Mad Cat Militia War Games: The Vision

Since the launch of the Mad Cat Militia NFT collection we have built an awesome community of 1,650+ unique holders and we are still growing.

We like to listen to our community and hope this blog post will answer recent questions about our vision for the war games mentioned in our roadmap.

War Games

If you google the definition of ‘war games’, you’ll see something like this:

An often physical or electronic simulation of a military operation involving two or more forces and using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an actual or assumed situation.

BORING! We have a more succinct version:

A straight-up street fight between the most badass cats the digital world has ever known.

The truth is that our war games will land somewhere in the middle.

Aim

Our primary aim is to provide our battalions with a place to battle, back up all the trash talk with some real action and prove themselves the most badass collective in the militia.

Battle Arena

Our war games will centre around our battle arena webpage. This will be our primary UI, providing a single location for both verification and for the battle itself.

See below for our first mock-up of this core page. Please note, all of the following designs will likely change over time as we develop our ideas and listen to community feedback.

Figure 1: Battle Arena

As you can see in figure 1, the fighting battalions are assigned half the screen each. Both have four distinct sections:

Figure 2: Battle Arena Element Breakdown

1. Battalion health: outlines both the existing health of the battalion in this battle and the remaining number of living fighters.
2. Active fighters: this shows the two cats currently in battle and the next four waiting in line for each battalion. At first, it is likely only the two cats in the centre will be part of the action but as we evolve, it would make sense for this whole section to be involved. (Think archers firing from the back, or a black ops cat wiping out five opponents at once!)
3. Upcoming fighters: these are the waiting hordes who will gradually move upwards until they become active fighters. These fighters still display health bars as further down the line, we’d ideally like to introduce additional artillery to make possible a number of user-controlled attacks on and from this area.
4. Battalion information: here, we provide statistics on each battalion’s performance.

At any point users will be able to select any cat on the screen and view its details (figure 3). The level of information available may be dependent on your previous performance in the arena - the more experienced you are in battle, the more clearance you have to view a cat’s files.

Figure 3: Cat Details

Battle Process

1. Public announcement: we will announce battle details (date, time, numbers, URL depending on battle location) publicly ahead of the event. This will give the battalions time to rally, and create their own promotional material and trash talk gifs.
2. Verification: on game day, we verify each mad cat entering the arena website. Those in the correct battalions are entered into the fight and will appear on screen in turn.
3. Battle: at the agreed time, the battle will begin and play out automatically. Users whose cats are in the “active fighters” section will be able to interact, launching certain attacks using either their cat’s existing weapon or any special items acquired from other MCM events, such as scavenger hunts or an MCM armoury. Longer term, we hope to introduce a higher level of participant control (e.g. being able to launch limited edition weapons from outside the active fighters zone which could change the course of the battle - airstrikes anyone? - or giving higher-ranking officers the ability to choose which troops to send in first). There is huge potential for community strategy here - do you launch special weapons early to gain the advantage or wait for the opposing general to arrive and take him out? Commanders in first or hang back behind the troops?

Depending on the size of the battle, we will be able to control the speed to keep things interesting. It may be that if we have two entire battalions signed up for an event, we run the battles at high speed with a slowdown ‘bullet time’ effect for key strikes / the most interesting head-to-heads. This will need to be worked through in beta.

Similarly, we will need to actively monitor how we deal with battalion attendance differentials. For example, if battalion A turns up with 500 soldiers and battalion B rallies only 100, we need to be able to handle that. In some cases, if the community requests it, we may leave battalion B to rally more of their troops; in other situations, we may limit the battle to a smaller number per battalion to ensure everyone attending has the full battle experience.

Figure 4: Late Battle KIA Detail

Killed in Action

If your cat died in battle (it would happen to many and don’t worry you are only dead until the end of that battle), you would be greeted with a screen detailing your cat’s time of death and any significant fighting achievements e.g. multi-kill (figure 5).

You would then be invited to view your cat’s page in our gallery or return to the main screen to watch the battle’s climax.

Figure 5: KIA Summary

When the Dust Settles

Once the battle has played out and the winning battalion been decided, all users will see a summary screen (figure 6) showing the winning battalion, cat(s) of the game and significant statistics.

Figure 6: Battle Summary

What’s happening under the hood?

It’s important to get the underlying mechanics right - both to make the battles interesting and the rewards appealing.

Verification will allow us to read the metadata of a cat - rank, weapon and even battle history in the longer term. We can then assign scores to these attributes in our engine. In essence, the outcomes of individual battles will be determined by probability across a range of attributes. We can feed in as many as we like, but for now let’s stick to health, power and agility for ease:

1. Health: assigned according to clothing (e.g. SWAT vest provides a higher score than T-shirt. Higher score means more health).
2. Power: assigned on weaponry (e.g. sword scores higher than unarmed. Higher score means more health taken away from the opponent(s) following a successful strike).
3. Agility: less weaponry and clothing gives a higher score, and therefore a higher chance of dodging blows.

Rank will also play an important role. An officer, for example, may receive a multiplier across all traits in line with their seniority. They may also receive a bonus if a certain number of their troops turn up to fight. We can power-up those ranking officers who rally their community into action. Imagine the rankings to be like meeting a series of ‘bosses’ in the gaming world. We’d expect to see foot soldiers fight to the death in relatively even matches, but when faced with a colonel or general, many will fall. And a black ops?? Lights out.

Levels

One of the key takeaways from battles is XP and the ability, therefore, to ‘level up’. Similar to the battlefield awards/medals, this level will be displayed on our gallery page, and will actively increase a cat’s probability scores, making it a more dangerous opponent. The more battle-hardened your cat, the more havoc they can wreak. We may even see some interesting economics for high-level cats.

Cats will fight until their health runs out and they are KIA. If their opponent’s health reaches zero before theirs, they will register a kill and carry on fighting the next opponent. Combined with the probability mechanism, this gives huge scope for single cats to go rampaging through many opponents, and in doing so, gain special multi-kill accolades.

It would make sense that the scores derived from specific attributes is affected by rarity. In most cases, the rarer the attribute, the better the score and so the increased chance of victory for that cat.

Final Thoughts

This is going to be a big project, and it’s one we’re very excited about. As always we’ll be reaching out to the community for feedback, testing and improvements - so stay tuned!

Here’s to future glory on the battlefield!