How will galactic war work?

I know knight had already told me how this would work in few details but that just led me to more confusion (no offense knight). I know now that it isnt one giant galaxy more of a group of games (solar systems) going on simultaneously if i am wrong please correct me. So my best guess is that when you zoom out all the way you come to the galaxy map were you can pick which "map" you want to work in?

oh and btw.. this has probably been said a billion times so go ahead and yell at me... i dont care

You're mostly right. But you don't zoom out to see an entire galaxy... at least you don't do that while fighting.

I expect you'll be able to look at the state of the galaxy before and after each game. From there you'll be able to pick where you want to fight next, and who wants to fight you.

No, if you've played DOWark Crusade you'd have a better idea;

Basically it's a series of Skirmishes based on the CONTEXT of a Galactic War as shown in between Skirmishes.

Mike

One question I have regarding this is how it transfers to multiplayer stuff. Can you have a public galactic war, and have different Alliances/Clans vying for control of sectors? I mean potentially that could be made into a huge open ended map.

Or will online gameplay be a series of solar skirmishes?

Since the default "map" for PA is currently envisaged as a solar system, I would assume that the skirmishes being fought will be single system (whether that is one planet or several planets will probably depend on the number of players).

Tying those skirmishes together can be done in several ways, but the most likely is the Risk style sector map (DoW: Dark Crusade, Dune) with sector control determined by the skirmish victor. The number of sectors, sub-sectors, super-sectors etc. will determine how many fights are needed to establish an "overall" control to "win" Galactic War.

e.g. the main Galaxy map has 10 sectors, each of which is split into 10 sub-sectors. Each sub-sector has 1 fight (i.e. one control point) to determine control. If you go with a simple majority for ownership (assuming only 2 factions), you need to win 6 fights per sector to control the sector, and do that for 6 sectors, and you "win" the Galaxy (this is 36 out of a possible 100 victories, so not a simple, simple majority).

At the heart though, it's going to be the basic skirmish fight repeated ad infinitum (heh, infinite war) on different "maps" until you get a predetermined majority of some form.

Obviously that is just an example, and it's straightforward to make it more complex and introduce more tactical options (multiple control points, implement both a sector majority and also overall control point ownership majority to determine sector ownership etc.) to increase the effort required to gain and/or maintain galactic dominance, or to reduce the effort required to break galactic dominance. I suspect we'll see several iterations of Galactic War that use all of these and more until we get to a stable and balanced implementation

The galactic war could also be a way for multiple servers to communicate their status with each other. Aside from being just a metagame, a gaggle of servers could coordinate their matches and jump players seamlessly to a spare server for each game.

It is more like an "interactively decided list of fights, laid out over a galaxy like a Chess game or a game of Risk. The movement among the galaxy to cover it is between individual match game fights, as if in a game of Risk where: you move your pieces before you fight being the galactic map, and where you fight being the battles when two enemies meet."

The rest of the details are vague, whether or not multiple enemies can meet at once or or big or small galaxies will be or what other things you do during all of this.

I hope the galactic war will be the occasion to introduce and try some asymmetric gameplay.

I would like to see some persistence put into the Galactic war. I understand that the meta game territory control would be some sort of persistence I think some game play Persistence should also be put into place.

for instance you have just spent the last few days playing matches to take control of the system for you and your clan. The next day it comes under attack from other players but oooh look the base i built seems to have vanished. This annoys me in some games cause i put all that effort into securing the place and now its all gone and i have to fight from scratch.

I realise there is balance issues but i think it would add something to it.

I understand the Galactic War screen is effectively a pre-game map, similar to Spore's Space Stage and Total War.

Persistent online gameplay was what I was getting at, I also think it'd be awesome

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=43595&hilit=ongoing+massive+galactic+war

wait.. why isnt there gonna be space battles ... :evil: :?:

/facepalm

because Uber said so...

Because that's an entire genre in itself. It'll most likely be modded, or (unlikely) included in an expansion/update.

srry for going off topic but sense the game is in the far future and your suppose to colonize planets and with the massive scale proposed with this ''galactic war'' it would only seem logical that there be some form of space based combat... think about it if you were traveling from one planetary system to another and you encountered your enemy would you simply ignore him or would you try to explode his a#%... im only thing is tht the devs havent confermed the means of travel to get from planet to planet except via rocket ships and unit cannons

btw im not expecting a homeworld lvl of tactical complexity but rather more like
sins of a solar empire-ish were the ai assumes general command of the space units and gives simple attack/move orders you just click in a direction and it handles the rest
imperium galactica pulled off land and space battles rather well and it was released 1997
i dont see why they cant have something slightly similar
{Because that's an entire genre in itself} no its not this game seems similar to 4x which is what soase and ig are
{because Uber said so...} i repect the devs wish it just seems... illogical to not be included regardless via mod... though i'd rather see the professional dev make it than some amateur do it.... we can dream can we? well at least i can...

