Factorio Forums

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the fact that you control a certain amount of land, and you have to conquer new land in order to obtain its resources. This is great, but gets boring since you're just fighting against an AI. (although the AI is really well-made, for an AI)

The best of both worlds

What I really miss in a lot of games with multiplayer capability is the concept of having a long ongoing war and conquest for territory, that spans further than just single gaming session. RTS games are usually made out of matches, in every match you have to build your complete base from scratch. On the other hand, in a game like Factorio or Minecraft, when you're away, you can't defend your factory (disregarding mods that make entities unbreakable to other players). This renders Factorio unsuitable for conquest spanning over multiple gaming sessions.

What I've described here are two completely opposite types of online gaming. I'd like to make a mod that combines:
- Having the ability to conquer new land, either in order to improve your power, gain access to more resources or for its strategic value
- Doing all of this in multiplayer environment

The concept so far

- The map is divided into sections, like a chess board.
- Players are assigned a section when they join the server
- A section can be either player-controlled, alien-controlled (AI), or neutral
- An alien-controlled section will turn into a neutral section if all alien structures on it are destroyed
- (?) The first entity placed on a neutral section by a player is considered the HQ of the section. Destroying it renders the section neutral.
- (?) When you attack someone elses property, you are officially in war with that player, Of the player you are attacking is offline, you will be given a certain amount of time to conquer the the section. If you fail to conquer the section within that time limit, the damage you have done get reverted.
- You can request build permits on another players property. You plan your proposal by placing ghosts-entities describing what you want to build. If the other player accepts this, you are allowed to build according to whats allowed by the proposal.
- For example, this allows players to set up trade routes between each other. This can be nessesary if you don't have access to (enough of) a type of resource. It might not be worth it to try and conquer hostile territory.

Example: Pete might be sitting on massive amounts of oil, but joelmeijering might have an abdundance of copper. They could either try to conquer each others' land or set up a trade route. For setting up the trade route, they could cooperate by neutralising the alien territory between them.


The problem

As you might understand after reading the concept so far, I believe the biggest problem is how to handle conquest in absence of the player being attacked. There are multiple ways of handling this, for example by trying to schedule a battle. This could be at set times. The player being attacked could for example chose between 5 of the next open timeslots, with a minimum notice of a set amount of time. This gives the person being attacked a small advantage.

Obviously there are a lot of problems with this concept, what do you guys think?

This could be done with zone-control centers ,and the main base producing enough zone-defence stuff. If enemy forces enter a zone, the zone-control center could trigger spawning a "defence force". In addition to any static defence (turrets, walls) the zone's automated defence forces can spawn and react to enemy attacks. They could be swarms of flying bots, or soldier-like entities such as those in my robotarmy mod.

Factorio pvp... Agen.
Definitely completely doable. Except that nice and fancy map overview.

Adil wrote:Factorio pvp... Agen.
Definitely completely doable.

How do you mean factorio PvP again? As far as I know, all PvP/multiplayer mods so far don't handle territory and conquest in the absence of a certain player. For this mod, I think it should be impossible to grief enemy property except when it's an attack that can be considered fair for both players (even if one of them is offline).

Adil wrote:Except that nice and fancy map overview.

I think the map overview would be the least of my concerns, I'm more worried about handling the absence of players. I'm also worried about wether or not people like the concept of territory control as much as I do

kyranzor wrote:This could be done with zone-control centers ,and the main base producing enough zone-defence stuff. If enemy forces enter a zone, the zone-control center could trigger spawning a "defence force". In addition to any static defence (turrets, walls) the zone's automated defence forces can spawn and react to enemy attacks. They could be swarms of flying bots, or soldier-like entities such as those in my robotarmy mod.

Great thoughts!
I like the idea of having a specific building for this. I just got the following idea: what if at the center of every section there would be a slot of sorts. This slot could either hold debris or a players' HQ building. To conquer a section, you need to destroy the existing HQ (if present) and build you own one at the spot.
I also like your idea that the zones' military strength is affected by the production rate of the factory. A large factory could produce weaponry at a high rate, which could positively affect its strength. Also weapon stocks could build up over time at a rate depending on the size of the factory.

Adil wrote:Factorio pvp... Agen.
Definitely completely doable.

How do you mean factorio PvP again? As far as I know, all PvP/multiplayer mods so far don't handle territory and conquest in the absence of a certain player. For this mod, I think it should be impossible to grief enemy property except when it's an attack that can be considered fair for both players (even if one of them is offline).

Adil wrote:Except that nice and fancy map overview.

I think the map overview would be the least of my concerns, I'm more worried about handling the absence of players. I'm also worried about wether or not people like the concept of territory control as much as I do

kyranzor wrote:This could be done with zone-control centers, and the main base producing enough zone-defence stuff. If enemy forces enter a zone, the zone-control center could trigger spawning a "defence force". In addition to any static defence (turrets, walls) the zone's automated defence forces can spawn and react to enemy attacks. They could be swarms of flying bots, or soldier-like entities such as those in my robotarmy mod.

