Galactic War

Second only to my strong desire for a nice long campaign mode would be my love for the old Galactic War system in Total Annihilation (TA).

In your typical RTS ladder scenario you have a dozen (or less) maps, a few races. Veteran players inevitably memorize every map and race combination and develop strategies for each of them which can be boiled down to precise build orders which they have drilled repeatedly into their brains until they can execute their plan consistently each time. May the fastest clicker win. Bored yet? I sure am...

The Galactic War system used in TA was a very different animal. Each day players would be fighting over a small number of different systems (planets) each of which featured a different map in the game. Build orders ended up needing to be a bit more flexible because there were a heck of a lot more than 12 maps in the pool and there was a lot more variety.

And map variety wasn't the only thing I loved about the system. The whole grand galactic overview map of the many systems in the galaxy just felt right to me. The idea behind all of that had a very different feel to it. In a typical RTS game the only thing you're accomplishing is raising or lowering your ELO (or whatever) rank in comparison with other players. In Galactic war, you were fighting for your "team" more than for any personal edification. It created an environment where my own modest skills felt like they were a meaningful contribution to my side.

Despite the fact that I generally shy away from multiplayer in RTS games I loved the Galactic War in TA. I miss it. No other game since has had anything like it. I would love to see it again here in PA.

Maps will be procedurally generated this time, so you don't have to worry about people memorizing the ideal strategy for a map.

I did notice this, and I am really excited and hopeful about the idea of procedurally generated maps.

That however only scratches part of my itch for the Galactic War as featured on Boneyards for TA. There really hasn't been anything quite like it ever before or since. Sadly, for those who do not remember the system I have no example to show you because Boneyards was shut down many years ago.

However there are no doubt many old TA fans here some of which must remember the Galactic War. I can only hope that some of them will share my dream of seeing the Galactic War reborn here with PA.

As for the rest of you unfortunate souls who never experienced the Galactic War, I can only pity you, and hope that you may one day soon have the opportunity to experience it.

Ah the good old boneyards. I really hope they make something similar to that in this. The main challenge I see with this is the fact that there are no sides in this game. Just one faction with everyone fighting everyone (which I think is cool). Galactic Wars had you joining one side or another, and trying to take things over for your side. What are your thoughts on what they would do here?


By the way, even though maps will be procedurally generated this time, I really hope they intend to let us still have a list of premade maps made by fans (I know you can make maps yourself, but I hope sharing and having a lot of different ones will still be easy too).

I'm hoping that there will be really large world maps, and with that, maybe a chance for really long (50+ hour) campaigns. Obviously, with save/load games.

I think Uber said maps won't have a limit in size apart from what computers can handle (ie, you can't have a 100 TB map, as you won't fit that on nearly any harddrive).

The PC Gamer interview specifically mentions a Metagame like the Galactic War.

Yeah, but that could mean maps with lots of star systems... rather than star systems with huge planets.

That said, what I'm really wondering is if a planet could have multiple maps that are loaded/unloaded when zoomed-in, allowing you to play a campaign across a planetary surface...

Might be wishing for too much, butt I'd like to try

I personally am still holding out hope that this story of there only being one side is a dirty lie that will get stomped on and eaten by Kickstarter bonus rewards.

Failing that, they can always just do a classic red vs blue type scenario. In the end it really won't matter all that much to players if both (all?) sides are completely identical. As long as they look even a little bit different, that will be enough to satisfy people.

Regardless of how they handle the little details, I am hopeful that there is a chance once again that the Galactic War can return.

My comment was more directed towards doctorzuber and neophyt3 who were hoping for something like the Galactic War and this Metagame was already mentioned in the PC Gamer interview.

That's how it currently will be. 2 or more sides fighting against each other while having the same pool of units and buildings at their disposal. What "story" do you mean about there only being one side? If there was only one side, why would there be a war in the first place?

As I said, it was already covered in the PC Gamer Interview

I choose extra units over single player campaign content any day.

Seriously, units and game worlds trump campaigns by a long shot in terms of user engagement, replayability, and general bang for the buck.

The big ticket items (that are optional to some degree) are probably:

• unit variety
• meta game
• scenario variety (snow worlds, etc.)
• game mode variety / game customizability (e.g. more sensible skirmish and MP options)
• campaign

And a campaign is simply the least important of these. I hope it's the last stretch goal they set, at at least a billion bucks of pure post-launch profit after taxes.

I'm completely with you on this. Though it only lasted a few months, Boneyards and GW had me completely addicted the whole time, and I'd absolutely love to see something like that again - if not at release, as something that can be developed after the post-release shakedown period.

To those of you young whippersnappers that never heard of or gotten involved in TA's Galactic War, it was a full scale metagame, where you signed on as an Arm or Core commander fighting over a sector of the galaxy. Players would play matches on different contested planets (represented by a particular multiplayer map). At the end of each day, the side that won the most victories on a planet captured it, shifting the battle lines to new maps. However, the one element that really sold the GW was the weekly war reports - the Galactic War had an actual narrative that worked like an evolving, changing campaign storyline, based one what players were actually doing. It also gave the Cavedoggies some wiggle room if a particular sector became log-jammed. Near the end of the beta, the fighting was taking place in the sector around the Core homeworld - when Arm players finally captured the planet, the war report described the manner in which the planet was destroyed (and which player Commander Core Prime's entire database was downloaded into during his escape). In another instance, when a stalemate took hold around a bottlenecked Arm homeworld, the Core constructed a superweapon on the other side of the sector and simply vaporized the Arm sector capital.

