I'm working on a starship battles 2D mulitplayer iPad game, and have most of the high-level game design for the first version of the game in place. 5 races compete in a free for all, which each race having 10 starship pilots on their team.

However, I feel as it stands now the game will be too difficult for any side to win in a reasonable amount of time, and thus am looking at implementing more snowball mechanisms. In addition to that, as with any free for all style game, putting in place some anti-turtling mechanisms is probably going to be helpful.

If anyone has general ideas for snowball, or anti-turlting mechanisms / design techniques please chime in! Here are some possibilities:


* higher resource income based on teams' map control, leading to better equipment and teleportation ease (currently the only one in my game)

* experience; leveling up with new abilities or better stats unlocked based on time and distance spent away from your homeworld

* buffs (eg Baron buff in LoL; a team doing well enough can secure the powerful Baron further increasing their advantage)

* stronger NPC allies / weaker NPC enemies based on map control objectives; (eg destroying an Inhibitor in LoL gives your team more powerful minions trying to defeat the enemgy team)

Nice. Also, hopefully under-powered players will still have stuff they can do to help their friends without feeding or just spending most of their time waiting to respawn.

I'm not sure if this is applicable for your game, but I find that allowing more/better units to be trained or hired (say from a different race or faction) based on increased map control is a really effective way to stop players from turtling without making it an extremely obvious cop-out. It can also help to end games quicker as you start to restrict your opponents' unit selection while increasing yours with any captures.

Any type of "one time use" or inaccurate long range attack helps break up turtling. Relic game's do a good job of anti-turtling IMO. As for snowballing, I would issue the leading player of a team the task of issuing specialty weapons to other players (if this applies). That way the leading players can explore more responsibility and less successful players can explore some new items.

Great feedback, thanks everyone!

One thing to clarify is the starship pilots are all individual players with their own iPad's, so it is 50 live players divided into 5 teams (races), as opposed to just 5 live players. But I think the same logic in terms of strategy applies, every idea you have suggested is really good.

What I'm leaning on right now is this:

* Timers : every 20 minutes, if no race has been eliminated in the previous 20 minutes, then the race who has lost 1 of their 2 bases, with # of planets controlled being a tiebreaker, is eliminated. In the case of a remaining tie (eg there are 2 races that each have 1 base and 10 planets), a warning message goes out to all players that these 2 races are at risk of extinction and as soon as one of the races involved in the tie has a change in map control, the worst-positioned team is eliminated.

This is for the first released version of the game. The first version is a stepping stone for a more expansive version of the game down the road, which builds on this basic gameplay but adds in more players, more unit type variety, more upgrade variety, and a much richer diplomatic / strategic aspect. In later versions, I might replace or augment the timer with these other snowball mechanisms.

The key problems in a FFA are how to prevent last-to-move-advantage (which causes stalemates) and how to prevent kingmaker situations. I wouldn't worry about snowballing / turtling until you have a good idea what you are going to do about those things.

If your game has a time limit anyway, why not have non-replenishing resources in the game? That would encourage exploring and fighting. Different tech trees might have different consumables.

The key problems in a FFA are how to prevent last-to-move-advantage (which causes stalemates) and how to prevent kingmaker situations. I wouldn't worry about snowballing / turtling until you have a good idea what you are going to do about those things.

Yes, I admit I had originally intended this to be just 2 teams playing against each other, for all the challenges FFA game designing presents. It was only recently that I changed my mind, as part of an overall push to re-prioritize diplomacy (though most of the diplomacy-side features will not be in place until a later version). I believe a 5 team, 10 starship per team war would feel more epic than a 2 team, 25 starship per team war. I like the depth it gives. But yes, it definitely introduces many game design challenges, some of which I'm not prepared for.

I'm debating the possibility of encouraging Kingmaker situations, at least to some degree. I am considering incorporating some of the design elements of the board game Diplomacy into this: alliances, backstabs, etc. The key game design element in Diplomacy is that to expand your position (and thus make progress towards winning the game) requires either putting one of your borders at risk, or taking the risks of an alliance. The risks of an alliance are that it could leave you open to backstab, or simply that while it helps you out it also helps out another player, one that you eventually will have to destroy.

Unlike the game Diplomacy, there is no delayed orders so to speak (in Diplomacy, it is a turn-based game where everyone submits their moves and they are unveiled simultaneously). All teams have full vision (simply because I believe at a certain number of players, it just becomes too easy to have another friend log into the enemy team as a spy and report their position to you, making the game unfair). I have not figured out a way around that, so decided no fog of war in order that everyone be assured the game is fair. It complicates game design significantly though (particularly if I go with a Diplomacy-game style strategy element).

For the initial version of the game, I would like it to be somewhat more of a general mahem with few of these higher level strategy and diplomacy elements. Not that I think they are unimportant, but just for the initial version I don't think I'll have capacity to implement enough depth to be able to support the rich diplomacy aspects that I want for a later version.

If your game has a time limit anyway, why not have non-replenishing resources in the game? That would encourage exploring and fighting. Different tech trees might have different consumables.

That makes a lot of sense. As currently designed, each starship can have 2 special abilities. Initially I was thinking each of the two special abilities would have both a cooldown as well as require resource income (currently just mining credits). It might make sense to keep 1 of each starship's special abilities still based on the main resource (mining credits), but for their 2nd special abilities have it based on these non-renewable resource locations. There could be enough supply for not just 1 usage, but perhaps multiple uses, with each starship being able to carry the additional inventory in their cargo and being appropriately marked as such, so they would not only have to find the resources but also make it back to one of their bases successfully. Starships carrying such cargo would be vulnerable to ambush and losing the bonus resources to an enemy team until they returned to base.