Continent shape, geography, barriers and (mental) influence on territory held. - Page 3

**Malorn** · 2012-06-08, 02:23 PM

please stop derailing this thread

Talk about size estimates in the other thread. Talk about layout, geography, and mental models in this thread.

Landtank · 2012-06-08, 02:26 PM

I have decided that this thread is actually a TR ploy to discover the tactics of the other two empires.

Xyntech · 2012-06-08, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

please stop derailing this thread

Talk about size estimates in the other thread. Talk about layout, geography, and mental models in this thread.

Will do, but I consider my earlier points in the thread to still stand.

One way I think that you could further increase the mental barriers and flow of territory is to add different regions to the continent. I'm not talking about the three biomes, these would be separate from that.

The idea is basically that you have a cluster of hexes that when you control all of them, it gives you a regional bonus. Sort of like a continental bonus from the first game.

If these bonuses were global, it would provide incentive to fight on continents where you don't have much resource control, which is a big problem in their current system.

My idea of the system would be to have 7 regions broken up something like this:

(notes: circles = hexes with bases, the flower shaped things = empire footholds. this is based on an old hex map and isn't intended to be 100% balanced)

My idea for the bonuses would work something like this:

1) Controlling your foothold region provides a global benefit to your empire. This provides incentive to stay on a continent even when you are outnumbered. Taking the other two empires foothold regions (you don't need to take their foothold itself to control their region, you only need to take the capturable territory) would provide very small bonuses to this benefit.

2) Controlling the central region would provide another global benefit. This would reward an empire for dominating the most hotly contested part of a continent.

3) The in between regions (marked in yellow) would provide some lesser benefit, perhaps only beneficial to those on the continent itself (non global). Unlike the foothold regions, these benefits would stack, getting much better the more of these outlying regions you held.

Of course all of these benefits would have to be mild. The main thing wouldn't be to make the rich get richer, it would be to provide some reward, as well as to provide some small amount of assistance for an empire to be able to try to hold onto larger amounts of territory. As long as the rewards were small, it would be well balanced by the fact that the dominant empire would be fighting against two enemies ganged up on it.

I think the idea would be open to a lot of balance tweaks. One larger tweak could be to have 4 regions instead of 7, with those outlying regions replaced by larger foothold and central regions. I think the main parts of the idea would apply regardless.

Of course this wouldn't very much change the way continents were designed, but it would alter how they played. Getting a region would be similar to controlling a continent in the first game, in more ways than one. Trying to hold or deny a benefit would help define battle lines.

And of course, if they did implement a system like this, it would likely have some influence on future continent designs. Deliberately makeing continents with an eye towards regional control would probably influence other concepts, such as the donut continent idea.

Edit: The style of regional break up (both the 7 region and 4 region versions) is intended specifically for Indar. Other continents of other various shapes could have totally unique styles of region layout. Maybe a donut shaped continent has no central region, but instead an empire must control all 3 outlying regions to gain the secondary global benefit. I think the region system is very scaleable and could be used in conjunction with a lot of other ideas.

Figment · 2012-06-08, 05:31 PM

The regional hex system is something I've been thinking of as well.

It's something that is used in Crusader Kings II actually in a somewhat similar way:

Empires:

http://lpix.org/660949/1_32.png

Kingdoms:

Duchies:

http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/...ndom/ck2_8.jpg

If you own certain territory of a De Jure part of a Duchy, Kingdom or Empire, you can press your claim on the whole and declare war to conquer it.

Holding such territory as a whole provides extra bonusses. But it does inspire wars against and amongst the AI to "complete sets of territory". In the above maps you can probably tell that the De Jure territory of Duchies, Kingdoms and Empires can change over time through territorial integration (own for 100 years). I don't think that dynamically changing such regions over time is suitable for PS2 though (it's possible that it's added to a faction's "core territory", but that could have major consequences).

Either way, this would also provide some grander strategy victory conditions or achievements, so it's certainly something to consider adding to the resource system. In that case, even denying the full region ownership would already hinder the enemy to some degree. It would mean these would be even more fiercefully defended too though.