The inclusion would make sense, however the limitations are due to the nature of this project; it is crowdfunded, and the budget cannot support the level of development complexity required to make a balanced and fun space combat part alongside a balanced and fun ground combat part.

Uber are however committed to providing very in-depth modding support for the engine (which is awesome), so I would certainly expect someone, at some point, to do all the work necessary to try to get spaceships in the game. How well they will work (and whether they completely overshadow planetbound units as a result) is a different question.

From my point of view, the engine should already have enough hooks for "proper" space combat, as long as gravitational mechanics (orbits and how space objects move) is implemented without too many shortcuts. If asteroid-with-engines behaviour is implemented by doing all the right calculations (thrust, gravitational effects etc.), you can also apply those same ones to any space object with an engine and it should all work itself out

Note: in my vision this is not popular spaceships with aircraft-like handling, this is "proper" spaceships in a zero-friction, conservation of momentum medium. Which won't be very intuitive for most players, unfortunately, because you won't get swooping space dogfights. You get clumsy units that like to go in straight lines and take forever to turn around.

Goddammit there's another mod I'd love to make but I'm never going to have the time or skill to finish. I should have just backed this game and never registered for the forums at all :roll:

It's also worth noting that within the lore, space combat just isn't economical.

Mike

but my question is this actual lore or did some fan write it up to discredit the idea of space combat let alone is this game in cannon with the lore of TA or are SUPCOM, TA, and PA separate stories with similar concepts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOjiWfxv7Q8

in the video you see a web gate, the same tech used to get your commander from point A to point B is used to get ships across the stars and to render fleets of ships obsolete seems unlikely as this is what a space fleet would do this to land based units:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNc242mbiUs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYPSg-Ab7Dc

Why use very slow spaceships (relative) to transport things when I have access to teleportation?

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I hope you know that Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is NOT Supreme Commander.
Also you're trying to make a point of Warhammer 40,000 having congruent physics?
...
Warhammer 40,000?.. Physics?..
...
Seriously?

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As a further aside:
In Warhammer 40000, faster-than-light travel is achieved by jumping into a parallel dimension called the Warp or the Immaterium, which is essentially Hyperspace. A manifestation of the thoughts and emotions of all conscious life, the final 'resting place' of everyone's souls and the origin, and the Power source / Curse of all Psychic Powers.

But it is also a Hell brimming with soul-eating daemons and dark Gods. Ships need special Fields to keep the entities that swarm through the Immaterium from passing right through the hull and feasting on the minds and souls of all within. Even with the Field, the ship needs to be covered in holy baroque symbols to prevent daemons from blowing it up, or worse.

The normal passage of time is also completely irrelevant; it's impossible to know the exact age of people who do a lot of Warp travel and it's possible (though rare) for a vessel to disappear within the Warp for centuries or even millennia despite the crew only experiencing a few months of difference. Distance travelled is not necessarily related to the time taken to do so and there is at least one documented case of a ship entering the Warp and exiting at the same location...
before they left.

I could go into a lot more detail... but honestly this is not the time, nor place to do so.

It's totally a fanfic. Space combat isn't part of the game because it isn't the focus of the game. Commanders are. Wars are staged and orchestrated by the Commander, making it the single most important thing in the TA universe.

Fortunately, the background of TA goes a long way to justify things. The most central excus- reason is the macguffin, the Galactic Gate. The GG is unique in that it allows instant access to nearly any location in the galaxy, even if nothing's on the other side. The catch is that it is stupidly expensive and has a very limited capacity- in the TA-verse it could transport a few thousand tons before collapsing and needing several weeks to recharge. Thus, a gate is incapable of fighting a war- any units sent through are effectively stranded from their home.

Sending a few simple units isn't very effective. The TA solution was to send one exceptional unit- the Commander. I think you know what happens from there. The Comm warps through, stripmines his local environment, and builds an army to conquer the world. The process of planet conquering could take hours-weeks, before the Comm vanishes back through another GG, ready to begin the process all over again.

Space ships can't deal with that. It's too fast. Even using Star Trek speeds, any ship responding to a distress call will only find a ruined system and no Comm in sight. No space fleet can protect a planet, because Commanders can teleport from nearly anywhere directly to the planet. Even killing one is a Pyrrhic victory, as the antimatter explosion will rip a chunk out of the world. There's no way to win.

Now, is that sort of background appropriate for PA? You tell me.