What is "flat balance?"

[Anarchid]

I can not think of any RTS where one unlocks a new unit type and then previous units become useless like that.
That is not satisfying definition to me.

Funny that you mention Age of Empires and then write that. Any other kind of melee infantry makes clubmen obsolete, and the game is literally built on such things.

(also Nuke Trooper obsoletes everything)

[Jools]

So ZK guys decided to make up this term for their balance paradigm?

• all tech1
• no hard counters
• most units are viable late game

Am I missing anything?

All those points are the opposite of what chess is. I also wonder what I'm missing.

Of course if you define 1 = 3 then 1 = 3 in all circumstances. But such a definition is not very useful.

[Google_Frog]

I was a bit unclear there. By "some other unit" I meant "the ability to produce some other unit" (as in teching). So being able to produce unit A does not make it pointless to produce unit B. I don't quite know what "unit-choice in players factories" is. Is it your own factories? Enemy factories?

I meant that "unit is viable" depends on two things:
1) Can I (I, as in the player) make a unit that is better?
2) Can/does the enemy do/produce something that counters my unit?

The idea of flat balance is that even with access to every unit type:

• For all units there exists a situation where the answer to 1) is no.

Knorke you are using the term 'flat balance' a lot. It looks like you are trying to exactly define flat balance. This is pointless because it is not how words work. Every word we have points to some fuzzy area in concept space and that word becomes useless once we look too narrowly on its part of concept space. If you are trying to dissect 'flat balance' then make up distinct terms for each aspect of 'flat balance' instead of using the same term for many things.

Words don't have well defined meanings and they break down if you look too closely at them. This can fuel many pointless arguments so I do not want to argue about definitions. I have given my definition (which is relevant here because ZK is related to Spring) and tried to explain what it means. Whether that definition is right will depend on the context in which it is used.

This applies to you as well CarRepairer. There are many meanings for the words 'flat' and 'balance' so it is not surprising that other people would have put them together in a sentence. I doubt that albator hijacked the term and what he said made sense in the more normal usage of 'flat' and 'balance'.

In particular 'flat' can mean a lot of things:

• albator 'flat': Boring, averaged, generic. Like a flat fizzy drink.
• ZK 'flat' as in 'flat balance': Balancing as if the tech tree is flat. Perhaps the tech tree is flattened too.

I can not think of any RTS where one unlocks a new unit type and then previous units become useless like that.

Apparently Supreme Commander has (or at least had for many years) a tier system which made the previous levels obsolete. Almost every *A game has T1 and T2 economy and the T2 economy makes the T1 economy obsolete. There are a lot of RTS games out there and I trust few of them to be well balanced/designed and most of them have some sort of tech system. People seem to naturally design towards tech systems and decide that higher tech should give some reward, this is often in the form of making previous levels obsolete. So I expect there to be many games in which previous units become useless.

So ZK guys decided to make up this term for their balance paradigm?

• all tech1
• no hard counters
• most units are viable late game

Am I missing anything?

No, it is not an all-encompassing term for "what ZK does". CarRepairer is basically correct in what flat balance means in the context of ZK. I would say "no unit obsoletes another" is the definition of 'weak' flat balance. The additional property "nearly all units are equally accessible" is what we tend to use in ZK when discussing flat balance because it is a closely linked concept. The exact definition will depend on who you ask but within ZK the term is well enough defined for us to use it. So whether it means everything is at tech 1 is not well defined.

ZK has lots of hard counters regardless of what knorke thinks. In any case it is an orthogonal property. I don't see any justification for statements such as "In zero-K unit choice is not as important as in other RTS. It is more how/where/how many you use.".

Flat balance does not say that most units are viable late game. It just says that they don't completely lose viability based on the tech level that you possess. Whether a unit is viable in the lategame will depend on the state of the game. If you are playing on a very open map then raiders will be viable into the lategame. If instead the map has many chokepoints then raiders may not be viable. For most units I can make up endgame scenarios which make them unviable. The important distinction is that unit viability depends on more emergent properties of the game as opposed the simple decision procedure "I have tech 2 so will now never make unit X".

[smoth]

Feels like flat balance is a buzzword then.

While there are many rts games who do have units become invalid late game. Many others try to have them placed within some sort of role or usage. By the logic described in this thread, if grts didn't have research tiers it would have been flat balance. Of course the point at which a player has access to all the tiers (1.27 I believe only had a handful) the game would have been at a "flat balance state"

However, this assumes players are all homogenous in their usage of a unit rather than some units better fit different play styles.

Another thing is the "loose" nature of your definition makes the point hard to say, well they do this. Not really, from what I have read so far, you guys set an idea, decided to call it "flat balance" and then loosely followed the idea based on your own definitions. The walls of text bouncing all over from point to point don't help really.

