RocketBoy

Season 2 Holonet | Info Drops and Discussion

Recommended Posts

4ae70e32f5032838a0a82eea86e3be2dc74039e2.jpeg.d1b410161f9ce358fdcf8cd93cea6090.jpeg

Season 2 Holonet: Victory Points (VP)

One of the big changes in Season 2 is that holocrons are out, and Victory Points are in. Instead of 7 (then 20) holocrons hidden throughout the galaxy, the system the GMs are currently working on has 50 key planets around the galaxy that, depending on their importance and strategic value, grant between 1-3 Victory Points (VP). 

The benefits to this? It will be much easier for Factions to get VP than it was to get holocrons, meaning you get to "win" more often. They're also more plentiful, so you won't be struggling over only a few planets (unless you want to). Holocrons also didn't make much sense in terms of the game story: they were a McGuffin, and they served their purpose. On the other hand, VP Systems follow a strategic logic: big, wealthy systems like Coruscant and Corellia give the most points (3), populous systems like Lothal and Ord Mantell give you 2, and less powerful worlds like Dantooine and Batuu give you 1. 

We're working, and will want your help, to make sure every corner of the galaxy offers a chance to score points, though anyone who's watched Star Wars knows the Core Worlds are richer than the Outer Rim. You can help make it as balanced as possible by contributing your thoughts and ideas.

We're also assigning Types to these planets, to further outline what kind of benefit you're getting. This doesn't (currently) have a mechanical function in gameplay, but it helps differentiate worlds that are useful for their farmlands and worlds that have productive shipyards. It's flavor, story content for those who want insight into the kinds of worlds they control.

We're planning to open up a shared document where people can contribute ideas for VP worlds: how much VP they would grant, and what Types they would classify as.

We've also considered giving Factions the option to earn VP in other ways, like taking control of a specific set of planets, or even accomplishing custom, Faction-created goals. We can talk more about that later on.

Edited by RocketBoy

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Looking forward to this. I wanted to be a part of Season 1 more but just didn't have time (work and kids are a lot outside of my favorite hobby). Glad to see that Season 2 is coming! 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

4ae70e32f5032838a0a82eea86e3be2dc74039e2.jpeg.d1b410161f9ce358fdcf8cd93cea6090.jpeg.cce6422b687a7cd7e62923616fb8449e.jpeg

Season 2 Holonet: Assets

Another addition to Season 2 will be Assets. Assets are one-time-use bonuses that can be applied to your Factions' builds, and will become more common as we try to make LTCs less frequent. 

Informally broken down into two categories:

Special Assets are things like one-use Wayfinders to inaccessible systems, shortcuts to establishing Space Stations (and potentially blockades), and in-roads to specific subregions on the map.

Boost Assets are one-time-use 2x score multipliers you can apply to a build. Boost Assets are (at the time being) specific to certain themes of builds: one might only be applied to a starfighter build, an agricultural build, or a microscale build. (This should incentivize variety and trying new things.)

Assets will be earned by discovering and claiming them when you take control of a system. The idea is that the kinds of Assets you find will depend on the kind of planet on which you find them.

The design intentions behind Assets are to give the game a new kind of reward that offers a substantial bonus and a new strategic factor, but doesn't dramatically imbalance the game. They'll also encourage good building; you'll want to score as well as possible before you double that score. LTCs got a little wild toward the end of Season 1, and I think that put pressure on people (it did on me!). We'd like to do LTCs less often, so Assets can assume their role. 

We're open to ideas for new kinds of Assets! Share your thoughts or questions.

The document below is for adding Asset ideas, as well as contributing to the Galactic Gazette; a way of tracking which planets belong to what categories, and which planets deserve to reward Factions with VP.

