Movie Battles II mod for Star Wars: Jedi Academy

3 comments by MaceMadunusus on Jan 31st, 2012

Balance of Power

Balance of Power is not a gametype you see often at all. In our variant the map relies on a single central capture point similar to those used in Conquest with a very large radius. The map is also symmetrical similar to Capture The Flag.

New longer curved hall route around the backside of the map.

The idea is to control the area, and dominate the other team. The more you kill of them, the better your chances are. As well as the more team that concentrate on capturing the area the better your chances are.

Balance of Power originated as an offshoot of Conquest and will even use the same entities to do so. The idea was to add even more variation to gameplay with little effort!

The first location you will be seeing Balance of Power in will be Death Star. The full assault map will still be there of course, this is an entirely new map set in the same location.

Just outside the pit. You will notice that it is no longer a single hallway to the walkways.

Balance of Power is designed more specifically towards the medium player count as an intermediary map size between the full Assault maps and the Duel maps. However, it can full handle high player counts as well. It is entirely up to the server.

The levels themselves are very similar to Capture The Flag in the respect that they are near symmetrical and designed to give both teams an even chance at fighting for the central point.

The idea is to fight for the area, the more you kill, the more likely you are able to capture that point. The more players on your team there is in an area, compared to that of the enemy, the more likely you are to capture that point.

New pit area specific to the Balance of Power version of Death Star

Balance of Power uses the same entities as Conquest, with a few modified flags so that the game knows that it is a Balance of Power map. In a Balance of Power map every person within the flag radius counts towards the capture rate. Unlike Conquest where there is a maximum rate that it can capture. However, each person increases the capture rate much less than that of conquest. In the case of team stacking, the game takes into account the amount of players on either team . So if the case it ended up to be 11 v 7 the maximum people that could affect the capture would be 14, 7 from either team.

Scoring is also kept on a point scale, that point scale is determined by the rate of capture. There is a maximum number of points set by the mapper (Currently there is a maximum point setting of 950 points so every map MUST be less than that). The more people in the trigger, the more points added to your team. Once you reach the maximum point value set by the map, then your team wins. While there is a maximum point setting of 950 it is recommended that level designers set this value to be much less so that a variety of player configurations can play it without much hindrance.

 We are currently testing a value of 300 points. The maximum rate is currently 3.7 points per second, which is determined by having 16 players in one team within the capture radius while the other has zero. If that is the case across a five minute round that team will gain a total of 1110 points.

The idea is to keep more people in your team within the capture radius than the other team has within it. The more people you have over the other team, the faster it will capture and the faster you will win.

One of the updated hall routes for Balance of Power - Death Star

Remember, this will require teamwork. The central assault should be focused on the capture area if you want to win, but be sure to use those flanking routes to get the drop on your enemy and gain the upper hand. Use it to help your team keep control of the central capture.

The capture area will be obvious, and no one should have any problem navigating to it. You can see an example of the WIP for Death Star's capture area below.

While there isn't much to Balance of Power itself, or much to vary it there's a lot that can come out of Balance of Power. First, we all know that Balance of Power is a subset of Conquest that was announced recently. In case one would not want to design a Balance of Power map, Conquest is another option as well as our traditional Assault or Duel type maps!

However, Balance of Power maps could be used later on to create another gametype which could help us vary gameplay even more.

Thanks to everyone that has been involved in creating this amazing and well thought, variable, and unique gametype. Thanks to Lervish for the Hologram models! Thanks to Zudni for all your coding efforts to get this working! And of course thanks to the testing staff and the rest of the team for feedback!