On the peak of the Progenitor civilization, thousands of intelligent self-replicating machines called Commanders were sent to distant galaxies to identify and destroy any possible menace to humanity. 70.000 years later the first Commanders have reached Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. No sing of alien life in the galaxy but the arrival of humans last transmission is about to unleash a brutal war for the conquest of the new galaxy. What is this about? Canis Major Dwarf (CMD) mod is a tool to play a multiplayer Galactic War in PA. A CMD game can be seen as a weekly clan tournament built over a map of stars similar to Galactic War. As in any other tournament players still have to coordinate and host the matches "manually" but they'll be able to follow the tournament progress in the mod screen. How can I join? To join just install the client mod CMD. You'll find a new button in PA start screen that will take you to a new screen. Automatically new players will send a petition to CMD server to join but it won't be effective until midnight. Players Players plays as a comm that can be destroyed in each battle but has the ability to reassamble itself every turn. Players comms can be a mercenary (merc) without affiliation to a faction (clan) or join one. Each faction has 1 or 2 leaders that manage the galaxy orders and the faction treasury. Systems can only be owned by factions, not by mercs. The game currency is Tantalum units or Tau. This metal is essential for reassambling comms. Huge ammounts can be mined by factions in controlled system and small ammounts are obtained automatically by players every turn. At any time players or factions can give Tau to other players in exchange for any kind of service (or empty promise). Transfers will take effect everyday around 00:00 UTC +0. At any time (but only once per turn) players whose comms were destroyed in a previous turn can spend 10Tau to reassamble (reactivate) their comms. Goals Factions: Conquer every system in the galaxy. Mercenaries: Amass a fortune selling your services to the highest bidder. Arrival The first time a player opens CMD he's given 5Tau and start playing as a merc. Turn Duration 1 week. Phase 0 - Faction Planning Monday-Tuesday At the beginning of the phase each player gets 5Tau and each faction gets the income generated by their controlled systems. Factions get a bonus income for connected systems under their control. Faction leader: Claims systems for his faction. Claiming a new system cost 10Tau, claiming an enemy system cost 30Tau. There must be a link between a system from the attacking faction to the enemy system for the attack to be valid. At the end of the phase the factions planned attacks are revealed to everyone. Phase 1 - Battle Wednesday-Sunday Players have to agree on a date to play a PA-Legion game for every jeopardized system (a new system claimed by 2 factions or a faction system claimed by another faction). Same faction players share armies while mecs don't. Only active comms (not destroyed in previous turns or reassabled) can participate in a battle. Each player can fight in only one battle each turn. The mod limit participant factions to 3 per battle. If more than 3 faction leaders ordered an attack on the same system, the latests orders will be discarded. Players: Each participant faction can summon from 0 (meaning the faction withdraw from the battle) up to the maximum players set for that system. Those players can be faction members or mercenaries recruited for that battle. GameName: CMD_<turn>_<system_name> GameMode: Team armies Armies: Shared armies or unshared at the will of each faction. Development: Factions face each other while mercenaries help the faction that sponsored them. Aftermath: The result of the battle will take place once the new turn begins. The winning faction gets the system and all his participant faction players and mercenaries remain alive. All the losing faction players and mercenaries are declared destroyed and will have to be reassembled to be able to fight in future battles.
About the beta The beta war (hopefully) begins. There is still much to be done specially documenting the rules, but in the meantime it would be great if some of you install the mod to start the ball rolling and help me find any bug.
I don't normally post here but I don't see a thread for this on Steam. I think this mod is an amazing idea and I'm super excited to see how this plays. Reminds me a little of Planetside. My only question, is what, if any, mechanisms are in place to minimise faction snowballing? If Legionis Machina has twice the number of players, are there advantages given to the other factions to encourage people to play there? How about if one faction is clearly dominating the game, does it get progressively harder to keep pulling, or does it just spiral out of control until they win and the system resets, and again, the same faction dominates?
No, it isn't on Steam. At the moment there is no mechanisms to prevent snowballing, I'm thinking about limiting the maximum players per faction and doing so depending on the players ladder rank. Anyway, with 3 or 4 factions they should ally against the strongest faction.