I am not trying to give a negative critique of your project or it's balance paradigm. I am trying to get to a simple definition of the paradigm.


lets see so an example:

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gundam 1.28 was going to have the "butterfly waffle" paradigm:

Key Goal:
Elements designed to emphasize attacking the player bases, with the express goal of establishing player as targets. I do not want to play capture the flag/hunt the mex. I want giant robots blowing stuff up. I don't want to play base management either, that means no construction units, no shields, no nuke structures. Outside of rudimentary defenses, the base will be best defended by mobile units, which will be required to protect the entire massive base. The focus should always be on mobile units, with your base acting as a "king" like in chess. Should you loose your base, there is a very high likelyhood that the battle is lost.

Elements

• large structures and lots of them. The base is large and will require a solid effort to completely destroy.
• power system restricting how many defense can be run and how much resource conversion can be done per tick.
• players can only effectively defend the base by having units patrolling it as powering all of the defenses will require a hit on your ability to produce
• most units can stand a fair chance against their cost equivalent.
  • squad build system exists to facility macro play
  • ability system exists to promote tactical play.
  • armor/damage classes exist to provide clear roles for combat
    • light weapons are amazing against air an support vehicles but do poorly against normal units and structures
    • anti-unit weapons are not good against structures.
    • explosives are good against structures but fire too slowly to really counter a lot of units.
  • targeting classes exist to provide clear targets for specific targets
• tiered research system: unlocking tech grants permanent access to the units/structures.
  • Different tech can be chosen based on user preference of playstyle
  • rank is required to reach certain research tiers discouraging idle "turtle" play
  • structures grant higher rank awards which encourages targeting enemy structures
• tiered economy: making losing key structures reduce access to late game units/structures.
• Map control is only strategic not resource based.

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I have to run shortly but something like this. It isn't complete but like I said, I have to run.

What are the key elements and design principles behind the "flat balance." It seems you guys just appropriated the term, that is fine but can I get an idea as to what exactly the concept is supposed to be?

[Anarchid]

What are the key elements and design principles behind the "flat balance."

TL:DR: "as if the tech tree is flat"
INB4: "chicken and egg"

As applied to your gundam paradigm, it would be "flat" in above sense if you required that no units should be more powerful simply because they are harder to tech up.

ZK kinda cheats on this self-reservation by removing the "as if"; zk tech tree is just flat.

[CarRepairer]

For the computer scientists here, we can say the tech tree is very "shallow" or "not deep." That's where the "flat" comes from. The tree is not tall. It may now be more "wide" than it was previously before flat balance. The vast majority of the nodes are at the second level: Comm > Factory > Mobile units.

It seems so diluted now in this thread, but when Saktoth came up with it, it wasn't complicated at all. Remove tiers so all factories are buildable by the commander. The tree is mostly flattened.

Edit: The "balance" comes from the fact that with higher tech tiers, units must be better than lower ones or there is no reason to tech up to those tiers. Were tech 2 units not better, the resources to unlock them are wasted and could have been spent on tech 1 units instead. So flat = shallow tree, balance = no units obsoleted due to unlocking higher tiers.

[Jools]

If you simply mean the hierarchy of the tech tree, then it's better to use standard concepts such as matrix or hierachical trees/organisations.

[smoth]

Cool, I was making it more complicated than it was after seeing so many posts. Thanks carp! Discussion can still continue as I like to read thoughts on balance

[klapmongool]

Perfect Imbalance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

I like this concept.

edit: there are other interesting videos by the same maker. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w

[PicassoCT]

At its core flat balance does not deal with how effective units are against each other. It is a statement about whether unlocking access to new unit types makes production of any of your previous unit types strictly bad.

I can not think of any RTS where one unlocks a new unit type and then previous units become useless like that.
That is not satisfying definition to me.
I think flat balance is basically the opposite of RPS, always understood it more as question of "how important is unit choice?" In zero-K unit choice is not as important as in other RTS. It is more how/where/how many you use.

Cyclic balance should be really part of one game, every superweapon forwarding the cycle..

[Google_Frog]

Smoth I am happy with the summary that CarRepairer provided in his last post. Flat balance is an atomic concept, not a large design paradigm.

[smoth]

Cool thanks again

[CarRepairer]

If you simply mean the hierarchy of the tech tree, then it's better to use standard concepts such as matrix or hierachical trees/organisations.

When we come up with concepts we don't always spend a lot of time thinking of fancy names and instead focus on the meaning. When Saktoth described no more tech trees and called it flat balance it was simple (and faced a bit of resistance).

Another example of a ZK gameplay element (which I'm proud to have coined and implemented) is known as "factory plop." It was the first word that came to mind when trying to come up with a term. I can only hope that plopping would not face the same confusion as "flat balance." Might be too toilet humor.