Second Proposal for Shared Victory

1

As described a few days ago, I am exploring the idea of adding a feature that allows allies to share a victory.

I hope to provide players a better options than just quitting and becoming, or working to hard give stars to allies so they can jump into first place.

UPDATED :17- 9 - 23 to reflect my current preferred design.
Updated again 25-9-23 while implementing the system I decided I didn’t like this and implemented something similar.*

Shared Victory System MK2: Fealty

  • In addition to a victory badge to the ultimate victor, 100 victory points are awarded at the end of the game. The amount of victory points you win indicates how much of the win is yours.
  • At any point during the game, a player may offer an oath of fealty to another player.
  • When the oath is accepted, the player becomes a vassal and all stars are given to the lord.
  • Vassals are out of the game.
  • The tick in which the oath is accepted is important for determining the final victory points. The later you offer fealty, the more points you receive if your lord wins.
  • You cannot change your mind about becoming a vassal, you have conceded defeat.
  • If you have vassals of your own at time time you offer your oath to another player, your new lord inherits your vassals.
  • When a player hits 50% of all stars the game moves into a 24 hour count down until the end of the game. At the end of the 24 hour period, the player with the most stars is crowned winner.
  • The victory points are distributed so that each player receives a share based on how long they played before becoming a vassal of another player, and how many vassals there were under the winning player.
  • Algorithm for calculating share of victory encourages allies to swear the oath as late as possible to get an much of the victory points as possible.

Examples

Winner on tick 500. Has 5 vassals that became vassals on tick 450, 300, 200, 180, 50.

Tick Victory
Winner 500 29.76%
Vassal 1 450 26.79%
Vassal 2 300 17.86%
Vassal 3 200 11.90%
Vassal 4 180 10.71%
Vassal 5 50 2.98%
Total Time 1680 100.00%

Another example, Winner on tick 500, but 3 vassals came very late to clench victory

Tick Victory
Winner 500 23.84%
Vassal 1 499 23.80%
Vassal 2 499 23.80%
Vassal 3 499 23.80%
Vassal 4 50 2.38%
Vassal 5 50 2.38%
Total Time 2097 100.00%

Another Example, the winner hoovered up lots of players who had their own vassals.

Tick Victory
Winner 500 21.29%
Vassal 1 499 21.24%
Vassal 2 300 12.77%
Vassal 3 250 10.64%
Vassal 4 200 8.51%
Vassal 5 150 6.39%
Vassal 6 100 4.26%
Vassal 7 100 4.26%
Vassal 8 100 4.26%
Vassal 9 50 2.13%
Vassal 10 50 2.13%
Vassal 11 50 2.13%
Total Time 2349 100.00%

Scoring

And the end of the game, a leader board will be shown that will show how much each player one.

In addition to your points, a special badge will be awarded to the Winner. (The player who collected the vassals and pulled together the victory)

Each game type displayed in the “Join Game” page will have a leader board that displays the total number of points awarded for that game type in the last calendar year. An annual tournament.

Collecting a large number of vassals will mean each player will have only a small score for the annual tournament. Winning the game yourself without vassals will result in earning all 100 points yourself for the annual tournament.

AFKing from a game rather that conceding defeat will result in losing points on the annual leader board.

2 Likes
2

Some notes and feedback from discord.

  • The leader should have to hold the 50% victory stars for at least 24 -48 hours to give the other players a chance to smashed them back down and assemble their own victory alliance. (An exciting count down clock might be cool) (Adopted)

  • It might be simpler (but not as fun) if after you become a vassal you are just out of the game and all stars and fleets are given to the lord. This is also a lot clearer. There is no intrigue or backstabbing once you are a vassal, once you are a vassal, you are out of the game. You are exiting in a way that will help your allies in return for a share of the victory points. We are trying to avoid players having to do the work of carefully vacating their stars so a friend can take over. (Adopted)

  • If we do hand over all stars instantly, there could be some kind of penalty. Economic upheavals, some infrastructure losses so that the newly captured stars take a little time and money to build back up. (Considering)

  • You should be within scan range to be able to be able to offer fealty. (rejected for now)

  • we might need to block fealty for the first part of a game, so people who just don’t like their starting positions can’t just give all their stars to a neighbor without even trying. (rejected for now)

  • in the meta, the leaderbord and scores should be presented as total victory score from x games, but also perhaps as a list of each games outcome so you can see if a player always capitulates. (we’ll just show a total score)

  • A player with a lot of vassals is incentivized to take as long as possible to finally win, so that their share of the victory is larger, but given there will be other players also trying to win this is probably not too big of a problem.

  • I wonder if there will be a culture of offering players a chance to swear allegiance when its clear they have lost, (but the loser could tell them to go to hell and fight to the last ship!)

3

A player on the discord suggested star count could play a roll in the percentage of victory points.

If we did use star count instead of tick, it would be confusing to count stars more than once in the tree of vassals, however there are some advantages of dropping child vassals, when a lord submits to another player.

  • If you become a vassal of a player who doesn’t win, you get nothing, so you are encouraged to keep playing as long as possible, and only give up and become a vassal when in striking distance of victory.
  • Its nice and clear than if the victory stars count is 500 stars and you hand over 100 near the end of the game you will get 1/5th of the victory points.
  • players might feel they are letting their vassals down by submitting to a lord near the end of the game. Given there is so much randomness in the order in which empires submit, it would be impossible to predict if you get any victory share at all. It would prevent the system working to consolidate different parts of the map.

