Posted 26 December 2014 - 02:01 PM

Deathlike, on 21 December 2014 - 09:45 AM, said:

I would like to know what determines when a launch is an actual Attack (when attacking) instead of Holding (when attacking). Same application goes for Defending (when the game decides it should be a "Counter Attack").



I'm hoping it's not just a "die roll" (RNG), because I've always felt when running Attack contracts, that most of the matches tend to be for "defense"/holding and playing a severely high number of them in a row (this has been the general theme among people I've asked).



Hey Deathlike,Lots of confusion stemming from this it seems. Throughout the entire design, CW is designed as a very roleplaying like territory conquest meta-game. Each planet in the inner sphere is divided into a set of states or territories, each territory has an ownership state (defender or invader), and each territory can only field a single match at a time.Given this setup, here is how CW works:All territories start as owned by the defenders. Defenders can queue up to defend this planet, but no matches will ever kick off, as there is simply no objective for the defenders to accomplish on that planet at that time. Once a 12-man invasion team forms, they will lock down a specific territory to invade, and a match will form.To add some flavour, say territory 1 on Trell I was actually Sarghad. Your 12-man invasion strike team would be dropping to take Sarghad for CJF. Fortunately for you, GDL left Trellwan some 30 years prior for more lucrative contracts, and took the best anti-mech personnel the planet had to offer with them; so you only have to deal with the 12th Donegal, and Victor runs away. You drop, destroy the 12th Donegal Guards, take out the automated defenses, and Sarghad, along with it's spaceport, is now yours.We have the ability to customize map and game mutators per territory, so every time you drop on Sarghad on Trell I, you will always see the same map and mutators. As we add more maps and time of day, hopefully this will become a more relevant feature.Alright, so invaders now own one territory on Trell I, defenders still own 14. Until that first match ends and victory is awarded to CJF, Sarghad is still considered owned by Steiner. We only support 24 players in a single match, so no more players can drop on Sarghad, but there are 14 other territories open on Trell I for battles to form. All of them are currently owned by the defending faction, so no more matches will kick off until an invading strike team forms up. Defenders can queue and form 12-man teams, but you're going to wait in a pre-lobby state indefinitely for that attacking team to form up first, or for that first game to end so you can initiate a counter attack.To fall back on my diagramming skills:At the input side, there are queues of groups per planet, per faction. Those quickly form up into pending strike teams of 12 players. That pending strike team queue is a FIFO queue that needs to wait for a pending lobby. Only one pending lobby is allowed per planet at a time, and it is at this time that the territory and game rules are selected for a match. If the territory is owned by defense, the invaders will be attacking and the defenders will be holding. If the territory is owned by the invaders, then the invaders will be holding, and the defenders will be attempting to reclaim that territory by counter attacking.To answer your specific question, the backend attempts to alternate between attack and counter attack games to give equal chance to both defenders and invaders. It does this by blocking specific match types from forming for a small amount of time, currently set to 5 seconds. For example, if the last match was an attack, the backend will refuse to initiate another attack game for about 5 seconds, only allowing a counter attack game to form. If no defending 12-man is available to initiate a counter attack for those 5 seconds, that lockout will expire, and the backend will allow another attack game to form for a different territory instead.Again, the whole system is designed from the ground up to operate in a persistent manner. Territory 1 on Trell I represents a specific region in space for us that has ownership properties, and associated map and mutator data. To keep things consistent, we simply don't allow multiple games to take place in the same area at the same time.