Let me guess, disco zenith and other stuff

I don't see how you drew those conclusions from this game. The lesson shown here is that scouting is vital. Nobody scouted any of the superweapons while they were being built.

Given the dispositions of the players, I expect that they would have paid for 2x cost superweapons. PetTurtle had two cloaked Detriments and was happy to sit there and make a superweapon. indaled built up much more economy, and would have built even more if not for the threat of superweapons at around 40k cost. Expensive superweapons would push back this threat and likely just extend the game for at least another 15 minutes.

Here are some more lessons:

• Stockpiling Paladin doesn't seem that useful.
• High trajectory DRP is way worse than low trajectory DRP.
• Move Detriments to the very front of your base when preparing for hostilities.
• Don't attack someone without scouting everyone else first.
• Make sure to set Detriments to Fire At Will when using them to assault.

Upon scouting and finding a superweapon either complete or nearing completion, the players needed to bring out the diplomacy. Instead, the two players that completed first just killed each other.

Forever how was this game meant to end? Mass Detriment? Mass Shockley and Nuke?

quote: with a 50 M income, you can easily make one in a few minutes with some reclaim.

50m/s is 3000 metal per minute. Without reclaim, focusing your whole 50m economy on the cheapest superweapon while your enemies do nothing will give you a DRP in 11.6 minutes.

How much reclaim is some?

quote: Because it is what happends in 95% of the FFA games.

Does this happen more often on maps which are naturally divided into symmetric domains? E.g. on this map you expect to control exactly as much territory as everyone else because everything clearly and symmetrically belongs to some player's domain.

On SandCastles there's some contested territory (the middle) but generally unless you lose your castle you also expect to not be very poor and the castles themselves are very difficult to attack without superweapons.

Europe and Hunters results in superweapons almost always, but i think there it's more of a case of the map being so big that the economies can eventually afford the superweapons trivially.

Black Star also has defensible starts, but in my experience is just as often wiped with paladins / detriments / spam rather than a superweapon.

Splintered Tropics results in superweapons much rarer, because there are always reasons and benefits to incremental conflict in the form of contested mexes between the starting oases, and the oases themselves are far from being unassailable. Plus i guess few chokepoints leads to mobile warfare.

TL;DR i think Energy Spire Plain is a bad map for ZK FFA.

Anarchid, that is probably true.

Then maybe we need more maps that dont have those typical fortresses like most ffa maps do atm.

quote: There is a reason why some maps are centralized in your starting position.

Enabling superweapons? :P

maybe the problem is that FFA is an inherently broken concept: the "optimal" way to play involves avoiding fighting, which should be what the game is about.

A thing XTA peoples did a few years ago was play a king of the hill mode instead of regular FFA:
- "king of the hill" zone in the middle
- if a lone player holds that zone for more than a few seconds, that player's cap timer increases and the others decrease
- if a player holds the zone for 5 consecutive minutes, he wins (everyone else blows up)


Another sugestion would be to get people to play 1v1 and small teams instead of FFA

If you want an FFA that revolves less around diplomacy, then the solution is to limit players' freedom of interaction. Arrange things so that each player is somehow restricted to attacking only one or two specified other players.

For example: https://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/16883

Azure Rampart is an attempt at this, but the circle-of-death mechanism breaks down due to air and long-range superweapons.

Anarchid...not for superweapons it's to stop 1 vs 1 player from rushing other players.

The problem with superweapons in FFA is that it turns the game into a race rather than a contest of diplomacy and fighting. Superweapons can do huge amounts of damage, quickly, to any opponent. Fighting is usually a net loss vs all opponents even if it's a net gain locally vs your target, and diplomacy is difficult to predict. That makes racing to superweapons the best choice, so it becomes the dominant strategy.

FFA without game-enders might be more interesting, because instead of racing to game-enders you'd have to engage in diplomacy to convince others to fight - and fighting with the support of allies (whom you would eventually have to betray) would be the only way that anyone could win.