Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky Way

If there is already discussion on this please forward me to that topic...

Otherwise
1) I am interested in a discussion and plan on how strategy would work across such a large scale.
First I have 3 computer screens so I could have each screen handle a different map (galactic map, world map, and active screen with what I see and am actively involved).
The maps would show radar and what units are being attacked/attacking. And possibly set way points if traveling.
Can go on...
But others may not be so lucky. How would they have the same tools?
2) Android tablet app to help with strategy that would somehow connect to the server

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

PA is a real time strategy game. The galactic map will most likely serve as a scoring system/map pool for a series of matches. It is unlikely that choices made on the galactic map play any direct role beyond choosing a new game.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

No the galactic map is just a level of strategic zoom, that's what galactic war is. compare it to sins of a solar empire when you zoom out you can see all the planets zoom in to a planet and you can control units

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

In SC FA you can enable the secondary display and it is a map of everything that you can zoom in and out from and click on units when zoomed in.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

it's true, having multiple monitors and fast hardware can offer an advantage versus a player living on minimal system requirements. How much of an advantage depends a bit how useful these additional views end up to be, but in a game with multiple planets I guess they will be quite nice.

But in the end it's not that much different from earlier games. To a degree hardware was always a certain factor influencing the balance in game.



PS:To connect to earlier discussions, I would say, hardware is more pay to win than any custom commander ability, that was speculated about.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Not verified. It is unknown how war will play across a galactic sized map. But we know huge games will have 40'ish players, so individual games will most likely occur in some arbitrary sized sector of the galaxy.

A hundred worlds and a dozen stars is very small on a galactic scale, but it is big enough for truly insane games.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Off subject but....

I built up my pc to run virtual machines, but it turns out just having windows hyperviser installed kills fps in games... Really would liked that fixed...

In that idea is there a page where people are posting there system specs? After the game is released I will be interested to know how well it plays on a range of system parts and over all specs. Really interested to know if the performance will be more dependent on CPU/RAM speed or GFX card. Also brand GFX card.
Maybe start a new post for this but it will only matter after the game is released.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

I guess I misunderstood I thought you were talking about solar systems. I re-watched galactic war vid, and now I under stand what your talking about. Galactic war is like world of tanks clan wars.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

I hope not, I think a real time galactic war would be better, no turn based meta game for me...

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

While a meaty server might have limitless potential, hundreds and thousands of players do not seem to be planned for individual games. I'm not sure the internet could take it!

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

This is off topic... But...

If your suggesting a turn based system for Galactic War, then the whole game has to be. And with 40 players, you have to wait for all 40. I believe the last turn based game played on a PC was called Deadlock. Even though it easy a good game, I do not want to see this game going in that direction. If you need a powerful server to run this game with 100,000 units fine. I just won't host a server to do it, but I don't think it's gong to be as crazy as we think. Crazy still, yes. But not as crazy. My home server I am hoping to host a galactic war for 4 players.
My home pc games I play now has 1000 unit of my own on one map. Play with 4 people that 4000 total per map. If that's one planet, add that up to 5 planets in one system, and then have a galactic field with 20 systems.... That's 400,000 units. Server is handling units and game control and pc is handling graphics. I think current systems should handle this as the power is distributed.
Remember RTS is Real Time.
Going back to OP
I would like to use all 3 of my screens as mentioned in my first post.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

This is off topic... But...

If your suggesting a turn based system for Galactic War, then the whole game has to be. And with 40 players, you have to wait for all 40. I believe the last turn based game played on a PC was called Deadlock. Even though it easy a good game, I do not want to see this game going in that direction. If you need a powerful server to run this game with 100,000 units fine. I just won't host a server to do it, but I don't think it's gong to be as crazy as we think. Crazy still, yes. But not as crazy. My home server I am hoping to host a galactic war for 4 players.
My home pc games I play now has 1000 unit of my own on one map. Play with 4 people that 4000 total per map. If that's one planet, add that up to 5 planets in one system, and then have a galactic field with 20 systems.... That's 400,000 units. Server is handling units and game control and pc is handling graphics. I think current systems should handle this as the power is distributed.
Remember RTS is Real Time.
Going back to OP
I would like to use all 3 of my screens as mentioned in my first post.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Hah, sorry, but the "should be able to handle 400,000 units" made me laugh...
That's 400,000 units that need to be aware-ish of their surroundings, so they must keep tabs on a few units in the area, say 3, that's 400,000 units with 3 units each, 1,200,000 units to watch. They must also be able to have at least 5 shots in the air at any one time, that's 2,000,000 projectiles.

