Alliances, and warfare

[AdmV0rl0n]

PA had alliances added a long time ago. Parts of the game now have infrastructure in terms of alliances.

Today, Alliances tend to block and form NAPs. the game is riddled with peace, and often rounds come down to who got NAPd with whom, and for how long.

So I propose something different. When an Alliance is formed, they are given a single planet in a single galaxy. I use this as I think that would be the easiest way to translate to the game/coding? This planet would be an asteroid belt. The planet would produce a number of roids per tick. You could call this planet a secluded asteroid belt or some other suitable name in game terms.

You could add some interesting things on that. The number of roids per tick is allocated by membership, thus more members, more roids get produced. The res from roids while at the planet go to the alliance fund.

Players from in the alliance can 'roid' the planet.
Players from other alliances, and players can roid the planet.
The owning alliance would have to roid and defend said planet, to get the most out of it. Other alliances would have choices in wether to attack other alliances 'roid' planet, while getting the most out of their own.

The Planet can build some constructions, and perhaps could do a tree of research that when an option completes, gives the players IN alliance the tech tree option. (Thus a new Tech tree could, if PAteam felt up to the challenge be created).

Planet control is by HC level members.

Small alliances/players who hit bigger alliance special 'roid' planets could jack a lot of roids from bold moves. Assuming they pull off the move. Bigger alliances would have NO choice but to attack the planet if they wanted to stop the enemy alliance getting Tech tree advantage for its members.

What would this add to the game? The larger alliances, whom would have a planet now producing roids (and perhaps constructs, and maybe a tech tree beyond the current one) at a substantial rate, would become targets for smaller alliances, or players, and would have an actual tangable asset other alliances could go after beyond just players and members of other alliances.

[Smudge]

There's a glimmer of an idea in there - an Alliance Homeworld.

Could be fun.

[Kargool]

I think the idea needs tonnes of refining for being at all considered as something interesting. The whole concept of PA would change with this idea too wouldnt it?

[Smudge]

Originally Posted by Kargool

I think the idea needs tonnes of refining for being at all considered as something interesting. The whole concept of PA would change with this idea too wouldnt it?

XP?

[JonnyBGood]

This reminds me slightly of an idea I posted about a year ago on the development forums. As it hasn't been snatched up eagerly I'm going to repost it here as an alternative method of introducing a "higher" aspect to the game than the normal process of score accumulation.

Similarly in order to introduce depth the previously mentioned concept of "outposts" or "colonies" emerges. There are different ways to approach this idea, possibility of score, resources or eta bonuses. I'm proposing a combination of the first and third ideas. Alliances, and possibly private galaxies if those were introduced, can fight battles for outposts, which are unplayable planets located in particular clusters. The best approach would be the creation of a specific ship which if it does a certain amount of "damage" would take over the outpost for the alliance of the players attacking it (the possibility of two alliances attacking the outpost in the same tick exists, you can decide who claims it based on value or "damage" done). Alternatively, and this is how it will most likely look in the short-term outposts are buildable and destroyable, not capturable. These outposts would give a separate, undestroyable score boost to the alliance itself as long as it still controls it. The outpost would also give an ETA bonus of -1 to anyone in that alliance sending defence or attacking in that cluster. Most probably the best approach in terms of sending defence to the outpost itself would be on a -2 ETA bonus as opposed to the standard -1 bonus in-cluster. Also a similar value-based cap on whose alliance you can attack would probably be involved. Details in such a new area are obviously open to fine-tuning, the key point is the introduction of an extra element which provides an incentive to interact with an alliance both in terms of "fun" and an advantage ingame.

[AdmV0rl0n]

Originally Posted by Smudge

There's a glimmer of an idea in there - an Alliance Homeworld.

Could be fun.

I accept that if I put something up like this, that it may need refinement, in particular, there may be aspects as suggested that are impossible or bad to 'code' for.

Indeed, usually when writing this stuff up, I'm still mapping the thing in my mind as I write, so never expect anything 'finished'.

