#maybe i’ll edit together a better part 2 that communicates my beliefs on time usage and how it differs from other games

[selfmaderibcageman]

Okay ^_^

So for those who don’t know (most people (especially on here)) Foxhole is a mmo(rp?)g played as an (eternal) series of open-form matches (wars) between two factions on a 36-hexagon(best) map grid, each of which is a server that fits about 250 players, so a war might be fought by about 2-4k people at once, but in a (frontline) hex it’s sort of a rotating 100-on-100 match. Your faction wins the war when you take X(~=28)/36 hex capitals slash *prozd voice* victory points

Probably the most important thing in Foxhole, though, is that basically every single thing in the game is made by players. Every trench is dug by someone, every bunker base is dug out, fortified with materials that were refined from scrap that was mined at one of the dozens of scrap fields, crated up and hauled to the front. Every rifle and every bullet was made out of the same reprocessed scrap, every truck, tank, barge, destroyer, battleship. (Well, not quite- there’s actually about a half dozen types of resources all used and processed into more and more advanced materials at, you guessed it, player-built facilities)

Because of this, there are absolutely massive benefits to specialization and division of labor. A regiment (clan) dedicated purely to logistics will be orders of magnitude better at turning their time into usable equipment. It’s simply not worth doing things not at scale. Not only are there duplicate paths that let you use for better outgoing production efficiency, collecting resources at peak hours is going to lead to you competing with dozens of other players, but an Australian can have basically free access to resource spawns.

All of this is sort of adjacent to the main point of why I wanted to write this. You’ll notice I haven’t really talked about the combat at all. It’s a twin stick shooter basically. Probably not what you expected! It’s fun though, there’s skill, it feels appropriate for the interwar period aesthetics, etc. But it doesn’t matter! Shooting dudes on the frontline is simultaneously the only reason the game exists and literally pointless. New players will spawn in on the frontline, fight over a broken bridge for 6 hours straight, have a great time, and have contributed literally NOTHING.

Right now, in the current war, about 3 weeks in, in the center of the map there’s been a fight that has stagnated since day 2 or 3 of the war at the outskirts of a city.

Six Hundred And Seventy Five Thousand player deaths have occurred.

Zero territory has been captured.

So obviously, nothing ever happens, the game is impossible to push in, etc. Except wars very much do progress and end! Like I said, we’re only 3 weeks into this war. There’s been like 4 or 5 wars since the year started. So how do you actually do something? I mean, you’re not gonna brute force it. You can’t die 675k times on your own.

For better or for worse, the answer is in game mechanics. When you capture an enemy base (player-built or map town) by destroying and rebuilding it, you get 25% of the supplies in it, but more importantly, you reset its defensive tech progress. Map bases start out with all their tech, player built with none, but if you capture (“tap”) it, all that progress is gone, and it takes IRL days to re-tech it. Things like garrisoned houses in cities, seaports and stockpiles, advanced construction materials for bunkers, anti-tank and artillery counterbattery emplacements, your ability to build all of that goes away. What this does is turn the area into a no-mans-land (often filled with artillery craters and rubble). This type of frontline is impossible to really effectively hold while it is frontline, hence no-mans-land, but you can push through it. When you tap a town with a storage depot full of supplies in it, even if you don’t hold the town you knock all their private supplies public, and more importantly, you stop them from getting to any of it for at least 2 days, even if they retake and hold the town (which they now have to do without all those supplies!!)

Everything in Foxhole is about time. You want to make sure you are using your time in a way that has the biggest multiplier of your time spent to enemy time destroyed. Every time you kill someone, their respawn costs 16 salvage, plus the cost of all their extra gear, plus the time it took to refine all that, drive it up to the front, etc. This actually ends up being a piddling amount- you have to kill like a hundred people to deal even one logi truck worth of time-damage to the enemy, and at a hot frontline, a logi will be rolling up every 3-5 min. This is why shooting dudes does not win the war.

For a long time, my regi’s philosophy was to go directly after the juicy, valuable Enemy Gamer Time directly- we’d camp out a klick behind an enemy base, shoot up logi drivers as they shuffle up to the frontline, steal their truck, and send someone to sneak it back to our frontlines and deliver the supplies. Here too though, you run into time problems. This ie a fantastic strat with 3-5 players. A few good partisans (the community’s somewhat inaccurate term for logi interception and backline harassment) make a fantastic impact in terms of player time spent per player time destroyed/recovered. But they saturate quickly- if you have 3 people holding a road, you can probably stop 75% of trucks, 5, 95%, but beyond that you’re investing tons of extra player time for almost no gain. Any time you hit 6 people camping a road, you should immediately mitose and hit two roads with three people. Once you saturate all or even most of the roads to a base, extra partisans do nothing! Your td/ts goes to shit!

So if you’re a big group, you also lose efficiency by being big. Same effect with partisans happens with tanks- if the terrain doesn’t let all your tanks frontline, you’re wasting those tanks time. These independent saturation effects make multitasking more important. If you have 40 people in hex, you should have, yknow, 18 doing tanks, 8 doing arty, 10 doing infantry, and four doing logi/building up the front. Each of these activities is a force multiplier on the other, but you end up with everyone doing the same thing in 80% of clan ops. I partially blame discord for this, because it doesn’t have whisper functionality, and you really need like a command comms channel where all the squad leaders can talk to each other.

Some regis can pull this off, sure, but it’s rare. Making best use of player time is just a really multifaceted issue that has both exogenous and endogenous constraints.