Think... SupCom can handle ~5000 units on a high end PC. If this game is optimized to be twice that speed per core, that's 10,000 units. Now let's assume it's perfectly multithreaded to run on ~16 cores. That's 160,000 units. These are a lot of assumptions and you only get 2/5th of the way to your number.

Now, there's the issue of memory and network. Say each unit uses 1/4kb of memory, 96,000 units makes ~40mb. Imagine that those 160,000 units are spread over 160 players. You were saying that there'd be 4 players on each planet, so let's assume each player is watching 2 worlds max. They'd each need access to the information on 8,000 units. Now say those units only need to update once a second, that'd be 2mb/s of network traffic to each player, so 320mb of internet traffic, JUST to transfer the units' information.
Your 400,000 units at 1/4kb per unit makes for 800mb of network traffic per update.

Now add projectiles and the fact that units need to update more than once a second.

Even if you only use mere bytes per unit, the network traffic and calculations required are staggering. Say 100 bytes per unit = 80mb for 400,000 units, say 20 updates per second, that makes 1,6gb. Add projectiles, 2,000,000 times 10 bytes, that's 800mb (assuming 2 visible planets per player).

Do try to remember that Uber has said they will not be distributing the workload over all PC's in the game, as that's unrealistic and prone to cheating. Also, the network traffic needed for the system they are currently planning is already high (high enough for them to worry about), if they had to sync between the PCs and the server and among PCs themselves it'd be even higher.

Disclaimer: These numbers are made up, the calculations are not.

Tl;Dr: 400,000 units is ridiculous and real-time galactic maps are a bad idea.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

I understand what you are saying and do agree. But from what we have been told about PA and how big the games will be and my own experience with SC FA, I can see it being possible.
With an AMD 4400+ and 4850s in CS (2gb RAM) I played single player and multi player skirmishes on 80km maps with each player having 750 or 1000 units. Generally 4 or 5 players including myself. Most of the time the other 4 were computer players. Some lag at times yes, but still playable as I did it that way a lot.
Uber has said this game will be server based with thousands of units (or more) depending on server hardware. These games will also be large with possibly 40 players. As players die off in game resources will free up and will allow others army's to get larger.
They said this game is server based to not restrict the games size to the user with the slowest PC as the limitations that I can only now assume we're on the SC games.
If that is all true, and I can be wrong but I assume that the server will handle all the logic and PCs all the graphics. Obviously I cannot imagine that would completely 100% true all the time but for the sake of argument that is how I am assuming the game will be played.
Also you don't really need to send all data about every unit on the field over the network every second. The pc knows what the unite is and capable of. The server just needs to send where the unit is facing and what it's doing. I would expect both the server and PCs know what each unit can do. I have played FPS games on my PS3 with 1 or 2. Hundred people on one map. I do not think every detail was sent to every PS3 at the same time. I can remember the game but will post it after I pull it out later. But in that idea, the PS3 only has 256MB ram and only about 192MB (sounds right) was used for games after an update that took some space back from the OS.
The. PC I am going to use as a server is a 2.8 ghz phenom 2 with 8gb RAM. If all I said above is true, I am hoping 2 friends of mine and a few computer players can play a galactic war together that will last days or longer. I can only hope! I work every day and married with a baby so I probably will only play a bit on a Sunday and would hope we could all jump in and out of the game as we have time. One of my friends travel around the world for work and stay in location for months at a time so jumping in and out is a must.
My desktop was built for testing purposes and running VMs. I put an AMD 8350, 32 gb RAM and 2x7870s (Hawks) in crossfire to play. Worse case I will just use that as the server while I do my other work and open the game client when available (depending on if implementation of the game allows that of course)

