Epic ongoing games, how could that work?

this is from the shacknews interview.

Well how can you imagine that that works out?
I mean, if you have something like that, obviously several people have the possibility to play one team. For example I play 2 hours, then a clanmate would log in, and take over.
But is this even possible? I mean what, if I am the only one logged in, will the enemies' units be then deactivated? I really love this idea but I dont know how it should work^^

Well, the defenders have the clear advantage (because of an existing economy, and a pile of tanks).

I think it'd be a white-wash against the attackers unless two things happen;

• attackers join en-masse (awesome, because it involves teamwork, and that's never a bad thing),
• commanders need to be inherently OP compared to conventional games (otherwise the defenders can mindlessly welp tanks and bots onto the fledgling attackers.

There's the other problem of; how do you prevent an entire nation from joining the same server at the same time? I think this could be solved by having setting up the universe so that players would literally have to hop from one system to the next to get anywhere. Though that has a pile of problems of its own.

Just like in any other RTS; if your opponents quit, you win.

You'd have to have separate star systems for this to work, I think. It would be very difficult to penetrate an enemy star system and successfully clear it out. That would make it so you could leave your star system to manage itself for a while so you didn't have to constantly babysit, which would probably be very hard/impossible to pull off. That way you have a constant back and forth, with neither side ever gaining a ton. The games would last for an incredible length of time, but it would ensure that all sides had a fairly decent chance at winning. I think it's a cool idea, but it would take a ton of work to get right.

I somehow missed this topic, but posted a very similar question - although I must admit, I did not think of a 'take command of clan units' approach..

IMO, the key to a format like this will be two things:

1: Pre-determined logon times set when creating the game (eg, pause the game from 8 AM - 6 PM on weekdays so I can work in peace!).

2: Automation tools that allow players to set how AI will behave when they aren't logged in. Set factories to endlessly build units to replace ones that are destroyed, queue up huge building queues for construction units to complete while the player is away, and hopefully some sort of "contingency" system like "if this gets destroyed, then carry out this chain of orders".

The idea here is to enable the engine to do this stuff. Whether or not big ongoing games end up being fun is a different question. Hopefully we will all know the answer soon

which stuff do you mean? AI controlling units? or some other ideas that you have?

In the idea I was dreaming up, having a persistent universe - no taking over of 'clan' units, I wouldn't even mind no AI controlling construction of units, commanding in my absence, etc.

Only that defensive structures, and units in place even when I am not logged in and playing continued to function as last commanded.

With an ongoing, persistent battle, huge empires/alliances would be created and clear front lines would be established - so you wouldn't, say, leave your assault units on or near the front lines. But you could leave artillery cannons, artillery and other defensive vehicles strategically placed,and the other players in your alliance would be fighting on that same front line essentially protecting your units in your absence (and your units assisting in the battle to maintain ground).

of course, if your side lost ground - you would lose those units. As well, if your side gained ground, your units would not be playing a vital role in the fight - although, they would still exist as cursory defense in the event that units tried to sneak attack, etc.

In this way, an alliance could maintain defense over their main base, with players adding to the strategic defense while not logged in and playing - and those logged in could lead the fight to new territory, while keeping on eye on alliance territory for large assaults, sneak attacks etc - in which case they would switch focus from new territory back to a defensive posture.

While that does sound all kinds of badass, I think the angle this game is going for is (slightly) more restrained, with games with admittedly a lot of players, but not lasting more that about an afternoon. It seems more like a single game will go on, and people can join or leave and get a share of the team's units
Although having a newb come and mess up your invasion plans would be very annoying, perhaps the current team leader could designate some units to give? Like "here's a moon, now go and make sure the enemy don't steal it" =P

Although with drop-in and drop-out play, and enough customization on resource income in custom games, who can say what certain clans will get up to =)

oh, yeah, absolutely...I know that as the game is currently, mmo-rts type gameplay ideas are just out of their scope.

I am thinking more along the lines of a Mod, or future DLC content....for what this COULD become lol.

I just see it actually being feasible with procedural generation taking care of the scale of the persistent universe, and management split among dedicated servers who manage sectors of that universe comprising of the total supported players that PA will support conccurently in one sector.

There would admittedly need to be support of a "cloud" type server network worked into the API or at least the possiblility of adding this type of support. but the scale that the dedicated servers will support as-is should be more than enough to provide epic-mmo style action with the addition of persistence.

but i dream....

Just to confirm, we can still save games... so that way we could pause our 40-hour gameplay marathon, go to sleep... go to work... school, whatever... and then resume playing?

As far as i'm aware, by popular demand they may have decided to have MP saves, although no confirmation yet

Here's the list of all the things: Big ol' list

Are you an Eve player? If you aren't, you probably should become one.

In any case, I too want to see a metagame very much like this.

It does sound fun, can't even begin to imagine how many servers it would take to run a game with like 10 solar systems with 5 major planets on each, but with some clever programming (like players not being sent data from star systems they don't currently have units in), it would actually be feasible to run a very large game that lasted a week or something.
Or indefinitely if it's well balanced and the teams don't suck =P

I wonder how this new update will relate to our discussions here - especially as it relates to the Clan Wars servers...

This update definitely makes me the happiest

Players joining mid-game doesn't sound like a great idea to me to be honest. I look forward to being surprised but I just can't picture it working well.

I'd hope instead for the game to work at a sufficient range of scales (e.g. 20 minute 1v1 to 2 hour 30v30) and have a sufficient critical mass of people online at any one time that players will be able to hop into games of their preferred length without too much fuss.

Having good skirmish AI would also help a lot with making play accessible to people with less free time.

I'm pretty sure that was the way multi-player was already going to work prior to this update, only that now the scale is even larger- prior to this update they said that interplanetary combat could sustain 70 players, so I imagine especially for the clan wars servers that this will be multiple server host instances, and a larger meta-game of hundreds of players.

or at least that is what I am hoping it means lol

Yeah. I'm optimistic for the multiplayer generally. The main thing I hope for is that it will be possible to have just a small match as well as massive ones and that the game will be fun whether played on a small scale (say 2 planets and a couple of asteroids) or immense scale.

I think there's a big market for multiplayer RTS games that can be finished within 20-30 minutes and still be a lot of fun.

The watchword, as I like to say, is scalability. You should be able to have small quick games and large giant games. People will play whatever is the most fun and whatever their schedule allows. Our job is to make sure this is all possible.

I have faith! Nice to hear that scalability is a recognised goal.