Poll: Is a game with more units better?

[albator]

Maybe you are right when talking about the average player, but you are wrong when it comes to BA in FFA or 'the best player in the team'. These players do hit high unit limits on a regular basis AND it forces these players to change their tactics.

If you really have a replay/screenshot of a player with "control thousand of units", please post.
Sometimes it happens that players must reclaim solars etc, replace with fusions when they reach unitlimit. Unitlimit on most hosts is 500 atm? The players still hardly have 500 controllable units in normal games. If someone was to make 300 peewees that would be quite special.
Maybe fighter swarms can reach such numbers: but one does not really controll or micro them.

Pick any on of those ffa replay: http://replays.admin-box.com/player/608 ... match_type most have a max far beyond 1k unit. I advise you watch games with Kuros so see how bad it can get :D

Ofc you don't usually control thousand (even thousands) of unit, but it happens, especially on non-acidic map cause of eco-whore-see-vs-ground-balance of ba (see unit to take over ground suck being balanced by cheap underwater eco)

And when you need to do that (there are often 5k unit+ with good player on map like mearth), you just happy you can actaully macro your group unit and not just to crtl+A, click and wait 2 min fps goes back to normal...

[Das Bruce]

For the discussion, are we considering buildings units too?

[klapmongool]

For the discussion, are we considering buildings units too?

I think Knorke doesnt. But why discriminate? If I prefer to 'mass-guardian' my enemies to death I should be able to do that without being limited by the number of cores the engine uses.

For the record; games with very little units can be very cool also. I just think *Annihilation is so much cooler with a shitton of units.

[Jools]

Less is more.

[klapmongool]

Less is more.

So you think the ideal situation is that game-makers are limited by the engine in their game design choices?

[Anarchid]

game-makers are limited by the engine in their game design choices?

You, as a game developer, are never limited by the engine.

If you feel so, just go and fork it. This is open source.

Considering the modern multiversion state of spring, you could also easily demand that all your players use that fork.

[klapmongool]

game-makers are limited by the engine in their game design choices?

You, as a game developer, are never limited by the engine.

If you feel so, just go and fork it. This is open source.

Considering the modern multiversion state of spring, you could also easily demand that all your players use that fork.

I am a player btw, not a game developer. I don't want to be a game developer nor a engine developer. I can imagine the game developers not wanting to be engine developers or the other way around.

So yes. Game-developers are limited by the engine they are working with. The degree to which they should be considering cpu-power in a multi-core world is being discussed.

[Kloot]

You sure live up to the "mongool" part of your name.

Whether game-developers feel limited (and there will always be limitations) is irrelevant. They do not develop the engine and do not get to decide what reasonable limits for it are or should be. Nor are the engine developers in any way obligated to expand those limits when 1) their engine is a free product and 2) there are other technical concerns besides just consuming all of the "cpu-power in a multi-core world" which you as a non-developer have no clue about. This is not a democracy and you have no vote in the process.

So no, if you prefer to do X and your engine of choice does not allow X, then nothing. Find another engine or join the development team so you can involve yourself, otherwise drop the entitlement card of what you "should" be able to do because it carries no weight with actual developers.

[klapmongool]

You sure live up to the "mongool" part of your name.

Whether game-developers feel limited (and there will always be limitations) is irrelevant. They do not develop the engine and do not get to decide what reasonable limits for it are or should be. Nor are the engine developers in any way obligated to expand those limits when 1) their engine is a free product and 2) there are other technical concerns besides just consuming all of the "cpu-power in a multi-core world" which you as a non-developer have no clue about. This is not a democracy and you have no vote in the process.

So no, if you prefer to do X and your engine of choice does not allow X, then nothing. Find another engine or join the development team so you can involve yourself, otherwise drop the entitlement card of what you "should" be able to do because it carries no weight with actual developers.

Nice job on the insults. Now grow up and understand that what a discussion is.

User was warned for this post. Felony 1.

[Jools]

discuss /dɪˈskʌs/ vb (transitive)

to have a conversation about; consider by talking over; debate
to treat (a subject) in speech or writing

Etymology: 14th Century: from Late Latin discussus examined, from discutere to investigate, from Latin: to dash to pieces, from dis-1 + quatere to shake, strike

In Spanish, discutir means to have an arguement.

[Kloot]

Nice job on the insults. Now grow up and understand that what a discussion is.

What discussion is that, exactly?

The entire purpose of this thread is to be one giant insult directed at every active Spring developer other than zerver, because he already knows our arguments (but won't accept them) and we know his (but won't accept them).

Not to mention it was you who just had to contribute this:

Without knowing anything about coding i'll say this on the subject: true MT is the future of Spring.

1) Without knowing anything about coding or how Spring works what do you hope to accomplish with such a remark besides polarizing the "discussion" (which is not even supposed to be between developers and players) from the start?
2) You don't work on Spring to determine its future, we do. And a horde of BA players jumping up and down feeling limited because they can't spam 12984305843854365 armflash in FFA won't influence it no matter how many polls zerver starts.

[a1983]

+1 for big scale battle. I think it's Spring feature - control in battle changing from micro to macro.