Beta update: Thanks to the people who have installed the mod. I've promoted the first 4 players to faction leaders. Now you should be able to cast invasion orders by selecting a system. You can attack as many system as you want but keep in mind that every invasion costs Tau (money) and you'll be able to take part in only one battle this turn. Once some of you have cast orders, I'll advance the game to battle phase where we will fight for the systems. For the first systems I've chosen the following maps: From Uber: -Pax Prime 2014 -Iron Sky System From WPMarshall's Map Pack: -Marshall's Lament (Titans) -Sorian's Supper Please report me any bug or improvement you think of. To those willing to join, you can do so at any time. But remmember that your current name has to appear in http://pastats.com/players?search= before installing CMD mod.
Beta update: First battles Great! 9 players already and a few attack orders. I've advanced the game to the next phase (Battle phase). As you can see, new icons have appeared over the stars. The awful attack icon represent the battles that have to be fought and the small faction icons the combating factions in each system. As you can see Legionis Machina are the only contender for one of the stars so they will be given it without a fight. Now faction leaders must coordinate to set a PA-Legion game to decide the result of each battle. You have the rules in the firs post but I remind you that the game names should be like this CMD_<turn>_<system_name>. For example, CMD_1_IronSkySystem. Belligerent Leader steam11000010e29661d from Legonis Machina has decided to invade all 4 systems. However, right now he is the only player in his faction and will be able to fight personally in just 1 battle out of 3. He can now contact (by in game chat or any other way) some of the factionless players to fight for Legonis Machina this turn in exchange for Tau (money) or withdraw from 2 of the 3 battles. If he decides to fight for the system to the left (IronSkySystem) he has to take into consideration that the maximum number of players per side is 2, so if he doesn't get help from other players he could be fighting a 1vs2 in that battle. So let the battles begin, and contact me for any doubt. Thanks again guys for installing the mod, I've found a few more bugs that will get fixed soon. I've detected that quite a few players have installed the mod without being on PAStats, due to a bug they may be able to issue some orders but none will have effect as the server code drops them. I'm updating the mod to show a message clarifying this situation.
Would be great for players to let me know when they do battle on these systems. Would be good to cast!
So, does this mean that CMD cannot automatically launch games, but instead we need to individually create lobbies and host our own games?
PA most famous caster @wpmarshall , that would be great! However, as it is still in beta, the factions are placeholders, it would be better if people asked me to set up factions by telling me: Faction name, leader(s), faction members and faction icon. @Ostler5000 You're right CMD cannot launch games at the moment, it would be a nice addition but the main difficulty to play will still be agreeing on a time to play. It would be great to have a chat room for the mod because it quite a social metagame. @mikeyh could you help us with that? is it feasible to have a permanet chat room for this mod?
I'm always right. Can I make a request - Can we get the 'Mercenaries - Tai & Status' window moved to the left of the screen - With it being on the right, when I open the friends/players list from the games taskbar, it covers the window I needed to see to type out steam11000010e29661d's username. It's minor, but it'd be appreciated. How do players join factions? Do they just post here and notify you and you do the rest? If I talk to someone on Steam, or in-game and they want to join Foundation, can I post here on their behalf? As the faction leader for Foundation (My favourite of the 4, actually. What luck!) is the responsibility of faction recruitment and organisation on me? I don't mind playing a Moderator role of sorts in maintaining the CMD mods management. Whether it be organising times for all Foundation matches on day X, or dealing with fair play issues. Is it also my responsibility to reject people if the Foundation has, lets say, 1.5x the number of members that the 2nd busiest faction has? After a match has been played, do we just post here? Do we need to link to the match from PAstats? What if someone cannot agree on a time, or fails to show up? What if a faction (for example, Legionis Machina) attempts to start more battles in a turn than they have Commanders to manage, and are unable to do one of the fights - do they automatically forfeit? Is there a penalty for doing so?
Fair enough, next update the Mercenaries window on the left. I'm glad you like the Foundation There is no tool in the mod to manage faction members, I prefer to control it manually till we find a system to assure balance between factions. Yeah it's your responsibility to manage that kind of things in your faction just tell me who you want in or out. If things get unbalanced I'll limit faction's players. Yeah after the match post here the result and the PAstats id if possible. If a faction doesn't show up they forfeit, they just lose there is no special penalty but they don't recover what they spent when clicking on invading. For any organizational problem contact me couse my word is law muahahaha.