Anyway, as Mastacheif also noted, I'd personally like there to be ways to conquer and neutralise the footholds themselves. It's also good as Malorn said to move these footholds further to the preiphery of a continent, I'd even say on islands or within craters of various sizes and shapes. After all, I'm really worried that fights on one continent cannot interfere with fights on another beyond resources and more or less and then you lose the sense of global warfare. The lattice links being blockable, lockable and openable were very interesting options for strategic combat in PS1 after all. (Especially caves).

Another observation regarding water and ravines can be made from Extinction. Back when it was added, the idea was that factions could attack through the steep ravines with amphibious units. Aside from my outfit and a few others, few used these options. I don't even think the options were noticed. In fact, I even made a map with amphibious access points for a tower taking event (to be ran by SOE) once to make these options more clear to all:

You can also see how the symmetry of Extinction, the bridges, water and ravines and the central vulcano has a major influence on who owns what and what territory is perceived as owned by who. Also note that for Extinction, due to the slightly closer proximity between north bases and west bases, most of the fighting actually took place north and west of the vulcano. Even though the relative distance difference is almost neglegible, it was almost impossible for people NOT to take these bases in a specific order, unless starting at Jarl, or having two access points to the continent at once (also Mithra/Hvar were often attacked at once to block sneak attacks on Nexus and Desolation).

Xyntech · 2012-06-08, 10:39 PM

Originally Posted by Figment

Anyway, as Mastacheif also noted, I'd personally like there to be ways to conquer and neutralise the footholds themselves.

Previously, I had thought that taking over footholds would only work when we got more than 3 continents, but with the regional territory system, I think that it could work with just the initial 3.

The original idea was that when one empire took control of all territory on a continent (rare, but probably still possible), that all players on that empire on that continent would be given a vote. The vote would be which one of the three warpgates they wanted to be their new foothold. If they picked the same as where it already was, it would stay the same, but the other two warpgates would become broadcast warpgates (or stay broadcast warpgates more accurately). If they voted for one of the other warpgates, their foothold would switch to that warpgate and the two remaining warpgates would become broadcast warpgates.

This is where the regional territory would come into play. Instead of requiring you to dominate every capture point on the map, it could be made so that an empire only had to control the foothold region surrounding an enemy foothold to take it over. Once they gained control of that region, they would be given a similar choice, except that this time it would be a two choice poll. Move your foothold to the new warpgate location, or keep it where it was. Obviously if you held all 3 foothold territories at the same time, you would still be given the choice of which one of the 3 you wanted to be your foothold.

The interesting thing about the regional system would be that you could technically try to focus on capturing footholds without even taking every other territory on the continent. Sort of an encircle strategy, and then mop up the middle.

Obviously in both of these ideas, it would be vital that all empires had at least one foothold that could never be captured. Either it would be a permanent foothold on a fixed continent that never changed, or it would just be that if an empire only had one foothold left, they could never lose it.

I'm a big fan of footholds switching ownership, but I hate the idea of arbitrarily rotating footholds. I'd like to see a system, perhaps the one I described, being used to dynamically change the foothold locations around from time to time.

Limiting each empire to having a maximum of one foothold per continent would ensure that there would always be access for all three empires to attempt to fight on each continent, coming in through the neutral broadcast warpgate(s) if nothing else.

Also, with the regional version of the capture idea, not only would it be possible to implement the idea even with only 3 continents, but it would also still allow for the possibility of all 3 empires holding a foothold on the same continent. An empire would just have to claim the territory surrounding a broadcast warpgate to take control and turn it into their own foothold. Easier said than done, but possible.

Originally Posted by Figment

It's also good as Malorn said to move these footholds further to the preiphery of a continent, I'd even say on islands or within craters of various sizes and shapes. After all, I'm really worried that fights on one continent cannot interfere with fights on another beyond resources and more or less and then you lose the sense of global warfare. The lattice links being blockable, lockable and openable were very interesting options for strategic combat in PS1 after all. (Especially caves).

