Victory Point Gamemode (King of the Hill)

[Total Oh No]

The problem:
The default base destruction victory condition can end up very grindy (slow and drawn out) for anything that isn't a small scale match and it's possible to reach a late game state in which resources and units are produced so quickly that it might even be unwinnable for both parties.

The idea:
An alternate victory condition. Place a couple victory point locations around the center of the map. Players will gather victory points as long as they have a unit stationed on the tile (some locations could produce more victory points than others). The first player to obtain X (amount should maybe be choosable in the pre-game settings) victory points will achieve victory.

One slightly different way to implement that would be by placeing only a single victory point location into the center of the map. The player with a stationed unit on that point would get points for holding the point, but additionally get bonus points for every artefact that player is holding. Besides that, the artefacts would still function the same way they do in a standard game. This would prevent a possible draw and give artefacts an additional use in the gamemode.

With either idea beefy neutral units could be placed down at the victory points to prevent very early captures.

[SpaffMiester]

I guess one problem with this suggestion is that it favours certain playstyles and factions; it could change the meta significantly. Those that are faster to the CP. Those that can build cities near it. Those with more durable combat units etc. I can imagine playing a game and doing quite well then suddenly the game ends because a Necron AI faction got to the CP and held it early.

I agree that late game can be grindy. I rarely get there tbh with Guard playing on Very Hard. What difficulty are you playing on?

I can think of a few spins on the concept that could work, but they'd require a bit more programming. Such as having the CPs spawn on turn XXX in semi-random locations should no victory condition have yet been met.

[Total Oh No]

Yeah, I don't know enough about the game to talk about balancing. Don't know if building cities would be OP. I guess you could prevent cities from being founded too close to victory locations, but then you'd also have to limit space marines' assault drop pods as well.

I've only really played one game, but that one went on for so long that it turned into extreme unit spam, so much that the game would probably never end if I continued to play it by normal means.

Is it possible at all to do something like this through modding or is modding just for customising units right now?

[Ail]

I've talked about the prospect of implementing such a different victory-condition as option with the Devs yesterday.
From a mere-game-mechanics point they actually liked it.

But what it would need would be some sort of backstory and another victory-text. Right now there's only texts for quest-victory and elimination-victory.

I personally am not to lore-prone to feel confident to come up with something like that.

What I suggested mechanics wise was just to use controlling artifacts. The amount of points required to win would scale with the amount of artifacts on the map. I would also think that some sort of score-display would be required so players can actually keep track and react to that and not, like Spaffmiester feared, are surprised by someone winning that way out of nowhere.

What I like in particular about that idea is that it leads to more points of interest and some sort of incentive for temporary cooperation. You can attack the cities of the score-leader or go for the artifacts.

AI would need some adjustments for that too. But I'd happily care about that part. Because I really think that this would be a welcome addition to the game for a richer gameplay experience that avoids a lot of tedium about how difficult it is to take cities out.

[Rok]

A question for reflection: why doesn't holding artifacts and outposts already give you enough of an edge to eliminate everyone -- or is the issue just that it takes too long after you know you've won?

[Total Oh No]

Originally posted by Ail:

I've talked about the prospect of implementing such a different victory-condition as option with the Devs yesterday.
From a mere-game-mechanics point they actually liked it.

Awesome!

Originally posted by Ail:

What I suggested mechanics wise was just to use controlling artifacts. The amount of points required to win would scale with the amount of artifacts on the map. I would also think that some sort of score-display would be required so players can actually keep track and react to that and not, like Spaffmiester feared, are surprised by someone winning that way out of nowhere.

What I like in particular about that idea is that it leads to more points of interest and some sort of incentive for temporary cooperation. You can attack the cities of the score-leader or go for the artifacts.

One thing that I think would be a good idea is that only 1 player should be able to gather points at any time. Either by making it so that only the player with the majority of artefacts gathers points or that you need to hold something special in the middle to score, but get bonus points for every artefact you hold, like I said in the OP, or by making it like in C&C Rivals where there's only 1 charge bar (see below). The reason for this is that this gives more opportunities for comebacks. For example you see that your opponent is only a couple turns away from victory, but you're still missing a lot of points yourself. If you manage to somehow become the point scorer then you'd actually still have a shot at winning as long as you can hold your position long enough for you to overtake the enemy in points. If you have everyone scoring at the same time (for example by gaining 1 point per artefact held), then you run into situations where the enemy has such a lead over you that you have no chance of winning as the enemy just needs to defend one of his artefacts to ensure he keeps getting at least 1 point per turn. To actually make a comeback in that situation you'd need to take EVERY artefact from the enemy, which is probably an incredibly tough feat to pull off.
And yeah, the way the game mode could give higher importance to several locations on the map is great and a score display on screen would be very important.

