Allegiance Wars: Fleet Command (AW5)

[CronoDroid]

Hello folks, it's the CronoDroid, your resident Patty Rider and Longcat Lover.

Allegiance Wars has had a long and proud history that I know very little about being the mere three-year noob I am. Allegiance Wars: Fleet Command was the fifth iteration of this illustrious series, with a novel new concept, bold ideas and an effective and well-thought out implementation. Unfortunately for us plucky gamers, like the new Zone Games, Double Tournament, a multitude of new core events and the Allegiance Nationals League (We Love ANL) before it, AW:FC didn't have the reception it so rightly deserved.

In the words of McWarren:

QUOTE (mcwarren4 @ Oct 27 2008, 02:54 PM) As far as I'm concerned, unless someone else wants to take the reigns now its over.

Good game guys, we tried hard but it just didn't pan out. I had fun on occasion, but it was mostly me and grav beating up on MW and watching him getting mutinied and booted.

Other highlights include:

An epic defeat, losing six full fleets to none of the enemy's. This included losing three fleets to A SINGLE ENEMY ONE.

The decisive battle, me, Night and Grav with Rix, Dreg and TF fleet against the dreaded Rebel Alliance and finally succumbing to their onslaught.

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I'd like to summarise what I personally think were the problems with this series.

-Terrible attendance. Well, obviously.

-The forums weren't on FreeAllegiance.org, and the thread that pointed to them was overlooked by a lot of people.

-Lack of tags (and the ASGS messages that come with them) after the first couple of games. Mainly to do with ASGS messages. I know McW doesn't have time to babysit everyone but attendance is vital for this sort of event, and ASGS messages probably would've helped. I broadcasted a squad message for the last game but I think most of the people who have the ability to make ASGS messages gave up due to apathy.

-Bitter infighting and lack of esprit de corps on the part of both sides. While I can't speak for the Rebels those couple of logs juckto posted of MW going off his rocker looked like the Rebels were as uncooperative as the Scions were. A lot of people on the Scion side reacted badly to so-called "morale boosters" given by some of our members. I guess people don't like being shouted at for failure.

-Too complex. The combination of both in-game strategies and the forum-based metagame, with its associated GAs, units, building and map made things quite complex for the average player. While the last AW from what I saw had similar things (being able to buy GAs for your faction), a lot of people just lost track of the strategy/tactics discussion. Plus most people never really had any sort of clue what the maps looked like. Personally I think you should've made all the maps in advance, or at least just left them the way they were. Or even posted the maps in the main thread announcing the game so at least SOME of the players would have a clue of what to do. It's very hard to talk shop with your players when most of them aren't on the same page.

-To build on the above point, those turn strategy threads sprawled on and on and on and even I stopped paying attention at one point. Democracy is all fine and good but not when you have ten players simultaneously suggesting elaborate plans. Each side really should've had a command staff or inner circle dedicated to discussion strategies. At least the battle plans were in different threads for the commanders to discuss. I know everyone wants to help but as they say too many cooks spoil the broth.

-I'm sure a comment about Spidey's picks should go in here somewhere, it always felt we were fighting an uphill battle. Faction/fleet choices were also somewhat perplexing on our part...but this is criticism levelled at how our particular team conducted ourselves.

To conclude, the biggest killer was definitely the attendance problem. Which may or may not have been influenced by the other points I have brought up. It was probably a given some people would give up when and if the fight turned sour, it was just unfortunate the most important game (by my reckoning, the 3v3 in FreeBeer) occurred after we lost six fleets to none. Attendance claimed ANL, and it has always been a bane of Allegiance.

I mean we'd still be developed by Microsoft if Allegiance was popular right? So there's not much you can do to stop people from not attending. Turning down the complexity helps, for example not having a map, playing fixed teams, etc. but it wasn't your fault mcwarren that this wasn't as successful as it should've been. Hell, even ZGs started to fade away after the 20th or so.

Thanks to the co-creators for their efforts, Spidey and aarmus for commanding the rabble, all the fleet commanders for trying their best, the pilots who turned up, the map makers, strategy makers, and of course the man himself McWarren4 for creating AW:FC.