Currently, the devs said that we don't earn resources from other continents while not fighting on them. This is actually a huge problem, since once an empire loses most of it's resource access on a continent, they will have little incentive to stay and fight. Better to go where the resources are, on other more favorable continents.

This is part of why I want the regional system. Providing global benefits for holding a specific region would keep players and empires wanting to hold at least some territory on every continent. Once you are holding some territory, the resource system kicks in and you will want to own more territory on that continent, especially if there are even more region benefits to take control of/deny to your enemy.

Obviously the regional benefit system would provide some cross continental interplay, but it certainly wouldn't provide anything like the warpgate lattice links. Quite frankly, I haven't yet come up with any ideas that would smoothly combine the new continent style with something similar to the continental lattice system. The neutral warpgates of my foothold capture idea would have to be broadcast warpgates to make it work.

I'm very interested if anyone has any ideas that could expand on mine/replace mine that could also provide additional cross continental interplay. The hex system is much more dynamic than the lattice system, so I would kind of hope that the inter continental lattice system could be replaced with something equally more dynamic. I have no idea what that would be though. I'm continuing to ponder it.

Originally Posted by Figment

Slightly off topic, but speaking of battle islands, I hope that after the 3 initial continents (which I expect will all be vaguely similar in size to Indar), that they diversify wildly and start adding some wildly different continents. A small continent like a battle island would be fun. It wouldn't work as the main playable space at the start, but once that need is satisfied with the initial 3, the more diversity the better IMO.

**Malorn** · 2012-06-09, 12:46 AM

Figment it's interesting you point out the behavior on Extinction. It is a good illustration of how the typical player behaved in the game - they move to the next nearest target. While it is just as easy to move from the bottom left base to the top right, that isn't what they did. Some outfits would do that, but most and the general masses would just move to the next nearest obvious objective, even if it was only slightly closer.

We saw it all the time on Cyssor after capturing Bomazi. Wele and Aja were both hackable, but the vast majority went and sat at Aja instead of going for the more valuable tech plant. All because the amp station was closer.

That same mentality will show itself again in PS2. It's that mentality that I think will cause the TR to attack the NC tech plant west of the amp station on Indar instead of pushing north to the VS. The north has a big strip mine pit, which is a geographical barrier in its own right, but the west is the more obvious next target - the big facility. The VS will likely attack that same tech plant due to it being closest to their southernmost facility, and the strip mine also blocks them from the TR.

Like PS1, some outfits will organize and go after the flanks but the majority of the fighting will occur along roads to the next nearest objective. From the look of Indar, it will be south and west of the strip mine.

Xyntech · 2012-06-09, 02:14 AM

During the height of PS1, the zerg always was the main attack force while the tactical elements worked around them. I don't think it will be too bad if the zerg tends to go for the next closest target most of the time. In the end, I think it will just help define the battle lines. The more tactical outfits and players will take care of the rest.

Still, some thought should certainly be given towards making the zerg flow in directions that are positive to gameplay. We'll certainly have to see how the mission system influences this as well.

I think that even the zerg will be able to contribute to capturing something like a region though. Players like capturing objectives, such as continents from the first game, so I think we'll be able to get them to help take at least most of the territory in a region, perhaps with some tactical elements helping to mop up the last remaining 1 or 2 hex areas. Again, the mission system may be an additional help in this herding.

**Malorn** · 2012-06-09, 04:29 AM

It's important for them to understand how the path of least resistance mentality works. You can't really change it, it's just the primal instincts of unorganized humans. But you can understand it and design continents accordingly. Creating right triangles instead of equilateral triangles means that the hypotenuse will rarely be a path of attack, as Extinction shows. They can use that PS1 knowledge to go back and make Indar and other continents better.

Figment · 2012-06-09, 08:31 AM

Okay so to examplify the basic influence of the footholds and creating gaps in hexes by introducing simple terrain features like mountain ranges, this is more or less what happens:

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/b..._Influence.png

The influence of the position of the foothold is large. You can see that whatever lies behind a foothold is automatically core territory. It is considered out of range or hard to reach without severe opposition. If you create a barrier in the vicinity though, things change somewhat, the footholds control over the territory weakens.