Originally posted by Ail:

But what it would need would be some sort of backstory and another victory-text. Right now there's only texts for quest-victory and elimination-victory.

I personally am not to lore-prone to feel confident to come up with something like that.

I think for that game mode you could probably just write some victory text that applies to all factions equally (except for maybe some personalised part at the end about what your people do after the victory). An easy explanation would be to say that you're spending time, holding the artifacts to gather information on- or to program and activate some other old one artefact super weapon which would instantly ensure your domination over the planet once you finished activating it. That's basically what the faction quests are about, too right? At least the Necron one. I don't remember Dawn of War having any lore attached to its map control victory conditions either though.

One way to flavor this would be to take some idea from the C&C Rivals phone game that sorta recently got released and instead of gathering victory points, the thing in the middle of the map could actually be a weapon that you use to slowly destroy the enemy cities by applying permanent damage to them. That would require some art assets though.

Here's an example of what C&C Rivals plays like by the way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcRAaM12QVA
The way they do it in that game is that you need to hold the majority of victory locations to charge up the nuke launcher in the middle, which then fires at the enemy base to destroy it (in two hits). That game only uses a single charge meter though instead of a charge meter for every player, not sure what to think of that idea yet. Means you could let one player charge up the nuke and then steal it before it fires, but probably also makes the game end a lot quicker than with individual charge bars. It might be fine because the defender has an advantage anyway.

Originally posted by Rok:

A question for reflection: why doesn't holding artifacts and outposts already give you enough of an edge to eliminate everyone -- or is the issue just that it takes too long after you know you've won?

Pretty much. The late game city battles are an incredibly grindy experience. You can only move one tile per turn, there are units everywhere, there's an armor bonus which makes the already very tanky units even more tanky, city main buildings have ludicrous HP pools and they continue to pop out new (tanky) units every couple turns.
The artefact bonuses give you enough of an advantage for the enemy to lose (most of) their chance at a comeback, but they actually don't give you enough of an advantage to quickly close out the game (unless the enemy just concedes). Having map control only means that you will win EVENTUALLY. That's where the king of the hill game mode comes in whose exact victory condition is map control.
The idea behind the KotH game mode is to prevent the game from slowing down too much until it enters a grind and to hopefully spread the battles out a little more.

[Ail]

Originally posted by Rok:

A question for reflection: why doesn't holding artifacts and outposts already give you enough of an edge to eliminate everyone

Artifacts recently were nerfed, so the bonuses they provide aren't that significant anymore. There's also vast differences in that depending on the total amount of artifacts. On bigger maps with higher Artifacts-density you indeed still get enough of an advantage from owning enough of them.
Btw. the healing-bonus should be a percentage in order to scale properly. +0.5/turn on a unit with over 100 HP is barely noticable.
Also the vision-range-artifacts are a bit underwhelming in what they do. Now if it was weapon-range...

Outposts don't really scale well into the lategame. They provide a significant bonus early on but once the city-economy becomes really strong that +2 of some resource of each outpost doesn't make all that much of a difference anymore.
Bit of an exception is a Space-Marine who got to keep all of their Fortresses. They can snowball into an overwhelming super-economy very fast.

I think artifacts are a good example to show that you can't really make it right for everyone's taste. I personally much preferred it before the nerf and would like them even more powerful while I know there's also people who wish for a way to disable them completely because in their opinion they imbalance the game.

Originally posted by Rok:

or is the issue just that it takes too long after you know you've won?

As Total oh no already said, pretty much that. In my unfinished games it was the case, that I was pretty certain that I couldn't lose anmyore but the formal act of actually closing out the game by pushing all the way towards the enemy cities against a constant stream of hard to kill units didn't really feel like.

Kinda miss stuff like the black-hole-generators from Pandora. Yes, they kinda broke whatever metagame existed before they came into play but with these things you actually could close out the game at the end of the tech-tree, even if all other victory-types were disabled.