So, I contacted Bringerofflighters and flubb today, who have been appointed as faction leaders for Legionis Machina and Revenants, respectively. However neither of them were aware of this thread, that they were faction leaders, or what they needed to do. I think it might be worth contacting them and asking them if they would rather not be faction leaders, and opening the positions to people who are more involved with the CMD. Also, tiny nitpick - The faction insignias are the wrong colours. Can we get them changed? Foundation should be purple Legionis Machina, blue Revenants, red and Synchronous, orange. Speaking to bringerofflighters - we agree that CMD could benefit from having some sort of intro tutorial video, or at least a clearer set of rules laid out within the mod itself. Personally, I think we could do with changing some rules. I think factionless mercenaries are an idea that doesn't really work - A) There's no way to avoid attacking a Mercs units in a shared army game. B) If a merc wins a round, then what happens? Can mercs own systems? C) How can we possibly coordinate games with multiple individual users? Is there any point to having a system view, if people can attack any system they like? You can see each of the stars are connected via lines like they are in GW, but I could attack the far left and far right ones without consequence. The CMD board should start off like the GW board does - every faction has X number of systems already under their control. I can move one system out along the lines if I choose to, but I can't just attack a system on the other side of the map. The TAU system seems a little too complicated. I would instead impose a player cap on each faction, and allow them to make as many moves as they like each turn, the only limit being that each player can only fight one battle (Like it works now) If I have 6 loyal members of the Foundation, I have enough players to assign to fill a team of 3 attacking one system, while defending another. If Legionis and Synchronous both attack two of my systems - I need to decide whether I'm going to assign 2 sets of 2 coms to defend each, while another 2 attack another system, or put all 6 coms to defending both attacks, in turn meaning I cannot attack anything on that turn. I think any coms that are eliminated should miss a turn, but be allowed to play again on the next turn. This includes any coms who are eliminated, in a game that they ultimately went on to win. This has an advantage of allowing even a losing team, to potentially hurt the team that beat them. It sort of gives players something to aim for, even if they're fighting a losing battle. This would however, require players to keep track of their own Commanders so that we know specifically who got destroyed.
I've seen this thread (I just thought something new had been posted @Ostler5000), but I'm not active enough on GW or CMD to be team leader I think. It would probably be better if someone else was team leader.
-Faction colors will be changed by next release. -I want to include a "show CMD rules" button but I haven't finished defining them yet. I cannot know which things work yet. I know it adds more complexity but I really want to make CMD very inclusive so every PA player could jump in easily. A) is a problem. B) Not a problem. Mercenaries can only participate in a battle if invited by a faction, so that faction would get the system. C) Mercenaries could be more "casual" (meaning not very involved in the mod) players that you could recruit right before the match -People can't attack every system. You can attack every "new" system but only enemy systems conected to one of your faction. In the first turn every system is new but in the following turns I'll make one or no new system and factions will have to take each other systems. The reason for this is that I don't want to release a huge galaxy right now with 40 or more systems because: 1.I don't wanna work that hard finding a good system for each of my stars. 2.I want to have the action "controlled" in a few stars and keep growing according to the number of active players in CMD. The money system (Tau) main reason is to rank players specially mercenaries. With no mercenaries there would be no real reason for this to exist. About the current faction leaders: Right now CMD is in beta, I asked (twice) for volunteers to be faction leaders but found none and, as I needed to fill that role to test the mod, I chose the first ones. I really thank you beta faction leaders and you'll be released from your "duty" whenever you want AND someone else ask me to be faction leader.
Beta update -I have deactivated 2 factions until someone ask me to be faction leader. So now it's a war between The Synchronous led by myself and the Foundation led by Ostler. -As you can see in the screenshot, there is no battle to be fought as only 1 faction attacked each system so I'm gonna advance to week 2. -I'm gonna restart all player sign ups to fix a problem so you may not find yourself in the player list for a few hours. -I'm releasing a new update of the mod with minor bugfixing and a new option to declare the winner of a battle. Please contact me to join a faction as a member or as a leader.
As we learned from PA steam reviews , tutorials are important so: Video tutorial Week 2 - Battle Now we are supposed to fight between The Foundation and The Synchronous for Pax Prime system. I have assigned ramdomly players to factions so check the mod to see what side you are. To coordinate battles join PA Discord to set a date for the battle. https://discord.gg/76hVa