We might consider preserving child vassals, and have some kind of cascading victory percentages, but it would get complicated.

You could just use star count in place of tick and use the exact same algorithm as suggested above. However, given the winning player always has the final number of stars (50%), and assuming a vassal of equal size gives up the hard fought 25% to create that 50% it seems more fare that they would receive an equal amount of the victory.

I think right now, I prefer sticking with tick rather than using star count as all.

4

I think this is a cool idea. Here are my thoughts for different ways of implementation.

It would be better if instead of infrastructure damage there is an administrative cost to the lord. e.g The lord pays a certain amount of credits that are destroyed for fealty to occur. This fee could even be greater than the amount of credits currently owned so you would have your next few production cycles docked (like child support).

Getting a bonus the later in the game you pledge fealty is weird. I think earlier fealty should be rewarded.

I also think it would be better if the vassal gets to keep control of their stars. You might have to innovate an interesting way of conveying this maybe keeping the shape but changing the color or vice versa. If the vassal does decide to surrender or go AFK then they would give full control to the lord. As a way to make things interesting you could force all stars conquered by the vassal to go directly into the control of the lord. While the vassal maintains control of their home stars, ships and carriers. I’m sure that would require a pretty significant rework to combat regarding who owns what ship.

A scenario that this makes sense to me is actually I game I am currently playing.

I have game where a close ally has decided to quit. I already gave them a safe passage through the bulk of my stars. This is now a problem because if they become an AI player and I try to take my stars back all of sudden my ally is now my number one enemy. Not to mention the fact that they will have access to my entire territory.

5

That’s a good point @macewindu

I do think I want to implement a system like this even though I didn’t receive much feedback yet.

1 Like
6

I like that idea of vassalization instead of concession!

I also think that metric should include more than the tick.
It definitely says something about skill if you see higher tick numbers.
But likewise if at that tick you happen to have higher share of the galaxies stars (and/or ships, e, i, s, income, production, research)

But on a more general level, I also somehow don’t like the whole determinism of this approach.
I think it should be possible to actually negotiate the amount of victory points awarded for vassalization. That way you could gain more if you pose a credible threat of a good time.
(i.e. pay a bit more victory points to gain ships and stars rather than losing more ships in the process.)

Of course then you could run out of VP to distribute or it could just be too few to buy off the last contenders. Which could be an interesting caveat.
Or maybe everyone could gain something like 10VP per tick, so vou automatically can only give a number of VP capped by tick.

7

I didn’t like this idea at first but the more I think about it the more I like it. There are just some comments I have.

  1. Tick bonus
    I find this the most interesting part of the idea. I agree with macewindu it is kinda weird that the last people to jump on the bandwagon will get more points but that also adds some strategy, do you wait for a later tick and get more points but risk someone else claiming it and ending the game. With more points for earlier fealty, there is one big problem, I think that what macewindu is suggesting would be better. I also like the idea of making it star based because if someone with a lot of stars pledged fealty sooner and the player that they pledged fealty to uses those extra stars and infrastructure to win, if right before they win a player with less stars joined, the player with less stars would get more points. I have a similar idea to the star based idea could even make it so that the game keeps track of which stars and ships came from you and at the end of the game it totals it up and gives you your percentage. The point of this idea is that if your ships take a star it still gives you more points because it was your ships that allowed the person you swore fealty to capture it. I don’t know which idea would be best but those are my thoughts on the tick bonus.

  2. Strategy
    I was wondering how this would affect strategy and alliances. I feel like one person getting all the vassals and being impossible to defeat will be a common occurrence in games which might remove a final fight but instead become a weird standoff between player while they decide if they should become a vassal too or if they should try to attempt to get second.

  3. Control
    This is another problem I have with the current idea although others have pointed it out. The loss of control over your own stars after becoming a vassal is one part I think should be changed I feel like it is just an easy way to quit. I don’t like it when people quit the game. I have done it before so I kind of get it but it feels like people will just get stars and then pledge fealty to the person with the most badges and just wait for them to win while they repeat that with a bunch of other games. It would also greatly discourage me from sharing the victory if I can’t play the game after that. I think that if you still give the player permission to move carriers and upgrade stars that they used to control with the permission of the player they swore fealty to that could keep the players involved while still giving the head player the ultimate control.

Those are my thoughts, I hope you liked them and didn’t find them too similar to other people’s comments. Please note that I’m new and don’t have a full understanding of the game. If you have any questions feel free to message me.

8

I guess I’m a bit late to the conversation, but I’ll share my thoughs as well.
While I do like this idea, and it sounds fun to play, there are a few problem senarios to think about.
The main problem senario that I thought of is when an empire has one or two stars left, and stacks hundreds or even thousands of stars on said remaining star. These stars are generally not worth taking, at least for a while, and might be left alone for a long time before that empire is forced to concede defeat and become a vessel. This might result in a lot of empires just stacking a last star, hoping to get overlooked for as long as possible for more victory points. That’s boring, so there should probably be some system in place that either further incentivises taking that last star (maybe a cash bonus for taking an empires last star if they don’t concede?) or makes it harder/less worthwhile for nations to just sit on a single star.

Besides this, I really like this idea, and can’t wait to play with it!

9

You can sign up right now and give it a try.

10

Thanks! Will do.

11

One more suggestion: 64 player games should probably give 800 VP (12.5VP per player)

12

I was thinking of just giving one VP for each star. I think it might make things much clearer.

13

Sounds good to me :+1: