Asymmetric/Objective/Round based map modes?

[pandatopia]

I was wondering if there was any interest in getting some asymmetric team objective types of maps, something other than CtF or DM.

I'm taking a lot of the inspiration of this from Chivalry, one of the only other PvP games I play.

One suggestion is a "kill the king" type of map, in which the the teams area 3v4 or some such arrangement, with one ship on the 3 ship team being the "king". The King's guns do additional damage and has additional hull health, but obviously you lose if the king dies. The defending team may have longer respawns, etc. The penalty to the defending team as well as the bonus to the king's abilities leads to an interesting choice for the defenders: try to turtle for as long as possible even with the numbers disadvantage, or have a king fight as much as possible to gain the upper hand.

One way to balance just being a super tanky king (and 3 engies on hull, etc) is to have the king's armor rebuilds only be half effectiveness, or have extremely large but non repairable armor, or alternatively have no armor at all but extremely high hull.

Alternatively it could be a round based assault type, 3v3 or 4v4, where the teams alternate attacking/defending and win based on time to kill.

Similar to this, you can repurpose the Crazy King mode into a series of 5 or 6 point caps, in which certain points are locked until all previous points are capped (say 1+2 block 3, 3 blocks 4+5). It would lead to interesting team splits and maneuverability vs staying power which is already a consideration on Crazy King. Again this would be an attacking/defending setup.

Oh man and then you could do a system where the points themselves have npc defending ships, and each team's base sends out waves of smaller fodder ships which you could kill to power up your ship and ...  _{(please don't kill me =D)}

[RomanKar]

There is always a lot of talk about different game modes.  Always good to keep hearing new suggestions.

I for one would like to see a 3v3 two or three point simultaneous capture map.

Another idea I had was an escort.  An NPC ship moves in a set path through say Canyon Ambush and must be protected the whole way.  In the description of Canyon Ambush, it talks about it being a dangerous place to pass through, but the quickest way between the kingdoms.  Be nice to see that played out in a game mode. 

[redria]

I don't think I ever see Muse posting on any of these threads. It makes me wonder if there are plans in the works or if game types are just too much, or if they know we will be satisfied by "X" that will show up in adventure/co-op. Maybe there are things they are working on that can be pulled out of adventure/co-op and quickly converted into skirmish mode toys. Maybe when they are released we will start to see these things get pulled to make skirmish more varied.

We never hear anything about game modes or maps. Naturally these are some of the harder things to add, but I still wonder.

[pandatopia]

Well I think its certainly a lot of work - especially balance wise, and I can see why they would likely want to focus on mechanics and gun/ship interactions first.

I was just putting out some ideas that feel like they could be interesting, and put more emphasis on varying types of pvp other than just "kill ship" or "stall at a point until help arrives, then kill ship".

Of course combat would still be the focus.

It would be cool to see some of these as "quests" or arenas in adventure mode, and I think since Muse stated they were separating PvE and PvP it would be easier to balance.

I also think that in GoI you aren't ever going to see that kind of "mass pvp" sort of thing, where its like 30 people on a team swarming another team of 30.

The main reason is because each ship is a 4 person investment. Our current max 4v4 sounds small, but its already 32 people! Thats a lot.

Having 16v16 or something team combats would put a ridiculous 128 people on the map, which MIGHT be awesome but also ridiculous (and even more "Lobbies of Icarus").

So it is really difficult I think to have stuff like uneven teams, because teams come in such huge chunks (even losing just 1 ship in 4v4 is a 25% loss).

Oo, another idea though, what about asymmetric teams in that a certain team only gets 3 people a ship? That could be interesting.

[Neithrantulre]

It would be cool to see some asymmetric play with even numbers, where you have attackers and defenders. Battlefield and TF2 have some interesting attack/defend modes that could be implemented very similarly in GOI. Battlefield Rush comes to mind, where a different area of the map is used for each control point and maybe there are more than one defense point per phase.