6 replies to this topic

[Aidan Kerensky]

Disclaimer: I post these suggestions here openly and give full rights to the owners of the website / PGI to use them or not use them in any way they see fit. I ask for no compensation or recognition.

I wanted to offer up a suggestion here for a (hopefully) well thought out Community Warfare implementation that could be done without significant changes to gameplay (i.e. the in core combat part of the game).

The core pillars I have in mind are:
1) Player decisions should matter: It shouldn't just be an endless swapping of irrelevant backwater planets. We should be able to create a narrative ourselves through the actions we take. There's plenty of room in the battletech narrative to permit this.
2) Defenders should have SOME kind of advantage.
3) Planets should have "personality".
4) The number of contestable worlds will be quite large.

The world would be set up to seed the planets around the galaxy. Each planet will have some kind of trait to it that makes it "special" (not necessarily unique). Certain planets will produce specific mech variants (allowing free repairs for that mech chassis for their owner, perhaps?). Certain planets will have rich citizens (C-bill stream). I'm sure other features could be possible. Each planet will also have three, randomly assigned, maps that are its maps. That means that combat on those planets will always take place on those maps (although more on that in a minute). So each planet has a unique "feel" and the defender will be intimately aware of the maps that are applicable to their territory (allowing them to customize mechs as needed).

Over time, new maps and new "specials" will be implemented. I'd suggest that the algorithm used to seed them in the first place should just be rerun, thereby rerandomizing all of the contestable planets (perhaps with an override to keep factories in place). This will produce a certain amount of chaos as planet owners scramble to reassess their situation. But that kind of chaos and that kind of "our incessant war has left things shifting and changing in uncomfortable ways" feels very "Battletechy" to me, personally. I'm not married to this, they could be reseeded by hand in some way as well.

To contest ownership of a planet, a merc groups needs to purchase a jumpship and dropship ride (future expansions could have merc groups owning their own jumpship and dropship). These will be priced based on the distance from their home base (either the planet they own or the faction they're housed out of). In this way, the closer in contestable planets will fall first and easiest (and be the most widely contested) while the planets on the periphery will be less fought over. It also creates regional wars since you know that your neighbor is at a financial advantage to attack you as compared to some random upstart merc group housed on Luthien.

Once they purchase their ride and declare their intent to take the planet they input a 6 hour window in which they're willing to fight the fight. The defender then chooses the time within that window. Admittedly, there are other ways to crack this nut but this one seems like the most "fair". When the fight time arrives, the fight begins.

Each invasion will consist of a series of escalating battles over the three territories of the planet (see what I did there?). The defender can choose the order that the territories are fought in.

The first mission is the combat drop. The defenders can bring any force composition they want, the attackers can only bring light and medium mechs. However, the attacker's command can choose their deployment from anywhere along one edge. The Attackers goal is to get as many units to a randomly designated edge on the opposite side. The defenders try to kill them. Each mech that survives gives the Attackers 100 tons to player with for the next battle.

The next battle is a pure combat one. The defenders can again bring whatever they want. The attackers can field the tonnage won during the previous fight. This combat is a pure, "destroy the other team" fight with a ten minute timer. The team that destroys the most tons (not necessarily the most mechs) will get a 15 (30?) second head start in the final battle.

The final battle is a defend the base mission for the defenders. The attackers have ten minutes to destroy the opposition base (a destructable object perhaps? Or just an area to occupy a la WoT... ). The base location should be randomized slightly so as to encourage scouting from the attacker. Both teams can field whatever they want.

All in all, the process should take about 30 minutes. Either side can quit at any time if they feel they're getting pummeled too badly. I offer up these suggestions not as a way to say this is how it should be but as a POSSIBLE implementation to get people thinking. I think the core pillars are sound though. We (at least I) don't want to fight over irrelevant, homogenous pixels. I'd like to feel some grand strategy could be played out. I also think, if the suggestion to limit the terrain type of a planet to specific maps is implemented (which I think it SHOULD be... though 3 may not be the right number) then the attackers should have a cheaper "raid" option that they can do to learn the terrain (and feel out the opposition). That wouldn't take the planet but perhaps it takes a set amount of C-Bills from the defender's treasury or something.

[Exilyth]

Aidan Kerensky, on 27 August 2012 - 10:52 PM, said:

The world would be set up to seed the planets around the galaxy.

The location of all planets is known... sarna.net has location data for almost all of them.
You might want to read up on the IS a bit.

Edited by Exilyth, 28 August 2012 - 01:36 PM.

