As the release of Star Kings approaches, I would hope Triumph considers Planetfall a success. I was blown away when I discovered AoW3 in 2017 (1200 hours), and have had a lot of fun with Planetfall (600 hours). They continue to impress me with their creativity, ambition, and design sense. Having robust, interlocking systems with as much potential for wackiness as Planetfall has is no mean feat.
All that said, there's one area where I think there's room for a lot of improvement: movement and ops.
Ancient Battlefields Were Concentrated, Modern Battlefields Are Distributed
Think about films you've seen with "massive battles": LotR, Last Samurai, Troy, Gladiator.
They're all about ancient, pre-gun warfare, (with the exception of Last Samurai, which is specifically about the transition). And all battles take place in a relatively centralized location.
Now think about "movies set in WWII." Yes, you've got your Saving Private Ryans, but a surprising number of WWII movies don't go near a battlefield at all:
- spy movies
- submarine movies
- even "engineering" movies, like Imitation Game (cryptography) or Fat Man and Little Boy (Manhattan Project)
- even just "non-combat" movies that happen to be set in the UK during the Blitz (Foyle's War, a *detective* show)
There's a joke in software engineering that "A distributed system is one where your program can fail because some computer you've never heard of crashed." Modern war is war where you can be winning in one battle, but then lose because of something that happened on some other battlefield, far away (or vice versa).
In general: the ancient way is more glorious at the level of the rank-and-file foot soldier, but less strategically interesting. The modern way has little in the way of glory for humans-as-combatants (and is in fact quite brutal), but is more strategically interesting. It's worth noting that Starcraft's successful sequel was Starcraft 2, another strategy game, while Warcraft's successful sequel was WoW, which is a role-playing game.
Most of the stuff here is intended to move Planetfall more towards the modern style, with a greater emphasis on movement, firepower, engineering, and covert ops.
The Flatness of the Planetfall Map
It's strange to write this about a game with as many exploration sites, anomalies, landmarks, imperial defenses, etc., as Planetfall, but it's true---in practice, the map in Planetfall is relatively featureless. This is true of the risk landscape---that is, most tiles are about the same in terms of combat conditions---and of the reward landscape---the meaning of the battle, what makes the tile worth fighting over in the first place.
Risk: Fight Here, Fight There, Whatever
How much does location affect battles? While Triumph has made stabs in this direction, the answer is usually "not much." In ~600 hours of playtime, I have never been dissuaded from an attack because of a strategic op---the most important factor was always numbers of troops on each side. I'm not saying it'll never happen, but...
Consider this:
- Tactical ops are available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, at full power, regardless of distance
- Strategic Ops and Imperial defenses generally have buff/debuff effects, which means they can only serve a supporting role, aiding a defending army, rather than replacing it. A force multiplier, but with a very low multiple---90% of the time the winner is the one with the larger army.
Reward: It's All Just Mines and Wheatfields
When you capture a sector, how does it affect the larger war? Again, most of the time: not much. Yes, sectors are valuable economic assets---which means their time to pay off is measured in the tens of turns. There is no tactical payoff. Compare to the US Rangers' assault on the guns at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day to support the main beach landings only a few hours later.
The Cure: Let Ops Affect Units More, Let Units Affect Ops More
What if Ops Were More...
We want texture on the map; for terrain to mean more than it currently does.
The core "problem" with ops---both strategic and tactical---is that they are both:
* too available
* too weak
What if they were stronger, but more limited?
We can easily come up with ways to make them more limited:
- requirements like "must own sector," (or adjacent sector)
- "must have a specific unit in the sector" (Abyssal Tear should probably require a Malictor in the sector, right? right?)
- increase energy or Operations Points
- a "wind-up" effect, where they don't take effect for a number of turns
- *locate* the source of the op on the map somewhere (perhaps a created structure), such that if the enemy captures it, the op disappears
We can also come up with ways to make them stronger:
- higher damage/stronger effect
- lower cost/operations points
- permanent artifacts (tie effect to a structure the op creates)
Movement, Covert Assault, Op Negation, "Really Strong" ops
If you just dropped powerful ops like the ones described above in the game and did nothing else, it would make the game way too ops-centric, and we'd never see an actual battle again.