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

They said during one of the live streams during a q&a that galactic war is going to be a "Meta Game" he elaborated for less than 30 seconds on it, but essentially "it's a way to tie individual skirmishes together." sorry to burst your bubble but galactic war will not be real time, or at least not real time enough you'll be able to hop back and forth. It might not be entirely turn based either though, it could be real time in the sense that it keeps track of ongoing battles and when players are finished they can immediately move on to new battles. Maybe we'll even have options to re-enforce persisting battles by moving surviving units onto FTL transports. That would probably be done entirely post battle though, if done at all.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Thanks for the update. I must have either missed that or misinterpreted what I heard.
I will have to read more into this... If you have any links that go further into the current expectations on how galactic war will be played, please post them. I will also continue to look into this on my own.
Thanks

Edit
I get it more now. After a quick Google search I think I just had a brain fart on what meta games were. How I would like this to all tie in together and be "played" could still happen just done differently, maybe easier. Like how some MMOs are played.... Large scale games played across small parts, that can still effect each other. Will think more on this... Like a script waiting on one of its variables to change from another script but still may stay in the same loop with care until that happens. The first script doesn't need to know about and doesn't have any care on what the other script is doing. When it's happens it only cares the variable changed. Like ships leaving one solar system going to another.
The question now really is, host multiple solar systems on one server, or connect them over a local network or the internet. Servers may not even care about the connections, and each players pc may actually handle this. This would allow many players on each server and put that strain on the local pc. You would just have to have an app watching each server and updating at key moments like your being attacked or nothing at all interactive and just keep the session open allowing you back in as needed. Your units will just continue doing what you asked them to do while you are away.

I could keep going on this thought but I think what I am saying can be understood with out me writing a book.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

I think this is what galactic war will ultimately translate into. 40 players in a galaxy, sort-of played tournament style. Players start out battling the neighbors in their system, and players will begin to be eliminated. Then whoever conquers the system begins moving on to new systems (other skirmish games) with a select amount of units and resources (maybe how much you can bring to the next system depends on how many transports you can build before a skirmish ends?). Then you fight another skirmish with the other winners, so on and so forth until large swaths of the galaxy are left in ruin and only two remain, and duke it out in the last habitable system with everything they can muster, until only one remains and the winner gets the coveted 40-person-FFA-winner badge.

Edit: I'm curious as to how this would play out with players being unavailable for the next battle, scheduled skirmishes and things. Seems to me like a lot of people will end up forfeiting after a few matches because they can't make the next game, or they realize one player is already decimating everyone on the other side of the galaxy.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Just had a thought...
If everyone could host their own solar system on their own pc, and when off line build up their army (with some uber implemented rules to keep things fair like number of planets you can build on) you could take your solar system online and have galactic wars with others.
Puts a new spin on PvP.
When you jump online you will exposed to all others or just your friends.
If using a dedicated server, Game states (solar system data) would save on your local pc, but would upload and run from the server that everyone connects to OR, the server would be used to sync the game across all clients running their own solar system. Moving your unites across to another solar system via any method, worm holes, solar rifts, light speed ships, transfer warp etc... I can understand if the 2nd method will not work as well as the game will be completely server based and this depends on the idea that servers will be able to work together with a central server making sure everything is in sync, same units/mods and no cheating.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

If not actual full Real Time Galactic war then the project should be shelved for development of the technology.

A glorified ladder/elimination system is not worth all the effort and wont do the games esthetic any good.

Re: Galactic Maps - Planning and Strategy Across the Milky W

Baby steps. A proper, in-game themed ladder system is very welcome, much better than a constantly-edited forum thread. Barely takes any effort at all.

People seem to have unrealistic expectations of what "galactic war" means. The name is probably more awesome than what it actually is.