[Ray Gunn]

Aidan Kerensky, on 27 August 2012 - 10:52 PM, said:

Disclaimer: I post these suggestions here openly and give full rights to the owners of the website / PGI to use them or not use them in any way they see fit. I ask for no compensation or recognition.

I wanted to offer up a suggestion here for a (hopefully) well thought out Community Warfare implementation that could be done without significant changes to gameplay (i.e. the in core combat part of the game).
<snip>

I basically like this idea. One of the things I enjoyed about Mechwarrior beyond the actual combat is the background and the intrigue. That interplay between the factions - the subterfuge, the politics, the massive battles for territory control, pride, or just plain fun (you know how those nobles can be). In a sense, that's what Battletech is all about. There's a heck of alot of plot, evident by just reading the lore that's accumulated over the years from all the Battletech games. My first experience with the universe was with the old C64 game "The Crescent Hawk's Inception". That was an RPG, but probably one of the first CRPG's to take place in the Battletech universe (in fact it might have been the first). Anyway, since then I have been very interested in all things Battletech and found the Mechwarrior games very interesting. Of course, I think everyone likes to see persistence in a game and likes to be able to have a visible impact on a huge world, so these are kinda lofty goals for any game to achieve.

The trouble is when you have potentially thousands of players all interacting with a world (by which I mean the game universe - in this case the Inner Sphere). Any one player's potential contribution in such a sea of interactivity gets diluted to the point where it doesn't make much difference. The two ways around this are either to split up the world into lots of little "alternate realities" with just a few players interacting in each one, or to basically force players to pick sides and become a part of a huge army, with each army being able to have a major effect on the world through the actions of all the players that make up that army. The Merc angle provides an interesting alternative whereby a player can jump around from army to army. Your idea is good from a gameplay angle, but I think it needs to consider just how many players could be interacting with the world at any given time. Maybe we can look at a game like Planetside for some clues as to how this might play out. Planetside, for those who don't know, was an MMOFPS that basically created a huge war that was driven entirely by players. There was no PVE in that game.

In BT lore, most Merc companies were not necessarily at war with each other, they would hire out to various clients who were interests within the major factions. Some merc units would work only with one faction while others diversified, working for the highest bidder. This is essentially what Mechwarrior is. You can choose who you work for and either establish faction loyalty or just go for the biggest paycheck. This is what MWO should be. I should mention here that I'm not opposed to the territory control system you've presented, but rather I don't think it should be implemented as simply thousands of Merc companies all fighting each other for territory. I think that the major factions (the Successor States) should be fighting over each planet, with Mercs picking and choosing which factions they work for on a mission-by-mission basis. There could be a limited number of top-tier players who have achieved a certain status in a faction who can pick and choose what planets to invade, essentially giving them access to a sort of mission generator system. Other players could choose one of these missions to play. Pay and rewards would all be determined by the game so as to prevent cheating, and missions would be constantly generated and completed so there would always be something new and different for the typical player to choose from. The Merc Company system would allow friends to play together in the same mission.

In regards to planets, randomization is basically just a mechanic to prevent things from getting repetitive and tedious. I think it's worthwhile here. While there can (and should be) handmade maps and missions/scenarios/minigames/whatever that are frequently fought over (for instance key planets/cities/facilities from the lore), there should also be a ton of lesser, totally randomized maps and so on to act as filler, otherwise people will get tired of the same stuff over and over again, heck they'll probably get tired of that too, but less quickly. There's a good argument for procedural generation in games - Minecraft and its seemingly inexplicable success is a good example of that. The early Mechwarrior games used this sort of procedural randomization effectively (mainly due to technical limitations), and it kept these games from being very short and repetitive although Mechwarrior 1 was very short by today's standards (I think I completed it in a 6 hour long marathon session at one point). As far as the lore goes, it definately supports this sort of randomization. Planets are massive things. Each one could have potentially thousands of maps depicting that planet's variety of terrain and biomes. There's nothing lore-contradictory about this, even if we already know all the names of the planets and their locations. There's no reason not to use the canon planet locations - they don't need to be randomized, we'd gain nothing from doing so. The game could be programmed to generate a randomized map for a misson on a planet based on that planet's possible terrains, biomes, and other statistics. This would vastly open up the number of planets the game could take place on, and the lore's chock full of them. We could have all kinds of different terrains, skies, building arrangements, environmental features, etc, and it would present an unpredictable situation every time. That's a gameplay mechanic in itself. I'd love to see some areas of my favorite planets rendered in such a system. Every true BT vet must have a favorite planet or two. I'm partial to Pacifica myself (which I guess everyone else calls Chara III).

