let me start by saying that the center planet will forever remain worthless for the purposes of bridging, so long as it remains in its current form. it is isolated from the battlefield, too far down from the skybridge complex to be of any lasting relevance. while bridges build off the center planet were once impactful, in the current metagame wherein every team kicks off the game by building a stairway (giving either team a preemptive height advantage over any of its offshoots), its utility is relegated to diversions and desperation tactics.
before we can effectively repurpose the middle planet, we must first decide what we want it to be useful for. my original rationale for the middle planet was the sort of misguided idea that a team's strength should come from its ability to control the center of the map. conversely, sal's intent was to curb the dominance of skybridges. obviously neither of our goals were achieved; a team's strength only increases as it approaches the enemy planet, and skybridges have only become more prevalent and more refined.
if there's one thing i'm certain of, it's that skybridges are here to stay. height advantage is simply a fact of life in oosos, and while we can lower the max build height to reduce the amount of power skybridges afford, we cannot change the physics responsible for empowering vertically superior bridges. instead, i think our focus should to be to make it so that the space race isn't all there is to oosos. after all, skybridges aren't the real enemy - strategic conformity is.
while the battlefield of oosos is technically three dimensional, the game itself is essentially played in one dimension. as it stands (note: i haven't played on the expanded map yet, so i can't make any claims about the applicability of my thoughts here to the new metagame - though i speculate it's fundamentally near-identical), the oosos is a struggle to main control along a line. the line may bend and twist through three-dimensional space, and the nature of the line may vary from location to location, but it's still in essence a linear path. the primary objective of oosos (detonating the enemy's planet) as well as its secondary objectives (severing the enemy's bridges, attacking their bed/chests/cobble gen) all depend on a team's ability to traverse this path quickly and safely. all of the game's tools either further this end directly (cobblestone, swords, picks, stairs, lava buckets) or indirectly (cobble gens, wood/saplings, bone meal, iron) or are useless (bows, potions, snowballs, blaze balls, etc). secondary paths can be constructed, but are comparatively weak by virtue of inferior height. any success they have is incidental, an accident of stealth, or an accessory to an already prevailing skybridge assault. (i have some curiosity about how exactly a secondary skybridge would play out, sufficiently distanced from the first, when your team is losing the fight for the primary path, but i can't speak about that at this time.)
returning to the matter of the center planet, now, i feel we have two options. if we simply want to make it useful, we can simply elevate it so as to be proximate to the recurring skybridge complex. its primary usages, then, would be to aid in bridging the gap between competing skybridges and to provide a mid-field source of extra blocks - a utility that would primarily benefit the team in control of the single path. nothing fundamental about the game would change, but it would surely make the center planet useful.
personally, i have some mixed feelings about the unilateral 'space race' state of oosos. on the one hand, it represents the cumulative knowledge of 8 months of strategic development. it's symbolic of oosos's evolution since i started playing in january, a reluctant sigh of acceptance of the immutable physicals we've fought against ever since we realized skybridges were a threat. skybridges have their place now, and it's front and center. many of the strategic breakthroughs over the last two months have been focused on mastering skybridge warfare rather than countering it (stair blocks, half-slope ascents, lava buckets). this is oosos's natural and inevitable maturity. it was always due to come out this way. truthfully, i'm proud to see it all grown up.
on the other hand, oosos's adulthood is much tamer and more predictable than it had dreamed. it's bustle through a wild and exciting childhood only to wind up with a tedious job in a cubicle farm, struggling to suppress its bitterness and frustration over adult life. the attitudes of the players have changed accordingly. its tolerance for incompetence has plummeted. risky experimentation is no longer encouraged, and rather players are expected to perform by the book. games are virtually won long before the enemy reaches the planet, resulting in a theoretically winnable, but ultimately hopeless, grind to delay an inevitable defeat at the hands of absolutely advantaged foes. the losers walk away bitter and discouraged, and the champions are scarce satisfied by a hollow (if hard-earned) victory.
let's return momentarily to the matter of the center planet. one solution was to reposition the center planet to make it pertinent to current standards. my second proposition calls for a modest repositioning of standards to make them relevant to the center planet. as an added bonus, in addition to emphasizing the importance of the center planet, my proposed changes would add a secondary objective to the game, one that necessarily lay along a second path, challenging the grueling linearity of the current metagame.
the heart of the plan is this: make cobblestone a scarce resource. rather than condemning each team's mother to their respective "kitchens", personal sources of infinite cobblestone, we force the opposing teams to fight over a single wellspring in the center of the map - the newly petrified center planet. the competition for the invaluable commodity provides a secondary objective, serving to support the team's main initiative of skybridge-building, but requiring separate bridges and unique tactics. in this way we solve both dual issues of monotony and center planet irrelevance.
an obvious prerequisite for this plan is the removal of lava buckets. they needn't necessarily be excised outright (though i suggest we test it this way first), but if they are left on the map, they must be difficult enough to acquire that they aren't givens (as they are now). if you can get a lava bucket too easily, the center planet plunges back into irrelevance. i can't think of a way to make them sufficiently costly, my preference would be to remove them completely, and the remainder of my post assumes a 100% lava-free map. of course, i'm open to contrary arguments.
