Re: Slippery slopes and intuitive games
Posted: 28 Apr 2008, 17:44
nobody wants to add farms to *A games, they do just fine (minus some overpowered static defenses.)
Open Source Realtime Strategy Game Engine
https://springrts.com/phpbb/
Unless the enemy makes a mistake too, hence back and forth gameplay.Forboding Angel wrote:No, because that would mean that if you make the slightest mistake, You lose. Battles decided in 5 minutes? No thanks.
Well if the enemy you are facing is so dam good to be perfect the maximum you could do would be to draw the game... in a realistic situation both players will be comiting a lot of small mistakes... :)Forboding Angel wrote:No, because that would mean that if you make the slightest mistake, You lose. Battles decided in 5 minutes? No thanks.
Exactly, and I'm saying the winning player should be more prone to mistakes to make it even. For example, have large area exponentially difficult to defend from raids, have an effective way to kill swarms (dgun?), etc. That said, I think BA for example plays well.manored wrote:Well if the enemy you are facing is so dam good to be perfect the maximum you could do would be to draw the game... in a realistic situation both players will be comiting a lot of small mistakes... :)
Early game can be brutal, KDR rapes pretty good with char as the commander ship turns slow, barely keeping pace with that rascally char . Also, late game the commander can be taken out with 5 powered gms(machine gun ones) or goufhs/zaku2fz/stuff on dodais. Not too bad really.Saktoth wrote: I dont think gundam is slippery slope, the second time KDR mentioned Gundam i was just continuing my train of thought about other games.
My point was:Not being able to do much during the early game = boring. I want to have active and constant interaction between the players, aggressive territorial acquisition, raiding and expansion denial. I want map control to be important and combat meaningful. But i dont want the game to be over in a single engagement. Its a delicate balance.<KDR_11k> Try Gundam, you can't do much in that during the early game
<[LCC]Saktoth> Ya but its also boring.
The discussion was mostly about 'How to solve the problem with games based around territorial resources being slippery slopes?'. 'Remove territorial resources entirely' isnt a solution to this problem in the system, its replacing the system with a different one
As for adding an incredibly strong commander to downplay the importance of early military victories, this can either make early interaction seem pointless, or only help the losing player hold on to his final 10% of the map, delaying the game once its already over.
Its all about degrees. There is no such thing as 'perfect play', esp in spring mods. We arent executing some build order and one deviation means we lose- a standard game between high skill players is littered with mistakes from start to finish, large and small. What constitutes a 'fatal' mistake is up to the games design itself and the enemies ability to exploit it.Teutooni wrote:If two players are of equal skill, and have all the same options, the first one to make a mistake should soon find himself on a slippery slope, lest the games be "brick wall" stalemates, hardly the kind of back and forth Saktoth described.
Have you played Kernel Panic? Its an excellent game. :DForboding Angel wrote:No, because that would mean that if you make the slightest mistake, You lose. Battles decided in 5 minutes? No thanks.
I think IW suffers from this particularly. I think BA and CA have softer curves. For physical examples of why their curves are not as steep as say, KP or IW:Warlord Zsinj wrote:right now t=1 is what is happening now with most mods (incl. IW). T=2 is more ideal.Talking here is ultimately all academic; I'd like to see some physical examples of dealing with slippery slope dynamics in games...
Yes. Absolutely. I'm not advocating mindless RPS mechanics as the end all for strategy. What I am saying is that, as a game designer, you NEED to realize, that even if they attempt to even them as much as possible, simply due to the nature of units in a physics based system some RPS mechanics will exist... and furthermore, because they will exist, you need to design and control them.KDR_11k wrote:Careful with RPS gameplay. If you make that depend on unittypes you pretty much shift the inclination of the slope to the build process instead of the actual battle. I don't think any real life battles were really won by one side having the counter unit to the other side (e.g. real life antiair sucks pretty badly and doesn't really counter air, only fighters can really fight air effectively). How did the 300 Spartans defend Termopylae? Not by having their spears counter Persians or something, they won because of superior tactics. Having victory depend on who made which units (though you'll probably just see equal amounts of every unit) is stupid, it means the battle is decided before it's even fought. The battle should be decided by the battle, by the tactics players exhibit during the battle and by the terrain it's fought on.
This is me stabbing you repeatedly in the thigh with a rusty butterknife. die die die die die!(flags being worth more the longer you hold them, etc).
Me too :) Then someone smart could adapt that to make supplies system using transportable supplies...smoth wrote:honestly, I wish we had resource harvesting. oh well. :\
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XieuTnq2gtw ?smoth wrote:honestly, I wish we had resource harvesting. oh well. :\