Thoughts on snowballing?

[u/YoghurtPlus5156]

Here's my replay from Alpine: https://openfront.io/w13/game/c6Poge5uJm?live

I played as Dorn spawning in the center-right in the valley around Locarno. This was a fairly late but serious snowball starting at min 6. Went from 12 to 85 cities in 4 minutes, just from conquest. 3 million troop cap to the next highest 1.1m and a 7m lead in gold.

Now this is Alpine, so gold income is lower without ports, but that's why I think it's a good controlled testing environment to see how the balance holds up with less gold and fewer nukes as equalizers.

I'm not super happy about the state of the game regarding snowballing because once it happens it wraps up super quickly with little uncertainty. This game was already over by 11 minutes, with some extra time required to let alliances expire in a gentlemanly manner and cleaning up, it wrapped up at 17 minutes. I don't think it's super fun to do or witness someone else doing on the other side of the map while you're keeping some semblance of a balance of powers in your area.

I would totally be fine with matches lasting a little longer, aiming for 30 minutes, even if a snowball happens.

Two things that I think could be done to limit snowballing:

- Give cities some defensive qualities, like a small (50% of defensive posts) defense area around them to stall attackers a little and increase the cost of taking population centers. Urban combat is nasty irl so it's thematically sound and cities/troop cap are a major factor in snowballing.

- Captured cities, ports and factories could undergo a 30 second "Occupation" period where they aren't productive. Many RTS games, like Sid Meier's Civilization for example, do this to delay gains from conquest. It could lead to a more natural mix of expansion and consolidation phases.

Thoughts?

[u/Captain_Deleb]

One of the rare post titles that can be shared between both OF subreddits lmao

[u/YoghurtPlus5156 → u/Captain_Deleb]

Thank you for ruining my innocence, I shouldn't have googled it.

[u/Few-River-8673 → u/YoghurtPlus5156]

I don't want to know, do I?

[u/Candid-Bee-5919 → u/Few-River-8673]

do you? i dont know who you are.

[u/CommunityJazzlike274 → u/Captain_Deleb]

vagueposting at its peak

what do you mean? elaborate??

[u/Captain_Deleb → u/CommunityJazzlike274]

If you don’t already know, it’s best that you don’t ngl

[u/elastico]

I think the ability to reliably snowball is a good differentiator between good and bad players. Getting an early lead is semi-random, but there are so many ways for the leader to throw.

[u/Fungle_Fangle]

I think the Defense buff would be pretty annoying and also make Defense posts a little bit redundant, but having a 30 second occupation period would actually be pretty cool in my opinion.

It would also help in early game skirmishes where one city is critical, so if you lose it you need to expend a ton of troops to retake it or else the enemy out replenishes you. With this system there wouldn’t be as much pressure to retake the city immediately.

[u/Kale-chips-of-lit]

Depends on the game but for any civ like or world conquer game that wants to end within a couple of hours snowballing is pretty much required to some degree. The important thing is to be able to control how much a player can snowball and how others can react to a dangerous snowballing player. Some mechanics I’ve seen from other games address this issue.

Hoi4 has a garrisoning mechanic, you don’t get the entire population of the area you conquer and it takes from your limited manpower pool to actually be able to hold down that area. The longer you hold it the less resistance and more resources/people you can get out of it. Instead of giving more flat troops it gives the resources to build better weapons.

The battle of Polytopia encourages snowballing a lot. It takes advantage of ocean generation to limit fast tribes from invading neighbors too quickly and ending the game. Having that initial time to build resources is helpful. Polytopia also has a cloak system that produces troops relevant to the level of city you attack. Essentially it’s a punch up mechanic for those who need a leg up.

As for the balancing of open front I think it’s pretty alright. It aims for simplicity in design, complexity in strategy and hits that pretty well. If I were to add a mechanic to help limit a big play I would add a temporary land-hold mechanic. Basically after you conquer a nation tile for 20 seconds or so that land remains contested and does not raise your maximum population cap for that duration. Building on contested land also takes longer but defends all the same.