Hmm, not really the point of the topic. The point was that the Mods can be fun and attractive. Whether or not you have a like ore dislike of the mod's art style I strongly disagrea about the old models. it is a matter of simple things that make the TA based mods very unattractive. Everything from the holes in the units, to bad texture choices that are obvious in a true 3d engine.
However, I never said that gundam should be played because it is pretty and neither does any other moder say the same about their mods. We all feel that they are good as far as fun. If you read the 1.0 release you will see that the effects and graphical improvements are mere footnotes in it. Seriously, read it. Read the EE release, read the other releases. we are not saying we are the baddest.. or the prettiest... we are not looking for the badest mama jama around this town.. we are not looking for the master
*SHONUFF*
... the shogun of harlem....
we are just saying they are fun. It is the label of only pretty that I fight. I know that gundam being anime is going to be against many peoples taste. That is fine, if they would not be themselves I would not like them and they would ceast to be gundam... and I would have quit at TA.
Graphics and gameplay.
Moderator: Moderators
Smoth, the fact that a unit behaves very differently depending on whether or not it's moving is the kind of stuff I really want to know... the problem is that a fat paragraph of text doesn't give you any comparative information. All you can say is "good" or "bad"... when some attributes are things you just want numbers for.
Here's my approach or what I'd put on a "stat" screen for each unit:
Blurb (brief unit description)
1) Common attributes:
Cost
Armor
Speed
Firepower (or buildpower)
Range
2) Special attributes (attributes not every unit has, at most 4). Only list the attributes that the player really needs to know about. eg:
Blast radius
Reaction time or accuracy (if it's a problem).
Cloak radius
Jammer radius
Underwater speed
Fuel
If any action-energy-costs are notable, list here.
3) Bulletted Notes (any features that are more complex to explain, eg: higher accuracy while immobile, depletes fuel by bombing, etc)
4) Recommendations
Here's my approach or what I'd put on a "stat" screen for each unit:
Blurb (brief unit description)
1) Common attributes:
Cost
Armor
Speed
Firepower (or buildpower)
Range
2) Special attributes (attributes not every unit has, at most 4). Only list the attributes that the player really needs to know about. eg:
Blast radius
Reaction time or accuracy (if it's a problem).
Cloak radius
Jammer radius
Underwater speed
Fuel
If any action-energy-costs are notable, list here.
3) Bulletted Notes (any features that are more complex to explain, eg: higher accuracy while immobile, depletes fuel by bombing, etc)
4) Recommendations
If so, keep using 3do. Spring does read 3do, you know!I for one am only familiar with modelling one face at a time and really don't have to time to sit down and read about all of the other effects supported by Spring. I was shocked when jc made the changes to upswing and they were exactly what I needed to get rolling on models for a mod.
A long time ago, I was maybe eight years old, I had drawn a labyrinth with "Paint-It" on my dad's PC and printed it. A school friend of mine had drawn a labyrinth with a pencil. He asked me to scan it, genuily thinking that scanning and printing his messy pencil drawing would make his drawing as pretty as a drawing drawn on a computer. I hope the flaw in his reasoning is obvious.
However, what most people fail to realise, is the same applies to 3do<->s3o conversion. "Being s3o" doesn't confer a model magical ability making it super awsome to the eye. If you automatically convert a 3do to a s3o, it'll be as ugly, and even uglier (due to s3o not mirroring face) as the 3do. S3O is better because it allows for UV-mapping (which makes texturing easier, well, when making professionnal grade content at least), and
it has better control of the collision sphere (a point that'll overshoot past the head of 91% wannabee modders I'd say), but this only help when making a new s3o. There's no intrinsic benefit in moving from 3do to s3o.
