Global Strategy & PS2's Territory System

[Malorn]

I've always been a huge fan of the macro strategy of Planetside. For background understanding on this topic, please see my Planetside Manifesto, Section 2. It's context will help for better understanding of this discussion.

First, I want to say I'm hugely excited about the territory changes and believe they are really, really good for this game. They've far exceeded my hopes and expectations with such a design. However, there are still issues I wish to discuss that will still be a factor in the new design.


There are three problems I would like to discuss in this thread.


1) Preventing the Rich from getting Richer

This is a problem that mildly existed in PS1 in the form of continental lock benefits. For example, the empire that held Oshur (battle islands) got the repair benefit on all continents. This helped them on assaults and defenses on other continents quite significantly. In PS2 this will be a much more pronounced issue if not addressed due to resources being the reward for territory control. As an empire accumulates more resources it will assist them in winning further victories. Conversely, the losing sides will be resource-starved and have a harder time reclaiming land from the dominant empire. Basically if you win you get rewards - which then helps you win more. The loser is denied those rewards and so they have a harder time competing. Its a positive-feedback loop where the rich have an easier time staying rich.

One simple way to help counter this is to add a ratio of territory ownership into the equation for how quickly an empire can conquer any territory from the owning empire. The desired result is that as an empire gains more territory it starts taking longer to capture additional territories, and its easier for opposing empires to capture territory from them. This puts natural brakes on conquest and helps the underdog empires dig out of a bad situation. Of course once things start evening out then the bonuses/penalties go away.



2) Countering the double-teaming behavior and motivation

In PS1, those of us who participated in the Global Strategy metagame had two goals: 1) capture as much territory as possible (tangible domination), and 2) provide as many victories as possible (winning is fun). From the information released about PS2 this past weekend that goal is going to be even better supported in PS2, except that the first goal will have a resource element motivating the capture. That is, the goal is to capture as many resources as possible (which requires capturing territories).

A major problem with PS1 is that the best way to capture territory is to attack an empire that is already defending, more commonly known as the double-team. Since each side only had a certain amount of population if one empire was spending most of its manpower fighting one of the two empires then they would be unable to handle an assault by the 3rd empire. This usually led to losing on both fronts if they tried. For example, if TR is attacking NC on Solsar (NC is defending), if the VS wanted to gain territory their most strategically sound option is to attack the NC. Attacking TR might cause them to withdraw from Solsar, leading to the VS having a two-front war. This led to the majority of global strategy tactics revolving around either engaging-in or avoiding being double-teamed. This would continue until one empire was backed into a corner fighting both empires on different continents, or the 3rd empire decided to create a 3-way on one continent (this was not always possible due to population lock limits on continents).

With the current details we have I believe this problem will be exacerbated in PS2 when there is something tangible to gain by gobbling up lots of resource-rich territory. The preferred tactic will end up being the same as PS1. Commanders will ask a simple question - What is the most beneficial target to attack that will grant us the most captured resources? The answer will always be the targets who's owning empire is least-fit to defend. In addition to creating some un-fun situations, it also has another detrimental effect...


3) Removing motivation for the 4th Empire

The disasterous consequence of 2) is that the empire being double-teamed is generally losing on all fronts, sometimes lopsidedly. This isn't fun and often leads to "the 4th Empire" effect where players log off the losing empire and log onto one of the other two where they can avoid being in that situation. If an empire is in that position going into primetime it usually meant they're going to stay there all night and so the 4th empire became quite prevalent after a time. This only exacerbates the problem for the losing empire. PS2 will have a 4th empire if it has any form of free play option (which it should if it understands the FPS market, but that's another discussion).

There is something mentioned that will help with both 2) and 3) though it is not a complete solution, and that is the Missions system. The missions system could take global dominance into account when deciding where to put default empire missions. It could favor missions against the larger enemy empire, or if the larger enemy empire has a very large amount of territory it could not attack the weak empire at all. Likewise, it could also give missions to the dominant empire such that it is 'greedy' and ends up attacking both foes, which increases its chance to bite off more than it can chew and lose some ground.

Additionally, factoring in total global domination into the capture times as mentioned above for 1) solving the rich-get-richer problem also helps with this problem by changing the underlying motivation. If the larger empire gets a penalty to capture times and the smaller empires get a relative bonus depending on the global domination of their opponent then the answer to that question of "how can I acquire the most territory" changes! Since capturing territory from the larger empire will be faster they are motivated to going after those territories instead of picking on the small empire being hammered already. Likewise it helps the empire with the smallest holdings reclaim territory faster. If capturing territory yields benefits then it motivates players to stick around on the underdog and fight it out. The larger empire is still motivated to stick around also because they're reaping the benefits of a lot of territory. I believe this will help lessen the # of players who are fair-weather and logon to the winning side and counter the 4th empire behavior.

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I believe the most desirable result is a landscape that globally shifts around and favors each of the empires roughly equally. They'll win some, they'll lose some, but the net resource gain over time will be approximately equal across the empires. The empires will have periods of stronger success for a time, but the goal is for them to not last too long and to minimize the situation where any one empire is being exclusively attacked by the other two (unless the empire being attacked owns a huge portion of the world). Its also desirable that the populations of all three empires is roughly equal and doesn't have dramatic shifts due to fair-weather players abandoning their empire when it is in an unfortunate position. Weighting the capture times by relative global domination between an attacker & defender could go a long way to helping encourage this behavior, as could a mission system that takes such data into account when assigning missions.

Thoughts?