Competitive format

from Sins Forums

I think there's a few preconditions that need to be met before a Sins ladder can be viable. One of them is game length - this should preferably be below 1 hour (~equal to HW2). Many people don't have a patience longer than this, especially if it's a game with relative strangers and there is no guarantee that it's really enjoyable. There's also many people who can't commit daily more than 1 hour anyway. Developing a good format for competitive play is essential if you want to enjoy any, though some casual gamers might find it fun as well.

What would be the requirements for and the options to implement a competitive format? I'm thinking maybe something like this:

  • Time limit (1 hour?)
  • Some kind of a scoring system to determine winner/draw if the time limit hits
  • Extra resources or preresearched technologies
  • Readily colonized planets (50% of all colonizable?)
  • Prebuilt core fleets
  • 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3 locked teams
  • Limit on planets, 10 + 5/player
  • Limit of colonizable planets (not counting dead asteroids), 6 + 3/player - so in a 2v2 game, the max is 6 + 4*3 = 18 colonizable planets

Please note that this is just a preliminary suggestion, as my experience with Sins Online is still rather limited. Many of these things you can get straight from the map, others would need to be implemented as a mod. You could call the complete system/format Sins Pro if you like :D

multiplayer
7,823 views 6 replies
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I thought of that briefly, and it seems to have its problems. For one, it would take long before a ladder game is completed. It could work for 1v1 games, but getting a group of more than 2 players online at the same time is a significant challenge, not to mention getting it together again - especially if one side of the game is about to lose it!

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Is giving a big bunch of resources a good idea? In the end everybody would have to spend most of that into building fleets for rushing/countering rushing. Not the research it would be intended to, but maybe that's good... the research could come gradually just like in the regular format.

How much rushing should the format tolerate/require? I gather there are very different players for this game: some can take 1 hour at most, others insist on BIG games that take at least 4 hours. For the first mentioned, the sooner the fighting starts the better - for the latter, rushing would be out of the question. But a MP format has to go pretty much by the lowest common denominator, we should get everybody (and their dog) behind this format for it to revitalize Sins online play.

 

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Maybe the best option is to give players precolonized planets. Although this limits the player's options in forcing his options of strategic constellation in the system, it moves the initial frontlines closer to each other so action can ensue sooner. Also it offers the best balance between factions, since there are differences in resource extraction (some factions can gather them more easily) and ship costs - Vasari ships for example are costly but powerful, while TEC typically crank out loads of cheap crap rebranded pre-owned premium vessels. We should probably try to balance the prebuilt ships RU to RU, eg. calculate all costs of the ships and seeing that they match faction to faction, since we need to give separate lists for each faction anyway.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Based on fast setting......

 

6x all dps of any kind.

1/3 on research time.

2x on any kind of income.

2.5x ship speed

4x speed for phase jump.

With this game will be finished quickly, regardless of the size of the map or limitation of player number.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Many of the 1v1 maps with all settings on fast can be played in close to an hour as it is. Some of them start you off with 2 factories, a few frigates and static defenses (Gauss cannon, etc). With a bit more tweaking to whichever 1v1 maps that would be in rotation for ladder games, it could easily work.