Faction Clash Gamemode Automation

Development Ideaguys
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This thread is more for me to spit ball ideas at the wall regarding automating the Faction Clash gamemode (the Human vs Human event).

Where We Stand

Despite many changes, Faction Clash requires a lot of admin setup to run properly, this includes…

Manual Interventions
  • Manually setting UPP role slots at the start of the game, and increasing slots to ensure the UPP don’t get far more spawns than USCM spawns.
    • Somehow monitor how many USCM late spawns there are so you can compensate the UPP with more spawn slots.
  • Communications must be manually turned on. For the planet, this is set by simply spawning a tower, but for any custom OpFor ship, you need to manually go into the MC and edit it so you can get ship comms on.
  • Manually spawn in a series of OpFor assets, including a ship map, landing zone, dropship.
  • Send manual ARES/OpFor AI announcements giving both factions their lore briefing as to what they are doing (Akin to the ARES game start announcement).
  • Manually time how long you will give both sides to prepare to deploy and lock/unlock dropships as required.
  • Manually enforce any ceasefire times if required
  • Deploy Foxtrot reinforcements for the UPP if the USCM buy one.
  • Send req supplies to UPP due to no automated cargo system
  • Monitor the round to determine when the game end conditions are met (either 1 faction secures the other’s landing zone, or a ceasefire/draw is announced when a certain time frame is met).

Basically, there’s a lot to do even if we’ve made great strides in cutting down a lot of the automation.

How To Proceed

I feel the best way to automate this kind of game mode, to reach a point where it requires no admin intervention. Would be to affect …

Firstly, and obviously, the game needs to be able to spawn in the OpFor/UPP ship map, dropships and OpFor landing zones automatically.

The game needs to auto balance the amount of spawns available to the USCM and UPP. We can’t have a situation where one side has twenty more combat roles than the other.

Dropship deployment times need to be synced so both the UPP and USCM dropships can deploy at the same time with an automated announcement indicating this, further…

The game should spawn some kind of Fog (or whatever lore wise) separating the USCM and UPP forces for around ten minutes when the first ship lands, this would be to give both sides time to set up their FOBs and prepare for battle. The alternative here, would be to not spawn fog but mechanically disable the ability for both factions to fire their weapons/lase coordinates during the cease fire time.

The game will then need triggers to end the round. I believe there should be two main conditions when a round will end automatically.

  1. A faction loses their landing zone and/or all members of a faction on the planet are dead, lying on the floor or handcuffed.
  2. Once the round reaches a pre-set time (I’d argue around 2 to 2.5 hours) an automatic ceasefire will be declared and the round ends in a draw.

I feel if the above is achieved, you’d have a game mode that would not require staff to be online to operate it. To the point you could even allow players to vote for it as a rare/uncommon event without needing staff to trigger the vote.

These are just my rantings on how this can be achieved, I’d consider all of this a pipe dream. But I am interested in people’s thoughts.

5 Likes
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welp the UPP req PR is sitting then waiting for review for about 4 months already. I am looking for any contribs willing to help with implementing all this stuff

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I think this would be an amazing addition to the game.

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Honestly, I don’t think that completely killing the other side should be a win condition for this gamemode if it goes automatic. I fear what’ll just happen is that people will just lockerhide or otherwise try to stay groundside after their main hold is down, thus delaying the game. And this isn’t to say that these two are bad things. On the other hand, it is absolute soul to see your side lose and decide that rather than flee the planet, to continue the fight by hiding and ambushing the enemy. However, this kind of roleplay would be discouraged if the goal is complete annihilation.

I feel we would be better off making the objective a sort of King of the Hill game, with the two factions fighting to repair a central radio tower or something to serve their own purpose. It would avoid “delay-rines” extending the match to ungodly hours and by its very design, have a maximum time limit so that we no longer have any 6-hour hell rounds.

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End state could be Hijack (for both teams) and that’d end opportunities for delay. I don’t really agree that objective gameplay is necessary (or at least good) for any part of this game (except for hive core and killing xeno queen)

I could just be being a hater tho, and it could just be completely different with HvH

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Lockerhiding already results in your being counted as dead for game-end purposes.

I feel the end-state should be fairly simple and straight forward, just as how the end-state of Distress Call is to kill the entire enemy team.

I could foresee one way to give a faction an alternative to end the game on the ground, and that would be to make it that once a faction secures the enemy Landing Zone, it now counts everyone of that faction that is not on the planet as having “escaped”, furthermore it would give the faction who secured the Landing Zone a Sensor Tower to find any remaining enemy Forces.

Really, whatever we go with it should be simple and straight forward. K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid.

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I don’t think porting hijack for HvH would work.

I’m not saying this is an opponent of hijack, but that I believe a human faction doing hijack would not work since the attackers would lose their logistical train, whereas the defenders have now shortened it.

Going on the earlier “king of the hill” idea, I could envision one system where you steal Battlefield 2142’s system of having a capture point (or multiple points) on the map that will periodically fire missiles at the enemy ship, and if a ship takes too much damage, it will be destroyed.

I don’t know if this is a good or bad idea, but it would be more complex to code and implement.

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So you feel the same too? :face_holding_back_tears:

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How would the game know if a landing zone is ‘secure’?

Maybe each FOB could have a big flag, and the enemy faction wins if they manage to take down the flag (in a hellish 10 second long action where they must stand still next to it) or something. That would be soul.

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I’d suggest that any member of the opposing faction needs to interact with the groundside ship console for a certain amount of time (30 seconds?) to seize control of the landing zone.

I would also suggest that this action can be undone by anyone of the faction that uses the landing zone with a similar 30+ second timer.

Essentially it would be similar to a Queen hacking the Dropship, or interacting with the groundside ship console, except with a longer timer.

I feel this idea would be a good way to do it.

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well, it’s certainly less work than the flag! Could probably also have announcements that it’s happening, like with the nuke maybe.

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Thank you for making this.

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