Simplifying this beautiful Game Suggestion

[Cindy]

Based on experimentation, I have gathered that it is already possible for a clan war to be fought with just PvP. The current system allows 1% per kill on a clan tagged pilot by a clan tagged pilot, so if pilots would agree to no contracts and keep it that way, the problem with the disliked "contract wars" would be solved without Vice having to do anything.

[Zach]

I think the problem is the temptation of reverting to contract wars when one or more people start feeling soul grapes about the way PvP is going.

As long as it is in the game, it will always remain a problem to deal with. The only thing that will change is the relative scale of the problem.

[Star King]

Cindy great work but I think the 1% clan kill should be increased to 5% so the battle kills mean someting.

[Edited on 12-25-2008 by Star King]

[Star King]

Zach we want clan action without contracts so increasing clan death percentages makes it fun. Imagine patrols attacking and defending?

[Serayl]

Before I throw my two cents into the bin, I'd like to add the disclaimer that I've yet to actually play EM. That being said, I've played a few space sim/space strategy/sandbox/other games in the past, such as Freelancer or M&B - I hope to give the demo a spin as soon as I can, so with that in mind, I'd rather the walls of text I'm going to lay down be treated instead as idea fodder for you veterans that can then give anything you like a proper Evochron-flavouring.

Anyways, my experience with the business of making the game more competitive and interesting is to provide reasons why players should go head-to-head. In the case of FL, the usual PvP got fairly tiresome since there was little driving you to engage in combat aside from the fun of fighting. Decent group battles for an actual reason were rare, but when they happened, they had the potential to be very enjoyable.

I would have been more than happy to engage in other combat activities had the engine been capable of supporting it: from my knowledge, blowing up a station, if made destructable, with an offline player inside had the capability to crash the game. A similar problem existed for adding new stations, as the entire server had to be shut down and manually edited to include the new facility. This doesn't even take into account that without some significant editing, the endgame gear available rendered oneself nearly unkillable except by other players.

With such a large area to play in as appears to be in EM, having player-built stations determine system control will cause there to be more searching than fighting. This would quickly turn many players off (myself included), as taken to the extreme you'd spend several hours (possibly days) sweeping sector by sector looking for a few buckets of bolts that somehow enforce system control despite nobody excepting the owners having ever seen them.

I would like to suggest instead that to determine system control, expanding on what splosives mentioned, is to instead use those wonderful big asteroids as capture points that can also double as stations. They can be built up, at a cost, to function like any other deployable object, yet they could also provide additional bonuses to the clan it belongs to. Also, the owners can line the ridges with whatever defensive weaponry they desire, following similar rules to ships with energy use being key.

To claim a big rock as a new home, I'd figure a clan would either have to pay to lay claim to a free, unoccupied rock [money sinking], or evict another clan from their place instead. In keeping with the merc theme, these rocks would exist only in fields of some sort (other asteroids, nebulae, and so on). As a result, each big rocks' area may have a unique approach to defence and attack - within reason. Explorers can have a field day locating new places for hidden bases and the like.

An asteroid base in a platinum field? Count me in.

As far as defence goes, you would be able to build small platforms armed with whatever particles, beams & missiles are desired. Obviously, the number of these would be capped in some manner to prevent the issue of godmoding your rock. These platforms could have a small movement capability to eliminate potential blind-spot issues. As for constructing these turrets, I'd suggest reusing the station deployment mechanic. Thus, you would be able to set up the turrets in a specific configuration as needed. This comes with the necessary caveat that rock defenses cannot be placed outside a certain radius of the rock itself - no dropping defense platforms three systems away.

On shields, I would suggest them in the form of small emitters much like the turrets, where each emitter forms a small face. Adding each face up gives you your whole shielding system. Therefore, a rock may have say, twenty (or more) shield emitters that in total protect it, like a series of overlapping scales form a piece of armor. These too would be deployable objects.

Like the scale analogy, this gives attackers two options: either hit the shield at the seams (where each 'scale' overlaps), or focus on hammering one emitter, blowing it up and exploiting that hole. Each tactic comes with its own advantages and drawbacks - the same approach may not be effective in every situation!

