How to prevent ..

[PicassoCT]

the occurance of fixed Strategys ?

Even with assuming perfect balance, there is always (add dependance on circumstances like the map) a fixed build rearing its ugly head.

So if you hate fixed builds, and you want the indecent advances to a higher tech level to happen for a completely diffrent reason.. how to archive that?

Fetchquests?
Bring to your factory five captured pewees to upgrade?

Skillquest?
Dance the magice upgrade dance with some bots around it?

Ressources?
Bring forth the attention and push the button 42000 times?
Add metall and energy, stir the whole mass..

Transformerquest?
Walk a lvl1 lab to another, and give them some privacy?

Throw me some good answers..

[Anarchid]

Fetchquests?
Bring to your factory five captured pewees to upgrade?

Urban Assault was an RTS game with FPS elements.
In 1998, Urban Assault had a flat tech tree.

Still, sometimes in multiplayer games you had a restricted list of units you could use outright.
Ability to build others was gained by capturing and holding specific map locations.

To my knowledge, this was also revisited in some DoW games, as "relics".

A thing i'd love to see in JW specifically though, would be using corpses of your enemies as tech resource :)

Also: UFO-style reverse-engineering from captured enemy material. Bonus points for autopsies and torture of live specimens.

[scifi]

I vote on Skillquest!

This is very dependent on what kind of game you want to do but here are a couple examples.

Since journey war has a lot of insectoid units(i think???) maybe adding a lot of morphable units that you can add wings, or poison glands, or even atuning your units to an element like fire/frost/nature, each with either slow/damage per second or just raw damage increases.

Variety i guess helps a lot.

Maybe make the player have to make the Poison gland factory so that you can add poison to your units etc...

You could even make that be map dependent with having the resources to tech far away from starting position, or like dawn of war capture points etc...

Make progression and tech be about the units themselves, but i guess again this is dependent on what kind of game you want.

However i think unit diversity and customization beats factory tech tiers, but thats just me.

[SinbadEV]

What about having exploration and espionage? Finding certain map features or spying on certain enemy structures or units to learn new stuff yourself... this also makes for an interesting game play mechanic where opposing forces may have to avoid building certain things (or at least protecting them better) because they can be used by an opponent to unlock a particularly dangerous tech.

[PicassoCT]

What about having exploration and espionage? Finding certain map features or spying on certain enemy structures or units to learn new stuff yourself... this also makes for an interesting game play mechanic where opposing forces may have to avoid building certain things (or at least protecting them better) because they can be used by an opponent to unlock a particularly dangerous tech.

Bravo.. never thought of that :)
Really brilliant

One factory upgrades so far by feeding it your own units.. not very creative.. will add corpses of the enemy. Researchtrees never caught me- they are timers with fancy buttons and dependancys on other timers.

[Anarchid]

will add corpses of the enemy.

If unlock types depend on corpse types...

[PicassoCT]

Not possible - there are only three corpse types - small, medium and huge.. +Infantrycorpses

@SinbadEV... there is a huge problem to make this "Upgrade-missions" fair though... What if the enemy is not reachable without upgraded units? Behind a ocean..

Or behind several other enemys..
Puzzleboxes are great but they have to be solveable..
Artefacts might be interesting as a research ressource to destroy.. Enemy Units are difficult.. if you dont take any enemy but specifics...

[SinbadEV]

@SinbadEV... there is a huge problem to make this "Upgrade-missions" fair though... What if the enemy is not reachable without upgraded units? Behind a ocean..

Or behind several other enemys..
Puzzleboxes are great but they have to be solveable..
Artefacts might be interesting as a research ressource to destroy.. Enemy Units are difficult.. if you dont take any enemy but specifics...

Maybe there are other ways to get the same tech and the espionage is a short-cut.

That said, let's say the unit that allows me to learn how to build level 1 bug scouts is a level 1 bot scout... my opponent could only prevent me from learning this tech by never sending level 1 bot scouts to my base.

[Silentwings]

Hm I came here expecting the OP to read "pregnancy"

[PicassoCT]

Hm I came here expecting the OP to read "pregnancy"

Pregnancy - that sounds suspiciously like a doom timer to me :)

[CarRepairer]

ZK has lots of well-balanced tier-1 factories and lots of early game RPS. There are no discussions of fixed build strategies.

[PicassoCT]

No, Zero-K is symetric, thus chess balanced.

Also Anarchid vs Someone - coment by Shadowfurry

Thats very unsusual to go on this map for Spiders and Planes..

So even in Zero-K it boils down to fast executed chess... which means interesting play happens for newbs and very very experienced players. In between is the valley of learning all the tactics..

Master Licho says:

You need to remember to execute a swift kick in the balls, after pyrodrop. Its one of n! combos.
Got to learn them all!

Which is working in a way. But not good enough. Such balance, once mastered leads to matches were speed and learned knowledge triumph over what i want to actually see on the battlefield (which are clever ruses and wtf- never saw that cunning moments).
Its entirely imaginable that one day, two zero- k players start a game, see what the other has and has not, conclude the outcome and then say something like GG and dropping half a hour before the game would actually to start to climax and then wind down.

So how to capture those nugget-moments, were someone outsmarts a opponent? Allow for more backstabbing! And let them do interesting things to level up. SinbadEV is right when it comes to get something from your opponent.

[Google_Frog]

When you say it like that it sounds impossible to prevent fixed strategies as long as you have a fixed game. If you leave a game with a large enough community for a long time they are going to figure out what is possible within the game so there will no longer be any 'wtf' things. If a game is well made it will take a long time for innovation to stop, maybe so long that the players forget the old solutions and the meta-game is constantly changing. This may be the best you can hope for.

Obviously if you change the game it will not have fixed strategies. Perhaps you could introduce some unit attribute randomness or between-game feedback system to keep things fresh. So in one game some unit is really powerful but in the next game it is weak. This game would have a real research system because players would have to actually produce units and test them in battle in order to determine whether they were blessed with good stats in this particular game. You could even have a "field trial" system in which units of each type are initially weak and get better through use. A particular unit would not improve, instead using the unit would cause subsequent units of that type to be more powerful (their design is refined). This improvement could halt at some level which changes from game to game.

The random unit attribute idea could change the units which are seen in each game but the game structure itself would eventually be discovered. There would still be fixed strategies about how to efficiently research which units are best.

[PicassoCT]

mmh.. as usual some excellent points by gf

i could extend the game into the social sphere though, adding a diplomatic meta-game that adds backstabbing bonuses.. (blow up a friends fusionunit to discover the sabotour- unit)

I have to diggest that idea of a randomized (part-balance)..

[SinbadEV]

mmh.. as usual some excellent points by gf

i could extend the game into the social sphere though, adding a diplomatic meta-game that adds backstabbing bonuses.. (blow up a friends fusionunit to discover the sabotour- unit)

I have to diggest that idea of a randomized (part-balance)..

There's a great video about meta game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

I've got the most experience with Hearthstone's meta-game... there haven't been new cards for a while but certain decks and strategies come in and out of fashion because people come up with an "unbeatable" deck and then people figure out how to beat it and then people make a new "unbeatable" deck and so on... in an RTS basically this is like saying "If Core Fighter Spam always wins either play Core Fighter Spam or figure out a way to beat Core Fighter Spam" or whatever.

You want your game to have no unbeatable strategies... to ensure that if "everyone does it this way" the best players will learn to expect people to play that way and work out the best way to counter it even if doing so leaves them vulnerable to some other currently unpopular strategy.