I like the idea of having a specific building for this. How about this: what if at the center of every section there would be a slot of sorts. This slot could either hold debris or a players' HQ building. To conquer a section, you need to destroy the existing HQ (if present) and build you own one at the spot.
I also like your idea that the zones' military strength is affected by the production rate of the factory. A large factory could produce weaponry at a high rate, which could positively affect its strength. Also weapon stocks could build up over time at a rate depending on the size of the factory.

I just checked out your robot army mod, and I think it could indeed be useful for a territory control mod. Every player would have a robot factory continuously producing robots (as long as at least one player is in the game). This should help with defending your base while you're not in the server. Another problem that arises is that some players will eventually be very strong versus recently joined players. A solution could be to place new players at a distance from other players depending on the amount of hours the other player has put in.

So if a server has a player who owns a base with, lets say, 10 hours of playtime. The player who then joins will be placed at a few blocks distance, so that the other player needs to spend military resources to get to the new player. This is because of the biter nests in between the players.
As the difference in playtime increases, the distance that new players are spawned away from needs to be increased too. (although there needs to be a limit to this as wel I guess).

the scale of distance in this game mode would be pretty huge in general. Inter-player spacing should be massive.

allied players could build railways between their bases to trade resources.

The military stockpiles produced by each player is used to auto-spawn defenders in contested zones, allowing passive defence for offline players. They need to ensure a sustained attack is covered by their factory's ability to produce more military goods.

If the attacking player manages to overwhelm a zone's static + spawned defences, then that player will win that zone.

tricky tactics like cutting off a heavily defended zone (by taking zones around it) from train/power supply to cause laser - turrets to fail would make players have to generate power locally, and probably have gun-turrets and on-site ammo production going.

joelmeijering wrote: How do you mean factorio PvP again? As far as I know, all PvP/multiplayer mods so far don't handle territory and conquest in the absence of a certain player. For this mod, I think it should be impossible to grief enemy property except when it's an attack that can be considered fair for both players (even if one of them is offline).

I don't know any mods that are actually developed to be playable for people on people wars. I meant "another fervent idea of making people utterly destroy each other's creations in a game, where building your base for 8 hours is building fast". Consider this my "like the concept".

Adil wrote:

joelmeijering wrote: How do you mean factorio PvP again? As far as I know, all PvP/multiplayer mods so far don't handle territory and conquest in the absence of a certain player. For this mod, I think it should be impossible to grief enemy property except when it's an attack that can be considered fair for both players (even if one of them is offline).

I don't know any mods that are actually developed to be playable for people on people wars. I meant "another fervent idea of making people utterly destroy each other's creations in a game, where building your base for 8 hours is building fast". Consider this my "like the concept".

Well.. my robot army mod supports pvp just fine. I just haven't seen anybody use it yet.

kyranzor wrote:Well.. my robot army mod supports pvp just fine. I just haven't seen anybody use it yet.

Mods that actually implement pvp were talked about. Pretty much every sufficiently developed mod supports arbitrary number of forces and their relations, but there's no release quality mod which actually puts players at war, is there?

Adil wrote:

kyranzor wrote:Well.. my robot army mod supports pvp just fine. I just haven't seen anybody use it yet.

Mods that actually implement pvp were talked about. Pretty much every sufficiently developed mod supports arbitrary number of forces and their relations, but there's no release quality mod which actually puts players at war, is there?

This is true! There is no one single mod that fully does that. I think combining something like this territory control idea with player force selection/teams when you join an online server and more ways for players to actually -do- the war against each other (just vanilla turrets is boring) would be a good thing to put together

Adil wrote:

kyranzor wrote:Well.. my robot army mod supports pvp just fine. I just haven't seen anybody use it yet.

Mods that actually implement pvp were talked about. Pretty much every sufficiently developed mod supports arbitrary number of forces and their relations, but there's no release quality mod which actually puts players at war, is there?

I'm glad you brought this up. This is about the diplomacy side of territory control. What about the following:

- When joining, jou are at peace with everybody, and have no means of trading
- Using a GUI you can:
- Declare war on a player; this voids any build permits. Turrets and bots will fire at will. (since the the players' forces will be changed)
- Request a build permit (For example, allows you to build infrastructure for a trade route on other other players property, or help a player out with turrets/walls for whatever reason)
- Declare peace on a player; This changes the forces in a way that will stop turrets and bots from automatically firing at the player. This also opens the door for build permits.

The build permit thing can be as simple as giving that player permission to place entities anywhere on your sections. Otherwise I think the mod should prevent this from being possible.

Requesting build permits and peace agreements require agreement from the other player. Declaring war obviously doesn't need agreement.

This would cover the whole forces thing, right?

I just release SpaceBook, a new mod on PvP that might help you :
viewtopic.php?f=92&t=25680

I need testers