A way to make Free-For-All games work?

Typically in RTS games nobody plays FFAs, because there is perceived to be no skill involved in winning or losing. Even though you have the fog of war, everybody knows where the enemy bases are.

The conceptual idea behind FFA is not what actually happens. In an ideal world, everybody would fight amongst themselves roughly equally until the strongest player wins. In reality players are mobbed based on how dangerous they look.

The concept for Planetary Annihilation has given me an idea. Assuming that the game includes solar systems with multiple planets, and given that those planets are randomly generated, I envisage a new game mode where FFA might just work.

In addition to the usual lobby where everybody sees who's about to play, how about a matchmaking system where you don't see who you'll be playing? Not only do you not see who you'll be playing, but there is no in-game player list. You would only reveal names on the in-game player list once you had had proper contact with them. Likewise you could only send chat messages to people you have discovered.

For example, let's say you have asked for a 6 to 8 player game in a system with 8 to 12 planets. After a matchmaking progress bar, the game starts. You do not know how many players there are until you come across each one. Unlike in a pre-rendered map, you don't know where the bases are until you literally find them. So some players may choose to scout as early as possible to get the measure of their opponents, some players may choose to stay hidden as long as possible and try to get a firepower advantage before making themselves known.

It's entirely feasible that player 1 & 2 would be fighting each other whilst unaware of players 3 & 4 having another fight, whilst player 5 has spotted player 2 and player 3's bases but has not made himself known.

I don't envision this replacing the standard lobby system, but it could be a very interesting game type.

Yes.

I'm imagining a game where there are 5 players, spread among 3 planets. The players know for sure that there are more than 2 players, but less than the max of that solar system. Two players that start on the same planet find eachother and decide to team up (might need some disadvantage to teaming up.. no idea what that could be, perhaps a fixed one -off cost), two players on another planet have a fight and the losing one flies to the more distant planet, meets the 5th player and teams up with them... this is getting confusing.

Anyway, something dynamic, full of suprises, and including losing players begging others not to blow them up in return for resources, would be AWESOME.

This sounds fantastic.

That sounds like an excellent idea! It's most definitely a gametype that I would want to play, since there are so many different strategies that you can employ.

I can dig this low intel approach.

This would be a great game mode to have. Love the idea.

Sounds epic. I agree, it would be interesting not even knowing how many enemies you have.

This also works with a known number of players purely due to the procedural nature of the planets. If you don't know the start locations, it ends up being the same thing.

Either way, it's a nice concept.

You never played TA or SupCom then? FFAs were not that rare there.

That's laughable, imho.

I wouldn't go that far, but it is true that luck (and diplomacy, which I guess can be considered a skill) plays a far greater role in FFA than in 1v1, where skill is more often the deciding factor.

A great idea, actually. Though, to make it "fair" you'd have to make sure that you put an equal number of players on every planet (the easiest solution to this is to just stick a person on each planet). I would be far more interested in FFAs if they were handled this way, to be honest. Even if you stuck two people on each planet, I still think it'd be interesting.

If there was a person on each planet it would give a degree of certainty that would be equivalent to knowing where all the bases were. So there should always be a few more planets than players.

e.g. there are 12 planets and 7-9 players. If I launch to a given planet I most probably will meet resistance, but I might just get an entire planet's worth of resources to myself. An interesting gamble in other words.

Of course if the planets are a reasonable size (say equal or bigger to a 20k Supcom map), you could quite easily get a base set up on another player's map, potentially with neither of you realising it until an unescorted construction unit unexpectedly gets a cap in his ***.

This is a great idea. Having a game where you don't even know how many players there are until you discover each one would add so much fear and mystery to the whole thing.

Procedural maps definitely enables this game style.

I love it.

This is a nice concept. It will be a nice feeling not knowing where your enemy is or the number of enemies.
Now think about a game where you don't know the number of enemies nor the number of planets... a random generated scenario where everything is random, even the number of planets would be AWESOME.

BTW I play a lot of FFA games in SC and BA.

I like the idea of random player counts for FFA but I don't agree with the premise. I see a reasonable number of FFAs. The main skill is diplomacy along with a broad knowledge of crazy thing which can be done with large economies. There is no 'fairness' in the sense that the player who would win a 1v1 tourney will win a FFA. Basically FFA is about diplomacy so I don't see why you would want to downplay it.

In short I don't think that FFA necessarily doesn't work.

This sound like a good idea!

My FFA experiences so far were that one enemy attacks you out of the blue and when you trie to get your revenge another player is crushing your base... or nobody attacks for full 30 minutes.... this with intel capabilities and everyone has its own planet would be very interesting...

It would be also interesting when the planets are on their orbit around the sun and different planets are from time to time closer and you are able to attack different enemies. This would mix up the whole start position concept because your neighbour changes every 10 minutes!!!

I had the idea before I realised it would provide an alternative to standard FFA. Please disregard anything that you think is incorrect about my comments on existing FFAs, they're just there for context.

I would love this because this would also be the concept of war. Maybe in this mode still have a a kind of cease fire treaty... ( idea )

Really great idea. I love FFA anyway but this sounds way more awesome.

Ordinarily there are only two reliable ways to win FFA; either a very early successful attack to double your territory by taking out the player closest to you, or hiding in a corner and building a superweapon while everyone else fights.

I'm not sure this idea would necessarily completely change those winning strategies but it would make executing each one more complex and would bring a whole new requirement for intel into the game. Plus the anticipation/fear from the unknown variable of where your opponents are and how many there are would be ace and avoid gameplay becoming too repetitive.

I like the "blind" concept, though wonder how someone could tell that the players that did join are ready to start without then revealing how many of them there are.

Would the system have a timer where after X amount of time the game starts regardless of how many active players there are?

Would the server auto-fill a random number of AIs in the event that no other players joined?

I think this would be fun in combination with the possible feature where we select where we drop. Combined, it would make both location and quantity of enemies an unknown, which could be intense.

This would also be benefited by in-game scoreboards not revealing any information about the other players.