Spring RTS Engine

How is the best way of avoiding games having a slippery slope, meaning one single random event will decide the game outcome.

I think the dgun concept is perfect in terms of adding a gameplay element that prevents this.

Victory should be achieved with continuous control over the battlefield, not with a few raiders sneaking through and evaporating the whole base.

A commander is a unit you have 1 of, in the whole game, so he should have special abilities? He is the COMMANDER, not a random builder with limited buildlist as a further handicap.

This only leaves the question, how to make the commander not the central part of a compush assault, and only make him a defensive unit?

CA has a modoption that incorporates a TA style comblast, that wont hurt other commanders. This way pushing a combomb and sacrificing your com for enemy comm and some of their defensive units/structures is not viable, since your commander wont take down the enemy commander as he dies, like in BA

Discuss :)

so by what your saying every rts that doesnt have a dgun is fail and is slippery slope ??

so thats all but Supreme com and ota (tho no1 uses overdrive in
supcom)

Some rts games give you one Builder unit with no abilities god forbid that!!!

I know your making this post over the shit im giving you about your bad mod option for CA.

Firstly your reasons why CatCom is great are highly flawed

Its a good defensive tool ?? i wouldnt call a unit with under 4k hp that dies rather quickly and levels your base as a good defensive tool.

to avoid com bombing ?? So the comassplodes levels your base but you make the com immune to death blast you lost your base but at least!! u get a 1440 metal corpse (most bases are worth more than 1440 metal)

and to avoid slippery slope ?? other rts's manage to survive fine without dgun (hello SC/DoW/CnC3/CoH/WiC/WC3) OTA and most *A mods are balanced towards having the dgun as a form of defense (guess what CA still has a nerfed dgun with a com upgrade) the mod your playing is taking steps to balance away from the dgun and around units.


CA isnt a Com vs Com game and it doesnt aim to be comcentric. Earlier revisions of CA ended up in com pushing and targetting coms to win. As it stands coms are still decent but losing one wont decide the game(YO DAWG LESS SLIPPERY SLOPE).

Losing a com is a slippery slope mechanic in itself. Lowering the value lessens that affect aswell as putting more importance on units.

In the end of the day your com option wont make it as default as its against CA's basic principles on having focus on All units and not just one specific one

now stop trying to compare CA to other *A mods. Dgun has made noobs complacent

Also CA is different to other *A mods it has flat balancing. as you can start heavier labs (tier 2) if you make a reaper for example and it gets dgunned its gg game over for u , you spend most of your eco on a heavy unit that just got one shotted were as losing a flash early isnt a big loss. It unbalances the lab balance

The sooner you get your headround CA isnt like TA the less your head will hurt. Because what your baawing about are TA hangovers.

Think of it as a new game !!

PS. if your com doesnt have a bomb you cant com bomb. So you created the problem your trying to solve in your com option nice contradicition :]

/thread

Slippery slope is prevented by allowing cost-effective defense/crippling attacks.

That means:
- more RPS (rock-paper-scissors) elements - to allow cost effective counters of enemy force

- tactical options (cloaking, air drops, jumping) - to allow cost effective surprising incursion/crippling attacks

- benefits for successfully defending side (lots of metal from corpses, cost effective turrets) - to give defending side some economic benefit if he can outsmart attacker

If u wanna avoid slippery slope and make the game last real long make defenses strong and make the mod economy be less expansion dependent.
Another option is to make mod defendant maps and make the maps porcy but the defenses weak..like starcraft for example.

I think either Com should have the same health and a dgun off the bat

OR

Keep having upgradable dgun, and then buff the health.

So far i've played lots of games today, and hitting a com seems to be the most effective way to cripple someone, just like ive had done to me.

im not speaking about BA preference, or OTA preference, this is standard with other RTS which make commanders non aggressive units.

More health means less chance of pop, and ultimately better 1v1 games, small team games 2v2 ect.

At the moment CA seems to be very 1v1 com ends unfriendly.