There are backups, but please treat the document nicely! 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11agssd6Y6hkZUoRCyMXBgDKIWwmsqM84g2IuQw_XxXM/edit?usp=drivesdk

Edited by RocketBoy

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi all,

I have been eagerly following this game and I am looking forward to join you guys for this new season with some pretty crazy stuff coming up.
The most crucial improvement that might need some consideration to my mind before launching the new season might be to set more balance between each Faction.
As I have understood, the Imperial Triumvirate has gained the largest and the most eager group of builders, and while understandable (the Empire is the coolest faction to my mind as well and @Darth Bjorn has put on exceptionally impressive and inspiring examples to follow) the game element would probably intensify, if the different factions would have more or less the same capacity to produce new builds.

The balance could be improved at least in two ways (these are just suggestions that came to my mind):

1. Trying to somehow guide new recruits to the factions having less builders.
The new builders should be at least informally encouraged to pick a faction with less builders to have a more balanced game. One could also think about a recruitment mechanism, where the faction that the most recently gained a new member, cannot recruit another new recruit before some other faction recruited one first.

EDIT: The following was a first draft. Check the next message. It has an actually potential idea.
2. The counting of Victory Points (VPs) could be periodically balanced.
This means dividing the scoring system to shorter periods, call them e.g. rounds or perhaps in this case offensives or phases. In practice, in a predefined amount of time the number of VPs gained will resolve the winner of each round, after which a new round would begin the VPs of each faction once again set to 0. This would make it less likely that any one faction would gain overpower with like 100 VPs rendering the second one as well as the rest of the factions with 20 VPs or so being doomed to lose without any chance of winning the season anymore.
Thus instead of playing one ice hockey game that will last a year or two, there would be a season of games each contributing to winning whole season.

Edit: there are also other more ingenious ways to balance the VPs than simply dividing the scoring in periods, because in this case it would be of course nice to associate the VPs with the control over a planet. However, the point being, it would probably make sense to have some mechanism balancing the game so that the big factions do not simply eat out the smaller ones merely by being big. The board game Eclipse has one cool example of this. It induces a cost for owning a planet. The more planets you own, the more is the cost, which can render big factions (Eclipse is also about conquering the galaxy) more fragile than the smaller ones in the sense that too many possessions can make you easily lose a lot of them when the enemy attacks, because the high cost of maintaining your possessions will limit your other resources in that game. This is just a general idea, the point of the whole message now being to mostly open this issue for discussion.

Edited by Samppu

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A concrete idea regarding the previous message and the point 2 about balancing the count of the Victory Points.
This idea is inspired by the mechanism that the board game Eclipse uses.

Gaining control over a planet could be balanced between unequal factions with the idea that each planet that a faction owns adds up to a maintenance cost.
This cost could be counted with e.g. the following table:

The number of planets a faction owns:                           The maintenance cost in XP:
1                                                                                      0
2                                                                                      1
3                                                                                      2
4                                                                                      3
5                                                                                      5
6                                                                                      8
7                                                                                     13
...                                                                                     ...
Etc. (the cost follows the Fibonacci numbers, which means adding the two previous numbers together, e.g. 2 + 3 = 5 and 3 + 5 = 8 etc.)

The cost could in practice mean that when fighting over control of a planet, the cost would be reduced from the XP each faction is putting to conquer that planet.
For example, if the Empire had 7 planets in its control and the Rebel Alliance had 5 planets in its control, the maintenance cost of these planets would be 13 for the Empire and 5 for the Rebel Alliance.
Then when they contested over the control of a planet, the XP the Empire is producing would be calculated by summing up all the XP the builders are making on that planet, say, 41 XP, and then reducing the cost, in this example 13 XP, so their total would be 41 XP - 13 XP = 28 XP.
Similarly if the Rebel Alliance builders produced 35 XP over that planet, their total XP would be 35 XP - 5 XP = 30 XP.
Thus the Rebel Alliance would win the planet, even if they had produced less XP in the battle due to their lower maintenance cost, because they are a smaller faction in this example.

