What game modes should we start with?

All answers will be very similar, so I don't think I'm saying anything new.:

Game option sliders/mutators:
-Seed Number, to generate the same scenario when using the same sliders on a game.
-Initial Resources
-Resource amounts on game
-Building Speed (faster games)
-Unit Dealt Damage (for faster games)/Unit health
-Planet Size/Type
-Galaxy Size/Type
-Max Units
-Unit Type filters, to on/off single units
-Random events (volcanos, asteroids, etc): off/low/medium/high
-Rogue AI units: off/low/medium/high
-# of AI's on the game, AI levels, and AI initial resources/advantage
-Player Teams: You can make groups of players (human or not)
-Friendly fire on/off. Some friendly fire type will be always on of course.
-Fog of War.
-Thirdparty Mod list: on/off each one
-Some save/load/export/import game options: For faster/predictable configs, useful with the seed number. I think it also need to store victory conditions and game mode too.
And a full Random button.

Victory Conditions:
-Annihilation: Destroy all enemy units and buildings.
-Planetary annihilation: Destroy a planet.
-Galaxy Control: You control >80% territory
-Galaxy Domination: You have 80% of everything (resources, units, buildings, territory, etc.).
-Regicide: Kill enemy commanders.
-Moon land: Wins when someone lands on satellite.
-Moon control: Wins when someone controls the satellite of a planet for X minutes, something similar to point control in FPS games (Battlefield and such). Minutes are acummulative, think about a count down of each player.
-Moon breakers: Win when someone is able to use the moon/satellite as kinetic weapon.
-Planet conquest: Win when someone succesfully setup a colony on another planet.
-Wealthy: Get X on Y resource.
-Time Limit: In this case there must be some formula to score players.
-Score Limit: Similar to prior.
-Tech race. First player with maxed out tech wins.


Game Modes:
-Standard: With previous triggers.
-Down the empire: Cooperative mode against the machine, N human players against the "empire". Empire could also be another human, but could be harder to balance. Empire could be on a separate planet, hmmm a metal one!
-Escape from apocalipsis: Time limited game, Sun is becoming a supernova, you must espace from "solar system", win the first player in building an escape <whatever>. Sun becomes bigger over time, engulfing/melting nearest planets. Players starts on nearest planet.
-Capture the flag: Steal something from enemy, N times in X minutes.
-Charred: You must capture the enemy <whatever>, interrogate it for X minutes, and then launch it to the sun. Obvious difficulty is to capture the enemy <whatever> and hold it for X minutes. Minutes are totaled, so it can be captured several times to sum up to X minutes.
-Horde Mode: Survival/Cooperative mode, waves of enemies launched each X minutes against human players. Each time harder and harder.
-Sandbox

In most games, people lose ~50% of games and win ~50%.
What I've seen in Spring ever since its inception was a huge tendency to play in teams. Playing teams in Spring has been offering players several features:
- When they lose, the loss responsability is shared. In a 4v4, your team might lose 1/2 of times, but you as an individual are only responsible for 1/4 of those losses, so it kind of feels like you lose 1/8 of the times. It is very stressful to play 1v1 and losses always feel very strainfull.
- It smoothes out imbalances in the teams' compositions - imbalances tend to be less influencial.
- It prolongues the decision of the matche's outcome. It is usually frustrating to start a game doing those common start chores, just to lose some very few minutes into the game.
- It caters for different roles - you can have "porkers" trying to defend, guys focused on raiding and breaking and "SimCitiers" building up technical game changing events (economic rush, Big Bertha rush, etc).


Commander
Your commander dies, you die.

Brothers in arms / Collective conciousness
For team games. As soon as any commander dies, the whole team loses.
This will anonymize losses quite a lot - basically, only one guy in the whole game will lose, half will win, and the remaining ones will be left with "it's not my fault".

Also, it will solve partially the slippery slope problem - your team may be colapsing all over but the game won't still b decided: you still know that all you need is to pull off a snipe on any of their commanders.

Hoarder / Space Pirate (hargh)
Whomever accumulates x metal wins the game (for fluff objective purposes, making you win a contract?). This will create a very interesting dicothomy between spending to overcome your opponent and saving to achieve the objective.

Also, it will probably smooth the games' times. One of the problems with Spring and SupCom (not TA, though) is the fact that the games are very inconsisten in the time they take to resolve - sometimes they take forever to be because of the lack of ability to definitely break the stalemate (in TA there were no shields and the Big Berthas would always break anything, and the bomber raids were more powerful).

Teleport
You need to teleport your commander out of the planet into a new planet/solar system. Whomever does it first, will reign supremme in that new place, so you need to do it first.

To do so, you need to build a teleporter (kind of like a wonder).
Then the teleporter will start operating and charge up, sucking up lots of energy and making itself aware to everyone else.
When ready, you can teleport the commander to win the game.

Presents mostly the same benefits as Hoarder / Space Pirate.

