Digitalis 16 [FFA or Teams]
Creator: PLMMJ || First Published: 11/12/2023 || Players: 16 || Size: 49x49
Categories: None
Rating: 3.00 in 5 ratings
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Comments:
DrNasty (02/25/2024 05:24pm):
Stall fest
Hyron (02/26/2024 06:35am):
A major problem is the First Turn Disadvantage here. First players can do in 4 turns
what last players can do in the first turn more or less. Is a FFA, ok not being it balanced
completely but this is excessive imo.

Suggestions:
First players could just start in corners, followed by "half mid" positions and then
middle ones, since they are overall the favorites, but same units for everyone.
Everyone should have same number of bases, and at least 1 starting to avoid slow
starts for no real reason.
Players starting after should never have more bases or more than 1 unit more the
available starting bases, otherwise starting is just disadvantageous.

Again, it's not supposed to be perfectly balanced since is a FFA but it should not be
that punishing for no reason either. Orange star has by far the worst position, starts in
the corner with 1 unit and can't spawn other soldiers or gain money until 2 turns
PLMMJ (03/13/2024 03:35pm):
1: How do you people think I am supposed to fix the stall here? I'm not really an experienced mapper.
2: Whoa whoa whoa that's a lot. My thought behind the 'FTA counter' here was that each side should get another turn of
counter for moving later, I guess that just was really wrong. I don't know how I'm even meant to counter FTA on this map,
should do more testing.

Hyron (04/04/2024 04:26pm | Edited: 04/04/2024 04:27pm):
It was meant to be a constructive critique, but maybe I got carried away.

I'm not an experienced mapper either, but I have a bit of knowledge accumulated which I will share, and the point of FTA is
to counter the intrinsic advantage of playing first. However all players should have the same number of starting bases, and if
you have that the 2nd player starts its first turn after the 1st player and they have equal or more units than the first player,
than the second player is advantaged.
Ideally you should have each player finishing their first turns with more units than the opponent (if you see any global league
map for example).

That said, it becomes harder for more than 2 players and clearly impossible for this many players to balance it out. Your
approach intuitively I think it is good, each side gets slightly boosted since they start later.

So again I'm not an experienced mapper, especially on FFA maps, but this is what I would try:
for FTA, just change the order based on position. I think something like

1-5 -13- 6-2
12---------- 7
16----------14
11-----------8
4-10-15-9-3

Every player imo should start with 1-3 bases to speed up, or 1 base and maybe 1 unit to first half and 2 to second, or 2 to
starting players.
Or maybe everyone has 3 bases and you give
players 1-4: no units deployed
5-8: 1 unit
9-12: 2 units
13-16: 3 units

so that last players have the turn almost as if it the first player already did.
Also maybe you could change the starting lab with an HQ so that at least the 1st player will generate a bit more income than
the last.

You may want to tune down the values I said for players depending on their starting position (maybe corner positions are
worse so you give them more units, or every player gets 1 less unit deployed, leaving players 1-8 with no starting units but
players 1-4 are in a worse spot). As a rule of thumb no one should be able to outperform anyone on their first turn.

For stalling I'm less sure since I have even less experience for FFA maps, but you have a very monothematic map (which is
why is fun on one side), the thing that comes to mind is to space the HQs properly (as it is it's already working fine, maybe
again at least 2 bases, 1 for each side of the lab/HQ, so players can attack in both directions), and create points of interest
near the players' most contested lines (for instance comtowers in (6,6), (18,6), and so on, so that players are more
incentivized to fight on the contested line. The line must be exactly halfway from both players so that both should play on
similar ground

You have to try stuff probably and maybe ask some more experienced FFA mapper than me, but hope to have helped a bit :)
Hyron (07/14/2024 08:02am):
I found out today there's a hard coded 1000 properties limit cap if you set it to off, so when one conquers half map the game is
over. Just to note



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