Player specific inflation

[tombom]

I've played Rise of Nations and it either didn't effect the balance much or was just an annoyance. I never felt it solved any problems or anything.

Admittedly, I never played/watched any skilled multiplayer games but still.

[[XIII]Roxas]

Yes, I've played RoN. And, I find that I agree with tombom's sentiments. By the time in game where you start mass-producing troops, you'll have a large resource-base to draw from.

[MadRat]

How is the idea of inflation really anything fundamentally different than using gold mines in Warcraft? You basically are creating a finite resource curve. One of the problems with TA imho was always its infinite resources. What the inflation will give me is a fairly predictable threshold of units, which makes it much more realistic to balance out. This threshold will make the game more logical and predictable in some ways, which is key to having any realistic ability to maintain balance.

[tombom]

How is the idea of inflation really anything fundamentally different than using gold mines in Warcraft? You basically are creating a finite resource curve. One of the problems with TA imho was always its infinite resources. What the inflation will give me is a fairly predictable threshold of units, which makes it much more realistic to balance out. This threshold will make the game more logical and predictable in some ways, which is key to having any realistic ability to maintain balance.

Infinite resources a problem? You clearly don't get TA.

[smokingwreckage]

Inflation limits the size of waves in early rushes by causing more damage to your economy when you spam infantry. It SEVERELY hampers players who would like to pepper the map with towers and castles. It forces early decisions on how and where you can expand your territory by making the potential loss of land-grab cities more painful.

I'm not an elite multiplayer of any kind, mind you, but I do pay attention when team-botbashing and in that context I am about as good as I can be without doing some pretty serious mathematics. Our standard game is 4 vs 4, the AI being tough, tough, tough, tougher.

Now, if you successfully boom, the inflation won't mean a thing. That's the whole point of booming. But if you get hit early by up to three AIs then you're going to have to pay attention.

EDIT: I think the intent of that "infinite resources a problem" post was that capped resources made balancing easier because you could predict the maximum possible unit count... but I'm not sure that's valid. You could just as easily say that having a small number of official maps made balance easier.

[MadRat]

I wonder how something like this would affect the current AI's.