Galactic War - How to make it awesome.

Things Galactic War should have to make it awesome.

Achievements and Statistics
Statistics are useless unless you can get the player excited about checking them. Linking your statistics to fun achievements is the way to accomplish this. Lots of people don't care about win/loss ratio on a map for example, but they would definitely care how many times you managed to kill overcharge a Monkeylord with your ACU. Achievements should have ranks, and the highest rank should take a LONG TIME to get. Make a list of all the crazy things you can think of!

• 
  - Number of enemy units reclaimed alive
  - Number of units killed by secondary (chain-reaction) explosions
  - Number of enemy units killed by a scout
  - Number of heavy tanks killed by scouts
  - Number of ACUs killed
  - Number of experimentals killed by overcharge
  - Number of aircraft killed by artillery
  
  - Achieve 100m/s in less than 10 minutes
  - Create 15 mass extractors in 10 minutes
  - Produce 50 engineers in 15 minutes
  - Send ally 1k, 10k, 100k mass in a game
  - Waste 0 mass in a 15, 30, 60 minute game

Link achievements to cosmetic changes in the game. Got the overcharge experimentals achievement? You can now shoot purple overcharge projectiles!

Achievements should also be tied to what you're doing - 1v1, 1vAI, Teams. Crazy stuff should be limited to 1v1 or 1vAI, and achievements for teams should promote good team play.

Getting Your Friends Involved
Make it possible to bring up a window in-game that allows you to chat with friends, and invite them into the game while it's in progress. Call in help in a particularly difficult game against the AI, and get your friends to take over part of your base, or get an expert to tutor you on what you're doing wrong. Obviously would be able to be disabled for ranked play. Have clan vs clan wars, where clan players can drop in & out of a long running game.

Separate progress in the meta-game from ranked play.
ALL types of gameplay should be able to affect the meta-game. Dedicate different sectors to different types of play. Rather than forcing players to go play by themselves in a skirmish, make a sector for skirmishing against the AI, and encourage players to call in their friends to conquer the sector. Include fun dynamics like setting the amount of cheating the AI does relative to the number of systems its lost.

Set up a mod sector where players can fight it out with their favorite mod, or where the system randomly picks from a select number of high quality mods for each battle.

Give us more than just each other as an opponent.
Break away from the paradigm that the AI must simply be a replacement for a player, and that games vs the AI should always look exactly like a game vs another player.

For example, you could create a new game mode: "The Corrupt"

When you enter the Corrupt sector, you begin in a small planetary system where you're happily tending your solar panel farm, when suddenly a meteor shower deposits a bio-mechanical substance on your planet that begins to corrupt whatever it touches. Once you fight off the initial wave, you discover that it wasn't a meteor shower but a weapon that attacked your world. You use the limited resources of your system to convert your asteroid into an inter-stellar transport, and set off to find and eliminate the source of the weapon.

As you progress through the sector getting closer and closer to the source, you use the resources of each system to upgrade your asteroid, making choices between power, mobility, weapons, production and so on. You carry a limited amount of resources to each new system, so you have to carefully balance the ability to establish a beachhead against an entrenched enemy with the enough production to build enough forces to hold and expand your beachhead. Unfortunately it seems the closer you get to the source of the corruption the more powerful its units become....and then you receive a weak transmission from another commander fighting the same scourge...

Some interesting ideas here. I think you should expand on them.

Calling up some mates to help: definitely. If it were guild-vs-guild it could be extended that far.

That said, there's the strong potential for people just playing to amass achievements, and not playing to play/win. I think those that don't care about actually playing and only care about collecting shiny stars have the ability to ruin a game for others - particularly in team games.

Statistics are good, achievements are a mixed-bag. Mainly because achievements promote you to play a specific way (which may not be an optimum/ideal way).

Achievements are kinda expected these days unfortunately bulletmagnet. It's been a long time since I've seen a game without them. On the whole though, I think there's a lot more uncreative players than creative ones, and giving them a set of goals doesn't really prevent anyone from playing the game how they want.

Keep sh!tty achievement and reward collecting relegated to sh!tty games please.

Well, that's kind of the point BM.

Who goes and tries to kill a Monkeylord with his overcharge usually?

Nothing stops a person from playing dumb, if they don't want to win. Sometimes though you might be the player who completely overmatches your opponent, and you decide that today is the day you're gonna OC that experimental. Fun and awesome commence!

The point is to promote non-optimal gameplay.


You could, however, have achievements that promote optimal gameplay
- Achieve 100m/s in less than 10 minutes
- Create 15 mass extractors in 10 minutes
- Produce 50 engineers in 15 minutes
- Send ally 1k, 10k, 100k mass in a game
- Waste 0 mass in a 15, 30, 60 minute game

Personaly I don't mind the achievements so much, stat tracking would be nice though.

Also I really like the idea of letting people hop into a game that is already going. Especially if Uber wants to have these "epic 40 person battles" there is no way you are going to get 40 people all in the same game lobby at the same time waiting to start a match.

ayceem how about describing what you actually want out of Galactic Wars instead of just hating everything?

I mean, you're welcome to go play the 1v1 ladder.

It's going to be bad in team games. I do not want one of my teammates to think that killing things with scouts is more important that trying to win, or trying to save my arse.