Now, these are a couple random blob continents where water is used as the first natural impediment factor to steer some control over areas. Note that this is about perception of core ownership, because it creates natural boundaries that are perceived as natural defenses and impediments (hard to cross == hard to hold, chokepoints == easy to hold. An area beyond a choke point would be considered "expandable territory".

If you add bridges, you can tweak the core territory further. If the bridge is far away, it'll be perceived as harder to cross. If you put several together, it'll become a stronger link. If you then add bridgeheads, bases on either side, these become outposts and footholds on their own that influence the perception of who controls the immediate area.

You will find that if you add bases in particular areas, you can fine tune the map further and further and create routes for players to follow. This can also be done by pure geographical features: if you create a valley by placing two mountain ranges in parallel, you also create directional conquest from the entrance of the valley to the exit, as well as chokepoints at the ends of the mountain ranges. If this is a ravine with two overlooking cliffs, it becomes conflicted territory as whoever holds the top controls the bottom.

The regional grouping of hexes can further stimulate the idea of areas belonging to or splitting up in core or conflict zone.

The next thing I'd like to do is show what it'd be like if you had an intercontinental lattice and capturable footholds. That's going to get a bit more complex though.

**Malorn** · 2012-06-10, 03:55 AM

Granted I didn't follow all of the diagrams but I definitely understood the point illustrated in text.

Geographical boundaries and barriers absolutely impact, but so do roads and distance. As Figment illustrates, even if there is a path (a bridge in his example), if it is out of the way then it will be considered out of reach or impractical.

Roads are an important part of the geography. When people leave a facility or outpost they naturally follow the roads. There were cases where this would lead players to uncapturable facilities in PS1 due to the lattice and the roads not being aligned.

People go to the next nearest thing and they tend to follow roads or clearly visible paths to get there. Therefore you can predict the patterns of conquest on the continent by following the roads to large obvious objectives (like facilties, which are intentionally big and easy to see), and they will capture pretty much everything along the road to that destination.

And that's how a great many players of planetside 2 will operate. Visible objectives will be the goal (facilities, even though all terrain matters due to resources most people won't notice or won't care, because fighting nets them resources anyway). And they'll capture everything along the roads between those facilities.

Outfits that understand the game and want to play a bit more strategically will take alternate paths or objectives, but they'll be the minority.

Perhaps the mission system can help here, but I think you'd have to have a strong motivator to pull people away from their natural instincts.

Xyntech · 2012-06-10, 04:07 AM

I've been thinking about paths of least resistance and the region idea I posted.

Basically, my idea with the regions is to replicate some of the better dynamics of continents from the first game, since Indar is like 3 continents slammed together. Obviously my idea calls for dividing somewhere like Indar up into 4 to 7 regions, but I don't think it would be such a bad thing to have smaller "continents" (now regions). The way I divided Indar up has each region with about 10 hex areas per region, with 10 capture points still being similar to the number of bases on some PS1 continents.

So here's what I've come up with:

Continents from the first game generally had the zerg spreading in the path of least resistance, and then as an empire took a majority of the bases on a continent, the remaining bases would slowly start to get mopped up, even by the zerg, because it was easier to fight on the last few bases on a continent than to warp to the next continent.

So to mimic that, I would drastically reduce the hex border benefit for capturing territory from one region to another. If I was in region X and I wanted to capture an adjacent hex in region Y, It would take a lot longer than capturing another adjacent hex in region X. Not as much longer as back hacking behind enemy lines, but still significantly longer.

Then, once all territory in a region was controlled by your empire and you had gotten the regional bonus, perhaps the capture time bonus could be returned to normal. So it would be beneficial to control all territory in a region before pushing into the next region.

The path of least resistance would encourage the zerg to capture an entire region before moving on to the next one. Especially if there was a massive XP/resource reward when you took the last hex, along with a cheesy "You won the region!" text flashing on screen for those who haven't turned that bullshit off.

