Global Strategy & PS2's Territory System

**Malorn** · 2011-07-11, 04:07 AM

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?

CutterJohn · 2011-07-11, 04:21 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

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.

If there were two sides you would be correct. With three, it will self balance. If TR becomes dominant and gathers like 40% of the land, they can push more, sure. They'll push towards the VS lands, and the NC will be biting off chunks of TR lands as a result.

Plus, if you'll recall, they said you use the resources to purchase upgrades to the weapons and vehicles, but nothing about using the resources to purchase the weapons and vehicles themselves. To me, this means that the armies will never lack the base capability to fight, they just can't purchase the nifty extras.

So, even if the TR holds most of the land, the VS and NC can still fight 80% as good. Since TR holds most of the land, they'll be fighting the TR, not each other(since an inconvenient lattice won't force it).

Land ownership will constantly fluctuate, but so long as the 2 underdogs don't fight each other, and as long as populations are reasonably equivalent, any situation where one empire holds a majority of the land won't last long. They'll all hover around 33% ownership over the long run.

You do say that it will be likely that the two dominant empires will team up on the not dominant one, but that didn't really happen in PS in my experience. The decision on who to attack was based on the lattice, and that pit you against the team that was winning as often as the team that was losing. In the more open system of PS2, the choice to attack the current aggressor is equally valid. It doesn't matter what they are occupied with so long as they are occupied.

SKYeXile · 2011-07-11, 04:24 AM

I like your idea of the larger empires territory getting captured more quickly by the other empires. while its always going to be hard to combat empire hoping, 1 empire per faction helps that. you can always give incentives to joining underdog factions. Hell I choose VS because it was under-popped 8 years ago, and never looked back.

Some of the incentives are obviously XP, but to play the lower populated empire you could also get more resources for the land you own. or alternately, since we dont know how resources are divided up between the empire, simply capturing land or having a smaller empire could result in a bigger resource share per person. skills could also level up faster for the underpopulated factions(though i believe skillups could be based of resources???).

CutterJohn · 2011-07-11, 04:36 AM

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

while its always going to be hard to combat empire hoping, 1 empire per faction helps that. you can always give incentives to joining underdog factions. Hell I choose VS because it was under-popped 8 years ago, and never looked back.

By not allowing hopping you hurt gameplay, since you lose it as an immediate population balance tool. You can't stop people from logging, but you can stop them from jumping to an overpopulated empire. Undoubtedly the first few will get through, but that will stop before long. Then you get to offer nice incentives to people going to the underdog empire. Example: swapping to the underdog doubles cert training on all characters for the day.

Just because PS1 had a poor implementation doesn't mean it can't be implemented correctly. Swapping sides is a common tool in FPS games to keep the populations even. Waiting for new players to join to fix populations won't fix temporary imbalances, and takes a while to take effect.

NCLynx · 2011-07-11, 04:29 AM

Hopefully we see populations high enough to more or less have the ability to fight on 2 fronts.

I'm sure it's just because NC is all I've ever really played but lately it almost always seems to be 2v1 with NC being the 1.

IIRC though back in 03 04 and maybe 05 all empires had population enough to fight on 2 continents or 2 fronts and stand a chance.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-11, 04:41 AM

It does't balance itself out with a 3rd empire. It didn't in PS, and we have no reason to believe it will here. The suggestion in my original post was to help encourage the 'balancing out' by providing motivations to attacking the empire with the largest territory domination (its faster/easier to take), and making it progressively more difficult to dominate a significant portion of the planet. Not impossible, but hard to do. Likewise, it was also to help out the underdog by making it easier for them to recover from the bad decision (which will reward them with captures, xp, and resource gains).

This will still happen with large populations because it isn't the size of the population that was the issue, it was the idea of attacking multiple locations and both sides escalating the conflict. Its easy for a conflict to escalate because it's a "good fight" and it absorbs the majority of two empires. Now that fight could span across an entire continent, but then what is the 3rd empire doing? They have only two options - attack territory elsewhere and gobble it up or join in on the fight and make it one big 3-way. If they choose the first option, then the most logical option is to attack the territory that will be difficult to defend or be unlikely to be defended strongly.

Population limits on the continents actually helped put a cap on how much of the population of an empire could get absorbed into a single continental battle. Without a limit it could very well engulf the entirety of two empires.

I guess you could say that there's a 4th problem here, and that is allowing a battle to engulf an entire empire's population. That might not be something they want to prevent, as that would be truly massive and epic (afterally, PS2 is going for scale, so more the merrier, right?), but I fear it will eventually lead stagnant 3-way battles on a single continent, with some land-gobbling along the way by the empire not locked into the epic struggle. But after they gobble some land eventually they'll decide to join in on the big fight. Missions might be able to help here too by encouraging folks to attack other fights after a battle escalates to a certain point to try to spread the fight around.

I think the load-balancing aspect to missions is to just do that - spread out the fight across continents and within the continent and try to prevent it having the entire server in one territory hex at the same time.

