ZaphodX's PA videos - updated daily

Nice! Yeah, no commander kills for the Untouchable plays well with rules that encourage them to go hard after one another - more food on the table, as it where. The rest are good ideas as well, glad to help! I think the thing is to find way to generously reward comm kills, such that the risk and effort of doing so is overridden. Designating a target for the Untouchable is particularly devious. Hm... or the flip side, maybe a commander kill affords a period of benevolent intervention from the Untouchable, disrupting assaults or attacking whoever attacks that team? Kinda' like that too.

Banning defenses would definitely promote more aggressive play, and also lead to a lot more early confrontations and commander rushing, I should think.

You could force teams to spawn together, or... perhaps you could force them to spawn *apart*. That would leave them more vulnerable, which might invite even more early attacking.

Anyway, there are a lot of possibilities, it's just about finding what's actually an effective incentive without being unbalanced. Looking forward to the next iteration!

Edit: If it works well that players are rewarded in some way for comm kills, consider calling the game mode Blood Sacrifice, or Appease the Gods, or something. lulz.

an awesome game type could be a ffa on a big planet, but setting player economy economy rate at a ridiculously high rate.
Also a rule for no engineers.
This will force players to keep building factories with the commanders and factories will just keep pumping out units.
This game type will certainly reward the aggressive and will quickly become into a huge unit spam

Edit: just realized player economy rate only works for games against AI :/
cmon uber! dont tease us that way

A variation on the "Kill Orb"/Assassination game type would be to allow the "Orb" player to rush Orb-ital, then get to another planet with his commander ASAP. Meanwhile the other players would attack each other. The "Orb" player would not be allowed to build anything on the 2nd planet. Once there, everyone else would be allowed to chase him down. Anyone chasing him down there would only be allowed to kill him by building nothing but fabbers and trying to reclaim his Commander (or each other)! First team to finish him off wins.

An optional rule would be to not allow any radar on the 2nd planet, except from the "Orb" player (to help him avoid being reclaimed).

Some alternate game type names for this could be "Fabber Frenzy", or "Claim the Com"!

Those would be fun!

I would prob suggest that;

1. no Pelter creep

2. limitation on how far you can expand

3. reduce the size of army you send out unless

These ideas are for the Untouchable only mainly because we were unable to really watch anyone else.

boring, my ***!
I've been lurking since about #50 or 60 and that was one of the most fun in my book. yah, it could use some refinement on the rules to become 'a thing', but your self-imposed, on-the-fly, smear-the-leader kept it interesting. more. like. this. that was awesome man, don't sell yourself short. i know the tendency, and appreciate your modesty here. it'd take a lot to un-lurk me out of my hidey-shell, and this is it.

more. like. this.

you rock.

I do this against the AI.
Place myself on 2x eco.

Its profaning fun.

#141 6P FFA WaterWorld

It's nice to hear that some people are liking the game type, because it sounded good in my head! I pulled a giant sadface when Zaphod said it was kind of boring...

No commander killing I always thought was a must from the start for the Untouchable player.
I also like the ideas of divine vengeance, that can be summoned by players who kill opposing commanders, and particularly the respite that can be offered in 5 minute rest periods. Maybe as well/ instead of requesting raids from the Untouchable player, they could request a nuke strike instead on a player of their choice, specific location chosen by the Untouchable? I guess this might lead to a snowball effect, although it would be terrifying to see the chat line appear:
"well done white, you killed a commander, what do you wish?"
"We request a nuke strike on orange"
"wish granted, prepare for nuke launch"


or perhaps, the Untouchable player accepts a sacrifice of one commander for a nuke strike

LOL. I thought nuke strikes were too powerful so wasn't keen on it but perhaps that is an acceptable price

Ideally, they would send the comm to the edge of your base, with a group of tanks..."Oh mighty Zaphod, we offer you our finest warrior, so that you may smite our enemies with unholy nuclear wrath" at which point the tanks open fire.

That was a very interesting game. I think you were on the spot for most of it. The one thing I saw you doing was you kept getting your stingrays on the front line. If you had kept them back you would have been able to push off that first big push from Orb much more efficiently. You then could have pushed back with the stingrays and done a lot of damage.

I know, easy for me to say when I wasn't in the panic box. I really enjoyed the game though.

I just want to point out (i was almost banging my head on the desk because of it) that you should have built at least SOME leviathans when you got your T2 production going. Those battleships can take on 5-8 bluebottles and win with proper vision. I saw Orb had a few, and they are just walls of steel when it comes to close in naval fights.

A mix of leviathans on the front and stingrays in the back would have been devastating, but he just cut through the bluebottles like butter to get to those VALUABLE units quickly. Might have changed the outcome of the game, actually.

