play you should think about something else then punishing the lower rated people.
maybe the higher ranks should only get credits through winning and not by waiting but instead will even gain a small amount of credits even if they loose. or just gain when winning.

the bigger problem why higher rated people did not play is the buying an attack thing that gets higher cost with every rank.
The idea behind that was that it would make higher rated player work together with lower rated players.
in my opinion it did not help much. I think a better idea would be that people would get a higher amount of credits if they played together with lower rated players. Playing should not be punished. The target should be to get the highest possible amount of games going.

Maybe there is even a possibility to enable matchmaking in Galatic War. that would be a cool feature.