So I suppose that brings us to content updates, which are expected of most MMO's these days. What alot of games do these days in lieu of randomization is just have a large team of content developers working to produce a steady stream of new content for players to explore. I think this can work, but many MMO's suffer from evident "creator burnout" at some point. This is basically when you start to see content entering the game that seems derivative or uninspired because the team of content creators have run out of ideas. Randomization doesn't exactly solve this issue, but I think it can take some of the load off of the creative team. The other alternative is to implement a system whereby the players can create content such as worlds and missions. This is usually more interesting, but it's a tricky thing to implement and manage since putting content creation in the hands of players opens up its own can of worms. Nonetheless, some MMO's have implemented it well. I'm rather fascinated by the idea of this in a Battletech setting. Battletech has such a rich lore already. This could be a thorny issue since you'd undoubtedly have players creating non-canon content alongside players who are quite capable of creating canon content. I'd like to explore this concept more but I'm already arguably off topic with this post.

In any case, I like the idea of territory control. Although territory control isn't the only reason for mech battles in the BT universe, it's probably the biggest part of it. Maybe expansions could be added on later that let players engage in more unusual missions, such as helping out one side or another in a regional conflict or civil war. These would be battles or mission chains that won't affect which faction controls a planet on the main map, but may rather cause statistical or cosmetic changes within a faction (which could be changed back later via a similar set of missions). Perhaps an expanded version of the system could even allow new temporary factions to be created (perhaps a rebel or pirate faction) which would persist and attack other planets randomly for a while until they get wiped out by a proper force later on. Other ideas could include the famous Solaris Tournament, or missions where you have to help train a noble, or run around and let some mechwarrior in training shoot at you (with options such that you could turn around and shoot the kid's mech out from under him or cause some kind of mischief as alternate ways to "complete" the mission), and other things that fit in with the background of scheming, intrigue, and arrogant nobility that the BT universe provides. In any case, I'd love to see some of these ideas experimented with by the devs, just to see how they play out. But of course that does take time and money, and those are limiting factors.

When coming up with gameplay mechanics, it's not necessary to be lore-friendly initially, but a rich lore can actually help to come up with ideas. Good gameplay is the most important thing for any game to achieve IMO. Adapting gameplay concepts to established lore is really not that hard to do if you're creative. It's a two-way street really.

I say this as a long-time game player and amateur game designer myself, but I will admit that one of the things I really love about the Battletech universe is the lore. I definately want to see the lore preserved and even fleshed out more. I would love to see this game really dig into the meat of the Battletech Universe lore, especially given the time period that it occurs in, which is arguably among the most interesting periods of the universe story. It's a fun thing to discuss and I think most BT vets would agree.

Edited by Ray Gunn, 30 August 2012 - 11:57 PM.

[Kyrie]

I kinda like this idea, but I wanted to mention the original MPBT: 3025 thread. You can use control-F to get to section called "Planetary Map". It has a pretty neat idea of a hex based combat system. Hexes and BT go together like hand-in-glove. :-)

Now the general ideas in that epic post (thanks once again Shadowstarr!) describe a House-centric focus for the strategic overlay, but mercs can definitely be worked into it with some thought. For reference to other ideas, please see the index of Community Warfare posts I've put together.

[Ray Gunn]

Wow. MPBT3025 sounds like it would have been awesome. I was looking for multiplayer BT games back in the 90's but I never even heard of MPBT. Well, if anything as cool as that ends up making its way into MWO I think I'll probably dump several years of my life into the game!

Thanks for the links. It seems that the community is definately interested in taking this game in the right direction. There's alot of good ideas which should make for a complex and interesting game, something I think the MW franchise could definately use. Frankly, I feel there are too many mainstream games these days that are really dumbed down. It'd be nice to see something with a more serious and invovled mechanic, at least at a later stage. I suppose the early game would have to be simple and easy so as not to scare away newbies. I guess I'm ok with that, but being a hardcore gamer I tend to find that sort of thing rather tedious.

Edited by Ray Gunn, 31 August 2012 - 08:38 AM.

[Kyrie]

Good idea on linking the devblog.. that is the first link in my index post.

And I'm very glad you like the idea of a complex metagame. I'm hoping we get full faction implementation, but it is likely that IF it happens it will be after serious study and consideration. This is something us House Kurita players have been debating endlessly to no avail, what to do: form merc corps or go with the house faction from the start. ;-)

Some have committed to doing merc corps, others like me are on the fence until we see the details of initial CW implementation by PGI.

[Ray Gunn]

Ah, oops. I removed the link from my post in order to avoid being repetitive, since it was already in your links. Well here it is again: http://mwomercs.com/...munity-warfare/

Maybe redundancy isn't such a bad thing, in small amounts?