When i.4 rolls around and mobs have a chance to have armour and weapons, maybe we could add some sort of spawning platform under the island or a way to farm mobs.
If it was only somehow accessible from the middle island i believe that would be a pretty good incentive to try to claim the island. it would of course also double as an exp grinder thus giving a potential edge to whomever controls it.
The only problems i see with this is adding more lag to the game then there is already (maybe?) and making it only accessible from the planet; making it a sealed bow with a tube going up into island made of obsidian/bedrock perhaps?
Speaking of exp, now that we get exp from smelting/mining maybe we will see the diamonds being worth getting again (are there even diamonds on the map any more?)

hi even though i am looking for ways to balance the map i still have some ideas of my own.

I liked a lot of what forks said, I just don't agree with his way of balancing it. Rather than nerf the shit out of both teams by removing cobble gens and making cobble finite, I think we need to make the center more attractive than just making a skybridge. As much as I hated the limiting feel of forks' finite cobble game, it did do what he set out for it to do: make the center planet relevant again. However, the fact that you continuously need to be on the center to get cobble, make it back safely, and craft swords/picks/whatever else your team needs just feels overwhelming. A skybridge is still more powerful than a team with cobble. This is why early game rushing was effecting on the smaller map.

There's not really any way to early game rush on the new map. It may be early relative to the new map size, but you're still going to take ages to cross that battlefield no matter how much dirt you have. Which is good, it's one step towards nerfing skybridges. They can't be made in the early game anymore, so there is at least one reason to not make them. In my proposed map of changes, I put two water source blocks and a lava block in the starting chest (which are back now. They were only removed to artificially lengthen the game) rather than a bucket. One of the advantages of having a bucket is that if you ever build too high over the enemy's planet or they've covered your water, you can just bucket your way down there. This is why you are no longer given the bucket, but the actual blocks of water and lava. This means that if a team built their skybridge too high they will have wasted a lot of resources to sit around and watch the enemy team advance further into battle. It now hurts you to build too high if you aren't prepared.

Well getting a bucket was only a hop and a skip to your first node, which is why I made the first node coal. I felt like the first node was the free spot in bingo. It's the node that says "Hey, you played. Good job, here's a freebie". Well if you can't get iron from your first node, where can you get it from now?

The center planet.

By removing the accessibility of buckets we can nerf the power that skybridges have. Now there's a risk in going too high. But what if you don't go high enough and you don't see the enemy's skybridge towering above yours until its too late? The new distance on the map adds a fog-of-war element to OO:SOS. Bridging out too high too fast can leave you stranded up top, only to see the enemy making a base level bridge to the now relevant center planet. Usually you're able to jump onto an enemy's skybridge and run down their staircase, one-waying things as necessary. However with this new set-up, you aren't forced to make a skybridge. If you were to simply make a base level bridge the enemy would continuously die from fall damage trying to maintain a presence. They will have to try again and build lower.

Another thing I've added to the center is an Ender chest. You also get one in your first node, meaning that if you arrive to the center uncontested you can simply stash the node contents in the ender chest and kill yourself. You can arrive back home and place the goodies in your team's chest, even if you were to be killed after gathering the contents of the node. forks really hit the nail on the head with "the only reason to make a low bridge is to hope to remain unnoticed". It's true, but now there's a reason to make a low bridge . a base level bridge, a skybridge, and a skybox bridge.

I know one thing we kept trying to bring back were the castle walls we all loved building and storming. This is why I've added a new node, the defense node. In this node you can find 3 iron doors, 3 pressure plates, a stack of iron bars, and 16 gold ore which take 15 seconds to break with or without a stone pick. This does wonders for defense, and we'll now find iron doors to be standard on every bedroom and forward base. I'm not really sure how people will use iron bars (or some of the other goodies in the node, like cakes or netherbrick fencing), but I feel that with new options come new gameplay. I buffed the second node, which now sports 2 stacks of cobble, 1 stack of stone brick, and a stack of birch in addition to the other useless items we so love. This means that if you grabbed both second nodes from a team choosing to ignore the center, you will have 4 stacks of cobble, 2 stacks of stonebrick, and 2 stacks of planks in addition to all the things you gathered earlier in the game. Should a team that initially chose to ignore the center now try and go for it after building a skybridge, you can destroy the ender chest and force them to risk death with the scraps you left behind.

The first node is also now made of coal, which you'll be needing since there are no more free torches. Both teams will need to stop to mine at least a bit of coal if they don't want to be overrun by mobs in the first night. There's also a bit of food (10 melons) because I understand that the new length means you're hungry by the time you reach your planet. I didn't put a lot of food in there because now you will find food in every node you collect, hopefully further encouraging people to gather nodes. There's also potions in the first node to further experimentation with potions, as a team that only collects the first node won't have much else. I've given out a little more bone meal here and there as well in addition to putting the diamonds back in the center planet.