Obviously there are some flaws with the basic idea. For example, if the TR owned all of region X and the NC owned only part of region Y, the TR would be at a huge advantage to push into region Y while the NC would be at a massive disadvantage to try to push into region X.

One possible way to deal with this would be to have the time penalty for pushing from one region into another be suspended in both directions for a fully capped region. In other words, the TR could push out of region X easier once they fully capped it, but the NC could also push into region X just as easily at that point.

Obviously that would create some scenarios where it would be pretty hard to defend your regions, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. A regional system with some of the ideas in this post would tend to form a lot of battle lines along regional borders, so preventing them from being such rigidly defensible lines would probably be a good thing.

I'd love to see how the T split would evolve and change in an environment with 7 regions which were advantageous (and the path of least resistance) to capture as a whole, instead of just forming arbitrary battle lines wherever the armies met up in the middle.

I feel that this system would be dynamic enough, with enough variables, that it wouldn't be as common to be fighting over the exact same hexes with the exact same battle lines all of the time. The 7 regions I drew would be polar opposites to the T intersection, so the actual battle lines would have a lot of room to fluctuate I believe.

Obviously handcrafting a continent with a system like this in mind would be that much better, but I believe even a continent that's already made such as Indar could be a pretty dynamic place with some of these ideas. You don't necessarily need to change the geography, just how you use it and how players relate to it.

Edit: Malorn, if you'll note, I deliberately put at least 2 base facilities in each region, except the foothold regions which are inherently valuable already.

I believe that towers will fight much more like bases did in the first game, but I don't disagree that a lot of the zerg will gravitate towards the biggest shit they can find. But if regions can be made to feel more like continents, as far as it being the path of least resistance to take a whole region before moving on to the next, then I think that natural gravitation would work to our advantage.

As it stands, the way the big bases on Indar were broken, up, I had to put all of them at the furthest reaches of each region. This would end up being a good thing, in that players could take one base at one end, and fight their way to the other base at the other end of the region. Even the central region has it spread out into a Y, where presumably players would tend to pick the closer of the two, but that would still be a better dynamic than an aimless T intersection.

I'm just not sure if there would be an effective enough way to make regions feel as similar to PS1's continents as I think my idea requires them to feel. I think my ideas in this thread would go a long way, but it's hard to say if it would be enough.

Grognard · 2012-06-10, 05:56 AM

Originally Posted by Xyntech

Here's a mock up I did the other week to illustrate how I'm guessing the devs intend battle lines to be drawn. (click the image to enlarge):

I'm guessing that the 3 way will mostly occur where all 3 sides have a front meeting up, where they all have a vested interest in taking or defending the territory. I have no doubt that some 3rd faction players may occasionally drop in uninvited to another empires 2 way, but I don't think it will be the norm.

Along borders where only 2 empires have a front, I mostly envision those two empires fighting it out. Larger fights in more critical and/or defensible locations, smaller fights along the rest of the border.

Interesting, I like that mock-up, all numbers equal up to the total continental sum? If so, they may just be down playing the potential population capacity.

Very interesting...

Figment · 2012-06-10, 06:11 AM

I'd like to say that the zerg did not expand on the path of least resistance, it expanded on the path of least organizational effort required and largest stimuli (provocations and (biggest) nearby threat).

Known to CR5s as "the nearest base" and "nearest spawnpoint" principles.

Meaning shortest travel time to the action.

So I'd even say they'd instinctively go the route of heaviest resistance!

Bobby Shaftoe · 2012-06-10, 06:42 AM

Originally Posted by Figment

Meaning shortest travel time to the action.

Q.E.D: Whenever NC/TR cap Anu on Forseral from the Zal Ascension link and 90% start footzerging Ogma (despite no link), instead of Caer.

mynameismud · 2012-06-10, 07:13 AM

Well if stalemating does in fact turn into the issue we think it will be during beta. They will hopefully recognize the problem and try to solve it. hopefully by removing footholds.