Demolition / Assault
There will be a computer controlled large and aggressive base.
Whomever manages to destroy a certaing building or destroys more in the aloted time, wins the game.

Competitive feel to it, with you racing against other humans, yet you're not being too much harmed by the other humans, so reasonably confortable.

And it is way too fun to bash up the computer - destroy whole bunches of stuff.

Zero sum mode / Lavoisier mode / Scavenger mode / Eternal war mode
(not an objective, just a game mode)
There is no metal production. Each player starts with a bunch of metal. No metal is lost in units' destructions - all metal spent on them reverts to the same amount in the carcass.

Attrition / Eternal war
Time limited. When the time ends, whomever has more metal collected or whomever destroyed more stuff on the opponents will win the game.

Slippery slope
Intended only a 1 party vs 1 party (being each party teams or solos).
Each team is ranked by how much damage (in difference) it has inflicted on the opponents. When the difference grows too big (hits a threshold), that team wins. After some time, the threshold start to slowly decrease, to the point that any minor difference will make a team a winner.

During the whole time, there will still be commander dies = loss (comms can be seen as valueing lots of dmg points, anyway) (either in "Commander" mode or in "Brother in arms" mode).

This will smooth a lot the games' durations. Also, it will prevent games that are mostly decided to drag on forever. Also, a party that is on the losing side, can still hope to come climb out of the slippery slope by comm sniping.

King of the hill / Holy land
Standard win by King-of-the-hilling a certain place for a certain time. Makes everyone be forced to struggle in that land.

Sandbox
Mandatory! We need to play around and try the game.

commander is stuck on planet and is invincible so u must blow up planet

Reboot:

Each player starts on a "deathstar" and the first one to activate it and destroy the other players win.

How about a gamemode where the players playing would at random switch control of armies and units? You would start out, and build up your economy, buildings, units, ect but then suddenly you switch control to an opponents stuff and they get control of yours (or whomevers if it's more than two people playing). It wouldn't be a very serious gamemode for obvious reasons. You wouldn't lose if your commander gets destroyed. Only all of your units and vehicles while you have control of them.
And if someone is on the brink of losing then you can add something in to make sure it doesn't switch people so they don't pass on their demise to some other unlucky player.

1) War of Attrition mode
inflect x amount of resources losses on the enemy in terms units/building being lost by metal cost
something like, make the enemy lose 1,000,000 metal worth of units and you win

2) Kill to Death Ratio = x mode?
so you can not just spam cheap units and attack with them because the enemy will achieve high K/D ratio and win! or if you drop below y% you lose. this will promote a new tactical dimension to the game.
this mode should be triggered after 100 units been killed or so in order for the ratio to start making sense.



what do you think?

I love this idea. Maybe with the prerequisit that the destroyed commanders army lays dormant until the dead comms wreckage is reclaimed by a commander. Could be epic on solar system wide or bigger scale with 40 players.

another list of brainfart's coming up

-invasion(both the player invade or an ai invade) something

-System/planet/objective defense/attack(ai that harass you from from somewhere in space)

-Sandbox mode(never ending game(could make good use of ''give unit to whoever'' and ai take over of players))

-CTF(might need special capture unit for that but i dunno just brainfarting a bit)

-uber mode!?(i dunno think something up from uber)

Capture the planet!

Up for those plus Phantom, murder party and zone control.

Honestly between Phantom and murder party I think phantom would certainly be more addapted to PA and PA team play and much more fun, and of course phatom reveal or no reveal should be an option.

Honestly who else here than me thinks Phantom (and all other game mods of the same principle) was inspired by this:

A widespread card game where you have an identity, you are either a villager (that could have a power) or a werewolf hiding amongst the villagers, you have a day and a night phase. Everyday the villagers kill one of their own they suspect to be a warewolf, every night the werewolves devour a human. To do this during the "day" all can see and debate openly weras during he "night" all go to "sleep" (must cover their eyes) and the warewolves silently uncover their eyes and with silent gestures agree upon who shall be their victim, that the game master anounces. Everytime someone dies his card is revealed to all. The warewolves are much much fewer yet if they are good liars, they have much better odds since (technically) they kill twice as much.

The daily debate is the pivot point of the entire game. Good argumentation and a clever disguise of innocence can lead the villagers to kill one of their own. Loose too much trust and you may find the next day you're the victim.

the fact that lying and uncovering lies is the pivot point of the game is what makes it so brain-disectingly fun. this applies to phantom too. A phatom without a chatt is no phantom.
This makes me think of a few other game mode possibilities,


A Game Master mode :

One were there is a game master, one that does not exactly partake in the war but has the possibility to choose times at wich to unleash natural disasters, buffs, nerfs.
he would be able to set the time for the meteor shower that Mavor mentioned.
he could also decide upon if the armies engage in war or not (the units of armies would not fire at each other during the time the truce was in effect) he could even set rules as to how many troops the armies are allowed to use in battle , the players would be given the choice of following the game master's orders or declaring his own wars. If an army does not follow his command, the game master could unleash an experimental units that the players armies would have to defeat. and finally the game master could be gotten rid of with a late-game weapon (he would be represented by a galactic station orbiting the planet or the sun).