In this way, conquering new planets becomes easier for smaller factions. Generally the ownership of the planets would also probably change more often, because when you lose a planet, your cost also goes down at the same time when your opponent cost goes up and it becomes easier for you to try to reconquer the lost planet back to your hands again. This also makes it more important to actually start to think about strategy over the targets of the planets that a faction wants to conquer. E.g. one must carefully consider, whether they want to own Tatooine if it only produced one VP but significantly added to the maintenance cost, so it would not be sensible to simply try to conquer everything you can possibly reach. 
(There are ways to make this even more interesting by carefully considering the logic of the map. E.g. a "cheap" planet with only 1 VP but which lies in an important intersection of the map and the control of which could possibly block the movement of other players, would produce interesting questions whether to try to conquer it or not.)

Story wise the maintenance cost could be thought to represent the cost of having to spread a faction's military forces to ever more widespread area to take care of guarding and escort duties as well as fight pirates and collect customs and generally maintain law and order and fight corruption and crime in the area of the possessed planets.

Edited by Samppu

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

@Samppu

Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback! I'm stoked to see you get involved, you clearly have a head for strategy games (and I appreciate pulling from board games). 

Balance is definitely a tricky subject. Typically when new players joined the Factions Discord, everyone (Bjorn included) encouraged them to join smaller factions, but at the end of day the point of the game is having fun and building what you want to build, so it's better if everyone has freedom to go where they want. Because it ultimately comes down to the skill of the builders and how much time they have to build, it's very difficult to artificially introduce a handicap that really works. That said, I really like your idea about maintenance costs. It's important that the game stay as simple and streamlined as possible. With Season 2 especially, accessibility is one of the big things we're focusing on.

Late in the game, Alliances provided a kind of organic balancing factor. A few of the smaller factions joined forces against the Empire, and while it didn't make a huge difference in the end, it certainly helped players feel more encouraged about their chances and brought out some great teamwork. We're considering codifying that for Season 2, so that smaller Factions with their own motives can form "super-factions" by way of alliances, and have a fighting chance against other, larger factions.

At the end of the day, unlike most games, not every single faction is going to stand a chance of winning the overall game. In story, that makes sense: the Mining Guild, Colony Worlds, and Imperial Remnant don't have the same odds of taking control of the galaxy. Star Wars is often about small, rag tag groups working together against a large Empire, so in that sense (story), things naturally worked themselves out. But in the game, everyone still has plenty of opportunity to accomplish their own personal goals, and goals for their Faction. I personally think it's important to emphasize goals besides winning the overall game (or season). My Faction, next season, won't be focusing on winning or collecting VP as much as growing a Jedi Order. We've discussed how to mechanically introduce Faction Goals into the game rules, but nothing is set in stone so far.

Thank you for your engagement!

Edited by RocketBoy

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 8/9/2021 at 4:15 AM, RocketBoy said:

We're also assigning Types to these planets, to further outline what kind of benefit you're getting. This doesn't (currently) have a mechanical function in gameplay, but it helps differentiate worlds that are useful for their farmlands and worlds that have productive shipyards. It's flavor, story content for those who want insight into the kinds of worlds they control.

An additional idea I am just throwing out considering the maintenance cost mechanism I introduced in the previous message. Would it be fun and simple enough, if the types of the planets would follow a logic that each faction must have at least one planet of the farmland type and at least one planet with a shipyard, or if they don't, their maintenance cost would go up some number of points until they conquer a planet that has them. In addition, it would be fun to have a rule that if your faction did not have a shipyard at the moment, every vehicle of that faction that appears in a build must be somehow rugged or rusty. Similarly if your faction did not have farmland in its control, your builds must show problems with famine or lack of supplies.

4 minutes ago, RocketBoy said:

@Samppu

Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback! I'm stoked to see you get involved, you clearly have a head for strategy games (and I appreciate pulling from board games). 