SKYeXile · 2011-07-11, 04:58 AM

3 empires does work, because the moment an empire captures a majority of the map, they will have no choice but to fight the 2 weaker enemy's on different fronts because the 2 weaker enemy's have no bases near each other. you don't get that with 2 factions.

lets say this is a planetside map at the start of the day, TR has 50% of the pop, vs 20 and nc 30

after awhile the map looks like this:

you cut the vs off from the NC, and give the vs no choice but to attack the TR, the tr is then forced to fight on 2 fronts.

and after awhile the maps back to looking like:

**Malorn** · 2011-07-11, 05:28 AM

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

3 empires does work, because the moment an empire captures a majority of the map, they will have no choice but to fight the 2 weaker enemy's on different fronts because the 2 weaker enemy's have no bases near each other. you don't get that with 2 factions.

lets say this is a planetside map at the start of the day, TR has 50% of the pop, vs 20 and nc 30

after awhile the map looks like this:

you cut the vs off from the NC, and give the vs no choice but to attack the TR, the tr is then forced to fight on 2 fronts.

and after awhile the maps back to looking like:

<snipped charts>

Your charts do illustrate one way it could play out, but there are a few problems.

1) You are leaving out the other continents. This is a "Global" problem, not a localized continental problem. The VS could ignore that continent and go attack the NC on another continent. They do, in fact have a choice.

2) You are making an assumption on map layout. We don't yet know how warpgates play into the design, nor how the empire bases are situated.

3) Attacking TR isn't the VS's best option in your scenario after initially reclaiming their territory. If you look strictly at the best option for the VS & the NC, that is the correct move. However the VS aren't thinking that. They're thinking of the best option for them without consideration for what is good for the NC. The VS, after initially retaking their bases from the TR could attack the NC once again since they would be unlikely to be capable of adequately defending their eastern territories while the TR most certainly can and would put up resistance if they took too much or went after meaningful resources. They could then lock up a decent chunk of the territory into a 3-way near NC territory and maintain resources. They will do this because they are outnumbered by the TR and they will want to keep the TR occupied with the NC to protect their own interests and not get pushed back out of the continent again.

NCLynx · 2011-07-11, 05:04 AM

Look at eXile, whippin out them charts.

I like it though. I know it doesn't balance itself out with there being 3 empires, I'm just saying (or hoping) that each empire will have enough population to hold there own on more than just one front.

Hell the TR still have the pop to do that, sometimes even the VS.

CutterJohn · 2011-07-11, 05:04 AM

There are multiple resources. Lets say TR had an absolutely shitty night, and are down to 15% of the land, and VS is attacking them. I doubt the NC are going to look hungrily at the bit they have left. No, they'll be eyeing the rich deposits the VS are sitting on, and go for those. Now who's getting double teamed?

And like I said, you can fight with no resources. So if you do get pushed back far enough, the other empires will have little interest in taking more of yours.

Edit: I was beaten, and by a chart at that!

Good point about the missions though.. They could surely be used to balance out who attacks who a bit.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-11, 05:42 AM

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

There are multiple resources. Lets say TR had an absolutely shitty night, and are down to 15% of the land, and VS is attacking them. I doubt the NC are going to look hungrily at the bit they have left. No, they'll be eyeing the rich deposits the VS are sitting on, and go for those. Now who's getting double teamed?

That's not how it played out in PS1. They would look at the NC for 2 reasons.

1) They can't defend their remaining resources; the TR can - NC's resources are easier pickings.

2) The fight is at the NC/TR conflict, so they will move to join in on that.

Missions can help here by encouraging them to go to the better place (which is something I mentioned in the OP).

However, the missions should factor in global domination (and population) into them, that's all. If the missions are purely evenly distributed amongst the opponents then it will actually encourage the VS to attack the NC in this scenario, at least partly. The smart way of doing it is to recognize the situation and put most if not all missions against TR-territories.

Also, has it been divulged as to the rewards for following a mission objective? If the system recognizes a bad situation and puts missions to correct it and those missions provide significant reward then that could go a really long way to stopping this most irritating phenomena.

NCLynx · 2011-07-11, 05:08 AM

I'm sure we'll see quite our share of an empire being backed all the way to it's "sancs" on all conts until they have nothing but those left. Once you have nothing left there sure is a lot of opportunity on the map and then it happens to a different empire etc and so on.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-11, 05:30 AM

Originally Posted by NCLynx

I'm sure we'll see quite our share of an empire being backed all the way to it's "sancs" on all conts until they have nothing but those left. Once you have nothing left there sure is a lot of opportunity on the map and then it happens to a different empire etc and so on.

That is a bad situation. The players on that empire will either log off for a while or switch to the other empire, further exacerbating the problem. What I'm discussing is a means of avoiding that scenario as much as possible. It shouldn't be a common occurrence.

NCLynx · 2011-07-11, 05:34 AM

I shouldn't have put it in terms of "It'll happen often", but back in a day where servers weren't all merged and there were times when the majority of players logged off sometimes you'd wake up the next day and a few squads of nightowls had taken everything.

Granted every faction will have there share of late night players but how that works out won't be determined until we actually play the game.

hippieschuh · 2011-07-11, 05:46 AM

I think without knowing details about the new system its all just speculation and you should not care to mutch about it.

All what we do know is that the region/resource system is far more complicated then PS1 so it will be a complete different gameplay (stratigic wise) then PS1.