I just want to say that’s an excellent take away from the lessons of PS1 and PS2. Thank you for laying them out. There’s clearly no obvious right answer and many wrong answers. I hope Inovae takes this into account and isn’t afraid to try different methods during Alpha/Beta.
Don’t be afraid to introduce something and then remove it because it didn’t work out. You have a unique game and to find what works may take risky ideas. It’s okay if they don’t work.
@Wargrim That’s a great writeup and I shall second what you said.
As for players leaving a loosing team you could try and create incentives to fight on a team that is loosing, maybe have leaderboards for the best pilots and pilot who play a loosing team get a bonus for the leaderboard points they score during that game.
Heck in the long run you could have an achievement system and if a player performs well enough in a loosing team they could unlock special skins for their ships etc.
The reason people leave a loosing team is because they decide it’s not worth the effort, if you can offer something for them sticking in there you can make that less of an obvious choice.
My proposal is that you use the act of finding players/bases as the pivotal mechanism for controlling these battlescapes.
In short players start with perhaps 3-5 resource gathering bases and another 10-15 small outposts they can spawn from. These bases are scattered on roughly one side of the solar system per team. Because of the size of the solarsystem, it is basically impossible to stumble upon any of these bases.
Players then must erect sensor towers in space to attempt to detect these bases. The sensor towers detect anything within a certain sized bubble (enemy players, bases, AI ships) and relay that information to the entire team. Having sensor towers equates to control over the ‘map’ by being able to see the movements of your enemy within a certain bubble. Sensor towers cost resources and can be harassed and destroyed by the other team.
Teams would slowly expand, building sensor towers outwards to search for likely enemy base locations and to search for enemy sensor towers to harass. Destroying enemy bases, and outposts denies them spawn locations and resources, and destroying sensor towers denies them vision.
From there everything is just details such as:
Having multiple sizes of sensor tower, the larger ones providing a larger detection area but costing more resources and requiring a larger ship to transport. Larger sensor emplacements also come with more guns/defenses.
Having different detection levels for different sizes of ships. EX: a sensor tower might be able to large enemy ships X KM away, enemy sensor towers at 2X KM away, but smaller interceptors and recon ships might be detected 0.5X KM away (on some sort of sliding scale based on ship/emplacement size).
Player ships also have their own sensor bubble range (though much smaller than sensor towers). Smaller recon ships might be able to slip by enemy sensor towers (outside of their detection range) and find the position enemy ships without being detected in turn.
Having resource production ramp up as the game goes on, making it easier to place sensor towers and detect enemy bases leading to larger and larger confrontation until all the main bases of one team are destroyed.
Overall I think the most desired outcome is to have a game that moves through stages and offers a variety of gameplay:
Recon/hunting stage
Skirmish and harassment
Huge climactic space battle(s)
Resolution and consolidation
Using a sensor tower/map control method ties allows for a game to progress through those stages.
First players seek each other out, building towers and flying recon ships around in search of emplacements.
Next, players attempt to destroy obvious or discovered assets and harass the enemy towers to prevent enemy expansion. At the same time others on the team must defend their established assets and towers
Finally, a large enemy base is discovered and one team masses to attack the base. The enemy team must respond and a huge climactic space battle ensues. Assuming the base is destroyed, the teams return to skirmishing and hunting until another large base is discovered. Perhaps there is some mechanic which allows the victorious team to establish their own resource gathering at the destroyed base, etc.
This continues until all the main bases of one team are destroyed.
I think using this method will preserve what much of the playerbase is interested in and give a little something for everybody. Those who want to go solo or small gang hunting around the solar system can fly recon, spotting out enemy towers and harassing support ships. Those who want to build/expand can hop in transport ships to ferry out sensor towers and turret emplacements - others can escort those transport/support ships to prevent them from being harassed. Those who want bigger battles can join in on larger attack fleets to harass larger assets. Then eventually everyone participates in an gigantic space battle around an large base.
There are many more ideas that can tie into this such as how to divide players and allow them to communicate (IE: recon fleet, defense fleet, assault fleet) but that is all ancillary. Also, I haven’t read through the previous comments in detail yet so something like this might have been mentioned already - my apologies.
Player-built stuff was a stretch goal which was not reached, therefore building sensor towers/satellites isn’t likely.
Even if that wasn’t the case, I think your proposal has some issues, not least it doesn’t encourage the server population into close proximity to increase player-player interaction.
I feel a bit misled by the title of the thread. There is no summary of the gameplay here.
How will battles be won, what are the victory conditions?
How will resources be distributed to teams?
How can resource distribution be disrupted?
If there is no base capture (only destruction) do all factories automatically start as owned by a faction?
As there are multiple locations that new ships can be spawned, which receives the resources from any given factory?
If a base gets destroyed do the resources in it get lost?
Do resources on route to a destroyed base get redirected?
How can a losing team fight back?
Will it get easier to win as the other teams get weaker even though that would be bad for gameplay?
How will having three factions make the gameplay better?
It seems quite late to only just be starting on all this.
I don’t think it has been discussed enough. Having a thread which drafts the actual gameplay design would be incredibly useful to INovae. With the combined experience of gaming within this community major pitfalls could be avoided by discussing the game design in advance. This isn’t even happening in the dev only access forum which was set up partially with that goal in mind.
I completely agree.
https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/gameplay-design-details/5110
I would quote the numerous times I’ve said this but I’m on mobile at the moment.