Galactic Clan Wars (GCW)

Let's talk about this. For more details read this post and the next 10 or 20 ones: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/clan-wars-4v4-clan-league.63162/page-25#post-1056729

If Exodus agrees to run this in the Clan Wars off season, we'd have a month or two to come up with a basic plan, and then the entire spring and summer to run the first instance.

We can start with a simple plan, just like Clan Wars did, to make sure it can work smoothly and everyone can enjoy it, and then make it more elaborate the next year.

So here's a starting proposal. Let's say we get 10 clans. That means 10 home systems. Then Exodus designs another 20 or so to throw in between them, and we have our galaxy for the season. And then we implement a turn system as explained by Maldor in the above-linked thread, so that players would have an incentive to finish a battle quickly in order to free up their players for other battles. The possibilities are mind-boggling. We just need a very practical person (i.e. not me) to hammer down the details and keep things simple so that we don't botch this.

All players are initially (i.e. at Turn 0) located on their home systems, and the clan leaders have to send them out from there to grab systems (taking care not to send their best players away from the direction of their toughest enemies -- so ALL of a clan's players can and should be utilized). Exodus' neutral systems are initially perhaps populated by AIs of varying strength (or uniform strength?)

Alliances between clans are allowed so that smaller clans can join together to fight the bigger ones.

This way we could have 3-way and 4-way clan battles on a single system, if 3 or 4 clans decide to move there at the same time. It will provide very different kinds of battles than those seen on regular Clan Wars.

Here is the map idea:

Lines and star systems placement can be changed
EDIT: credit where credit is due, All images are from Galactic war files and are by Uber Entertainment

Forgot VoW!

oops... One moment, thank you for catching that
EDIT: other than a missing clan (I knew I was forgetting someone) how does it look?
EDIT 2: map will be coming in next post

Some interesting ideas... Keep them coming.

How does a clan lose the war?

By the capture of its home system?

Or by having no more systems in its possession?

I think it would be more fitting to the "annihilation" style of game to go for the first option (just as you lose a battle if your commander dies, not if you lose every single unit in the game). However, the second option would allow weaker clans to stay in the war a little longer. Still, if the weaker clans are smart enough to ally it would help mitigate this.

Here is the new map with VoW homeworld added:

I added possesion indicators and team markers for each of the clans, not concrete colors mind you, clans would choose there colors, and play them throughout the war.

I think there would be a lot of complaints of "unfairness". Small clan with 8 players for example starts right next to the Realm and gets gobbled up immediately. "It's not fair", people will say. But war isn't fair either. Try a game like Europa Universalis and see if you can win by picking Malta or something. The players who take France of Germany have a huge advantage.

But I think that that's the beauty of all this. You want to throw all those players and clans in this chaotic situation and see how it plays out. Let some of them scramble to make last-minute alliances or be annihilated, while others march across the galaxy and flatten half of it until their opponents see the danger and gang up against them. We have regular Clan Wars for "fair" matches, so let's use this for more realistic movie-like scenarios.

And you can still juggle the location of the home systems to achieve a little bit more fairness. Don't start the 8-person clan right next to the Realm: start it among a bunch of other small clans and start the Realm right next to Team Burning (and with Promethean and PAG on either side of them). Give the big boys some immediate headaches, so that maybe they'll leave the smaller guys alone for long enough to sort out some large alliances between them.

Or the big clans could ally to flatten all the small ones, before turning on each other. This will be less satisfactory for the smaller clans, but from a viewer's perspective it will still be exciting to watch when the double-crossings and epic battles between the big clans start going down.

I wonder if it would be possible to do a mini trial-run of the model, to identify problems ahead of time.

Map looks great now, by the way.

Also, having the same color per clan throughout the war should also be adopted for regular Clan Wars. You want viewers to be able to identify a clan immediately by its color, just like with sports teams. I got dibs on red.

I might have to hold a meeting with other clan leaders and see what they want /sarcasm
Seriously though @burntcustard @cmdrflop and any other leaders come quickly claim your colors
Colors taken:
Red - Cult

I wonder if we split the Galactic Clan Wars (GCW because I'm tired of typing all of that) into two maps, one for the big clans like the map above and one for the smaller clans with a more chaotic map for them, that could eliminate the "unfairness of bigger clans".

I would also not allow alliances because that would complicate things this early in the development, maybe we can revisit the subject later when we have an idea of what will and will not work here
edit: I will set up a site for testing out the information related to this

It's true, alliances will complicate things, but how can you even prevent them? I can message a new clan behind your back and say: "Head in the direction of VoW and leave me alone and I'll do the same for you."

You could make the galaxy elongated as opposed to a circle, so that on the one end you'd have the bigger clans, and on the other the smaller ones. So that the big clans would not be able to rush for the smaller ones right away without leaving the region around their home systems open to invasion from the other big clans. At the same time, the big clans could still probably afford to send their less experienced players across the galaxy to attack the smaller clans, so that in the end you'd have a decent balance of matches, at least for the early stages of the war, before all hell broke loose and strategy became extremely chaotic.

It would help if we knew exactly how many players each clan has, and even better, all the players' 1v1 rankings (or as many of them as possible), in order to gauge clan strength and place them accordingly.

Alternatively, you could place home systems in a completely randomized manner, which would feel more natural from a lore perspective.

Let me take this apart:

Intergalactic gate is one idea to link the maps. An enlongated galaxy map is an interesting proposal.

For mapmaking purposes we should assume a clan that has a 3 player and a 5 player team all ranked at silver.

If anyone can suggest a tool or method of doing this feel free to let me know, if there is a plugin for Paint.net all the better.
I will mock up a example for a map that smaller clans could use later today

I don't think that your idea of several teams per clan is realistic (if I understand it correctly). We want team composition to be in flux to accommodate players' availability to play. If you tell a clan that they have to have a 3- and a 5-man team, you make things far more rigid than if you let them use any kind of configuration they want depending on availability.

At the same time, this means that moving PLAYERS on the map like chess pieces might be hard to make work. What happens if a player can't play for a whole month because of unforeseen circumstances? In regular Clan Wars you just use another player, but in GCW with chess pieces as players you've just stopped the entire game for a month, more or less.

what about the last humans home world?

And smurf world!