Slippery slopes and intuitive games

[Guessmyname]

Plus, it opens the map up for you: if your enemy has the centre, you can't sent units from one side to another if it crosses through the middle, meaning you'd have to waypoint it, which would take longer both in micro and in terms of units actually getting there

[smoth]

taking the center has always been it's own benefit.

[manored]

Having the center means that you are winning, since you are pushing the enemy harder than he is doing :)

[bobthedinosaur]

...or that you are surrounded and about to die quickly

[zwzsg]

In the first place it just creates a (boring) non-interaction period.

You still have early interaction in the fight for the middle. And to the contrary, there'd be even less building-up phase if the base is already built.

If the fight for the middle is meaningful, that is, the resources gained from it having that territory have enough impact on the game that fighting for them (rather than porcing in your 25% or so) is worthwhile, then you get the second situation i outlined- the middle is taken by one player or the other, and the base then serves only to prolong the inevitable.

I was assuming a game rich enough that it is possible to counter 33% more units with a better unit choice/tactic/micro/luck/whatever other factor.

I your game is so bland that economical superiority always ensure victory, then remove all the boring fighting part which are only postponing the inevitable, and go play multiplayer sim city.

The percentile are just wild guesses, but I'm confident there is point where owning the middle gives an advantage big enough to have players rush for it, yet small enough to not alone decide the outcome of the game.

Its possible the game could be paced and balanced well enough that by the time you conquer all the territory outside his base, you are at a stage where you can take the enemy base out relatively easy

Yeah that's the idea, if you have taken everything but the base, and have kept it long enough, killing the remains of the base is not a lengthy arduous hassle, but instead a short and intense last fight to give you a more satisfying game ending. Like how despite being harder than the cream, the cherry on the cake doesn't take hour to chew, and instead make the eating of the cake a more memorable experience.

[KDR_11k]

I've seen such a resource distribution in an old version of IW, the result was that one player boxed the other into his base but had trouble moving any further, leading to a slow battle of attrition at the base border that took 20 minutes or so to resolve (of course the boxed player lost).

[Warlord Zsinj]

Yeah, if you look at my bell-curve chart, the buffer really needs to happen at the central point, not at the extremities.

Previously in IW, because losing territory immediately gave it to your opponents (we've since adjusted this somewhat), there was pure slippery slope. The imperials have a powerful but immobile commander, which means that it is very difficult to kill them outright.

Further, we implemented a system where players could upgrade their Territorial Beacons to produce a lot of metal (well, the metal replacement) for an energy cost. The problem here was that they were so powerful that they let players produce large amounts of resources from their starting point.

The result was that even though the game had tipped against them, they were able to fall back to a tiny corner of their territory and hold out there for ages, even though the game was effectively over.

We've looked at the resource model again, with the intention of buffering the steam-roller effect when players start to lose ground - previously once the scales tipped in the enemy's favour say, 60/40, the game was pretty much over. What you want to do is buffer it so that the game is still in the balance at 60/40, even 65/35 - but once it starts tipping over to 70/30 or greater, to accelerate the end rather then stretch it out. I think this needs to be achieved with a combination of unit design and resource design.

[Zpock]

You can do it with long setup time and high cost for expanding your economy. Then the expanding player will be weak for a few minutes spending resources on expanding instead of fighting units until his more powerful economy kicks in. While also stretching his defenses thinner.

This gives a window of opportunity for the other player giving him the option of either trying to take advantage and attack or expand himself. If he fails to do so he will loose quickly after the other guys economy does kick in. You also need to have fewer but more significant resource spots for this to work I guess.

[KDR_11k]

Kernel Panic MM early game anyone?

[zwzsg]

I've seen such a resource distribution in an old version of IW, the result was that one player boxed the other into his base but had trouble moving any further, leading to a slow battle of attrition at the base border that took 20 minutes or so to resolve (of course the boxed player lost).

Then add more super weapons to IW! In TA, a player left alone for 20 minutes would get screensized hawk swarm, nuke, mass bertha, or other quick & easy game enders.

[manored]

I idea I would give for IW is to have territorial beacons start above level 1, and then give players the option to downgrade then, action that would give then revenue, as if they were "selling" back the upgrades... So if you make territorial beacon upgrade really expensive and add this, this would mean that at a short time-spam losing a territory wouldnt affect your chances of winning (assuming you had "pillaged" it and retreated before losing it for good), but if you took too long to react you would get in a bad situation since the enemy would have more victory locations to upgrade and gain money with... Only possible issue is that this would be a inversion of what we are used to see, that is, instead of the winning player on the offense and the losing player on the defense we would have the losing player having to attack to not be at a disadvantage and the winning player having to defend to upgrade his beacons and gain the upper hand... :)

[Warlord Zsinj]

I agree, we should add more Superweapons.