To keep actual units relevant in an environment with powerful ops, the most powerful tools are unit movement, and anti-op mechanics
Specifically:
1. Movement --- can range from just sneaking around a machine gun's field of fire, to amphibious landings, all the way to HALO parachute drops
2. Covert Assault --- sneaking *through* a field of fire---perhaps at night, perhaps camouflaged or in cover, or even disguised as a civilian
3. Op Negation --- some way to "protect" a battlefield from another. Includes really big shields, jamming radio frequencies so artillery/air support can't be called in, smoke grenades, etc.
4. Artillery/"Really Strong" Ops --- fighting fire with moar fire: calling in an air strike on a machine gun bunker, Hiroshima, etc.
I think this is a rich, unexplored territory for Planetfall.
Like, wouldn't it be cool if:
- there were more options for strategic movement in the game? Everything from limited-range blinks on the strategic map, to persistent portals, and everything in between?
- "surprise" were more of a thing when starting combat? A movement/ops-only "surprise turn," only granted if every stack in the attacking army was camouflaged in the tile they were attacking from?
- there were some way to "jam transmissions," preventing the enemy from using tactical ops?
- you could reliably, but expensively, negate enemy ops, rather than the dice roll that is the current counter-op system? (perhaps from orbit...)
Race/ST Differentiation
What I find particularly exciting about all this is the opportunity for race/ST/NPC differentiation. Not everyone has to have hard-hitting bombardment, not everyone has to have great strategic movement, etc.
For instance, Vanguard might have strong bombardment ops, and OK "orbital insertion" ops. Syndicate would instead opt for stationary hallucination projectors, punishing surprise rounds, and covert movement (which, with the map being more textured, would actually be useful). Kir'Ko might skip bombardment altogether, and focus on mass movement + op negation (a Kir'Ko tunnel erupts near the enemy HQ, the whole area covered by blinding miasma).
Conclusion: It's All About Strategy
There's a lot more that could be said---reviving orbital interaction from its rejected prototype, meta-ops, making ops more vulnerable to units (and vice-versa).
But the gist is: Planetfall is a fantastic battle simulator. However, the strategic map is mechanically more similar to the AoW3 wizard-in-a-tower setup than sci-fi. This hurts the game; a modern fire-and/or-move strategic map would be much more interesting than the doom-stack-vs-doom-stack of fantasy worlds.
All that said, there's one area where I think there's room for a lot of improvement: movement and ops.
Ancient Battlefields Were Concentrated, Modern Battlefields Are Distributed
Think about films you've seen with "massive battles": LotR, Last Samurai, Troy, Gladiator.
They're all about ancient, pre-gun warfare, (with the exception of Last Samurai, which is specifically about the transition). And all battles take place in a relatively centralized location.
Now think about "movies set in WWII." Yes, you've got your Saving Private Ryans, but a surprising number of WWII movies don't go near a battlefield at all:
- spy movies
- submarine movies
- even "engineering" movies, like Imitation Game (cryptography) or Fat Man and Little Boy (Manhattan Project)
- even just "non-combat" movies that happen to be set in the UK during the Blitz (Foyle's War, a *detective* show)
There's a joke in software engineering that "A distributed system is one where your program can fail because some computer you've never heard of crashed." Modern war is war where you can be winning in one battle, but then lose because of something that happened on some other battlefield, far away (or vice versa).
In general: the ancient way is more glorious at the level of the rank-and-file foot soldier, but less strategically interesting. The modern way has little in the way of glory for humans-as-combatants (and is in fact quite brutal), but is more strategically interesting. It's worth noting that Starcraft's successful sequel was Starcraft 2, another strategy game, while Warcraft's successful sequel was WoW, which is a role-playing game.
Most of the stuff here is intended to move Planetfall more towards the modern style, with a greater emphasis on movement, firepower, engineering, and covert ops.
The Flatness of the Planetfall Map
It's strange to write this about a game with as many exploration sites, anomalies, landmarks, imperial defenses, etc., as Planetfall, but it's true---in practice, the map in Planetfall is relatively featureless. This is true of the risk landscape---that is, most tiles are about the same in terms of combat conditions---and of the reward landscape---the meaning of the battle, what makes the tile worth fighting over in the first place.
