Balancing Fights - 2017

Introduction

So the community has voted – Imbalanced fights (zerging) are the biggest problem PS2 has right now. So what do we do about it? Well we could make each territory have a queue to enter… but that wouldn’t work as it’s no longer massively multiplayer. We could deny the acquisition of tanks, aircraft and MAXs to overpopulated forces in a region… but most vehicles are pulled outside it anyway. We could give outnumbered folk more health or higher damage weapons... but that makes me feel a bit sick. So we need some other options to massage player behaviour so that fights are more balanced by choice, and when players choose to make fights unbalanced do the rebalancing for them.

I did some work on this previously here, and while I still like all of the ideas on that image that massage player behaviour (i.e. directives and HUD additions) I feel that more can be made of slowing the spawn timers for overpopulated factions as that alone is inelegant. Plus I wanted to break out some math and figure it all out. If that's not your cup of tea the TLDR is down at the bottom.

Balancing fights is tricky as it is not only the population balance however that determines how fair a fight is. Ignoring skill, teamwork and tactics the remaining factors are:

• Population Balance

• Force Multipliers

• Base difficulty

• Attack direction

Each of these impacts on how easy a territory is to capture. What I suggest is that these factors contribute to an overall 'attack difficulty factor' which then impacts on the following ‘dials’:

• Spawn timer – default 10s – maximum 30s, no minimum

• Resource flow – default 50 nanites per minute (n/m) – maximum 100n/m, minimum of 25n/m

• Experience multipliers – default 0% - no maximum or minimum

• Reinforcements needed population cut off currently sits at 50/50 population but could be changed

Potentially these dials could be just for positive effects for the underdog but we could also apply negatives to those who have the advantage if we so desire.

Details

Effective force

As it stands population is the factor that determines reinforcements needed options however if one side has dozens of MAXs, tanks and aircraft (force multipliers) while the other does not the fight will be woefully imbalanced. The population balance and force multipliers would combine to make a value called ‘effective force’ (EF) something which Mustarde proposed almost a year ago. By balancing the fight around the effective force instead of just population we would reduce the impact of both population and force multiplier imbalance.

To that end each nanite costing vehicle or MAX would be assigned a value which would count up (if a player is using them) as follows:

• Infantry: 1

• MAX: 3

• Flash: 2

• Harasser: 3

• Lightning: 3

• ANT: 2

• Sunderer: 3

• MBT: 3

• ESF: 3

• Valkyrie: 2

• Liberator: 3

• Galaxy: 4

All numbers subject to discussion.

The attack difficulty factor would be the defender effective force divided by the attacker effective force. This would mean that if all was even then the multiplier would be 1 but if the defenders had the advantage the attack difficulty factor would be greater than 1 whereas if the attackers had the advantage then it would be less than 1.

Base difficulty

Base difficulty could be decided on a per territory factor which potentially could be based around real capture statistics. As a few examples:

• Biolab: factor of 1.1

• Tech Plant: factor of 1.05

• Amp Station: 1.05

• 3 point base: factor of 1.15

• Outpost: factor of 1

All these numbers are subject to discussion, as are any others in this document.

Attack Direction

Attack direction is also an important factor - take as an example Biolabs. Biolabs are notoriously tough to take and different adjacent territories have different teleporter and jump pad options with some clearly better than others. We would have to account for situations where an attacker has multiple attack lanes as well so I would simply remove this factor entirely if they have more than one lane.

Example

An attack on Allatum Biolab from the north, the defenders have greater population and more force multipliers. Usually this would be a near impossible capture without some seriously inept defenders or some sound tactics by the attackers. Using this system the attackers would have more of a chance. Details below.