I've had a match with licho where destorying his base and mopping up wasn't enough to stop two units attacking my commander, and having no time to respond (due to the commander alert going off after my com died)

From playing a few games, it seems that the com has so little health that theres no way you can move your com after its being suprised attacked.

I know otherside could go blue in the face in telling me that i should be able to counter a rush of t1, or t2, but the thing is, not everyone plays at the same speed.

If you rush t2 tank such as a bulldog, and you havent spent your eco on flash to counter it
there is no way your going to get away from it, no matter where it is, front line or in your base.

I've seen this happen to me, and others, and genrally its poor micro on the enemy side, due to me being able to get close, but then OH SNAP no dgun.

reivanen wrote:How is the best way of avoiding games having a slippery slope, meaning one single random event will decide the game outcome.

I think the dgun concept is perfect in terms of adding a gameplay element that prevents this.

(Disclaimer: the following opinions are from the perspective of playing CA and intended for it since the OP is a CA player.)

This dgun you so admire can go the other way and cause the slippery slope instead of prevent it.

In small enough maps, if one player commpushes and the other doesn't, the commpusher gets the center and wins.

If dgun kills large units with one shot, they must be balanced to be stronger accordingly. But when that dgun is lost, they are now too strong.

See BA drama surrounding the strategies of commbombing, commnapping, dgunning this and that. From perusal one would think nearly all BA strats are centered around the commander. These conversations are non existant in CA where strats (and drama) involve various different units.

http://trac.caspring.org/wiki/CommanderSillyTree

old topic is old.

Licho wrote:Slippery slope is prevented by allowing cost-effective defense/crippling attacks.

That means:
- more RPS (rock-paper-scissors) elements - to allow cost effective counters of enemy force

- tactical options (cloaking, air drops, jumping) - to allow cost effective surprising incursion/crippling attacks

- benefits for successfully defending side (lots of metal from corpses, cost effective turrets) - to give defending side some economic benefit if he can outsmart attacker

This is the best answer. There are huge wealth of potential ways to create these scenarios where defense can be cost effective, or offense can be crippling vs cost. Tech choices, RPS elements, tactical counters (air vs antiair), effective role usage (artillery being able to pound a defense line while being defended by strong mobile units), tactical options (surprise attacks of really any type), unit combination, the list goes on and on. From a game developers perspective, I suggest picking a few game mechanics you are relatively comfortable with and really crunching the numbers so you know they make sense and are balanced for all the scenarios you need them to be.

Even things like having a highly explosive fusion plant plays into it... because sure, while it's being well defended it's an incredibly potent economic center, but all it takes is a few well placed LRPC shots, or a half dozen bombers to slip through, and suddenly the game has switched around. So effectively you either need to cover every plausibe offensive, build antinuke, plasma shields, violent AA, and lots of antiground to prevent T3 kbot rushes... those things all cost a hell of a lot, or you focus on keeping your opponent too busy to slip those offensive items behind your front lines.

There is also the speed factor.
If you slow down a game there is less chance of overlooking stuff and losing tons of units.The slower a game is the more strategic it is,allowing you time to think.

Gota wrote:There is also the speed factor.
If you slow down a game there is less chance of overlooking stuff and losing tons of units.The slower a game is the more strategic it is,allowing you time to think.

Yup, and thats why XTA is so popular.

Play games with the "limited d-gun" option enabled.

Slippery slope means advantages lead to more advantages. It's nothing about raiding though raiding may be a way to tilt it. In a territorial game the incline of the slope is usually formed by the comparative sizes of your territories, the player who has more of it is stronger and more able to take more territory to grow even stronger. A slope isn't necessarily bad if it signals the beginning of the final blow that ends the game but it is bad if the slide is slow but unavoidable. A game that is decided 5 minutes in but takes 25 minutes to resolve sucks, the game should end quickly after it's decided. The slope part is that after that decision at 5:00 the game is a slow slide that keeps weakening the defeated player but still has him strong enough to keep fighting for a long time. A game where victory requires the elimination of enemy resources will usually have a slope but it's not an issue if it takes 1-2 minutes to play out.

