The Idea of Galactic wars!

It seems the idea for the galactic wars are to have clans vs each other in a huge galaxy. There will be galactic wars for single player instead of a campaign. There will be also servers for people who also want to fight in a galactic war (Uber will host servers but you can join community servers I think).

Uber might change this but for now this is what they're planning.

This is what I think it will look like V V V V V

For the people wondering, the game displayed is called Endless Space. It's a 4X RTS game. But the Galactic view looks amazing.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/verite/20130723.png

The current sovereignty map of Eve.

With a system like this, I don't think the community will be able to host their own servers. If I run a server, and someone comes and invades - what stops from from turning the server off-and-on again to flip control back into my favour?

That is, unless the one server hosts the entire universe and battles are literally fought one system at a time. If that's the case, then what's stopping server owners from rebooting when they're losing?

It's going to require some fairly morally white people to play on a server they run and not exploit the power the admin panel gives you.

Guys this is another game let it be another game and you will be have a good surprise.

Well, have a think about how it might work. Think about what makes it fun. Think about what might ruin that fun.

There's only a finite number of ways GW could happen.

Id quite like a Dawn of war style meta game.

The question is, what kind of advantage will a side gain for taking a system?

They're one more system away from losing, and one less system away from winning.

It's a source of conflict. Conflict is needed in a game about blowing things up.

It's not going to get you an increased income, or a bonus to unit stats. The idea of victory is take away all your opponent's systems. It isn't merely kill the commander. If you're playing an online GW game, you'll more than likely kill the same person multiple times over. Killing someone only helps you get closer to victory. It isn't victory itself.

And after you've conqueured the galaxy, what do you do?

You exit that game, and go join a new one. There's literally no point in maintaining long-term ownership of a solar system.

I know you won't be getting a resource bonus of some kind, but if holding ground has no advantage, then in a multi team game the winning side will never achieve a final victory without the others just ganging up and bringing the game to a never ending scenario.

If the never ending to-and-fro of gaining and losing ground is fun, then I see no problem with nobody formally winning.

I guess?

Have you played Planetside 2? It does the never-ending shifting ground quite well in my opinion, and is quite fun, as long as there is enough players on each side on the server.

@cryonicfire: I'd be worried if there were single-connection lanes that indicated from where you can go to where between all planet systems.

System-after-system according to pre-defined connections that you will have to follow typically just doesn't really leave room for very much strategy happening. It's almost guaranteed to be a fancy representation of a tournament bracket.

Besides, games on single lane connected maps almost cannot convincingly have very varied size. It just wouldn't match the map.

Different from that, I'd prefer GW just being a means to dynamically offload games to suffiicently powerful servers (=> the number of players and the area of frontier fought over in one single match is limited only by what's currently available in terms of processing power and configurable constraints on the GW server). Visuals for that might be more something like "spheres / areas of conflict" indicating just the planets / systems involved, or such.

It'd be far more interesting to play GW like that. Both for the option for very varied game sizes within one GW that could match what players currently demand and the enormous potential to for configurable rules that make a GW more or less strategic and/or more or less like a strict, fair tournament vs. "pick your own encounters" by the way the frontline is segmented and how much insight and control players have over how it happens.

Non-cheating server owners aren't that hard to come by. The very vast majority of server owners in online games I've played so far just doesn't appear to cheat - why would it be worse for PA?

Also, there's no way in which blatant cheating like you describe it would go unnoticed. People would just leave the server for a better one...

I think the "endless battle scenario" won't be too much of an issue if you have enough people to play GW with. If they design the planet destruction system in a way that's relatively* easy to blow planets away, the amount of resources and playable terrain is going to go down as people start nuking each other and slamming planets together. (I think Mavor briefly talked about this idea in an interview. I'll try to find it.) This could create a nice endgame scenario that's much more personal and fast-paced than a traditional Forged Alliance "oh-noes-strategic-launch-detected-and-I-have-no-defense" slow death endgame. But yeah, unless you're willing to spend a weekend playing hide and seek in a GW 1v1 match, I think you may just want to play in a single system. Hahaha.

*I'm not sure what relatively easy even means at this point. I guess we'll find out when they implement planet destruction/deformation.

If I conquer a system and have massive bases built, I think when another player attacks that system that I should start with everything I built last game I played on that map. It only makes sense that the system's state be maintained through the war. To compensate for this, attacking players should be able to bring their own planets and armies to the battle, since what would there be to stop them once they had full control of their originating system? Then, when you have say 30 player games in a single system and 1 player decides to pack up his commander and leave them map. The asteroid he rode out on should carry him into the next match (which ever direction he fled in. That would feel like a galactic war to me.

While probably interesting, this sounds very hard to balance. With players that don't make egregious mistakes all the time, letting anyone carry over a fully built econ & military into a new game is obviously something that would likely just make the very first game decide the entire galactic war... which is really boring.

I think it'd be better kept as an option for GW servers to enable/disable as they see fit for their player bases. Or maybe keep it as an individual planet's special ability (offset maybe with some other handicap, like that you have to fight 4 v 12 when said planet is involved).

If you mean that you could retreat from a match with your asteroid/planet, wouldn't a lot of the <insert curse here> players play it safe and run early in order to preserve the maximum amount of advantage, even at the cost of their alliance's overall chances to win?

In general, I think it best if planets / systems at the frontier had a varied and maybe GW-configurable range in which they can participate in fights. You might play one-two games against one alliance and then another one against another, but you'd eventually be out of range, even if the planet didn't get smashed. Whatever (hopefully not too extreme) advantage controlling said planet directly granted, it's eventually no longer relevant ... unless the war shifts back there.

It makes sense, but it makes for bad gameplay. You're now stuck in a position of adding features to maintain realism.

And if bases stayed during the war, then they should stay after you die as well.

If you want to build a base, then sit there and maintain it; sure, have your base. I'm perfectly happy for bases to blow up once the commanding player decides to leave.

And in any case, your base is an inherently selfish concept. In a 30-man team game, nothing 'cept the commander is really yours. Everything is there to benefit the team, and help the team achieve victory.

actually as can be seen in PA gameplay already, your stuff blows up when your commander does, presumably do deny your enemy access to all of those extra resources. There only machines, dammit man, they don't have souls!

If you win a game map, by the time anyone else reaches the target it's going to be utterly strip mined and worthless. The only thing left to do is blow it all to hell, so any future Commanders that target the sector end up screwed.

It's a rough, bacterial existence, where any number of dots in the sky are a fatal dead end for 99.9% of Comms.

Other games have dealt with this issue.

Zero-K had a PlanetWars for a while, until they ran into balance and trolling issues.

Doesn't SupCom have a Galactic War Alpha?