Come do some work for us so that we can get there

[Zpock]

Preporced players and superweapons

[Saktoth]

Preporced players and superweapons

Ever since i played FunTA with its super weapon of which you have a finite production, i thought 'It would make an excellent game if the correct use of this weapon against hordes of spam units was the primary dynamic of the game'.

Its a shame Evo wasnt based around that, but more of a typical RTS.

[Forboding Angel]

In a way it is tbh, sort of anyway. The orbital laser is available at lv1 (reason the cp can't fire it is only because I originally couldn't get it to work correctly -- I've since figured that out).

TBH the orbital laser is the exact same weapon, takes 4k metal to build (peanuts in evo) and can be stockpiled costs 250k energy per shot (just like in funta), 2 minutes to build a shot (instead of the 4 that it took in funta). It's not uncommon in large games to see orbital laser shots raining down on players (I will personally stockpile 4 shots and then use that to clear an entire area). Noobs always try to use it on the enemy C.P.U., nevermind the fact that is has 150k hp

Imo, what you describe would be interesting the first couple times you played it, but would later on just get kinda boring. That said however, I plan to fork evo in many different directions (under different names of course) eventually, but I would prefer that no one do that until the campaign/storyline is finished because not everything is in, and not everything is completed yet (the texturing being a perfect example).

Speaking of new textures...

[Pxtl]

Preporced players and superweapons

Is that such a bad thing? Superweapons ensure a quick endgame in the face of porc. Preporcing ensures that nobody gets eliminated early. Combine them both and you get something with a more flat "middle-section" of the game - instead of being a battle to eliminate every other player (thus kicking newbs out of the game very quickly) it becomes a battle to amass resources in order to race to the superweapon state first.

[Zpock]

Preporced players and superweapons

Is that such a bad thing? Superweapons ensure a quick endgame in the face of porc. Preporcing ensures that nobody gets eliminated early. Combine them both and you get something with a more flat "middle-section" of the game - instead of being a battle to eliminate every other player (thus kicking newbs out of the game very quickly) it becomes a battle to amass resources in order to race to the superweapon state first.

Exactly.

I guess it depends on if you want a competitive game or just some casual type game where people can relax and just porc->winbutton. Really a lot of people, most even, do prefer the latter...

[Pxtl]

Preporced players and superweapons

Is that such a bad thing? Superweapons ensure a quick endgame in the face of porc. Preporcing ensures that nobody gets eliminated early. Combine them both and you get something with a more flat "middle-section" of the game - instead of being a battle to eliminate every other player (thus kicking newbs out of the game very quickly) it becomes a battle to amass resources in order to race to the superweapon state first.

Exactly.

I guess it depends on if you want a competitive game or just some casual type game where people can relax and just porc->winbutton. Really a lot of people, most even, prefer the latter...

If resources require territory, its hardly porcing. It's just that players are fighting for turf and resources, instead of survival.

[Forboding Angel]

I agree pxtl, Thankfully I haven't even really had to worry about dedicated porcing being done in evo thanks to the variety of ways to deal with someone who porcs.

1 would be the emp silo which in many cases is cheaper than units. It has a 15 second emp in a radius of 500.

The thing is, most of the time I forget about it, and in many cases I will lose as a result. This is bad. I personally believe that is is because of the very fast pace of evo games. The entire thing in many cases feels like a race of some sort, cause you are always battling and have very little downtime.

I think I will soon move stuff that was in upgraded engineers build menu to the regular engineers buildmenu, give the same buildmenu to both engineers and make the benefit of upgraded engineers to simple fact that you get more buildpower out of them (which is bad news early game, but nice in late game), or remove the upgraded engineers entirely (it's not like they are expensive).

THis would also hve the effect of simplifying hte game in a good way.

I'm glad you caused me to think of that pxtl. Thanks!


Back to the subject at hand, I have always tried to make the most powerful superweapons very accessable, which is why they only cost energy to use. Energy is interestingly enough one of the easiest and hardest things to come by in evolution. For the simple fact that you can get by the first 10 minutes of the game or so with jsut 2 radiometers (think solars with variable energy). From there you can upgrade them into fusions (which is somewhat expensive to a degree).

In this way you can have superweapons that people with not super econs can use to the same degree that someone who has a crapton of resources can, which levels the playing field a little bit.

BTW porc+winbutton is most definiately not an issue if you set up the game correctly (unless that's what you wanted in the first place).

[rattle]

Clickable THUMBNAILS thank you