I prefer the strategy advice from TAspringers. As most of them are abit more agressive on the battlefield; they dont proc. The only thing I dont like about supcom is the sound track, compared to TA it doesnt seem like much of a composition. Thanks for the advice so far!TheRegisteredOne wrote:so taspring forums as more supcom players able to answer supcom gameplay questions than gpg forums?
Supcom advice?
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1v0ry_k1ng
- Posts: 4656
- Joined: 10 Mar 2006, 10:24
the way an RTS gets balanced in RL.
1) it is released.
2) good players emerge
3) good players find exploits
4) exploits are removed
5) good players note redundant units
6) redundant units are improved
end
99% of RTS, the devs only have a rough idea of how it plays. it takes hundreds of games before its known exactly what needs to change imo.
SupCom was balanced by morons. However, they understand this system.
They have a good balance forum, but more importantly, the game is so easily moddable that someone with no programming skillz at all can maek gaem.
fair enough, the current balance makes you want to stab your mouse into your eye, but they have given the tools to make balance mods very easily, and this is what is happening. supcom in a year might be old boy.
1) it is released.
2) good players emerge
3) good players find exploits
4) exploits are removed
5) good players note redundant units
6) redundant units are improved
end
99% of RTS, the devs only have a rough idea of how it plays. it takes hundreds of games before its known exactly what needs to change imo.
SupCom was balanced by morons. However, they understand this system.
They have a good balance forum, but more importantly, the game is so easily moddable that someone with no programming skillz at all can maek gaem.
fair enough, the current balance makes you want to stab your mouse into your eye, but they have given the tools to make balance mods very easily, and this is what is happening. supcom in a year might be old boy.
The devs got to have a good vision for how they want the balance like to start with to make it interesting. They also are the ones who can/should do serious statistical analysises and stuff. A player never really knows for sure what's going on, most of it is consensus I think. " everyone uses this so it's good."
Supcom units are mostly boring and one dimensional, and they seem to have some stupid "there is no RPS, there is no RPS" sentiment going on. Yeah keep telling urself that, like painting without paint making balance without rps...
Things like: 4 zerglings should beat the zealot in the open but the zealot should beat the zerglings if their choked. There you have a basic idea to start, then you have to run tests with 8 zerglings vs 2 zealots, more or less choke etc etc.
What players can do is of course kind of put attention on problems with balance, find the paths of least resistance in practice etc.
Supcom units are mostly boring and one dimensional, and they seem to have some stupid "there is no RPS, there is no RPS" sentiment going on. Yeah keep telling urself that, like painting without paint making balance without rps...
Things like: 4 zerglings should beat the zealot in the open but the zealot should beat the zerglings if their choked. There you have a basic idea to start, then you have to run tests with 8 zerglings vs 2 zealots, more or less choke etc etc.
What players can do is of course kind of put attention on problems with balance, find the paths of least resistance in practice etc.
Choked? 
SupCom's design is basically the same as TA's: sides which are mostly similar but with a few notable differences that people prefer and can create different playstyles and, most importantly, variety in gameplay. The sides must be similar enough that a person who learns to play as one race can play with the others without re-learning the game.
Ideally there should be three totally different sides, which Starcraft manages quite handily. But there's a difference - with who knows how long in development, Starcraft's designers managed about 10 units per side, total, and those aren't even all combat units.
It's not an exaggeration to say that it creates largely R-P-S gameplay though. There's just not enough units to create a completely natural balance system where a unit is not best countered by one other unit, but by a variety of methods, all of which must be protected against. AA - I'll say it again, before I RAN IT INTO THE GROUND, so no need to point that out since everyone including me already knows - AA had this. There was such a vast array of ways to attack and defend that it was literally the first of its kind, a real strategy game without any sort of built-in checks and balances (besides ones that were simpler to just work around, like reducing ground damage versus aircraft).
The difference, like I said before, is that you could say that almost all I had to worry about was balance. Balance balance balance balance. Nothing on the scale of what SupCom has achieved.
Now it's my turn again though. I'm going to perfect SupCom. I have more pure RTS balance modding experience than practically anyone. That's not a cocky statement either. The RTS genre has been around for like 15 years AFAIK, and I've been balancing for 2/3 of that. It's true that a lot of AA's ideas have come from elsewhere, but that's irrelevant. There will always be places to look for ideas. What matters is, knowing when to use them or not, and in what way, and how to use them to best advantage, obviously as well as coming up with a lot of original ideas. AA only faultered when I started not having enough time for it - when I started working on GEM and several other things in earnest, this was around version 1.4 of AA, this is when the problems started happening. And when I got this job, around version 2.2, BOOM.