If this were a democratic decision, your argument would have convinced me to vote against it.

These ones, specifically, I like the idea of. I'm probably biased, because these ones are for teamwork, and not for arbitrary "play this way, get shiny star" actions.

Yeah some forethought with the achievements is probably a good idea. You'll want to reward people for general practices that are just a good idea on their own. "Get to x mass streaming in within 1 minute"

Could you imagine an achievement like "Lose 10 team games in a row." that would be epic.

Yeah, BM, you've got a problem either way you look at it. If your teammate is so focused on an achievement that he is willing to let his team down just to get it, it would strongly suggest that he is a crappy team player anyways.

You could, however, very easily group achievements into personal and team achievements. Team games would add to your team achievements, single player / 1v1 games would contribute to the personal achievements section.

I'll add that to the original post.

That has some merit to it.

The irony of your statement is that I'm not advocating 1v1 ladder play.

I don't know what to expect from the Galactic War but I at the very least hope Uber will make something that is fun and ambitious in a way that will blow my socks off and make me want to come back for more.

I'm tired of lazy game developers shoving in achievements in leu of good gameplay that should stand on it's own merits.

If I just wanted to goof around and show off 'awesome' moments, I'd record my actions and make a video out of it to post on the internet. See how many views that gets. I don't feel awesome for ticking off a list.

Love all this.

What about adding uber-uber-uber units only available in Galactic War and not in regular games? Things that cost billions in mass and energy and take hours to build? Some examples:

-A wormhole generator to teleport your army across the galaxy
-Metal planets capable of being flown to other systems
-EDIT: just noticed interstellar asteroids are mentioned in the OP and I skimmed past them...
-A weapon (one time use) that blows up stars
-Etc

I second this idea.

Perhaps some of these UBER units would encourage teams to combine resources to manage the unit over multiple games—(game 1) discover build site (game 2) establish economy & start construction (game 3) defend construction site from enemy sabotage (game 4) complete construction and activate unit.

Perhaps the UBER units are used in the mini-game portion of galactic war, at a galactic map scale (if it has such a thing). Perhaps these units give passive bonuses if brought to a solar sytem battlefield.

That could get very unbalancing very fast. Especially in a multiplayer setting.

If one giant space empire rolled into a system with a pile of death stars then that particular match isn't going to be very interesting. You'll just have a handful of players who have reached this king of the hill state that are consistently steam rolling everyone else. You know they'll win, it's just a matter of waiting for them to finish off the galaxy. And on the scale i am picturing for the Galactic War game mode, that's a lot of waiting.

Oddly enough this is reminding me of old Eve Online politics :cry:

nick / ekulio - Great idea! You could have something like the 'Assault' mode of Unreal Tournament, spread over several games.

You could have a UBER unit in the middle of the map (or whatever) which is in the process of being constructed - except that it costs billions of mass, and its progress is added to collectively by each game played. Game would be over if you contributed 100,000 mass to the object, or if the other team reclaimed 100,000 mass from the object. Annihilating the other team would give you an automatic 100,000 bonus.

Rather than making it a unit that you control or use in the game against another player, make it part of the objective. A fully built Galactic Cannon could fire your commander to the next solar system for example..

Ayceem - please consider the context of this discussion. I am assuming first and foremost in this thread that PA is going to be an awesome game to play. I would not wish that any of the things I've suggested would take the place of good solid gameplay.

However, in order to build a community of both casual and hard core gamers, and in the context of the Galactic War online battlefield, extra things like achievements, ranks, hats, clans, mod support etc are all things that can make the Galactic War awesome by giving a wide range of players what they want. That means support for ranked, e-Sport type 1v1 ladders should be right along side of built in support for the next BlackOps mod.

OK having a fixed land mark could keep this balanced. As long as it's reach is limited.

Basically there can't be a way to stack your total awesomeness. No roving swarms of death stars, or passive bonuses from across the galaxy.

A while ago I was discussing why some games make you rage more than others with a group of friends.

The conclusion we came up with was, "In any game there is a certain point where you know who is going to win before the game is over. It's where that point is that determines how much rage the game causes."

For example in the game Monopoly there is a point long before the game truly ends where you know which filthy rich player is going to win in the end. But they have to grind everyone else into poverty first. And I have heard League Of legends players say that they can sometimes tell who's going to win just by what characters they pick in the lobby. Once you know the outcome all the game play after that is an arduous grind to victory for the winner, and a depressing exercise in frustration for the loser.

So if you want to minimize the amount of thrown chairs, flipped tables, and rage quits in your game everyone at any point in the game needs to feel like they can still potentially win. you need to keep everyone's hopes up right until the end. (By the way this is also the difference between an uplifting sports movie, and a depressing Mets game )

And constantly seeing 100 death stars roll into your solar systems, or always fighting someone with a zillion passive bonuses is not very encouraging.

Very good observation—I completely agree. (Off topic) I wonder if gameplay elements that allow the underdog to make a heroic comeback could be balanced. Less rage, more happy people, fun times.

I'd like to see galactic war as a casual/semi-competitive play mode—hope being—with less concern for competitive play there’s more room for creative and fun play modes. Aka. defend the fortified base, capture the flag, etc… Though this could end up being grind-fest/boring. I disdain escort missions in RTS, and survive the onslaught, etc…