[klapmongool]

Nice job on the insults. Now grow up and understand that what a discussion is.

What discussion is that, exactly?

The entire purpose of this thread is to be one giant insult directed at every active Spring developer other than zerver, because he already knows our arguments (but won't accept them) and we know his (but won't accept them).

That is something between you and Zerver. I can contribute my opinion in this public thread.

Not to mention it was you who just had to contribute this:

Without knowing anything about coding i'll say this on the subject: true MT is the future of Spring.

1) Without knowing anything about coding or how Spring works what do you hope to accomplish with such a remark besides polarizing the "discussion" (which is not even supposed to be between developers and players) from the start?
2) You don't work on Spring to determine its future, we do. And a horde of BA players jumping up and down feeling limited because they can't spam 12984305843854365 armflash in FFA won't influence it no matter how many polls zerver starts.

If you are bothered by me saying that true MT is the future of Spring (I probably should have said gaming) I invite you to argue against that instead of attacking me.

If you don't want to read posts from players about your precious engine then either ban us all from these boards or don't open these topics.

[Pxtl]

... I'm beginning to see why the ill-fated OSRTS fork project happened.

[knorke]

For the discussion, are we considering buildings units too?

I think Knorke doesnt. But why discriminate?

I think different unit types have varying amount of "fun potential" or "gameplay value" to them.
100 tanks are different to 100 windmills - which would you rather want to controll, which one need to be controlled?
The windmills do not provide much fun, the player can not do anything with them. Turrets are somewhere inbetween, Big Berthas or Guardians certainly have some fun value, but a forest of AA missile turrets not so much.

So you think the ideal situation is that game-makers are limited by the engine in their game design choices?

With regard to unit limits, no game* made a design choice. You can build stuff until you start to lag. No population limit to stop you.
This limit gets pushed further by faster computers, engine improvements etc but eventually there will be the same problem again.

*appearently except Flozi's BTL game but unreleased does not count!

[Kloot]

That is something between you and Zerver.

It was, until he started this thread. Now it's between zerver plus whichever part of the non-dev community he can persuade with his biased polls and us, and we are expected to defend against these politics because after all, who wants to live with only 1000 units per player when you can have 2000 or 4000 or 8000 or 16000 without lag or slowdown as the poll suggests, right? Why don't you accuse us of standing in the way of Progress™ next?

If you are bothered by me saying that true MT is the future of Spring (I probably should have said gaming) I invite you to argue against that instead of attacking me.

That would be next to impossible since you are unfamiliar with coding in general and Spring's design and code structure in particular. In any case I should not need to argue against an uninformed blanket statement (which I am bothered by, yes) that completely skips over the actual issues or why this poll really exists. For most players the fact that the majority of Spring's developers consider zerver's interpretation of "true MT" less than optimal should be enough information without having every technical detail explained to them.

If you don't want to read posts from players about your precious engine then either ban us all from these boards or don't open these topics.

You know this topic was not opened to create genuine discussion, so don't pretend our problem with it is that we do not want to read negative opinions. Maybe try to put yourself in our position for once and consider more than your own feelings of what Spring should be.

Finally, given that ...

Spring is provided to you for free.
You choose to use it to play games.
You choose to accept its limitations as-is:

Spring is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

... you can draw your own conclusions about how a sense of entitlement such as yours is received.

... I'm beginning to see why the ill-fated OSRTS fork project happened.

Are you? Please give us your insights into events that happened more than six years ago when none of the current developers were around.

[Forboding Angel]

I might add that Zerver has advocated the removal of LUA completely, because it makes MT "harder".

That alone should scare you.

Also, -1.

In Evo the unit limits are set to 250 per person by default. Due to the fact that the vast majority of those units are army units with only 20 or 30 being buildings, it works out very well.

This "poll" is inherently flawed.

[FLOZi]

*appearently except Flozi's BTL game but unreleased does not count![/size]

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... as#p508823

[Neddie]

I remember very, very little about OSRTS except that it was ambitious. I believe JC didn't have the time necessary to commit to it, but I don't want to overreach my memory on this topic. I will say that I believe there was no consensus on the language to use, and with a small developer base this stalled the project early on. The decision to create a new engine may have had something to do with the limitations of the architecture, but I don't think it came out of developer disagreement. Swift or Tobi may recall more.

To counter your assertion, Knorke, there are numerous Spring games which did not ignore unit limits in design, whether functionally limited or arbitrarily limited. I believe even ANTS had some work around that. In the S44 team we considered the topic relative to historical data, although I don't think we set any hard limits.

One of the points everyone is missing is that even without MT, the people who are voting "+1" here are already experiencing and enjoying games with huge numbers of units. They aren't advocating for the resolution to a problem, they're agitating for an ideal. This is, of course, probably part of the reason why Zerver brought this up in the way he did.

[klapmongool]

You assume an awful lot about me. And yea, I could point at all the fallacies but I won't. And apparently you get to say things that if I say them I get warned for. Not exactly a good basis for a discussion.

User was warned for this post. Felony 4.