A way to avoid needing a slope is to have a point judging once a time or point limit is reached with the points having no further influence on the game itself (e.g. a player with twice the points can't do more things just because he has the points) but that doesn't mean that a slope won't form when stuff gets blown up or built up, giving one player more ways to take points and blow/build up more stuff.

what KDR said. also, see what DOW2 does and what evorts did waaay before DOW2 was released (IIRC) - players start with a fixed amount of victory points; capturing territory makes the enemy's points go down. a player loses when his VPs reach 0. (never played COH, this may have been there, too.)

The concept originally came from the Battlefield games, CoH brought it to RTSes.

There's a difference between advantage curve and slippery slope. Slippery slope hits when the curve hits a certain steepness, it's definition is basically the point at which it doesn't really matter what the losing player does, or what mistakes the winning player makes, the end is just a matter of time and the conclusion is forgone. TA, generally speaking is a pretty good game for slippery slope, better then starcraft at any rate.

From a developers stand point generally you want your slippery slope as steep as possible all the while without causing the game to be chaotic or randomly decided. Players should feel like they are in control and they aren't just rolling a dice to determine the outcome, but at the same time you need to have those structures in place to make the winning team pay heavily enough for mistakes they make, and the losing team gain enough ground for events they orchestrated effectively.

You want your winning player to gain advantages for performing effectively in the start, the idea being that you want the curve to steep down at a gradual rate as one player takes control and the other player fights to come back... but at the same time you need those risk structures in place so that the right move at the right time can offset all but the steepest of forgone games.

An example unmentioned: Initial bases with defensive value (i.e. town centers in all the age games). This provides all players with limited zone control that is effective during early play.

In practice; it prevents some fools mate/rush scenarios. Unlike the D-Gun, it will never serve as a means for offense, much less outcomes like Com/Transport scenarios.

Relative equality and dynamic possibilities are sometimes unfriendly bedfellows. In the end, I see two approaches that seem to work across genre; "no one gets cheese" (ie chess or CS) and "more cheese for everyone" (ie AGE II or mod community TA [pre-spring]). Of the two, I have a bias for the cheesier in RTS's.

Common failures fit the metaphor as well. For instance; "secret cheese" (not newb friendly), "foreign cheese" (hacks), and "unequal cheese" (lack of balance - faction, map, or otherwise). I digress.

Fog of war and team games seem to be a huge factor in "slippery slope". If you don't know you are done, and quiting might harm someone else, it is hard to make the informed decision to capitulate (chess vs. 16 player BA on DSD).

Emmm, cheese. I am going to the fridge to eat some cheese.

cs cheese = awp fags.

Much glory to the no awp server.

Still, part of the fun was hunting down the awpers. You have to have someone to hate.

@Eman

The problem with starting defense is that the game can get "moribund" (I forget who coined that term, but I love it) - that is, the game is won, but the attacker needs to tech up in order to make the kill. If home base has defenses, attacker eradicate's defender's army (but leaves home defenses) and claims surrounding territory, laying siege. He then has to wait to mount a force capable of breaking the home defenses.

it depends on the relative strength of the 'initial defensive structure'

ie in the AOE games the Town centre is pretty crap, but it will stop a pair of clubmen from killing all your villagers. so while a 'spoiling' attack against it will fail, a determined attack, with the appropriate amount of resources applied will succeed.

slippery slope is all about the cost of a single failure (or not even a failure, just not doing so well in a particular encounter) in the early stages of the game. Imagine if you build 4 weasels at the start of a BA game, and your opponent builds 5 jeffies, if that was the defining point of the game (which continues until you lose 15 minutes later) both players are probably gonna feel a bit pissed about it. losing because your opponent lost one less/built one more unit effectively decided the game after 2 minutes leads to a distinctly unsatisfying game experience.

shit. i keep forgetting the points im trying to make