Galactic War "Metagame"

So I'm curious - Will the Galactic War "Metagame" influence gameplay?
I'm assuming here that an online realisation of it will be clan-based.

The Kickstarter video states that all technology has been "assimilated" by every side, so clearly cannon "unlockable" units are out of the question.

However, I hope the GW will serve as more than just a map.
E.g. There could be resource % bonuses/clan upgrades for fighting in or capturing systems/quadrants of space.
The resource idea be tricky to balance; perhaps not for everyone. I'd imagine something loosely based on Risk, adding an element of overall strategy to Clans/Guilds/Conglomerates/Collectives/Whatevers' campaigns for galactic dominance.
[Another option could be to have a clan "pool" which was added to with every system captured and allowed a clan Homeworld to be created/built up over a solar system. However this one in particular is likely one for the modders.]

Alternatively, capturing regions could unlock aesthetic things like new commanders, new clan decals, greater numbers of members in the clan. But it'd be nice, once you held a sizeable segment of the galaxy with your mates, to see that your clan benefited in some way from being more awesome on the battlefield. Even if it's just big shiny bells hanging off the ACU's nipple tassels.

Also what got me thinking about this originally was how one would actually expand one's galactic territory. Nebulas could be used to create bottlenecks, and wormholes to allow expansion into far-flung corners.

Galactic War isn't even past the initial conceptual phase yet. Uber hasn't put any resources into developing it yet. Hell they don't even have solid gameplay on a single planet yet, so asking if it's going to influence the grander scope of gameplay in the future is putting the cart before the horse.

Better to decide how you want your cart to work before you've built it.

A cart is useless (no matter how well designed) if you have nothing to pull it.

You're also asking the equivalent of what fabric you want the seating made of, before we even have the wheels... or a frame... or, as I said before, the horse.

I don't know why Metagame has quotes in the title, Galactic War is a Metagame after all. It takes a series of individual skirmishes and provides a type of contextual story for the entire series, in this case taking over a Galaxy.

Mike

I remember reading that Galactic War will be the main game type of singleplayer (or at least be available in singleplayer). And in that case clan stuff wont work that well (maybe, maybe with the AI but that's not what clans are made for).

Galactic war is essentially a replacement for the usual single player campaign(which are very expensive), but it is not limited to single player, imagine a 100 system galaxy, with 2 clans fighting for dominance.

Mike

Because it's not a game if it has no influence on gameplay whatsoever (even if it's just its own gameplay, and entirely separate from skirmishes). It's just a map. I'm just trying to engage in discussion about what strategic elements could be included in order to actually have it be a metagame.

Despite Uber not commenting on it in any depth, these are pretty basic considerations; will Galactic War be a map, or a metagame? And what could we expect from either? SUGGESTIONS?!
I'm not even expecting a response from the devs, I just wanted to brainstorm and Nano and Mike seem to have misinterpreted that as blowing my brains all over the wall.

The whole point of forums is to discuss whether you like ideas or not. I don't expect you to agree with me, I just wanted to discuss what people would like to see from GW.

From what I understand with my (albeit brief) exchanges with Neutrino on Galactic War (an area in which I obviously have significant interest):

There will be two (possibly three) completely separate metagames.

- A 'default faction' metagame, where players join one of several pre-defined arbitrary factions and play against other players who have joined different factions. These will be defined by Uber.
- A 'clan warfare' metagame, where members of different PA clans battle against one another
? A single player metagame, played offline on your own machine against AI

This could all be complete bollocks, of course, but that's the picture I've built up in my head from the snippets and hints that Uber have dropped.

As to anything more specific than that - I doubt even Uber have any concrete ideas of their own.

The question of the OP is : Does the metagame will influence the start of a game?

I imagine each clan/faction will have a main system.
Do you want to be able to take it with a standard 5min bomber rush, or does the game start with some kind of setup making the capture of the main system more like a special event.
With the ability to join game live, it would even be possible to have special rules to call for backup.