Oh, and balance is completly overrated, by virtue of being a multiplayer game, there cannot be any imbalance in a Spring mod. I unit X completly owns, then it is still balanced because you can counter it by attacking with unit X yourself. To support my claim that every talk about balance is meaningless, I'll point you to OTA:
It was on the subject of recreating TA feel in SupCom. This was said couple days ago by a fervent defensor of unmoddded online multiplayer OTA. What I mean is that in TA, Arm was superior to Core, plain and simple. Some units, such as flash or samson, were ridiculously overpowered, others, like the Penetrator, or even the whole hovercraft class, were so utterly useless there wasn't a single circumstance where it wasn't a bad choice to build once, amongst years of play in dozen (if not hundreds) of widely different maps. And because of such humongous imbalance, half of OTA games are just flash rush.BLITZ_Molloy wrote:Even if the mod was a very incomplete version you'd get a nice bit of attention by releasing it on that day. All you really need to start with is solars, mexxies, a commander, a lab and a flash tank. You could worry about making the Core side and all the other units later
Yet, despite its glaring imbalance, there's a strong community of hard core OTA players, that played TA for ten years straight and still have great fun and claim it's the best game ever and that its balance is holy.
In short:
- Don't like learning s3o? Then use 3do, duh!
- All talks about balance are bullshit.
No offense, but yours is especially so.zwzsg wrote:- All talks about balance are bullshit.
If unit X is uber, then the whole mod becomes essentially reduced to unit X spam. You can always counter unit X with unit X, *provided that* you can build unit X, which you can't when X=gator and you play Arm. Therefore, AA was imbalanced with respect to sides, i.e. core always wins in core vs. arm if other things (player skill, notably) are equal.
Now you say "don't play Arm then." I say "why include Arm in the first place?" It's not the same game without Arm. In game design, to balance means to give more or less equal viability to several available options, not 'there is a counter to everything', because the first definition doesn't allow for your degenerate case of one superunit.
PS. those hardcore players are fanatics. You don't take fanatics seriously or face the consequences.
balance is like chasing someone who matches your pace because players are always going to be hard up to find the next exploit so you have to gimp or hamstring this or that. It never ends, there are times where I am talking to fang and I say "those fucking players" because people forget about the spirit of something when they have to win.
I wouldn't say balance is bullshit but you can try and find the best balance you can. I always hate 1 to 1 balance though. That was part of the concept of gundam to allow the players to counter enemy units with a wide array of solutions with some more suited for different play styles. There should be counters but there should not be only one counter. That is asinine, I hate when games do that... starcraft drives me nuts with that crap.
Also, I like to think of balance more as an important thing because if I can get close to the asymptote that is balance I can watch really cool battles happen and THAT is worth the work. However, players try and make things as stale as possible: "GAETOR SPAEM!" immediately comes to mind. A game designer or mod maker should never make one unit that can be spammed.
As a note, one question that REALLY burns my ass is when a new player asks me "what should I spam." I almost always punch something. I cannot stand that mentatility. The point of the game to me is to come up with creative sollutions to different situations and maybe I expect to much from players.
I wouldn't say balance is bullshit but you can try and find the best balance you can. I always hate 1 to 1 balance though. That was part of the concept of gundam to allow the players to counter enemy units with a wide array of solutions with some more suited for different play styles. There should be counters but there should not be only one counter. That is asinine, I hate when games do that... starcraft drives me nuts with that crap.
Also, I like to think of balance more as an important thing because if I can get close to the asymptote that is balance I can watch really cool battles happen and THAT is worth the work. However, players try and make things as stale as possible: "GAETOR SPAEM!" immediately comes to mind. A game designer or mod maker should never make one unit that can be spammed.
As a note, one question that REALLY burns my ass is when a new player asks me "what should I spam." I almost always punch something. I cannot stand that mentatility. The point of the game to me is to come up with creative sollutions to different situations and maybe I expect to much from players.
zwzsg, texture limits were kicking my ass, this is my reasoning for moving to s3o.zwzsg wrote:However, what most people fail to realise, is the same applies to 3do<->s3o conversion. "Being s3o" doesn't confer a model magical ability making it super awsome to the eye. If you automatically convert a 3do to a s3o, it'll be as ugly, and even uglier (due to s3o not mirroring face) as the 3do. S3O is better because it allows for UV-mapping (which makes texturing easier, well, when making professionnal grade content at least), and it has better control of the collision sphere (a point that'll overshoot past the head of 91% wannabee modders I'd say), but this only help when making a new s3o. There's no intrinsic benefit in moving from 3do to s3o.
