Deployment Alternatives (nerfing challenger advantage)

Right now, you submit a challenge with ship types, a deployment plan, and a map.
The opponent responds with his own ship types and deployment plan on the same map, but gets an extreme advantage because he can vary his ships and deployments without the challenge ever changing.

I would like to propose the option of uploading variant deployments with a challenge. That is, the ships and map remain constant, but the challenge can be packaged with 2 or 3 (or more?) alternate deployments. When the challenger plays, one of the deployments are chosen randomly.

When you choose your deployment, its not enough to perfectly counter the enemy’s maneuver… you must prepare to counter at least 2 or 3 different maneuvers. I think this will add a little more strategy, competitiveness, and replay value to the game.

Of course, people don’t have to send more than one deployment, but I think it would be cool if the option was there.

+1

May I also add that throwing in a way not to show the deployment in addition will ensure that the challenger would have to build a much more variable fleet.

Berny

Wow, I was just thinking about “The Gamers Wish List” and how both SAC and DuelDown challenges could be automated by the game/application.

To me, correct me if I’m wrong, but the concept of SAC is to play one fleet against many challenges.

I know you’re proposing a random challenge within the challenge list, but why waste all those other sub-challenges. It would be great to have to play against them all. You build a fleet, and watch it fight each sub challenge (in random order?) one after another. Your fleet would be reset for each fight.

An alternate mode would be to have that fleet fight all of the sub challenges in random order without reseting your fleet! Sort of a mini “endless” battle. Of course, in that mode the sub fleets would have less credits that the challenger fleet, but ultimately, depending on how many sub fleets, the challenge list would probably total more credits pilots than the challenger fleet (the person accepting the challenge).

Ack, well that crystalized my thoughts on how to have the game could manage a SAC tournament.

A SAC entry fleet is created (SAC 1).
You challenge it.
If you win: your fleet gets added as SAC 1-1.
If you lose: nothing.

Now I come along and challenge SAC 1.
I beat it.
Then automatically my fleet resets and fights SAC 1-1.
If I win: my fleet becomes SAC 1-2.
If I lose: nothing.

There are some concurrency issues that would need to be resolved (simple I think) but you get the idea. My fleet that beats all the previous fleets becomes the fleet to beat on the end of the list.

SAC is more of a fleet exercise than a tournament. Tournaments have an ending; SAC is merely a constraint challenge.

That said, I don’t think SAC needs to be ‘codified’ in the game. It’s popular, yes, but it’s entirely possible that some shift of the core requirements or another gamemode won’t become just as popular or more so. Popularity will only wane if there’s thirty of the things going on at once.

As far as such challenges go, I think general browser functionalities (map/player filters, jump-to-number) take priority for usability.

Maybe I don’t understand the current SAC “tournament”.

What do you mean by a fleet exersize? And did you mean “is merely a constant challenge”?

What I’m describing is a way for my one fleet to be able to play against many challenges, in an automated fashion. The game loads each new match automatically.

Perhaps, but it could be coded that a new match can’t be started until some percentage of people can’t beat the existing “never ending challenges”.