Balance is definitely a tricky subject. Typically when new players joined the Factions Discord, everyone (Bjorn included) encouraged them to join smaller factions, but at the end of day the point of the game is having fun and building what you want to build, so it's better if everyone has freedom to go where they want. Because it ultimately comes down to the skill of the builders and how much time they have to build, it's very difficult to artificially introduce a handicap that really works. That said, I really like your idea about maintenance costs. It's important that the game stay as simple and streamlined as possible. With Season 2 especially, accessibility is one of the big things we're focusing on.

Late in the game, Alliances provided a kind of organic balancing factor. A few of the smaller factions joined forces against the Empire, and while it didn't make a huge difference in the end, it certainly helped players feel more encouraged about their chances and brought out some great teamwork.

At the end of the day, unlike most games, not every single faction is going to stand a chance of winning the overall game. In story, that makes sense: the Mining Guild, Colony Worlds, and Imperial Remnant don't have the same odds of taking control of the galaxy. Star Wars is often about small, rag tag groups working together against a large Empire, so in that sense (story), things naturally worked themselves out. But in the game, everyone still has plenty of opportunity to accomplish their own personal goals, and goals for their Faction. I personally think it's important to emphasize goals besides winning the overall game (or season). My Faction, next season, won't be focusing on winning or collecting VP as much as growing a Jedi Order. We've discussed how to mechanically introduce Faction Goals into the game rules, but nothing is set in stone so far.

Thank you for your engagement!

Sure, no problem, I am totally intrigued by this game. In personal life I have been working with my studies very hard, so I haven't really had the chance to join this yet, but I am now eagerly looking forward for the upcoming season. I totally agree with the freedom to choose issue, and like you said, equal number of builders does not necessarily produce equal number of XPs due to different experience and time available for each builder, so it is a fair and a good choice to try to get everyone interested in, be it in any faction they wish to join. I am also glad if the maintenance cost idea spawned interest. It is just a thought I am throwing, so anyone can feel free to develop or use it further or then not.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

4ae70e32f5032838a0a82eea86e3be2dc74039e2.jpeg.d1b410161f9ce358fdcf8cd93cea6090.jpeg.de4ab558efb690ad04e48e759303bffe.jpeg

Season 2 Holonet: Missions

Currently in active development, the Missions system would be a new addition to Factions, one designed to offer the fun Star Wars experience of adventures on a far-away world. Missions are a special build activity any player can partake in, some of which serve up story opportunities, while others have gameplay benefits. The Missions system has two types so far—Bounty Hunter and Scouting—but would extrapolate easily to all kinds of mission types.
Based off the gameplay feature from Factions episode 8, Missions require multiple builds which have to pass a certain score to move to the next stage. 

Bounty Missions: Builds: 2, Score Threshold: 5+
Players choose from a list of active bounties, which detail a target and their last known location. The Phase 1 build features your character tracking the target. If that build scores more than 5, you move to do your Phase 2 build, showing your character engaging your quarry. If you score 5+, you successfully capture your bounty and complete the Bounty mission. The XP scored on your second build will be given to you as IP to place on any system accessible to your faction. 

Scouting Missions: Builds: 4, Score Threshold 10+*
A more direct take from Episode 8, your Phase 1 build is on an accessible planet, and features your team preparing for the mission. If you score 10+, you move onto the exploration phase. In Phase 2, the player can put three builds on the target planet: they must collectively score 10+, as well as match or exceed any IP another Faction has on the system already. No IP is gained from Phase 2 of a Scouting mission, but a successful scouting mission reveals all VP and Assets in the target system.
 

As said before, Missions could be adapted to any number of professions or situations, and again, it's in development, so pitch in with your feedback and ideas. What do you think about Missions?

 

Edited by RocketBoy

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Missions sounds cool and a good way to break up any boredom people may feel with just month to month builds! Good job!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Missions sounds great, I love the idea of actually trying to make way through something that associates to that game mode.
Could there be a versus match from time to time as well? Two builders who mutually accept to challenge each other competing to accomplish the same Mission?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    No registered users viewing this page.