I really do have high hopes for these changes, though forks is doubtful of it doing much in the long run.

tl;dr buckets nerf skybridges, ender chest in center for node collection, new nodes, potions in first node.

I like Sal's idea way more than forks but I would like to see both be tested honestly, though arguably Sal's first because its much closer to the norm. (gold ore sounds scary for one waying though. Imagine placing gold ore all over their stair case if it comes to that)

I really don't have much more to say, I haven't even see a game played on the new map so I feel uneasy suggesting anything of my own, plus I only sorta watch and mother.

what sal's setup comes down to is whether all the goodies affording by tackling the center planet/node field are enough to allow a team to overcome a height disadvantage without resorting to building skybridge themselves. if they are, we may have ourselves a promising new era of oosos. looking very forward to the playtest.

though i feel that the one test of my proposed changes proved most of my predictions right (at least tentatively), what i failed to account for was how selectively it would affect the game for players as individuals. for rushers, the only impact the changes had was relegating them to wood tools for most of the map, resulting in an experience similar to that which already existed, but with the added frustration of playing in poverty. i suspect this problem would improve as we become more adept at handling the center planet, and might never have existed had we already been used to playing with wooden tools. that said, there are a number of changes necessary before forks:sos can actually be fun. for the center planet needs to be raised so it isn't completely indefensible. and of course, the problem of triangle stairs grimly overshadow any merits a functioning stone planet model might have had. maybe i'll revisit it once we fix our skybridge problem.

My problem is that breaking an enderchest results in obsidian dropped, which goes against some sort of credo the game has against obsidian. Unless we can make that chest unbreakable I am not sure it's the best solution.

Hey sal why not do for the defense node redstone ore since it takes the same amount of time to break as gold ore and is probably less useful for attackers mining it. Players could probably also use it for machines if they really wanted to, and I'm sure the light property could prove to be interesting.

hi i am going to throw in my two cents here I guess, mostly just a smattering of thoughts after last night's games:

The changes made to the map have definitely made skybridges a lot less powerful: I managed to win at least one game (idr about the first) by doing a lower bridge off to the side and sneaking into the planet undetected, because the opposition was largely concerned with the "main" rush. That said, the low bridges were pretty high-risk: they were pretty easy to counter. I died and had large parts of these bridges destroyed by a lone opponent several times, but ultimately won out through persistence. With this low-bridge strategy, the center planet definitely proved to be essential: it was where most of my resources were coming from, so being able to get onto it and stay alive was crucial to my gameplay, but not really anybody else's.

The fact is that, seemingly, the center planet isn't hugely significant once the adjacent nodes have been harvested or forsaken. It's just somewhere you might be lucky enough to land on if you get knocked off a bridge in combat. The diamond inside is, as always a pretty poor motivator, and the iron is mostly secondary too, since there's an iron node right next to it. For the most part, the center seems to get passed over, since by the time anybody's there, their bridges have probably moved up a few blocks above it because of coal node placement or a desire for an ability to gain the height advantage if needed.

The coal node is a nice improvement: it's legitimately difficult to get to it, harvest coal, and make torches before night sets in, and I like that. IT definitely succeeds in encouraging defensive playing. The other nodes, though, I'm skeptical of. In one game, my team lost its QOL node to a very lucky grumbler, and it wasn't a huge loss, despite the opposing team getting theirs. The inaccessibility of the QOL node sorta seems to place it in an awkward position: it's not easy to get to at all, being so far out and so far down. As a result, it's not accessible until towards the middle of the game, at which point both teams are either similarly advantaged, or one is sorely disadvantaged. QOL is such a deviation from what is by that point a full-force offense that there's no real need or drive for it: it's just kinda there. Any team that might strongly benefit from capturing their QOL node is probably terribly disadvantaged anyway, and has bigger problems, like the opposition bearing down on them at full force.

The defense node doesn't seem to be terribly advantageous, its biggest contribution being iron doors, which can be pretty hit-or-miss. After all, if you get any iron from the center planet or second node, you've got enough iron for a door anyway, since, really, beyond a bucket and iron picks for mommy, what's iron useful for? Experimentation may provide a legitimate use for netherbrick fences and iron bars, but atm their primary purpose seems to be towering out of the node they're found in.

The second node is moderately useful, since having the birch/extra cobble/stone brick provides more bridge building material to put in chests back home, and saves the mother a bit of time, for sure. Still, I don't know if losing these nodes would be a huge disadvantage, really. They're a nice plus, but not game-changing: I don't know if this is good or bad, but I'm leaning towards good.

To sum up: the changes made seem to have an overall positive effect in balancing gameplay, reducing the broken-ness of skybridges and making middling and lower bridges strategically valid.