Player specific inflation

[MadRat]

How would I go about creating an inflationary cost to units for a player that did not spill over into the economies of other players?

I had an idea where spamming a single unit makes it inherently more expensive on an exponential curve thereby making the player choose his purchases wisely and the timing of those purchases just may make tech progress - or a new strategic line of reasoning at the least - necessary to win a tight game.

This type of mod should make it much more difficult to do just about every current conventional mode of play. The goal is to facilitate the use of every unit available to a side. If tank rushing, bomber swarms, and whatnot becomes obsolete then it worked.

If I lua script the costs of a unit to increase, doesn't this affect the other players? I'm under the impression that every player shares the same build tables. If Player A makes some unit this should not affect the cost of that same unit to Player B.

[yuritch]

You can in theory use lua to deduct some amount of resources AFTER the unit is produced, and that amount can be different for each player. So, all unit costs are still the same, but resource lose is different for each team. Of course, that won't work well if the team is currently stalling on that resource - can't take much of what isn't there, but something could probably be invented to avoid that (some constantly looping lua function that remembers player's 'debt' and takes resources slowly once they are available?)

[Argh]

You can do this with LUA, but you'd have to store a set of costs per Team, then apply those costs when units were bought.

And, may I suggest an alternative? Instead of causing "inflation", simply have certain unit types draw upon a separate pool or pools, that regenerate over time, but do not follow the growth of your RTS economy at all.

For example, for 5 "specialist points", you could buy an UberMech Pilot, or a StratoBomber Pilot. They're both cool units, they cost very different amounts of Metal or Energy or Buildtime... but 5 specialist points take 30 seconds to regen- what do you need right now? What can you afford right now?

Meanwhile, you can spam armies of weak Soldiers and ordinary Tanks all day long- nothing near as powerful, but they don't use up specialist points.

Having a finite set of regenerating resources in the background of your game (which is a fairly good simulation of the real world, where it takes years to train a fighter pilot, and nuclear engineers don't grow on trees) might be interesting- players would be penalized by losing the "resources" that also gave them the most firepower or other special things, so they'd face the same problem generals have always faced, which is that armies cannot be composed entirely of SEALs- you have to deal with what you can get. It'd be another way of approaching game-design stuff that has been done with a third(fourth, fifth) resource traditionally, where one or more of the resources could not be expanded in production. Then, specialists or high-powered stuff could cost less, but draw down a pool of finite resources. So, as the economy went exponential, you'd eventually hit a wall, where you'd be able to afford a flood of spam, or for the same price, spend some specialist points and get something really terrifying, as an end-game monster...

[Archangel of Death]

Well, that doesn't quite do the same thing. What MadRat wants would force a player to use practically every unit to maintain a viable position. Even garpikes on Comet Catcher, once the spiraling costs of Gators and Raiders has pushed them out of favor. Your idea would still leave them able to spam "spaem unit" indefinitely, but force a choice between the various special units. And since "spaem unit" doesn't use special points, they'll probably be doing both at once anyways...

MadRat's idea would be easier to implement in an instant-build environment. Only way I can think of atm with slow building would require being able to intercept and supplant build orders (which would be really nice, can we already do this?).

[[Krogoth86]]

Well reminds me of an intelligent .nocosts command which doesn't set everything to 1 but to a value you somehow have calculated via LUA. It also works in so far that units that are already under construction aren't affected by the new costs. Don't know how far this is an internal feature you can "manipulate" to satisfy you though...

[KDR_11k]

Play Fibre?

BTW, to make sure no building happens when the extra cost isn't paid use AllowBuildStep.

[MadRat]

KDR, how is the player going to know the actual unit costs at that point? Which reminds me, how am I going to display to projected inflationary costs? Damn...

[KDR_11k]

You can alter the tooltip.

[ianmac]

Couldn't you make the build time longer the more of that unit you have? I think that would do the same thing.

[Archangel of Death]

Anything that would require changing the unit def will affect all players, not just each player individually. While that could be fun on its own, its not quite what Madrat is looking for. (It would allow player A to spam unit x, which is the best counter to unit y, when y has even been brought into play by anyone yet, so that when he spams y himself later for use against player B, B can't afford to defend with x. Could be fun for player A, poor B though. Should have wondered what dozens of x's were laying around for.)

[smokingwreckage]

The idea is a bit like in Empire Earth. The more of a certain unit you have built, the more it costs to build more. Then each unit uses a different combination of two out of five economic resources.... the economy and strategy interact in interesting ways.

[MadRat]

Wow, you're right about that Imperial Earth. It looks like a very interesting concept, actually much further developed than what I was looking at concept-wise. I'm going to have to look into that game and try to discover the intricacies.

[[XIII]Roxas]

It's called a ramp-up cost. Games such as Empire Earth, and Rise of Nations have them. However, all is not equal. For example, infantry costs eventually 'max out' at something like 150% the original cost. Forts, however, continue to escalate in price.

The ultimate, final, anti-porc measure.

[Saktoth]

Honestly, this is just a forced way to make up for poor balancing. If the units were all equally useful in the first place, or had specific counters if the enemy spams just 1 type of unit, you wouldnt need this sort of system at all.

[smokingwreckage]

It works well in Rise of Nations.

[quantum]

Still, it would be more interesting if you mixed units because they had synergies. I agree that it's lazy balancing.

[MadRat]

Okay, so a few people think the balancing from inflationary pressures is lazy. Be more specific in your examples. I think making such broad, generalized statements could be considered lazy. I'd like to give you few negative posters a chance to explain yourselves why this model is bad.

[KingRaptor]

If the units were all equally useful in the first place, or had specific counters if the enemy spams just 1 type of unit, you wouldnt need this sort of system at all.

[KDR_11k]

A valid reason for exponential prices is not to force unit diversity but to put a limit on the unit count. E.g. in Fibre the growing node cost exists to enforce a lower number of nodes but of course there's no alternative to nodes, it just prevents the player from covering half the map with nodes (namely the half that his enemy didn't cover). If you see people making more units than you want them to have exponential prices are a good idea.

[smokingwreckage]

Has anyone here actually PLAYED Rise of Nations? As someone who HAS- and a lot- I'm saying that it works in that game. Anyone who knows specific examples of inflation being "bad balancing" in an actual game, feel free to chime in here.