Epic By Design

If you and a friend wanted to fight a ZK battle that was both epic and challenging, how would you go about it? What conditions, features, or scenarios would you impose on the battle to produce that kind of outcome?

By "epic" I mean longer than average, with more combats between larger forces and with more expensive units than the average game sees. By "challenging" I mean a game that requires continuous involvement and aggressive action, one in which the outcome is not certain until the end, where early gains are important but not decisive and early mistakes are costly but not ruinous.

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The board game Power Grid is a game of resource management and territorial expansion. Expanding gives you more resources, having more resources allows you to expand. But the game is (brilliantly) designed to prevent a runaway victory by someone who takes an early lead. There are three primary mechanisms it uses to do that:

1) Marginal returns to scale are decreasing, not increasing. Incremental expansion gets more expensive and produces fewer resources as you grow.

2) Leaders are penalized. Each round, the players are ranked by amount of territory; the player ranking determines the order in which everyone takes their turn, with those doing the best getting the worst turn order. This has a substantial effect on the game, so much so that an important strategic element is deciding whether to take the lead in territory or hold back so as to get a better turn order.

3) The game is structured into phases, with each new phase pushing up the scale of the game by a substantial amount. Players also usually have an incentive to pause before starting each new phase, which gives trailing players a chance to catch up.

Power Grid is very tense and engaging from start to finish. Good early gameplay is rewarded but on its own is not enough to clinch the victory. Coming back from far behind is unusual but possible if you spot something the leaders missed or if they make a crucial mistake. Among the leaders, the game usually comes right down to the wire, with the top two or three players coming within just a few points of each other, and the victory going to whoever played the best within the last one or two turns. But playing well early on gives you the luxury of making some mistakes in the late game while still having a chance to win.

It seems that Zero-K is not like this.

1) In ZK, marginal returns to scale are increasing. Getting more resources lets you expand faster, getting more territory pushes up your income faster. Lanchester's square law means that as a large force gets larger its advantage increases even more rapidly.

2) Leaders are not penalized. In fact, they are rewarded - not by the game mechanics, but because a player in a winning position (who will typically be on the offensive) is better able to direct their limited attention by choosing their actions, in contrast to the losing player who will usually be forced into being reactive.

3) There's no distinct phases and no incentive to wait for the other players before escalating. The scale does increase over time as incomes rise and more metal is available to make larger and more expensive forces, but it scales up smoothly rather than in chunks, and of course there's no incentive whatsoever to wait until your opponents are ready to scale up the battle along with you.

Many ZK battles are over quickly, and many of those that aren't short are merely taking too long to play out a forgone conclusion. Not every battle is like this, of course. But most of them are effectively decided by an early advantage, whether due to skillful play by one player or blunders by the other. One big exception, of course, is the porcfest. But games like that aren't very engaging. They're certainly "epic", but they don't have the elements that would make them "challenging" (by my definition above). If both sides porc the conclusion is epic but there's no meaningful interaction until the very end. If one side porcs the conclusion is epic but the game is one-sided - the defender will lose, it's only a question of how long it will take.

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But does it have to be that way?

Couldn't we have epic games that are actually meaningful and interactive and challenging the whole way through? If so, how?

Please note that I'm not suggesting we make any changes to ZK. I'm only asking what two players (or teams) would need to do if they wanted to play a battle that was more likely to be as ambitious in scale as it is ferocious in gameplay.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts.

You can try to enforce that by your choice of map and opponent.

The map
The map needs a lot of metal for both sides to devellop. The map should be layed out so that you can hold your starting posisition relativly easy (note that a big rush distance/map makes for easier defense). The map may not be too porc friendly so you end up in a 50/50 split with both sides not attacking.

try the bigger team maps in 1v1, that can be really fun! To name a vew: Tabula, blue bend, Terra, Hide and Seek etc.

The player
I've found that if the players are of equal skill and the map is big the games tend be good and can take a while to finish, especially in 1v1.

hope this helps!

1) easy to replicate in zk.
Get a map where mexes have less output or less dense the more they are in the middle of your map.

2) Ground falloff can be used for extended range of plasma weapons, etc.
Take TinySkirmish or (more extreme) CookieMonsters for example - it is easier to hold your base than to attack (movement speed penalty uphill)

But to avoid porc, the middle has to be flat and the ground falloff increasing toward your base.

