GW is slightly different to what's being proposed here. GW = lots of normal games This = one single game extended over days.
What I were saying is that GW could be a lots of normal games with some longer game extended by the possibility of having people joining live games.
A few of our members can't play just yet, as they have beta access. We will probably wait till they get in and get used to the game before we do anything competitive tbh. Of course I don't speak for the whole group though, so something might happen.
I like the idea of massive battles that are managed by shifts. I also like the idea of massive battles that are solo based, not entirely sure how the planetary system is going to work yet but, Imagine let's just say 20 planets with 15 players, every player gets to start on a planet on their own, eventually it's going to boil down to 2 or more players left trying to take it all, this sounds like fun. An added twist would be if you could actually go and hide to build up forces on a planet that was more distance or harder to get to, or even just escaping certain death with your commander, to take him to another planet to try and rebuild while your enemies fight each other. Adding a survivability option for escape onto other planets could be fun, if it wasn't too easy to pull off, or then everyone would do that before death. Just an idea.
Didn't one of the devs (was it Mavor?) say that they are specifically planning something along the lines of huge multiplayer battles in a stream?
Well... wouldn't some of the battles in GW be as "giant" as the server(s) & engine involved can support? If that's not a feature yet, perhaps it should be. In effect, having GW automatically partition the front line into server-sized chunks (with some options to configure them to also be smaller) would seem the best option to me, in general. I'm sure you could use parameters to make games smaller, too. And if the guesstimate for large games fails and the simulation grinds to a halt, just give the players planet crushing weapon reinforcements from the off-map empire and fire some additional ones off at planets automatically, it'll reduce the load imposed by units drastically a moment later.
Yea, but what's the actual difference in features you're looking for? I imagine you can join-in-progress on a GW session? If not, I cannot imagine how you'd get a "huge" (as the devs said) GW going until it's done. I also dimly recall shared team control was a planned feature. So maybe you optionally can ultimately just join on whatever unit(s) your clan or friends or even faction command, even in a running match? As just said, I'd really hope individual GW battles can be big and long too, rather than it all artifically being kept to small matches. But since I imagine what's feasible in terms of a large game will be generally constrained by engine and server performance, the main actual "features" to support those big matches would be performance tweaks or perhaps distributed processing capability (=run the individual AI and planets on different servers while it all is in one game, somehow). And certainly GW being able to guess how large a match can get on an individual server, so it can delegate the fight over that chunk of the galaxy to said server. You also mentioned that one could slow down the game speed by raising HP values and buff defenses instead to get a longer game. (I think just slowing down game speed would also be another option). I wonder if it should be in the main game, though, because as compared to a more fast-paced match, there maybe need to be some additional concepts and units so you're not just sitting there twiddling your thumbs and wait boredly until stuff happens. It sounds more like it would be a mod. And I'll just assume you'll be able to do the stat tweak part easily in a mod, with all the modding features that were promised. Now, of course, maybe you all had some actual other features in mind that I couldn't think of. If so, perhaps you can spell them out explicitly for me?
Would be pretty neat if there were these solar system wide games going on, like 10v10 or something. It would have a setup like the team armies we have now. Instead of just having a single planet to select to build on, you could choose starting spots from different planets in the solar system (maybe 10 or so planets or so at most). And as far as the teams go, each team could invite other players to join that game's team. There would be a limit to 10 players in game per team at once, but players invited to that game's team could join the game at any time as long as one of the 10 game spots were open. edit: Joining the game you would not get a new commander or any other sort of units, you would just join and start managing units already in the game. I think this would allow for games to last a very long time without causing people to have to pause/resume a game and also not have to stay up for days to finish a match
Well I'm not the OP of this post, it's not features that I am looking for specifically. I just quite like the idea of games that last several days. I wouldn't expect Uber to look at this but it would be a pretty fun mod. (For a given definition of fun) As far as I'm aware GW is going to have almost a Total War-esque scenario, where individual solar systems form individual battles. Having the ability to drop in and out of these games would be fantastic. However I'm not sure whether I'd envisage these games taking entire days to play out. The suggestion here was to make a single solar system last a few days to place greater emphasis on the tactical rather than the strategic level. I would not suggest for a moment this be included in the core game. However, for an 'Epic Clan Showdown' mod? Hell yes.
what i imagined is that you reserve yourself to be in the game. you can then jump in and out as much as you want and teams could communicate to set up who plays and what kind of tactics to use. you don't want randoms being able to walk in so this makes it so that there is a white list of players.
Lol. Other features to consider are satellites- And I don't mean actual units necessarily. Instead, moons for instance. Let's take into account what sort of planets we know will be in the game and other features. So we've got planets, featuring from terran to tropical to complete water worlds, volcanic (magma) and the rare tech planets of pure metal (Go Cybertron!) Well, how many moons will these planets be able to have? Will it take size into account how many they can have? Will there be planets with no moons? (Uh oh!) Will moons be able to be asteroids or just moons? We also know they wanted to include Gas giants. Gas giants can have a LOT of moons, or even planetoids. Will this be possible for the solar level? Will those planets possibly have small moons of their own? (Micro moons? Dwarf planets? Asteroids?) Then you've got asteroid belts themselves, which will allow us to colonize on some of the asteroids out there that are large enough. Right? (Go-go rock missile!) Will there be wonky planet-esque asteroids out there? And that's all on just a solar level. Try taking that up to advancing multiple stars with all of that randomized and you get a galactic war. Which as I recall, the limit to this size of game was a max of 40 people. Not entirely certain how it'll all manage to keep up with the grit and large scale battles but so far as I know, it's still suppose to be planet to planet fighting, down to the ground level and managing each planet you have control over. Correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe they'll have an internal server to manage each planet or solar system of a galactic war- Not sure. However, let's look at the features from a multiplayer perspective. From one solar system to even a galactic war, not many people necessarily want randoms joining up on their team and starting to take control of their units. So how will managing this come about? Invite games only? Anyone from your clan? How will you know they join the right team? Buddy system maybe? What settings will you have to use to make sure this is a trusted person to allow into said game and not just someone you met in a game and you guys got along well in a casual game? Shared team matches, one commander or like the current setup where there's a commander for each player? Certainly would make for a fairly extensive game if you have to knock them all out, especially over a multi-planet system alone, not to mention a Gal War. For each player jumping in that isn't on a team already or a clan (IE: a random) will they spawn a new commander or be forced into a new team? Making a team of random people. I'm sure also that unlocked alliances will be a feature for the game. Allowing players to form temporary alliances between each other or even clan teams. Maybe this could even be a way to induct a person into a clan? See how well they do. And if not up to par, welp. Bump. No more alliance. Derp. What about spawn points for clan matches or teams? Will there be team planets that each side can spawn all over (even across multiples) or is everything going to be a sort of free for all? Might suck to spawn on a planet filled with enemy players. Or will maybe teams have one half of a solar system and the other team has the other half with some 'neutral' ground in between? (IE: planets close to the sun is one team, planets far from the sun the other team and those in the middle not yet colonized.) That's all I've got at the moment- I'm sure I missed something or I'll come up with more. D: Oh yeah- I want in on this too. Hah. I don't yet have a clan, but a bunch of buddies wanting to play the game when it comes out!
For long games it would be great to have some tolerance for server crashes. Otherwise it could become heart breaking.
As i understand John, what you described is exactly what a big game will be in one solarsystem. And this with up to 40 players and "millions" of units. and a galactic war is more of these games simultainless and the winnerteam per solarsystem-war will gain control of that entire system on a "map".