And it was awesome.

I actually saved as many of the old war reports as I could before the Boneyards site shut down more than a decade ago. If there's no legal problem with it, I can try to post them to my dropbox account or something and share the links.

Either way, combine something like that (especially given the probable lack of campaign), with procedural maps and entire solar systems, and we could be talking about something truly spectacular.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/15/plane ... terview/2/

Okay, Now I've read the relevant bit in the interview. I am even more excited about this game than I was yesterday which I find hard to believe is even possible.

The Galactic War is returning, be prepared...

I really regret not having done that myself. If you do upload them, I'd love the link

Now if only there was someone who managed to record videos of them being on there. Then that would be some real nice nostalgia. I had one, but for whatever reason, it never came to mind to record them (might be because I didn't use the Internet much back then, and never thought I'd have Internet fast enough to upload videos anyway).

I think it will be difficult, from even a basic conceptual standpoint, to support something like that when one of the mechanics in the game is to destroy the very terrain that you're working on.

I understand that the goal is "awesome" instead of "realistic"...but most games that have a persistent universe that people then fight over don't have destruction mechanics on the scale we see in PA.

What happens if you're about to lose, but then you destroy all the planets in the system, such that while your opponent may have claimed the system, there's not much left to come back and fight over.

That would be the one way I could see use for a new race: an NPC race that keeps trying to undo the damage caused by us!

It would introduce a lockout mechanic so that while a system is regenerating, nobody could step in and try to fight over it again. That would allow people all over our actual world in different time zones to try and control their chunk of land, similar to how Global Agenda handles their zone conquest. This would also explain why a system will be different each time they come in to fight over it.

This is an interesting thought actually, I'm unsure how the logistics would work for this one. In Galactic War for TA the same maps were repeatedly fought over by many players over the course of an entire day, so it was never just one battle over a planet (system). It was many battles. There could be a question of scale there for how that is handled. So logistically, I'm not sure how that might work. Maybe the system would be damaged afterwards based on the "average" damage done by the many players who fought over it that day? I have no idea really. I'll have to think on that one a bit.

I also see some potential for this as an interesting feature however. Imagine what happens if you end up back on the same system fighting over it again? Only this time, instead of it being a fresh virgin system with a full compliment of planets, you have a war ravaged system with extremely limited resources. It could make for a pretty unique and interesting battle.

This reminds me of the "Uplift" trilogy (two trilogies in fact) where in the many many alien species in the galaxy routinely labeled words as "fallow worlds" which nobody was allowed to colonize or even set foot on for a million years or so allowing the planets a chance to regrow.

I am unsure if this is the right direction to go with this idea in PA however.

lol, I wouldn't expect the destruction of planets translating to the meta-game state as well . In any case, I don't think it would be even difficult from a conceptual standpoint. May be you'll then always fight on a different planet within the same system, once one got destroyed in a battle.

I dunno, it could make for an interesting meta aspect.

So I'm going to make a bunch of numbers, so they keep in mind they could easily be tweaked.

..................okay I just realized my idea is actually really bad, But I'm sure there is someway to keep the planetary annihilation aspect, like they could do a resent every once and a while or something.

Mike

Here you go - unfortunately, I can't keep what images I have properly linked to the files using dropbox, and I don't actually have a hosted site anymore to put these on, so it's basically just the text. Good times though. In order:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _2-21.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... g_3-9.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _3-14.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _3-22.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _3-31.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... g_4-5.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _4-12.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _4-20.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _4-27.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... g_5-6.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _5-11.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _5-18.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _5-25.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... g_6-8.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _6-22.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... g_7-8.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _7-22.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12308964/Galac ... _7-29.html

Sadly videos and recorded games have been lost to the ages - not that videos were an option for me back then, what with my 33.6K internet connection (I'm betting there are plenty of people on this board now who have never even heard of a baud ). I only got broadband halfway through the Galactic War, and one of my first games was against a guy with a 1200 baud connection - 45 minutes on Coast to Coast before the first ship finished building!

As to a Galactic War metagame in PA - it obviously could not work exactly the same way as it did for TA, what with procedural maps and systems potentially being destroyed. On the other hand, it can work very similarly if you scale up the action - rather than each "node" on the metamap representing a planet, have them represent sectors (which would be full of solar systems - so no reason why battles would happen in the same system over and over again). Hell, the metagame map could be a sizable chunk of the entire galaxy, if not the whole thing. Talk about Galactic War!

It would take a bit of tinkering to develop a basic storyline (to create if not different races, at least different factions, even if they use the same units). And it could be anything at all - as much as people fawn over the elaborate stories behind a lot of modern RTSs', in my mind one of the great things about TA was its barely-there plot: talk about room for expansion! Anybody here who spent time on the old Cavedog forums probably remembers how quickly the official War Stories Board (intended for game accounts) turned into a TA fanfiction archive.

I see a lot of the same potential in PA.

Sweet, thanks! Can't believe I never saved those myself.

Yep, Internet speed is the only reason I never recorded any videos of it myself.

I was thinking something similar myself, why not have the battlefield the entire universe, while the galaxies are what you are fighting over? No problem with solar systems being destroyed then, what with the hundreds of billions of them being in each galaxy. You can easily fight over each galaxy over and over.