Competitive Symetrical Map

I swear to god, 90% of competitive TA games were on Gods of War.

The ending is almost an argument in favour of artificial inaccuracy. That transport bomb though was such a clutch play.

SETON'S CLUTCH WOO!!!

I think balanced metal distribution is enough to make the planet generation fairly balanced.
What else is needed?

Previous thread on the subject: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/symmetric-planets.54833/
Also related: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/randomness-in-early-game.55996/

Both MOBA and ARTS also happen to describe, like 90% of multi-player games ever realised.

If anything it's a competitive RPG.

Mandatory symmetrical would be a mistake. I really like having that option about though.

Uber said he would be working on it.

The map generation is so "evenly random" that it practically is a symmetrical map. The maps generally all feel the same anyways just to how perfectly even they mix together. More turbulence to the terrain generation needs to be added, as well as better island fractals etc. Such as the fantastic archipelago maps from Age Of Empires II. Spend 20 minutes in maya hypershade making planets out of fractal generated materials on spheres and see what I mean. Theres a bit of difficulty in making them not to blandly even, but some extra work can get more varied results.

Also..whats not symmetrical about making 2 identical planets in one system? Is that not symmetrical gameplay?
I would get real sick of joining games that had yet another attempt to re-invent the starcraft game model. Symmetry is easy, variety is not.

I think symmetrical maps and starting point options (including terrain and metal) would be a valuable addition. Mavor experimented with it at one point, and discovered it was far from trivial. And I know him to be a guy who oftens busts out new features faster than many people.

As for timing, I think many competitive features are going to lag behind our first release. In case it isn't obvious, I have passion around competitive play and eSports. I made this decision anyway, and I did it because I think it is good for our participation in eSports.

The reason is, as I have said in previous posts, eSports and competitive play requires a certain size of audience. And we can actually do some math to decide how large our player base needs to be. I don't have the back of the napkin numbers we ran, but the idea is that if a competitive/ladder game runs M minutes, and you have P players and Q percent of them want to do ladder matches, you can determine how long your ladder queue would take on the average for people to get a game if you matched them with any available player. If you then decide you want to try and create more fair matches, you must assume a narrower field for matchmaking, and a correspondingly longer time for people to wait. And really you need to calculate P players based on the active players and a given time of day, and understand how hard it will be to get a ladder match at your lowest level of activity.

So we had started working on ladder matches (we already had an implementation for a previous game) and I decided we couldn't create a good experience for our players and postponed it. And really what that means that we have a limited capacity to create competitive features, and should focus on game play issues and polish just a little longer.

Don't worry, we will continue to add to the competitive features, just as we recently did the updates to spectator mode!

I understand you're concerns about decent matchmaking and waiting times. I've been playing the Star Conflict beta (aside from RTS games I'm a big space sim fan- another rather neglected genre but thankfully it's coming back), and there are plenty of complaints about waiting times on there (as basically all matches are competitive PVP due to the design of the game) and we're probably talking no more than a couple of minutes as they have 1000's of players most of the time.

So I can understand that for the ladder system to be worthwhile you're going to need to hit a certain 'critical mass' of playes. What complicates it more is that you'll also have peak and off peak times depending on time zone however I suppose once you have the required number of players at peak times it's worth implementing.