To place factories without terraform, there also have to be some flat areas with no falloff.

3) Sumo is worse per cost than smaller units and the best example for such a phase.
But both - the wreckage fields and the possibility to re-use sumo - are the reasons, I don't see any possibility to encourage you to build big units/investments without giving the enemies a great disadvantage against you - the disadvantage is even worse if he has 1 or 2 fusions and rez bot spam.

I think the best way to solve this is to let others fight over the center while catching up where the highmap gives you an advantage.
( Requires FFA )
[color=grey]Once a player has the center and can kill another player to cap his base, he has 2 spots - either you ally against him or lose 1 by 1.[/color]

The issue that is preventing this is, that you have various ways to sneak into an enemy base and kill an enemy before he can react.
Some Examples: Sumo/Com drop, Krow (ignores light def), Skuttle defense clusters, Scythes
Which is very bad on FFA games with more or less than 4 players, because the team might not notice when the player on the opposite part of the map wins over non-neighbors or there is no-one to ally.

[color=grey]Even in team games your allies take some time before helping you if you lose an important spot and try to push at their front - running right into a trap.
Or they help you, you rebuild and their own front get crushed.
There is really nothing that allows catchup ^.[/color]

What do you think about point 3)?

Sak: You played SW:IW ?? Lucky dog. I bet you've ridden a unicorn, too.

Everyone: Thanks for the thoughtful comments so far, and I welcome further discussion.

I had been considering the effect of anti-snowball features (great term, thanks!) on mismatched opponents, and the idea that it would only prolong the inevitable, which is bad. I can't shake the feeling that there's probably some interesting ways to tease apart the issue, to consider the stability of the contested zone (i.e. whether leaving the center pushes you back towards the center or out towards the tipping point) versus the width of the contested zone (i.e. how long it takes to reach the tipping point given one player being consistently better than the other) versus the size of the swing (i.e. each time the momentum changes direction, the push is bigger than before, so that eventually you reach the tipping point no matter what, i.e. no stalemates).

Power grid is FFA and has mechanics that would feel out of place in a 'traditional RTS'. In board game design you can mess with almost anything to create a catch-up mechanism but try to do something similar here and it would look arbitrary. In trying to simulate a self-consistent world and are trapped!

So we cannot use common boardgame catch-up.

I think the steepness and shape of the (sometimes slippery) slope has a lot to do with map design. On average I reckon the shape would be similar to the shape of a team's metal income as they take the mexes further from the base.

maybe BA's adv. mexes are a good idea in making mex extraction in your base where you don't have to fear to lose them better.

The downside is, that you can spam it easily.

It has to be a much bigger investment for a very low base extraction gain.
Something like:
2m/s for 75 metal
2.4m/s for 500 metal
3m/s for 1500 metal
^ only good if you don't have to fear to lose it (base) and makes overdrive a small bit better.

this is easy

1) play on a 16x16 map

done.

It's not easy Ivory king. On a large map it takes longer for the units to reach the enemy and raiding becomes dominant and usually determine the outcome of the game. A small force of raiders require alot of effort and metal to counter on big map. It's usually better to make your own raiders to counter the enemy raiders as covering your expansion with riots is expensive.
Now raiders vs raider skirmishes are quite volatile and can easily decide the game early on even if there are some defences behind.
This applies to even larger maps aswell where the initial raiding is low but as the economies grow gunships and airplanes comes into play supporting the land raiders making the whole front volatile as the game can be decided in 1 swift battle when the losing player quickly loses alot of territory.

Make defenses ten times better and it will prevent players from early game rushes, it will move action to the middle of the map and it will make game much more interesting - heavy units, artillery, canons will be the must to break through defenses. However, this would involve changes like limiting the number of defense structures per base to not make them unreachable. Maybe I'm missing the point here and you're not looking for something like Age of Empires (or Supreme Commander), but such changes would make me feel safe in my base. :)

These are contradictory goals, I think. Very contradictory.

You want players to feel unsafe, but you don't want slippery slope - that means their "unsafety" can't be in the form of eco that will put them behind on the slope.

You want games to be long, but you don't want a moribund slug-fest after the war is over but it still takes 10 minutes to actually end the game.