Eh...
Seem to have gone off on a bitch haven't I. Well... eh... summary:
-SupCom is outstanding from a technical standpoint but there wasn't enough time to balance it properly among all the other challenges the dev team faced
-I'm going to fix that
-New version of AA for Spring is coming in June.
SupCom's design is basically the same as TA's: sides which are mostly similar but with a few notable differences that people prefer and can create different playstyles and, most importantly, variety in gameplay. The sides must be similar enough that a person who learns to play as one race can play with the others without re-learning the game.
Ideally there should be three totally different sides, which Starcraft manages quite handily. But there's a difference - with who knows how long in development, Starcraft's designers managed about 10 units per side, total, and those aren't even all combat units.
It's not an exaggeration to say that it creates largely R-P-S gameplay though. There's just not enough units to create a completely natural balance system where a unit is not best countered by one other unit, but by a variety of methods, all of which must be protected against. AA - I'll say it again, before I RAN IT INTO THE GROUND, so no need to point that out since everyone including me already knows - AA had this. There was such a vast array of ways to attack and defend that it was literally the first of its kind, a real strategy game without any sort of built-in checks and balances (besides ones that were simpler to just work around, like reducing ground damage versus aircraft).
The difference, like I said before, is that you could say that almost all I had to worry about was balance. Balance balance balance balance. Nothing on the scale of what SupCom has achieved.
Now it's my turn again though. I'm going to perfect SupCom. I have more pure RTS balance modding experience than practically anyone. That's not a cocky statement either. The RTS genre has been around for like 15 years AFAIK, and I've been balancing for 2/3 of that. It's true that a lot of AA's ideas have come from elsewhere, but that's irrelevant. There will always be places to look for ideas. What matters is, knowing when to use them or not, and in what way, and how to use them to best advantage, obviously as well as coming up with a lot of original ideas. AA only faultered when I started not having enough time for it - when I started working on GEM and several other things in earnest, this was around version 1.4 of AA, this is when the problems started happening. And when I got this job, around version 2.2, BOOM.
Eh...
Seem to have gone off on a bitch haven't I. Well... eh... summary:
-SupCom is outstanding from a technical standpoint but there wasn't enough time to balance it properly among all the other challenges the dev team faced
-I'm going to fix that
-New version of AA for Spring is coming in June.
This is weak, the true reason to make similar sides is that it's easier. The "easier to learn the game" idea is only a small sideeffect. Some people like learning completly different sides, others like to stick to one side and don't care. Maaaaybe some guy likes playing different sides but do not want major differences becouse its hard for him, whatever.Caydr wrote:SupCom's design is basically the same as TA's: sides which are mostly similar but with a few notable differences that people prefer and can create different playstyles and, most importantly, variety in gameplay. The sides must be similar enough that a person who learns to play as one race can play with the others without re-learning the game.
There's interesting good RPS, and there's bad RPS. There is no RPS-free design. RPS basically means some units beats another given certain conditions. Your beloved air-vs-AA-vs-ground if you strip the fluff is just basic RPS with some added dimensionality like AA-unit is slower, plane faster and stuff. And stuff like that, mobility and such, are just RPS on a higher scale that let certain strategies beat others, like fast units beating expansion wich beats slow units wich beat porcing wich beat fast units (RPS).Caydr wrote:Ideally there should be three totally different sides, which Starcraft manages quite handily. But there's a difference - with who knows how long in development, Starcraft's designers managed about 10 units per side, total, and those aren't even all combat units.
It's not an exaggeration to say that it creates largely R-P-S gameplay though. There's just not enough units to create a completely natural balance system where a unit is not best countered by one other unit, but by a variety of methods, all of which must be protected against. AA - I'll say it again, before I RAN IT INTO THE GROUND, so no need to point that out since everyone including me already knows - AA had this. There was such a vast array of ways to attack and defend that it was literally the first of its kind, a real strategy game without any sort of built-in checks and balances (besides ones that were simpler to just work around, like reducing ground damage versus aircraft).
Self-critic state of mind > "IM BEST"-state of mind.Caydr wrote:Now it's my turn again though. I'm going to perfect SupCom. I have more pure RTS balance modding experience than practically anyone.
Balance is an art, not just crafting. If you don't have the right subjective ideas that make for interesting balance, then your balance sucks even if you get the numbers right from hard work, experience, or whatever.
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/rock-paper-scissors/
This guy is probably writes the smartest thing i've seen on the topic of game design and his thoughts on RPS balance are no different.
