Vortex Wars

Great game, but I've got a couple of things that annoy me about it. The biggest is the fact that upgrades influence gameplay. The biggest of which is probably the reinforcement cap. A bigger cap means you WILL win on large maps, given you survive to grow past the other players' caps. The race bonuses, while fairly small, offer an advantage to longtime players over new players, and while that's fine in an rpg, or something like that, this is a simple turn based strategy game, which is random enough as is. It doesn't need the extra push to make newcomers guaranteed to lose. I don't recommend getting rid of it, but lobby hosts should be able to disallow special races, and set the reinforcement cap max. This would also come up if people want to host tourneys, and want to not give an advantage to people that have more money or shards to spend. Same goes for other upgrade sort of things. I approve wholeheartedly of all cosmetic upgrades.

Minor issue on text chat. Expanded view should autoscroll if you're at the bottom. This way, it doesn't bother you if you're reading past statements, but it doesn't make you lose messages if you happen to have it on at the bottom.

There should be a way for the player in the lead to offer some way to end the game with them in first, and the rest in the order of current ranking. The person in second should not have to hope everyone else surrenders first. The buttons should also be better explained. Looking at them, I don't know what the effect on experience gained will be. This should be in the tutorial, as should the exact rules for border reinforcing and attrition combat. Borders especially, because it is very gameable if you know where the troops will go if you take certain specific actions.

In game support for tournaments would be good, or at least passworded games. Lobby should autorefresh on a timer, perhaps 10-15 seconds, with a bit more of a consistent ordering to prevent confusion.

Game filters should allow you to exclude settings as well as look for them. If I just want to play something that's not HC, there's no good way to filter that. You could add these in within the existing menus, or perhaps add some fancy looking toggle that appends a "Not" in front of the selection.

As far as teams go, I think you've already got that essentially in terms of the factions. If people want to play as teams, they can mark it pretty easily. If you wanted to add better support for that specifically, interlace members of a team, and give them their team's total contiguous space over their player count reinforcements. Not really needed in my opinion.

You should add some sort of check to large map generation to make sure that there is no island of a certain size connected to another within a certain range with less than n paths between them, where all of these are magical numbers that make unwinnable standoffs less likely. It would be pretty easy in the one-connection case. You might be able to just merge 3-cliques, counting a merged clique as multiple places, though I haven't put much thought into that.

When people leave, they should still reinforce randomly, perhaps at a lower rate, to prevent people from gaining huge advantages from people leaving. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you could write a simple AI for it, though that would probably go best as a seperate feature. I've personally considered making this game with a set of different AI's, just to have a pretty screensaver

Possibility for making this version more unique: Adding spaces that give certain properties, like an attack, reinforcement, or defense bonus of 1 die. I'd be careful with that though, since it could cause silly things to happen.

I suppose you're adding a map editor, so that's all I've got right now

Awesome game, keep up the good work.

-Froggy

I disagree.

1. I like the added upgrades, as you say it adds more randomness, but that's real strategy: being able to combat random chance.

2. About the reinforcement cap, most times, you have to analyze your enemies and take out the bigger threats first. You see a level 10+ with no race upgrade, you got to assume he has a cap upgrade and position yourself between him and 20 areas, so his expansion is cut short anyways.

3. The upgrades also provide from the game falling into a rut, the new races, new abilities keep the game fresh and challenging. The bonuses are just good enough that they can change they tide of the game, but it's definitely not an OP situation.

4. I agree with your map editor though. Would love to see map editor released soon.

Heh... I forgot one.

The person who picks first should go last. Gets rid of first player's huge advantage.

Try_it wrote:I disagree.

1. I like the added upgrades, as you say it adds more randomness, but that's real strategy: being able to combat random chance.

I didn't say it adds randomness, more that it gives an unfair bias in randomness towards people playing longer. I'm also not proposing it's removal, just an option to disallow it in your custom match.

2. About the reinforcement cap, most times, you have to analyze your enemies and take out the bigger threats first. You see a level 10+ with no race upgrade, you got to assume he has a cap upgrade and position yourself between him and 20 areas, so his expansion is cut short anyways.

