I renamed the other thread to Galactic War discussion, and I made this to discuss the "Cosmic" layer lol. I know I said I wouldn't do it until after the first GW was done, but if we keep it to another thread it can't harm to throw a few ideas around now.
Basically, I want to turn this layer into something meaningful, as opposed to a mere number of galaxies owned on a scoreboard. I want the universe to become slowly mapped out, and populated with fully mapped out systems and galaxies, and I want each faction/clan to carve out its own domain there.
The question is whether the stronger clans would grab all the space, and push the weaker ones out of the game.
PlanetSide solved this problem by effectively resetting the war whenever a faction became too strong. But PlanetSide had a finite space, so they HAD to do something like that. We have an effectively infinite universe, so we don't have this problem. The weaker clans can simply keep expanding in the opposite direction from that which the stronger ones are pushing them.
But why would anyone ever choose to fight anyone else, in this format?
More or less for the same reason someone would fight someone else in the real world as opposed to going off to live in a forest alone: because it's more fun to take a system from The Realm as opposed to an empty one. And you WOULD be able to take one, even if your clan is much weaker, if The Realm has extended itself across 100 galaxies, and is fighting on 5 fronts with 5 other clans to maintain them.
So I want to create a format which will allow each clan to grab a part of the cosmos proportional with its power, so that you could tell which clan is stronger by simply comparing their "surface areas" so to speak, in a manner similar to our planet's nations (with exceptions like Canada which contain lots of land that no one wants to have, or useless African nations, etc.)
The question is how to create a format that encourages this to happen.