So bad luck this time, hopefully what I've said and what other people will say will help make the next AW (whether you have any part in it or not) a better experience.

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This retrospective brought to you from CronoDroid. Go Rix!

[Correct]

QUOTE (CronoDroid @ Oct 29 2008, 02:03 AM) -I'm sure a comment about Spidey's picks should go in here somewhere, it always felt we were fighting an uphill battle.

It was downhill after the first pick.

[CronoDroid]

Yeah, the first pick sent us downhill.

[Viscur]

Remember when we were happy to have 20 man games? and when we thought 40 man games were huge and rare?

Yea.. attendance problems are only really a function of the size of the total pool. Yes over 200 people signed up for the thing, but a lot of people really only wanted to see where they would be "ranked" by the initial draft. That, and the lack of regularity of times when games were played didn't solve any problems.

[Raveen]

Scheduling is a problem for events in general because we're limited to 3pm EST or we exclude on or other group of North American or European players. Sundays are set aside for squadgames and that's not going to change. So that leaves Saturdays, and how many people want to give up their afternoons/evenings on both days of the weekend?

Any bright ideas would be welcomed by the Events Zone.

[Grimmwolf_GB]

I attended only one game, because saturdays are very bad for me.

[MadAccountant]

Go two teams again but split the squads in half. Pick the non-squadded players and play every other Sunday. We may need to scale back the plans for whatever squad events but having squad based fleets or huge squad battles multi fleet or not would be fun. We'd still have time playing with our squaddies bu also some diversity in playing with other squads.

[Adept]

I'm still hoping that we'll finish this war, and use it to test how the new alliance options work. Let's make them big community events if we can.

It has been a blast. I flew in almost every game on the rebel side, and our Esprit de Corps was outstanding. The little tiffs when MW's ego problem got the better of him were more amusing than destructive.

It's too bad the last game was simplified to a 1 on 1. The multi teamers were the best I've seen (and some of the past Zone Games were pretty darn good). It was really neat to fly on the underdog 8 pilot faction when everybody else had 11 - 13+ pilots. The challenges and play style were quite different form anything else.

A fair bit of blue-on-blue. I was guilty of about four f***ups myself (and a few more where I realised my mistake before killing an ally), and was on the recieving end of a few more than that. Only one that annoyed me was when a tard started to pad his kill count while waiting for the victory draw to pass.

Thank you mcw for organising this. If this is the end, let's do it again soon Go Rebels! For admiral Aarmstrong and freedom!

[spideycw]

My 50 man squad shows more for squad games than my 200 picks for AW

[Makida]

For me, the whole thing was just confusing. Mostly the points about the incredibly long strategy discussions, where it was sometimes difficult to figure out what was actually decided in the end, and the related confusion over maps. I think in the end we had two maps, both made by players on our team, which showed different things and had confusing legends (since there was a lot of stuff to show).

Basically, for me personally at least, there was a massive disconnect between what was happening in AW as a whole, and the actual games of Allegiance, mainly because I could never be sure what the heck was going on in the former...

I think a small "inner circle" or command staff would be good; they could have discussions on strategy in their own separate part of the forum that only they could access, and then basically announce to everyone, "okay, here's what we're doing," in big bold letters, and well in advance of actual games. Maybe along with maps showing both the current state of the war as a whole, so we could see the bigger significance of the battle clearly, and the map to be used in the actual Allegiance game, which would make understanding what actually needed to be done much easier (though I guess in a few cases in this war these weren't really available in advance).

Also maybe fewer bases and technologies would be good. I mean, I don't think the complexity of AW tech should mirror the complexity of actual in-game Allegiance tech. Like, do we really need carriers? Mine fields? Three different levels of Constructor tech? Garrisons, refineries, outposts, maybe teleports, one kind of con for all of these, and maybe one tech base to research the three levels of fleet size and another for speed + intelligence + scan range GAs maybe could have been enough.

But Allegiance Wars was a huge event, and though in the end it kind of just died, for a while it was a very complex and quite fun thing for a part of the community. The idea behind AW is wonderful, and anyone willing to undertake such a huge thing for the benefit of the community faces a lot of challenges, and is really awesome for being willing to do so.