The overall goal of attacking a rock would be to get inside and capture an HQ - I suppose there could be different objectives too. In order to make this more difficult than simply 'dodge everything and magically get inside', there'd be shields protecting the entrances that need to be punched prior to zipping inside, possibility by striking specific systems located on the rock's surface.

Heck, I read about hiring AI wingmen to help you do contracts - a clan could similarly hire these guys to patrol their local patch of space, who would return to help defend if the rock came under attack.

If the attacker is successful, their clan inherits whatever remains of the rock, and some - not all - of whatever was inside it (equipment, materials, maybe the odd ship). This depends very heavily on how often you guys are cycling through ships and so on after being blown up.

I'm not sure how to handle ejecting offline ships. It might have to simply happen, unfortunately.

I think having to clean up your own messes would place an emphasis on a swift, organized surgical strike over trying to win by sheer numbers or overwhelming firepower.

With regard to having a base attacked while everyone is offline, I've only seen two ways of handling this. Either the system is set up such that the rock can only be attacked within a specific window of time that is a couple hours in width, or an attacker is bound by the game to set up a 'siege' of some sort. The exact time for the big deciding battle is given to everyone involved by the game. To build on the last paragraph, once a rock is taken, the battle ends and the rock cannot be hit again for a given period of time - a day seems to me to be enough.

Without this, there'd only be honour-bound contracts between everyone involved, but there is always a subset of folks who are willing to forgo this for the leg-up in the battle. Being attacked at 3am on a weekday, or on Christmas is no fun.

Each system may have a few (2 to 4, depends on a lot of things) bases, with the idea of system control being a bit of a muddy affair. Either way, their placement in the grand scheme of things is to encourage some back-and-forth action.

Here's a few sub-ideas:

The main one I had in mind is enabling other players to take contracts doing simple things around the rock, if enabled by the owners. Specifically, I had thought of being contracted to 'replace' a shield emitter or turret by having to deploy a 'new' one in basically the same place, then either blasting, undeploying (if possible) or using a SD on the 'old' one. Said SD would not be able to be used for anything else.

Another sub-idea depends on the depth & capability of the AI, but if things ended up stagnating for some reason, there could always be an NPC faction that comes knocking, complete with capital ships. In this case, should a player clan loses such a battle, the rock is razed and either becomes unclaimed again (+random timer on other people claiming), or becomes defended entirely by AI forces.

The last one is probably not suitable for EM given the mercenary flavouring, but there's also those great airless balls of rock called moons. Could turn those into large bases, complete with orbital bombardment of surface objects and/or invading using walkers to capture things once the low-orbit defenses are cleared out. Moons that can support bases would need to be in far fewer number than asteroid bases, and include better bonuses for hanging onto them.

---

I understand a consequence of doing something like this would redefine the role of player-deployed stations. When I think of this, I don't see a permanent establishment, but instead I see a forward base of some sort, from which an attack can be springboarded against something bigger and more worthwhile.

So, feel free to add things, modify pieces or simply brand the whole post as tl;dr nonsense.

[Austin]

A note for the clan's of the Evoverse: the percentage gained or lost during a clan PvP battles for a sector can be adjusted by the server admin. One of the last lines of the text2.dat allows for the change to be made.

` This line sets the clan territory credit level for PvP kills, default value is 1.0 (range 0.1-20)
941=1.0

Also interesting to note, the percentage for contract completion can also be altered as well.

` This line sets the clan territory credit level for completed contracts, default value is 1.0 (range 0.1-20)
940=1.0



[Edited on 4-9-2013 by Austin]

[Marvin]

Before I throw my two cents into the bin ....

We're gonna need a bigger bin.

[-splosives-]

Some nice ideas. Asteroid caves are perfect candidates for capture points.
Build a clan HQ in it for a certain clan control %, set up some defenses at the gate. Then move on to the next cave.

[Star King]

These are all great ideas but Miaz and Cindy's ideas could be implemened fairly quickly.