the other required change is a slight repositioning and reconstruction of the center planet. obviously it needs to be made of stone, and will need to be expanded so that it can supply two teams through a full-length oosos game. since the center planet is no required to be a strong bridging position, it should be lowered, at least to base level. since its integrity as a secondary objective relies on its mental separation from the primary task, it may be wise to make it lower than base level, so that it is even farther removed from the space race. lowering the center planet also helps ensure it is not misused as a secondary attack line, as it forces enemies invading through the low planet to fight uphill against defenders. another consequence is that it's harder to sever an enemy's downhill connection to the lower planet, making it near impossible for one team to definitively conquer it. at this point i'm not sure whether or not that's a good thing - some experimentation will be required to say for sure.
this is clearly a pretty big change from the current paradigm, with many interesting and significant consequences. perhaps the most obvious is that without cobble gens, the mother finds herself without much of a job to do. the obvious replacement duty for him to obtain cobblestone from the center planet. this process is not quite as simple or leisurely as the sedentary labor of today's mothers. this is a man's job. the kitchen is no longer a safe place to be - it is now the center of the battlefield, within the shared reach of both you and your enemy. the mother's job is no longer the safest one: task of mining cobble is complicated by the parallel task of keeping the mother safe in a hotly contested zone and ensuring that her payload makes it home in one piece. i can only speculate as to the exact amount of manpower needed to keep cobble production running smoothly. i envision the battle on the stone planet as a frequent turning of tides, looking something like this:
suppose green claims the center planet first and starts digging. two purple attackers beset the lone green "mother", oust him without trouble, and both get to work mining. before long, green sends two players to reclaim it. not wanting to risk losing the fruits of their labors, one purple heads back with their collective harvest, while the other remains to slow down green's incoming forces. he falls, of course, but the cobblestone makes it back to the purple base in one piece, where it is used to make swords and fortify the team's skybridge. with green firmly in control of the center planet, purple deploys two more men to contest it, and should they succeed, the cycle begins again. instead of sending one player back with the cobblestone, however, green may instead have both of them fight. should they win (presuming they weren't wounded too badly in their previous skirmish), they'll retain control of the center planet and return before the next encounter with a double load of cobblestone. either team may send more than two attackers at any time, obviously, at the expense of some skybridge pressure. part of the game will be deciding how big of a tradeoff to make between the high and low fronts.
an unexpected (well, i didn't expect it) bonus of this system is that it creates a new niche for archers as specialized motherfuckers. mothers will be protected for arrow fire most of the time, assuming they mine the planet from the inside-out. but when they leave to bring back the payload, they're liable to be picked off quick and easy (well - easy for bass, at least), possibly causing substantial frustration for the target's teammates. the practicality of this tactic depends somewhat on the height of the stone planet: if it's low, archers at the first node (in its original location, before the recent map expansion) can fire over it at retreating mothers; if it's at base level, he may need to position himself higher up or off to the side so that the planet itself does not obstruct his line of fire.
the other apparently consequence of this paradigm is that a limited amount of cobblestone is present. while it should be large enough to nourish both teams for the duration of an oosos game, if not larger, it has to run out sometime. when resources run out, the team that better managed their resources will have a temporary but substantial advantage over the team that did not (likely the first to hit empty). by adjusting the size of the center planet, we have some control over the maximum length of a game of oosos. given the wild variability of match durations, this could be a handy thing.
this proposed change (nominated succinctly, sometimes, as "finite cobble") has been controversial ever since i first brought it up. one common concern is that, with cobblestone no longer such an accessible resource, players will see elect not to pursue it at all and simply focus on their skybridge, using their superior force to overwhelm industrially-focused opponents. to make such claims is to severely undervalue the role of cobblestone in today's metagame. were these assertions at all true, the wood rush would be a more prevalent tactic, and teams would not bemoan with so much vexation a jammed cobble gen.
suppose that, in a game of "finite cobble" oosos, the purple team outright avoided the center planet and decided to focus the entirety of its energy on the skybridge effort. seeing this, green would acknowledge the center planet as uncontested and would only need to send a single mother to exploit it. the rest of its team could focus on the skybridge effort. purple would extend their bridge faster and perhaps win an early advantage, even though they only have wooden swords for fighting and planks for one-waying. the green defenders, armed with stone, would defend the assault quite ably, though given the difficulties of fighting uphill, would find it difficult to reclaim control from the descending purple forces. purple's wood rush would not be sustainable for long, however, and they would soon find themselves challenged by finite bone meal and the unpredictability of natural sapling growth. adding to this the amount of extra time spent chopping down trees, they may find their numerical advantage lesser than expected. the careful stewardship required to sustain wood production without bonemeal could remove one potential rusher from the equation entirely. should purple run out of wood, they would find themselves at an acute disadvantage late in the game. should they decide to dedicate one player to sustainable forestry, they will find themselves at a smaller chronic disadvantage throughout the game. both outcomes are, of course, avoidable by making a concerted effort to harvest cobble from the center planet.
along with these changes would likely be some reconfiguration of the nodes. i haven't thought much about this yet, but it's a definite option for curtailing the sustainability of wood rush if it is found to supersede cobblestone harvesting completely.
and there you have it: my humble attempt at fixing some of oosos's most salient problems without altering the nature of the game. some problems still remain, like the irreversibility of a losing team's manifold disadvantage in triangle warfare - and certainly one or two new problems will crop up in time, though that is to be expected. all in all i feel these changes will free oosos of some its contemporary shackles and revitalize the metagame, creating a void in which new strategies can develop for dealing with new situations, while leaving the established and better explored fundamentals of bridge warfare unmolested. if you have any questions or concerns please speak up and i will do my best to address them.
my thanks to everyone (or anyone) who managed to slog through my whole post. kudos!
