Third Faction.. A balancing force

Battlescape
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The latest weekly update has hinted at a couple things being considered to provide content and game balance. Keith, has suggested shrinking the size of the battlescape to force player interaction. He also said Inovea is considering removing one faction and bringing the faction count to two. Then he indicated that Inovae was considering utilizing the rudimentary AI for player balance.

I’d like to suggest a another option.

If AI is going to be used, consider making the third faction ENTIRELY AI driven. This would prohibit the two stronger factions from annihilating the weakest faction. It would also act as a mechanism to SLOW DOWN the strongest faction, by having the AI target it over the weaker faction. This would eliminate the “snowball effect”.

Plus… Inovae could always represent the AI faction as an Alien force… :smiley:

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Plus the AI for an “Alien force” doesn’t have to respond like a human would. I would suggest the developers have more leeway, or options in how to utilized the AI. The odd behavior of the AI could be rationalized as alien behavior.

But then again… I’ve just created a whole new set of models the design team needs to work on. :smiley:
Maybe start out with two factions, and introduce the third faction at a later time, in order to provide more balance.

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Just say third faction is AI run amok, explains their behavior perfectly.

Edit: would also explain why we still use people to fly the ships.

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I think a third faction in general just adds complexity where none is needed.

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More than 2 factions can be entertaining though. It was fun in previous smaller scope games (I think of the games I played, Dead Island: Infection took the cake in that regard so far. 3 teams pitted against each other + another ai team full of zombies that was annoying all teams at the same time).
I mean planetside 2 is a game with multiple factions and it seems to be working well enough, the 3 faction system wasn’t detrimental to the gameplay experience in my opinion.

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Planetside 2 is probaby a good example of the problems that emerge. If two teams happen to be fighting one team that team just won’t have a good time. In planetside, you just get warp gate locked and it devolves into continent 1v1, a different set on each continent. In battlescape, those players will probably have to either be split between the other teams or forced onto a different server…

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