But this is an upgrade that will pretty much guarantee victory between a player with 50 territories and no upgrade, and a player with 30 territories and the upgrade. This is very overpowered.

3. The upgrades also provide from the game falling into a rut, the new races, new abilities keep the game fresh and challenging. The bonuses are just good enough that they can change they tide of the game, but it's definitely not an OP situation.

The races aren't much of an advantage, which is why I didn't argue for their complete removal. Caps are undoubtedly op late game, though.

4. I agree with your map editor though. Would love to see map editor released soon.

Graph algorithms are fun, especially map generators.

Most of your suggestions have already been discussed and either been put on the to-do list or been shot down by Lopdo.

chess435 wrote:Most of your suggestions have already been discussed and either been put on the to-do list or been shot down by Lopdo.

In that case, I'd propose a sticky with a list of commonly suggested ideas that aren't happening I looked through 2 pages or so for duplicate stuff, but with most titles being "A request", it's not easy to check...


Also, zooming would be a trivial addition. It's a few lines of AS, and then whatever work you want for the interface.

Froggy618157725 wrote:

chess435 wrote:I looked through 2 pages or so for duplicate stuff, but with most titles being "A request", it's not easy to check....

How nice of you to title your topic the very useful "A large number of minor things", then.

Here's the counterpoint to an earlier suggestion:

It wouldn't work for the person who picks first to move last. This is because the person who picks last can pick a place next to anybody they like (since they're picking last), then move first and kill the person they're next to.
This might mean they have to expand outwards a bit first, and corner the other person in, but since they're moving first they'll have the advantage.

It's currently fair that people who choose later move later. People can't put themselves at an advantage over their neighbours, only risk a disadvantage.

tl:dr, it goes the OTHER way. It makes it so late pickers take all the advantages of current early pickers (and a bit more).

Pepper wrote:

Froggy618157725 wrote:I looked through 2 pages or so for duplicate stuff, but with most titles being "A request", it's not easy to check....

How nice of you to title your topic the very useful "A large number of minor things", then.

Do you really want me to topic flood a good 10 threads each about a small thing?

Here's the counterpoint to an earlier suggestion:

It wouldn't work for the person who picks first to move last. This is because the person who picks last can pick a place next to anybody they like (since they're picking last), then move first and kill the person they're next to.
This might mean they have to expand outwards a bit first, and corner the other person in, but since they're moving first they'll have the advantage.

It's currently fair that people who choose later move later. People can't put themselves at an advantage over their neighbours, only risk a disadvantage.

tl:dr, it goes the OTHER way. It makes it so late pickers take all the advantages of current early pickers (and a bit more).

This is pretty much true anyways. I've seen that happen plenty as is, It's an all-in early strategy. First pick gives a large advantage in board position on most maps, and going first gives you a large power bonus for a large part of the game. The first mover has less power in the the reverse placement, at least 50% of the time, and the times that he tries to instantly wipe someone out, he'll still only have the position the other people did, and be at a slight disadvantage in territory count.

Don't mistake me, this will be unbalanced no matter what. It's the nature of the game. I think that's just less unbalanced

Froggy618157725 wrote:This is pretty much true anyways. I've seen that happen plenty as is, It's an all-in early strategy. First pick gives a large advantage in board position on most maps, and going first gives you a large power bonus for a large part of the game. The first mover has less power in the the reverse placement, at least 50% of the time, and the times that he tries to instantly wipe someone out, he'll still only have the position the other people did, and be at a slight disadvantage in territory count.

Don't mistake me, this will be unbalanced no matter what. It's the nature of the game. I think that's just less unbalanced

The problem is that it's not really fair to be wiped out in the first round, because somebody places themselves next to you.

If a late picker puts themselves next to somebody, they're taking that risk. However, your way doesn't let people "take that risk", it makes it pretty inevitable for early pickers. They'll always get screwed over, without choosing to be put in that position.

Basically, by your version, a first-picker is the same as last-picker is now (they have to move last), except they're blind to where early players are. It's even more of a disadvantage. They can't place themselves somewhere safe.