A day & night mode:

the planet is orbiting near a Wolf-Rayet star and the radiations and solar wind are so strong this drastically modifies the army's and structures behavior (units do use solar power and their circuitry is not protected from radiations such as these). during the day the units move very slowly and also the radiated metal spots produce a denser metal (?) resulting in more metal production, hence the day phase is addapted into a base-building phase and defensive/turtle/fire base tactics are adopted, during the night however units are fully charged and ready to go, they are speedy quick and efficient, this is a raiding/sniping phase. Units start to feel the detriments of being exposed to the radiation progressively, so it is possible for a unit to speed out of the shadows and zip back in. It is possible to activate a bypass to a unit or units internal survival laws and stop using the internal nanomachines to constantly repair itself and use them for speed to obtain the same speed as night units but suffer the damages of daytime radiation, wich can lead to a quick death. this can be turned on and off and will not be changed back to default by nightime.

for a longer or shorter day-night cycle simply edit the orbit and rotation speed of the planet before starting game.

this will add an incredible strategic scope as players, depending on what they need, will fight over sunlit territory as well as fight over shadowy area. this game mode would also encourage the creation of planets with great vertical offset such as long ranges of cliffs and mountain ranges (conveniently alligned with the longitudes... : P)

UP to both Game Master and Day and Night!

Option:

-Time machine: A metal planet in the system is a time machine. Making use of the chronocam feature, you can activate this metal planet and make the game go back to the point you desire. You can use this metal planet as many times as you want as soon as nobody destroys or harvest it.

Map:

-Ancient Battleground: the map consist of only metal planets and asteroids. The asteroids are the remnants of planets destroyed by the weapons the metal planets harbor.
Go fling destruction at each other either by smashing or death ray.

I honestly cannot wait to see what you, and the rest of the community can come up with. But I also want to contribute my own gamemode.

It's a play off of a sandbox mode from many games, but with a twist of actual objective based gameplay.

Say the game starts off, with any number of players, all within a singularity. All strive to race to destroy the others, and the goal is to destroy all other players. As the final adversary falls, the destruction of their base triggers, wait for it,

The Big Bang

As you may notice, this game would be a sectioned game, one that may have two victors, each in their respective rounds.

After the Big Bang, players would be thrown into a molten universe, with barely hospitable areas for construction, and ultimately, battle.

As the game goes on, the universe would cool, opening up new options for expansion. And, to really bring the sandbox element to life, players that have reached a far enough stage in the game, may harness the ability to break the Therory Of Matter, and create matter.

Thats right, create new planets, asteroids, and moons to play a interactive, and pivital part of the game. Obviously, this would need regulation, to keep the balance.

Anyway, I know the idea as a WHOLE does not have a huge possibility of happening, but I hope that some of these elements make sense for such a revolutionary game such as Planetary Annihilation.

Here's what I hope to see.

Phantom
everyone is on the same team, 1(or more) is a phantom, no one knows. The phantom has a multiplier on income. phantom wins if he's the last standing, the rest wins if phantom dies.

and

Diplomacy
everyone starts on the same team, last man standing wins.

I also liked the planetZ idea.

The planetZ idea?

I really hope any time limit added will have a on/off button since most times I hate time limits :evil:
:geek:

One Victory condition could be bound to the Metalplanet.

"Capture the Planet and hold it for atleast 30 minutes" but that depends what you had in mind with the planet.

Another one could be "Hold X amount of planets/moons in the Solar System" it would be a "destructible" victory condition. I mean at one point a planet will break with enough asteroids smashing into it. Could make some interesting matches.

Supreme Commander 2 victory conditions are great for me:

Assassination: Commander must survive

Supremacy: Kill everything to win

I don't know if these have been posted so please don't shout at me if they have been suggested.

Space Race
Every player spawns on a different planet, unless they are doing the Team Army, then the teams spawn together. The goal is to get to space first and make it to your enemy's planet to destroy them. However they have fortified their planet so you have to think of a way to get in

Seananigans
Players spawn on small Islands with a couple of Mass Nodes. Main focus is on Naval Battles and Naval Units. Typical destroy everyone game and Team Armies version.

Realism (As much as you can get with this game )
Mass spawning is reduced and nodes will be depleted after a set amount of time. Units cost more and the Commander produces less resources. Units and Buildings take longer to build.

Survival
All players are on the same team and must defend a planet from advanced AI Commanders. The players then have to find the AI Commanders, which are on different planets, and destroy them to win. You can choose harder difficulties which will result in harder AI. It will take teamwork and communication to survive the Assault.

Tell me what you guys think