2 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

So a few people have asked me a few times, via PM, why I get on FW’s case so much and why I don’t want to play a Real Authentic A BattleTech Game™ when I claim to be a longstanding MechWarrior player and an ardent fan of the old BattleTech novels/fluff. One particular PM, sent from someone demonstrating his attempt to refute a point I’d made about how FW players have no idea what they actually want when they bellow for “MOAR IMMURSIV FAKSHUN PLAE!” had me wondering for a bit, and I think I may’ve actually stumbled across a remarkably simple idea worth enough consideration to get me to wander over here and see how it plays out. Outside of me being ridiculed for not being a Founder and die-hard Commodity Warfare Afficionado, anyways.

That idea is to drop the completely ridiculous, utterly unsalvageable Call of Derpy respawning res-rush ‘drop deck’ game style and get this game back to being a right and proper MechWarrior game SIGNIFICANTLY increase the time it takes to capture a planet in Commodity Warfare.

Currently, planets can flip in less than a day, if I recall the system correctly. Each eight-ish hour attack cycle resolves planetary ownership; leave for a week and you can come back to find that the borders of a three hundred light year interstellar super-battleground have completely changed. Among other issues, this lends a very real issue of perceived impermanence for any given capture or successful defense – who cares about capturing/defending these planets if the attackers/defenders can just flip things back the other way before the day is out?

Instead…what if it was a combination of two complete weeks, IRL time, of play that decided the ownership of any given planet currently being contested? Planet flips would be drastically reduced…and as a consequence, winning or losing any given fight would be much more important. Borders would change much more slowly, but that very slowness lends a sense of actual, tangible victory to having accomplished something for your choice of House/Clan. The much slower cadence of planet-flipping would also allow Piranha to, possibly, offer more faction-wide bonuses for doing well on offense/defense/controlling more planets, as the much more stable borders would be a lot less prone to abuse and wild variance in any given timeframe.

There’s a lot to be said about such an idea, really. Take the Tukayyid tournament method of giving a planet hundreds of control points to capture, rather than just a few dozen. You could (hopefully, ideally) even introduce a new game mode for Faction Play – use Invasion while a planet is new and the defenders control the majority of hardpoints, but after a certain number of points have been captured by the attackers (“securing a beachhead”), the game switches to the new Siege game mode. Basically, an upscaled nuAssault game mode where both teams have bases to attack/defend, or possibly a less-ridiculously-bad version of Domination – representing the shift of the planetary war from trying to prevent invaders from making planetfall (Invasion) to trying to claim/defend different resources and strategically significant points on the planet (Siege), which would probably require new maps (and thus won’t happen) but could be used to eliminate the severe chokepoint-y issues I keep hearing FW nutters complaining about.

Or they could not do that – the basic idea of massively lengthening the war for any given planet is really pretty easy to implement. People would have to work, and hard, to take their planets, and Piranha would be in a much better place to reward that work. Anyone figure that might be better than a half-dozen random skirmishes deciding the fate of entire worlds?

[Tarl Cabot]

Other posts, etc but many fall in the same line, it should not be as easy as taking and holding 7 out of 13 wedges at the 6ish hour mark to win a planet.

The planets should be broken up into tiers, with tier 1, such as prefecture/district capitals, taking the most battles to win and hold by 75%, none of this 51%, . Tier 2 would be the heavy populated worlds/heavy military presence, etc, etc until the last tier (3-4) would be the fewer battles to take. That would mean PGI would have to fill in lots of the missing planetary data but they could also use their own parameters.

PGI can still restrict the number of battles happening at any one time, I believe the max is 63 battles at once.

Scouting - If LT is not going anywhere, it should activate at different intervals for defender and attacking force. For defending forces, if their scouting queue is at the 95% mark, LT would only activate if the defenders have lost 30% of the planet, as an example. Attacking force with their Scouting at 95%, LT would activate at 60% ownership.

I prefer LT becomes extinct, or become more of a wide dispersal arty strike but the above would give two variables that can come into play. And for scouting, only the points of the mech escaping would be counted.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 13 July 2016 - 06:13 PM.

[Deathlike]

1453 R, on 13 July 2016 - 04:43 PM, said:

That idea is to drop the completely ridiculous, utterly unsalvageable Call of Derpy respawning res-rush ‘drop deck’ game style and get this game back to being a right and proper MechWarrior game SIGNIFICANTLY increase the time it takes to capture a planet in Commodity Warfare.

I'm not sure if you pay attention.. but only planets move during an event these days, and generally in factions that are overpopulated for FW (not that everyone plays FW, but the stacking does happen).

This is so much more a non-issue than anything else.

You're wasting your time analyzing the wrong issue.