Check it out
This guy is probably writes the smartest thing i've seen on the topic of game design and his thoughts on RPS balance are no different.
Check it out
I think it's the pure opposite. There's tons of different factors, or "variety of methods" that decide wich kind of unit beats wich in starcraft. Such as what i mentioned, choking, as in choke points. Since starcraft has melee units that work very well, something TA and Spring lacks for the moment, this is much more pronounced in starcraft. Choking is a factor in TA/Spring as well of course, but not as strong. Starcraft has a full spectrum of soft-to-hard counters that are often situational dependent.Caydr wrote:Starcraft's designers managed about 10 units per side, total, and those aren't even all combat units.
There's just not enough units to create a completely natural balance system where a unit is not best countered by one other unit, but by a variety of methods, all of which must be protected against.
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1v0ry_k1ng
- Posts: 4656
- Joined: 10 Mar 2006, 10:24
this is very much true. two sides being near identicle is a sign of un-ambitious devs being wary of making the game more difficult to balance.Zpock wrote: This is weak, the true reason to make similar sides is that it's easier.The "easier to learn the game" idea is only a small sideeffect. Some people like learning completly different sides, others like to stick to one side and don't care. Maaaaybe some guy likes playing different sides but do not want major differences becouse its hard for him, whatever.
the one thing i liked about c&c generals was the diffrence between the sides was very good and added more replay value to everything.
one reason CA looks damn promising is because the sides are being made diffrenent beyond the "one side has units with 5 less hp and 0.01 more acceleration" OTA style.[/b]
I've never played Generals for any length of time, so I can't really say much on that subject.
But I disagree that it's just laziness/lack of ambition for a game to have three sides which aren't all as polar opposite of each other as possible. SupCom has, I'm not sure how many units per side... probably at least 30. For a person to learn all the units on just one side and how to use them to best advantage would take a lot of time. Regular people don't usually have that much time to dedicate to a game.
Not only does the developer GPG know this, but the publisher THQ knows this even better. The developer obeys the publisher or the publisher cuts the developer off. A game must be as easy to pick up and play as possible, in the eyes of any developer.
To have such an unprecedentedly large and different game, also having such totally different sides, I can't see even the most reasonable publisher not feeling very uneasy about it.
But I disagree that it's just laziness/lack of ambition for a game to have three sides which aren't all as polar opposite of each other as possible. SupCom has, I'm not sure how many units per side... probably at least 30. For a person to learn all the units on just one side and how to use them to best advantage would take a lot of time. Regular people don't usually have that much time to dedicate to a game.
Not only does the developer GPG know this, but the publisher THQ knows this even better. The developer obeys the publisher or the publisher cuts the developer off. A game must be as easy to pick up and play as possible, in the eyes of any developer.
To have such an unprecedentedly large and different game, also having such totally different sides, I can't see even the most reasonable publisher not feeling very uneasy about it.
Even if it's the evil publisher men in suits TM fault that the game sucks, it still sucks.Caydr wrote:I've never played Generals for any length of time, so I can't really say much on that subject.
But I disagree that it's just laziness/lack of ambition for a game to have three sides which aren't all as polar opposite of each other as possible. SupCom has, I'm not sure how many units per side... probably at least 30. For a person to learn all the units on just one side and how to use them to best advantage would take a lot of time. Regular people don't usually have that much time to dedicate to a game.
Not only does the developer GPG know this, but the publisher THQ knows this even better. The developer obeys the publisher or the publisher cuts the developer off. A game must be as easy to pick up and play as possible, in the eyes of any developer.
To have such an unprecedentedly large and different game, also having such totally different sides, I can't see even the most reasonable publisher not feeling very uneasy about it.
And I'd bet Chris Taylor had his hands pretty much free.
Regular people don't care about "how to use them to best advantage". You're talking like every idiot has to be able to play the game like a pro.For a person to learn all the units on just one side and how to use them to best advantage would take a lot of time. Regular people don't usually have that much time to dedicate to a game.
Did he? Then is that why EA dropped the project and decided to focus on the more-easy-to-pick-up CnC 3?And I'd bet Chris Taylor had his hands pretty much free.
For some period of time, SupCom had no publisher. Was it because CT wanted full discretion and nobody wanted to give that to him? We can't know that, but I think it's certainly possible.
While you're developing a game, the publisher is the one paying your rent. Do what the publisher says or you are out on your ass. Make a game that is too radically different and unique and the publisher will say ".... eh... let's rethink this. How about making things shinier and less complex?"