This idea is an adaptation of one I suggested in terms of 'Asteroid fields' previously. In this case, I tried to go with the idea of a galaxy and a planet, as both already exist in the game as is, and might be less coding if I stick to some structures already there. I don't think its at all possible to have new fresh things without a level of coding and work, but if I use some structures in the game already, maybe it makes ideas more do-able.

If I were to simplify this down to its simplest idea construct. Players should fight over planets. Alliances should have an Alliance sized object in game they have to attack and defend, fight over, and it needs to be meaty enough that its interesting to persue, beyond just the game as is.

[AdmV0rl0n]

Just so the background is covered. I took this :-
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How to make the game more warlike.

All war usually has seeds in resources. Until now, PA has been focused on planets, galaxies, clusters, and alliances. And each of these has been focused on planets that hold the resources. But what if you take that existing basis, and add to it. These vast resources would be only locatable by alliances. To find them, exploration vessels would have to be built.

Proposals.
Gas Clouds.
Asteroid belts
Undiscovered Worlds.
(You can probably add in more here.)

Alliances would discover such locations, care of their explorer vessels. After all, its all about expansion and being the biggest empires. So how would you gather resources from these locations? Well, players would have to send roiders/tankers (probably needs a little more thought to clarify, but stick with me for the moment), and the alliance base ship would be based there. Alliances would gain points/XP/Similar for holding these extra game positions.

The location of the alliance base ship is only known by the members of the alliance, but could be uncovered by scans, fleet scan, jump gates, or similar.

Strategic wars.

People said the game needed changing from the current model. So, in the suggestion above, I am saying that you can still keep the current aspects of the game, with planets, gals, clusters, and alliances, but by adding this new kind of battle ground, it would mean alliances might end up warring over resources that are beyond the current planet/cluster/gal model, especialy if its lucrative or rather important in terms of score. Alliances should benefit from going out to find these locations, and once found they should be able to harvest them. But also, they should then face attacks and may lose the base ship.

Base ships would travel to these locations and remain, until destroyed, or the game ends. If two alliances have base ships at (example) one asteroid belt, they can both gather resources from it, but if two fleets from different alliances arrive, there would be a battle.

Thus, in theory, you would have a game where, alliances were able to go after 'super' resources, but they would also face having intel gathered against them, and losing resources to other alliances. It would be a case of taking and trying to hold these 'super' resources. Obviously, doing so might have implications. Fleet ETA times might be long, fleetcatches might be an aspect (tankers being caught on the landing tick), and off course, all this eats up fleet slots from alliance players. There should also be one added issue. There are less super resources than alliances (if you had more, there would be no reason to fight over them!)

The end result should be alliances having to divert resources, obviously for valid and reasonable, lucrative payback, which would give smaller players, clusters, gals a chance to play. The alliances would still have the option of targetting their enemy, and going after strategic planets that needed taking out, but the game would have a new layer above just planet bashing planet.

The intel aspect would also help, because if you had baseships somewhere, people flying to and from *are* probably from that 'enemy' alliance. Would add a whole new strategic aspect to the game.

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And modified the idea to the simplified basis I started this thread with. I figured I needed to slim it down and make it workable using more in game structures (Planets and Galaxies exist) and a simple cleaner theory..

Ad

[Gio2k]

What about making alliance galaxies. The whole galaxy belongs to an alliance. A galaxy could at any given night be booked by two hostile galaxies. The booking process would be done through the MoW (the MoW position would finally have a use \o/)
Booking would be done on a First come - First Serve basis. There would be some additions to the rule: If we implement alliance politics, it would mean that nap'd alliances can't book each others gals, and alliances at war get priority when booking a galaxy.
We could have a 6 planet per galaxy structure, with the 6th spot for scanning / cov-op planets, which would not be able to attack / defend, or be attacked, but they could cov-op hostile scanners / cov-oppers.
If the idea works, we could have some interesting wars. Another suggestion would be that value lost is not reflected as score lost. Basically, losing value would only mean you have less attack / defence power, but the score contributed towards your alliance so far would not be lost.