Something along the lines of a slower astroempires server might be a good metaphorical direction.
Consider the features of astroempires and how they do or could relate to PA mechanics.
In PA:
-Battle happens on or around the celestial body, not mid-space battles
-Travel from body to body in the same solar system is real time and takes a certain amount of effort.
-Traveling from system to system would be a further effort (possibly requiring either the whole solar system or some form of victory, like a gas giant or metal planet assuming they ALL have one, which likely wont be the case)

Based on the pre-game setting, we can dive into the astroempires structure a bit.
-Game length judges speed of travel from one system to another:
---Short Galactic game= almost instant (for a galactic map but can be played in a sitting or two)
---Med Galactic game= a time duration of perhaps 4-8 minutes of travel between systems, late game you may have several of these transfers happening at one time.
---Long/Hardcore Galactic Game= This is the "leave server on 24/7" game involving 40 players that hop on as they can. Clan based warefare etc. This would resemble the astroempires game structure the most. As you would send multiple bot colony/fleet/commander eggs etc etc to multiple planets and if you time them all properly, initiate all your landings/ assaults in a coordinated fashion. There will be times you are not available and sit down to have seen a planet lost. However, the transfer time may be several hours to a day, so incoming fleets might notify you of their arrival time etc. Assuming the size of a match like this, it would be where you micro that turns the tides of battles.

I hope you guys have seen Astroempires, its a web-based game that has hundreds of players per univers "server" and runs continuously. Every few months another universe is added and all players hop on fresh, over time the alliances build and the top super powers root out the bottom feeders. These servers never close however, so they are always evolving amongst the super powers. You would send a fleet to even other galaxies in this one, which gets bloody insane. The combat is stat rolling, so when a fleet arrives its just a name with ship amounts and stats etc, you initiate the battle and it resolves. PA would be a smaller scale of this game as battles require attention. I think with 40 players a PA version of this method in a single galaxy will hold together quite well.

...Or it can just be a node based victory points map. But I think there could be alot of potential in some more fluid movement of this game.

Cheers

EDIT: The post above has been revised due to my comments below, so if I look like an ***, please forgive Ortikon for taking my advice.

I found this interesting. I've played Travian and its sci-fi equivalents so I kinda get where you're coming from. I'm not sure I'd enjoy the level of complexity you're describing - I'd want the metagame to depend upon skirmishes, and not be obliged to come on and defend a system because my enemy had timed his attack to land at 5:00 am.

Therefore to allow the galactic map to be of any real strategic importance, in my opinion it either needs to be:

- Very small, adapted to (as you've suggested) quick games; a few skirmishes over a week or a month to capture the galaxy from one of several opponents. This doesn't make a great deal of sense to me as galaxies are (at least usually) gigantic and hold huge numbers of stars.

- Very large, with dozens of clans, each with potentially hundreds of members.
This way, clan commanders could command an "Attack", and members could jump in to attack and defend that system. This would add a strategic overlay to galactic warfare, as leaders would be able to pick battles and (potentially) the regions and zones to be won.
Clan commanders choosing where to attack would also be quite cool because clans with poor leadership would fail very quickly - nobody likes to be follow General Cluster.
A larger scale also makes more sense as we know already that single solar systems can hold up to 40 people, so the notion of having a galaxy fought over by that many seems limited. Also to have a continuously evolving galaxy, you'd need a lot of players from all over the world to continue defending/attacking while the others are offline.

If the galactic war is done right, I would love this game.
I hope it will be real time. Just zoom out, and zoom in.

It will not be real-time.

That would fry my brain and my computer

Isn't the galactic war literally just going to be a fancy version of this:?


with the white areas where matches are held?

To me it just sounded like a fun little meta-game to give relevance to your games and to give a feeling of accomplishment and progress when you win a game.

That's exactly my interpretation of it. Pick a dot. Fight over it. Pick another dot. Do this until you win.

The thing that would interest me about GW would be how persistent the play space is. For example:
The enemy attacks system 6B, which you hold. In one game you end up throwing multiple asteroids around in this solar system, and a couple of planets get destroyed. You win and push the enemy back.
A while later, you find your frontlines are pushed back again, and you are again fighting in 6B. Will those planets you felt it necessary to destroy to ensure victory in the first battle suddenly 'respawn', or will the conseqences of such drastic action have long term effects, by making these planets unavailable until a galactic reset?

If we can have persistent battlefields, that would be beyond boss.

Imagine the maps being filled with the wrecks of past battles, and how the conflict would change when upon revisiting a system a previously bas starting position is the best due to all of that unclaimed metal sitting around the crater of a previous base.