Galactic warfare

This is a problem faced by everyone in Eve Online. The solution is to try your hardest in not having a USTZ or a EUTZ group of players. Instead, have players from every timezone. Share the love around. It's certainly not a perfect solution, but it's you make do with what you've got.

Correct, but both sides start on the same planet. Repeated skirmish is kinda boring.

Dude what? One start system is a normal skirmish. I've played happily against the AI in systems with 10 celestial bodies.

I thought Planetside 2 was designed for that not to be an issue

I am also really interested to see what they do to solve this. After numerous attempts I think there is no particularly good solution.

RTS games are very prone to imbalance. Player skill and commander count can easily turn a game into a stomp. The average player does not want to play stomp after stomp so unless the open access Galactic War has good matchmaking it will be worse than the base game. This matchmaking is much harder than usual because it is restricted to balance along faction lines. I think we would need quite a large number of players online at all times for this to work.

If we don't have matchmaking and a large number of players then I think Galactic War would have to be organized by or even limited to some very dedicated clans. Clans would basically try to field their most powerful players for any particular game, they'd have to be dedicated enough to not care about stomps. I don't think this has wide appeal, it sounds quite demanding and elitist.

Why do both sides have to start on the same planet?

It was. Badly. It's fun when you can find a 'good' battle, and the lattice system helped with this immensely, but sometimes it can be quite hard to find something that isn't one faction steamrolling another.

Eh?

Can you read my post again please? I was referring to multiple battles on multiple planets, in multiple systems. Maybe skirmishes will have multiple planets as starting locations. However, I'm not raising my hopes after so fundamentally misunderstanding the galactic war

Oh.... that's disappointing. so worth a look for a casual pub server gamer, or not really?

Then you need better intuition for what is easy to implement. Starting on different planets sounds like a trivial change. It will probably be an option.

So is interstellar war between 4 players, and yet it is not.

And stable systems from the developers at the moment are 2 planets only. I set up a system with 2 planets, 2 moons and 3 asteroids. Game crashed immediately on startup against another human.

It's looking dodgy :/ erring on side of caution now.

Well obviously crashing isn't the intent. Each "node" in a GW will consist of a single system which will have different numbers and types of planets/moons/asteroids.

Well I doubt the coding is as simple as you believe it to be, plus that isn't accounting for the potential for any progressive elements or anything else, to be honest all we know so far is a very 'bare bones' version of what GW might be, and it's possible there might be slightly different versions depending on the context of whether it's Uber's 'Official' GW, Clan GWs or 'Offline' Single player GW.

We just don't know any real details yet.

Mike

I've been having this issue, too, and it is worrisome. But as far as Galactic War is concerned, it's a tough call; multi-planet starts might mean 30 minutes of macro and then nuke/orbital slinging immediately, while always starting on the same world means skirmishing over and over and over and over. Some way to carry over *something* from prior games... such as, I dunno, an engine-equipped battle moon... could help.

The way I see it, any one player will only be using a lot of data if they are zoomed in to one position on the map. Which the game can currently handle. As they zoom out, the screen will refresh, they zoom out past the draw distance, the data they need to use becomes less and less and less. Theoretically, it shouldn't be any more complex than the current build we have.

This is based on other games where you can zoom in close (like Sins of a Solar Empire, or Anno 2070) which support a reasonable number of players (10 max, 4 max, respectively) but detail is lost as you zoom out.

The issue comes in with planetary objects - but they should be moving along a line described by an equation which on paper uses quite simple maths.

We'll see what more details returns.

Yeah, but what about the server? It's still got to think about everything that isn't being shown to your computer.