Risk: Fight Here, Fight There, Whatever
How much does location affect battles? While Triumph has made stabs in this direction, the answer is usually "not much." In ~600 hours of playtime, I have never been dissuaded from an attack because of a strategic op---the most important factor was always numbers of troops on each side. I'm not saying it'll never happen, but...
Consider this:
- Tactical ops are available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, at full power, regardless of distance
- Strategic Ops and Imperial defenses generally have buff/debuff effects, which means they can only serve a supporting role, aiding a defending army, rather than replacing it. A force multiplier, but with a very low multiple---90% of the time the winner is the one with the larger army.
Reward: It's All Just Mines and Wheatfields
When you capture a sector, how does it affect the larger war? Again, most of the time: not much. Yes, sectors are valuable economic assets---which means their time to pay off is measured in the tens of turns. There is no tactical payoff. Compare to the US Rangers' assault on the guns at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day to support the main beach landings only a few hours later.
The Cure: Let Ops Affect Units More, Let Units Affect Ops More
What if Ops Were More...
We want texture on the map; for terrain to mean more than it currently does.
The core "problem" with ops---both strategic and tactical---is that they are both:
* too available
* too weak
What if they were stronger, but more limited?
We can easily come up with ways to make them more limited:
- requirements like "must own sector," (or adjacent sector)
- "must have a specific unit in the sector" (Abyssal Tear should probably require a Malictor in the sector, right? right?)
- increase energy or Operations Points
- a "wind-up" effect, where they don't take effect for a number of turns
- *locate* the source of the op on the map somewhere (perhaps a created structure), such that if the enemy captures it, the op disappears
We can also come up with ways to make them stronger:
- higher damage/stronger effect
- lower cost/operations points
- permanent artifacts (tie effect to a structure the op creates)
Movement, Covert Assault, Op Negation, "Really Strong" ops
If you just dropped powerful ops like the ones described above in the game and did nothing else, it would make the game way too ops-centric, and we'd never see an actual battle again.
To keep actual units relevant in an environment with powerful ops, the most powerful tools are unit movement, and anti-op mechanics
Specifically:
1. Movement --- can range from just sneaking around a machine gun's field of fire, to amphibious landings, all the way to HALO parachute drops
2. Covert Assault --- sneaking *through* a field of fire---perhaps at night, perhaps camouflaged or in cover, or even disguised as a civilian
3. Op Negation --- some way to "protect" a battlefield from another. Includes really big shields, jamming radio frequencies so artillery/air support can't be called in, smoke grenades, etc.
4. Artillery/"Really Strong" Ops --- fighting fire with moar fire: calling in an air strike on a machine gun bunker, Hiroshima, etc.
I think this is a rich, unexplored territory for Planetfall.
Like, wouldn't it be cool if:
- there were more options for strategic movement in the game? Everything from limited-range blinks on the strategic map, to persistent portals, and everything in between?
- "surprise" were more of a thing when starting combat? A movement/ops-only "surprise turn," only granted if every stack in the attacking army was camouflaged in the tile they were attacking from?
- there were some way to "jam transmissions," preventing the enemy from using tactical ops?
- you could reliably, but expensively, negate enemy ops, rather than the dice roll that is the current counter-op system? (perhaps from orbit...)
Race/ST Differentiation
What I find particularly exciting about all this is the opportunity for race/ST/NPC differentiation. Not everyone has to have hard-hitting bombardment, not everyone has to have great strategic movement, etc.
For instance, Vanguard might have strong bombardment ops, and OK "orbital insertion" ops. Syndicate would instead opt for stationary hallucination projectors, punishing surprise rounds, and covert movement (which, with the map being more textured, would actually be useful). Kir'Ko might skip bombardment altogether, and focus on mass movement + op negation (a Kir'Ko tunnel erupts near the enemy HQ, the whole area covered by blinding miasma).
Conclusion: It's All About Strategy
There's a lot more that could be said---reviving orbital interaction from its rejected prototype, meta-ops, making ops more vulnerable to units (and vice-versa).
But the gist is: Planetfall is a fantastic battle simulator. However, the strategic map is mechanically more similar to the AoW3 wizard-in-a-tower setup than sci-fi. This hurts the game; a modern fire-and/or-move strategic map would be much more interesting than the doom-stack-vs-doom-stack of fantasy worlds.
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