I'd also like to point out that stingrays are great vs land and structures, while leviathans are a Naval Superiority unit.

And that early game raiding is extremely effective with naval. You could have stunted zombie early on and finished him off for the eco later - just a thought.

Great game though. You guys use the.....*cough* hackmod to get that water world to work?

I actually watched this again to analyze why I liked it so much; here’s my feedback.

You were having so much FUN at times.

In particular, minutes 33 and 44 (protecting the bomber-snipes). I think those two highlights in particular capture the tone of enjoyment that folks generally want from a game. You were in the moment, having fun and sharing it with us.

I pulled this quote slightly out of context, because I think it applies to those bomber-snipe denials. Nice game format, drz1!

Same here.
Zaphod, you indicated that the game felt boring to you. I can understand that, and agree that there were some slow points. I suggest that perhaps the pacing didn’t feel as exciting as you’ve grown accustomed to. You didn’t have to constantly defend or react, which often provides immediate goals or counter-actions to focus attention on. Lacking those inputs seemed to leave you with abundant time to second guess your actions, and probably nudged you out of your comfort zone (I’m in danger of over-assuming now, so I’ll stop). But for me the overall fun of the game, dishing god-mode like “divine vengeance” more than compensated.
The other teams didn’t seem as aggressive with each other as I think was hoped, which should probably be addressed in a refinement of this game type.

Good fun, man. That doesn’t mean I don’t also appreciate the informative or harried/hectic battle casts too. But by way of comparison, this one had a less frenzied pace, highlighted delightfully with some good-natured knocks inflicted on mates.

Thanks man, helps a lot. Having no defences would give a whole lot more action and having orbital radar would give me a much better view of all the action. I've actually tried something like this before but the game was too laggy to post. I'll try and get something sorted this weekend.

Re: One player is pirate gameplay.


When we gain the ability to engage in diplomacy, that's when this game type will really come into its own. E.g. people bribe you on chat for non-aggression. Outbid their neighbours. That kind of thing. Do they give you their starting fabber? Or not? Think just massive bribes of units, in public chatroll. Do they give you 100 bots for you to attack them? Do they cede map control to your cause?

Obviously they could do this already - they could sacrifice metal expansions.

I kind of think that it should be more structured? I.e. They'll be a raid every 10 minutes. Or so. And the first wave will only consist of x number of units, of particular types.

I think the problem was that you just steamrolled everyone with impunity. Whereas you should have done the really dickmove things. Like sent hundreds of fabbers off on reclaim missions, sent skitter/firefly spam to attack places. Sent mobile AA randomly into peoples bases. Troll people by sending nukes over their bases. That kinda thing.

Then made actual attacks as well. With Ant and Leveller spam. And bombers.

Did you realize that you can set Air Units to Patrol right from the Air Factory? No need to waste time by continuing to select idle air units and set the on custom patrol routes. I do this for all of my Air Factories, so I never have to worry about getting my air units picked off by ground units, or have them sit idly by whilst enemy air units fly by scouting me. Much more convenient that way. Just a tip.

Actually, I never leave my air units to just sit there, I always put them on a small patrol route to keep them active, even after I micro them for a raid, or scout.

Whats with the PLanetary Vanguard title I see floating around?!

Way offtopic but - extremely interesting nonetheless

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/introducing-the-planetary-vanguards.54695/

So I got another game mode idea. It's called 'Simon says...'.

One player is assigned to be Simon. He can make up random commands for everybody to follow at a self-chosen interval that makes sense. Some examples:
- Everybody attack (dice roll)green(dice roll) relentless for (dice roll)3(dice roll) minutes
- Self-destruct all your Anti-Nukes
- First player to have an orbital unit in the air has a monopoly on Catapults
- Self-destruct everything except Commander and 5 Mexes and 5 Power; building may resume after all players comply
- Defensive structures no longer are allowed
- (in a team match) Stop all your Commanders NOW and self-destruct one of them within 30 seconds
- all construction bots must do a death march to an opponent (microing for reclaiming allowed)
- if you have a nuke ready, launch it at your own nearest Commander
- all fighter planes must move to the north pole for a fight to the death
- etc. be creative!

Having these baseline "Simon says" rules set up, you can even be creative in how to apply them for a match:
- The one player assigned to be Simon can be a spectating player, so he/she can oversee the actual 'playing by the rules'
- Multiple Simons; rotation between players, based on the in-game player list
- "One player" Simon makes all the rules up front to avoid 'weak player helping'
- "One player" Simon makes 6 rules up front (and can choose to share the rules or not), and each 2 minutes the dice is rolled...
- For clan/RLM games: all players go in the same Mumble/TeamSpeak server channel and can hear players respond to the latest Simon command