Planetwars Microbalance Suggestion

I just had a very unfair battle (anarchid in enemy team) and had an idea how to limit such unbalanced games: add an elo rating to planet attacks, so if yours is much below the given one, you know not to join (would be futile), while the top players wouldn't defend against an assault that a weaker team could confidently deal with.

Though I'd be careful with hard limits (ie. prevent top players from defending against a low-elo assault or new players from defending against high-level assualts) - partly because in times with low player count a faction could find itself completely without noobs to defend against a low-elo assault, but also to prevent a meaninglessness of faction recruitment (if only battles with 45...55 win chance would be allowed, progress would be slow and independent of faction skill) - I think that some sort of soft 'evenness encouragement' would be useful:

a) stakes correspond to elo
A winning attacker can claim 'territory' on the target planet corresponding to the elo (or some function of it) of the defending players - winning against weak players doesn't give much influence, but defeating a top player team could instantly convert half the planet. To make attacks with low-elo players economical, I'd suggest to make dropship cost correspond to elo: transporting the common noob to another planet is cheap, but the deployment of high-elo players is rather expensive.
This would also go well story-wise with an Ashes of the Singularity-Posthuman themed planetwars champaign (more experienced minds need more bandwidth than new ones)

b) limit elo per planet instead of players
Weaker players can team up to take down stronger ones.

c) limit player influence
The more planets a certain player controls with his influence, the less new influence he gets per battle. Strategic aspect: bring good players to make sure you win, vs let others play it out to increase impact.

d) current version
Low-elo players hurt their faction by occupying battle slots; high-elo players need to fight as many battles as possible, since nonparticipation weakens their faction -> below average players should strategically refrain from fighting while good players need to spend as much time as possible fighting, since the campaign seems to be decided by total (high_elo_hours - low_elo_hours) per faction

'Don't play that mode' is a horrible way to improve something. I like the idea behind the planetwars multiplayer campaign, and I think with some tweaks it could be balanced enough to be consistently fun.
I'm not going to abandon it without trying to fix it first.

ehtomlol C#

There's a plan to make low skill players useful but it's going to take some effort to implement, here's the outline https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Infrastructure/issues/2132

Generally changes shouldn't happen mid-round (as they are invariably going to favour one faction or another) so whichever the solution it would have to wait until the round ends.

Maybe what is needed is to change the function of PW in general so that it plays out like several missions. Almost like a campaign instead of a string of normal battles with silly buildings spawned already (eg: the annoying anti-raiding drone buildings). Give defenders and attackers actual objectives instead of "force enemy to resign" or "destroy all units". For instance, several mission types can be assigned by faction leaders against a planet such as:

Invasion: Destroy all enemy command buildings within X time. Requires other missions to be done (except Economy Raid).
Economy Raid: Destroy Planetary Power Grid and Deep Core Miner units.
Garrison Destruction: Destroy all garrison structures.

etc.

Each mission would have an effect on the planet. For instance raiding the Garrison may make it easier to complete an economy raid mission or an economy raid mission might impact the defenses in an invasion mission.

This would allievate a lot of the issues like needing to send your best players at a planet to win it since anyone could perform this task. Missions would be 1 - 10 players on each side. Missions could be set piece battles (no reinforcements/building of units) or with limited metal availability at start (based on faction's overall status).


The idea would be to make PW something other than matchmaker but with silly buildings spawned.

To extend on @_Shaman s Idea, the defending faction could get a significant resource boost, preinstalled defenses or automatic factories (don't drain team resources, but units are not controllable), while the attacker could bring in more people (and more commanders). This might somewhat lessen the influence a single good player has on mission outcome, while bringing interesting assymetric battles to zk.

Another option would be to allow starting many invasions at the same time, with bots defending by default. Defenders would join in and take over from the bots, but since there are numerous battles at once, good players could only defends against a fraction of them.