Usually never here in the forum. ZOMG who are all those people? Froggie was never before as accurate as now.

albator, USSR has nothing to do with communism and the "the true team game is about supporting the best player" thing works perfectly well since you can assist your best player by ecoing and building nanos next to their factory.

It's refreshing to see so many people supporting communism in games. Not just ZK, even though it is of course the focal point here.

I don't know how ZK has done it but I set forced share rates at 95% metal stored (similar for energy). Of course players can always share set amounts via the h dialog. Seems to be a good compromise, if the epic noob is leaking metal, the experienced players are getting it where needed and theoretically nothing is wasted.

Communism promotes proper teamwork and instead of losing because of "that stupid noob in the corner", you lose because your team did not work well enough together.

How does ZK handle metal/energy leak anyway? I'm not sure I've ever thought to ask that question. It really is quite relevant to the discussion.

Noone is quite sure how energy sharing works in ZK but I can outline the idea. Energy income is mostly shared and the fill proportion of the ally team's total energy storage is the proportion of the ally team's energy income sent to overdrive.

Overdrive works per ally team to create extra metal from mexes. 95% of the base income of each mex + full overdrive from each mex is split evenly between members of the team. 5% goes to the owner. Metal sharing only occurs with income received from mexes and if you completely fill your metal storage.

Storages are owned privately by each player.

Ok so basically if a player is useless and leaks like a bad tampon, his allies benefit. Dunno what the heck these BA nubs are complaining about then.

Well, lots of newbs also have a tendency to build 10 nanos for just a +10 metal income and then try to rush a bertha. That's when things get annoying.

That was a big reason for unlocks, which was to take away some of those tempting but ultimately destructive newbie tendencies to screw their teammates over with unrealistic strategies. BA doesn't have that as much because of the tech tree.

Wasn't there some talk of having more of the base (non-overdriven) metal extraction get kept by the guy who built the mine? That modoption could probably be implemented for the hardcore "I don't want to share" mode - a "Keep 100% of base extraction" would be doable, woudln't it?

pity, ZK is much less forgiving for small teams of mixed skill levels. One noob sat in their bases spamming sneaky pete and shield off no income cripples the whole team.. without coop the other players could just expand over his part of the maps metal and play on without throwing the game

I love you google_frog.

His friends call him G-Frawg.

I wish this forum had a +1 button so that I could break my mouse on clicking it for this quote.

yeah, google & sak are probably better qualified to put together RTS games than most commercial developers

How very facetious of you, come on ivory, that isn't right.

To be fair to ivory (my only objective here!) most commercial developers wouldn't even know where to start in making a good RTS. A lot of the commercial RTS's that come out are broken by the players for online play within a few weeks, having only one strategy that beats everything else: Even SC1 had zerg rush, which had to wait for an expansion to be fixed. Most developers don't get that far- for Homeworld it was fighters and light vettes, for Age of Empires 2 it was a tower rush (or a hun rush) in the fuedal age. That is after they fixed the issue (which lasted for a YEAR) where Tuetons could blow up their own town center and build it again outside the enemy town center, and out-range them, beating the enemy in the dark age with only villagers.

For league of legends dominion its cheater poppy and Sion with a full crit and cdr build.

Imho, fundamentally most RTS games haven't shucked the relics of the past. The first RTS games were single-player and were designed with a linear progression of units, unlocking units one or two at a time over the course of the game. It wasn't about balance, it was about what's fun - upgrades existed for the RPGish feeling of getting more powerful and awesome. Gradually multiplayer got bolted on but many of the RPGish tropes and gradual unlocking features remained.

I mean, look at the jump FPS games made in the late '90s as online-only FPS games changed the face of the industry - how Counterstrike and Quake 3 and Team Fortress threw out so much that we took for granted.

Starcraft 2 is still fundamentally the modern-day extension of Warcraft: Orcs Vs Humans. It's still an RPGish progression through upgrades and unlocks.... and I don't really see this being a good feature. Because of the progression through the modes of play, developers aren't really making *one* game but a dozen similar games. They have to worry about the initial scouting attacks, the early raids, the expansion phase, the assaults, etc. And for what? It means they've created a dozen games players have to learn and they have to balance, instead of one.

I don't see this as a good feature.

Most commercial games don't have hundreds of people playing them over a span of 5-6 years, most commercial games have some suit going "MAKE IT LIKE THIS but THIS 2.0." Don't forget the players and devs who's feedback and time have made ZK what it is. Hobby projects have MUCH higher potential for gameplay due to the fact that people working on them are free from the constraints of working for someone else. Just my opinion but either Ivory was being very rude or very dismissive of the people out there actually developing. I don't mean to downplay anyone's role here just saying I don't think he is making a fair comparison either mocking or exalting google and sak.

Working to that kind of requirement and deadline is a part of what being a commercial development house is. You're forgetting that they have budgets for testers and a long Q&A cycle: A part of this budget should go on skilled players who will be able to break the game.

I think a lot of competent players could do the same as Google and I. Not all of them, there is a mindset among some players of 'Make it exactly like that other game I'm great at' or 'You cannot be good at a game until you accept that its flaws are legitimate strategies' (The kind of Sirlin Scrub' mentality, which is Anti-design at its core), which doesn't make them bad players but does make them bad designers. For my part, I trust David Kim 100x more than I trust Dustin Browder, whose claim to fame is a few of the later C&C games...

you need to work as a developer for a few years. The goals are never realistic, the timeline a pipedream, the deadline and features are seldom a fixed mark.

if by competent players you mean someone like godde maybe.

@Saktoth - Sirlin's "Scrub" speech was a line to players.

He made it clear that *players* should be playing the game to win. If that game isn't fun, then that's the developer's fault. It's not that gameplay bugs are a good idea, just that if you're playing the game you should accept the game as it is and exploit the bugs to win... and if the resulting game isn't fun, you should play something different.

This was an argument to *players*. The problem is that hardcore players turn this adaptation into a merit of the game and elevate those bugs to features. Look at all the silly "pro-mode" FPS games that canonize physics bugs that date back to the late '90s.

And yeah,

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

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