An Idea to Help Keep Control of Multiple Planets

I got to reading the topic on Chris Taylor's thoughts about how the game would be too complex with multiple battlefields. I thought of a way in my head that might possibly make it easier to cope with.

What if there was some sort of government building that you could build (at a experimental level of cost), that once built would put an easy or normal ai on your team for whatever planet it's built on. Maybe you would have to give it resources that it's allowed to spend so you wouldn't have the problem of loosing resources you need for things elsewhere.

Of course the building should be an option to turn on or off for those that prefer one way of the other.

Thoughts?

No AI controlling my stuff, ever.

I understand CT's reasoning as most people don't have the skill to think on multiple levels/planes. But this is generally because it's not a used skill (unfortunately)... exercise it and it grows. So then it becomes a choice of do you want the game to be very accessible at the risk of it being 'boring' or do you want it to have a learning curve. I tend to prefer games that exercise my brain a bit as the progression becomes satisfying.

As far as having special AI's for planets you aren't currently focusing on, I don't think this would be necessary because having to manage multiple planets doesn't really put anyone at a disadvantage... everyone will have this same issue. I think having just good normal unit AI, unit production queue's, various standing orders, and a good UI are fine.

A full AI that controls a complete planet it not helpful at all in a Multiplayer-context.
Smaller helper-AIs already were discussed over many many pages in many topics. There are people who wish for them to do some non-trivial tasks, while others think that would not improve gameplay at all.
We'll see...

I do agree with most of your points.The UI being most important for managing I think.

Mostly where I thought it could be helpful was in like the galactic conquest mode. I can't imagine dealing with just a few different planets in a skirmish type mode being too much. However, imagine having say 8 planets for example and suddenly your enemies together attack 4 of yours. I feel like it would be playing basicly 4 different games of supcom at the same time. my concern is mostly just the amount of switching back and forth between the different planets to keep up the fights, or being too concerned with a big battle that the enemy could just take your smaller planet without you realizing it.

I guess there could be a few different ways to address it as I do feel if the ai did too much it would take away from some of the strategy of the game.

Yeah it would definitely have to be trivial tasks. Full control of a planet would take away a lot from a multiplayer game I agree. I don't feel particularly strong one side or the other, as long as the issue is addressed somehow.

Also I apologize if this has been brought up before.. I'm relatively new to this forum.

You don't understand what Galactic War is, its a metagame system to tie together a series a regular Skirmish type games.

Mike

Indeed. Ignore that scenario..

So what I think Chris Taylor and others missed is that Uber is also targeting multiple windows. Thus you can open up multiple windows to the battle.

This opens up a lot of options (in fact I think this feature is going to be crucial to keeping your sanity across multiple worlds):
1) one window on your base and one window on a major battle
2) 4 windows in quadrants.
3) What if you could stack windows over each other, so that you had a couple of small windows hovering on the right side giving rotating views of each planet you were battling over (sort of as a minimap or strategic map), and then two window halves for various work?
4) Any combination you dream up across multiple monitors

Hopefully the game will have an option to have a particular window setup saved, and then you can just open a few more windows as strategic maps. I expect people will come up with a preferred setup and it will change slowly over the course of the battle, with only one or two windows at the start and opening up a few more for minimaps, tracking targets and being able to keep an eye on a developing situation while setting up your covert base on the far side of the moon.

I also hope they pay close attention to the UI, making it easy to manipulate windows - something like "mousewheel scrolls in, but shift+mousewheel rolls up and down along full size, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16th size square windows. The windows can be docked to anything." So it becomes very fast to create and destroy windows to keep up with a game-in-progress.

Link to interview where this was mentioned

In addition, there have been a LOT of UI suggestions on these forums, and if Uber takes only a fraction of them into account, it will definitely mitigate many difficulties that may be presented by a multi-planet rts.

Imo, I think having to be able to manage your forces as you grow larger is just part of the gameplay.

A simple example: Sending an army to attack one planet, then once your opposition is distracted with that, you send a bigger army to attack a higher priority target on a different planet. Should net a bit of a leg up, as the other player isn't currently paying as much attention to his other bases.

So many great possibilities and strategies. And as it was stated by a previous poster, you will improve your multitasking ability with practice.

I feel like Sins of a solar empire might be a good example of how to do this.

Adding in a certain amount of unit intelligence (AA bot shoot at bombers as a priority, stick with formation, move to engineers for healing) so that you can be focused on the big sweeping decisions when there is a lot going on, and then can properly micro when else ware is relatively quite for the time being.

Now I can see how this might be a problem, with things like target preference not being what the player wants the units to be shooting at (Going for bombers over gunships) but with a certain amount of intelligence it could at least bridge the gap between units actually making decisions and having units follow a mob mentality as some kind of macro unit.

Well the idea is that you set up a system that will provide for itself. It's not too hard.

That it will be different and difficult is part of the appeal, but i cant imagine it would be that hard for the designers, who will have considered this.

simple suggestions so far...
multiple windows
multiple players
patrol routes
and an intelligent ping system that doesn't just say you are under attack, but quantifys the scale of the threat(s). and also state how many units are defending the area. " under attack by 100 aircraft at point x, you have 50 aircraft defending the area"

Hold on. What happens when a system isn't cared for? Is there some sort of planetary maintenance that I have to worry about?

I guess that nothing would happen.

And that's usually a bad thing in games like this.

I don't think it's a big problem if only there's a way to keep track of everything at once. That means strategic zoom, which presents some challenges but not insurmountable ones. On this topic i made some suggestions a while back. Here's an update for your mspaint viewing pleasure. (The strange shape of the maps comes from trying to do a strategic zoom-out of a sphere - it lets you see what's happening at the poles.)



This shows how you can get a pretty straightforward overview of not just one spherical battlefield but something as complex as the Inner Solar System plus part of the Jupiter system. It's a 3v3: Green, Teal and Orange vs Red, Purple and Pink. Red (Mars) and Purple (Mercury) got the jump on Green (Venus) and Orange (Earth), but Teal (Io) has managed to take out Pink (Europa) and is launching a nasty surprise for Red. This is from the perspective of Orange, as you can see Earth has building lists and quick build buttons. With some polish it won't look nearly as messy, and you can already see what's going on. So I don't think multiple battlefields will get that confusing honestly.

8 players per planet is 5 planets for a 40 player match.
5 planets...

If by the time 1 guy is ready for an interplanetary war I'm sure he got rid of his opponents first. He will have no challenge from other players if they are not yet in their interplanetary phase.

All this stuff will work itself out, I foresee few problems.