In TA it's essentially that, save that X is flash, not gator. And yes the only counter to flash rush is to perform a better flash rush (MT put you on the defensive and you end up wasting too much ressource on MT that can't be rerouted to any other use, samson only starts to beat flashes when in large numbers). And yes OTA players play Arm most of the time.
Yet the lifeness and hard-core-ness of online TA proves it is very balanced.
Hence no matter how imbalanced it is, it is balanced. Thus the "balance is bullshit" conclusion.
Of course it's an exxagerated statment and I don't fully believe it, but I know from experience that if I started getting into the details people wouldn't get the main message. The "more details" is that for a RTS, I would say it is unbalanced if there were some units that never ever ever had any use. However, it doesn't mean every unit must see equal use. It is perfectally normal to have mainstream units, built in mass, and niche units, build only in small number or under specific condition. For instance in TA you'd see a ratio of a hundred Missile Turret for one Heavy Laser Tower, but it doesn't mean the Heavy Laser Tower is underbalanced, just that MT is main all-round cheap defense, while HLT is expensive close range anti ground defense, for chokepoints or around important struct, only. I also guess I could agree that if a unit is most effective in a role that is completly opposite to what the description/name/look/intuitition makes it look like, then it's badly balanced. For instance, it strikes me as odd that TA main battle tank is the anti-air van and not the bulldog.
Ok, fair point about the 3do texture limit.
Yet the lifeness and hard-core-ness of online TA proves it is very balanced.
Hence no matter how imbalanced it is, it is balanced. Thus the "balance is bullshit" conclusion.
Of course it's an exxagerated statment and I don't fully believe it, but I know from experience that if I started getting into the details people wouldn't get the main message. The "more details" is that for a RTS, I would say it is unbalanced if there were some units that never ever ever had any use. However, it doesn't mean every unit must see equal use. It is perfectally normal to have mainstream units, built in mass, and niche units, build only in small number or under specific condition. For instance in TA you'd see a ratio of a hundred Missile Turret for one Heavy Laser Tower, but it doesn't mean the Heavy Laser Tower is underbalanced, just that MT is main all-round cheap defense, while HLT is expensive close range anti ground defense, for chokepoints or around important struct, only. I also guess I could agree that if a unit is most effective in a role that is completly opposite to what the description/name/look/intuitition makes it look like, then it's badly balanced. For instance, it strikes me as odd that TA main battle tank is the anti-air van and not the bulldog.
Or you simply let the mod as it is, and after a while everybody will be using the same "exploit" and "overpowered unit", and it'll be level and fair again. Like how in TA offscreen bombing, nanoshielding, sparkling and all other gnugs tricks are considered fair play, because since everybody can use it, none get any unfair advantage. Maybe nowadays TA play differently from what Cavedog designers enviosonned, but it doesn't necessarly make the game worse, or less fun, or less strategically open. All you have to do is acknowledge that no matter how finely tuned your mod is, there will always be a best way to play. So why go against it? I mean, just think about it, it's such a truism.balance is like chasing someone who matches your pace because players are always going to be hard up to find the next exploit so you have to gimp or hamstring this or that. It never ends, there are times where I am talking to fang and I say "those fucking players" because people forget about the spirit of something when they have to win.
Ok, fair point about the 3do texture limit.
erasamus GO SHUT TEH HELL UP YOU BABY MURDERING ROBOT....
it is possible to work on graphics and gameplay.. end of thread nuff said we win.. if you dont believe that then you dont believe in walking and chewing gum..
PLEASE DO NOT BRING EE INTO THIS I DONT GIVE A FLYING FUCK IF YOU THINK IT LOOKS UGLY AND NO ONE ELSE DOES EITHER SO DONT SAY IT CAUSE IT PISSES ME OFF TO HAVE MY HARD WORK INSULTED BY A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING...
it is possible to work on graphics and gameplay.. end of thread nuff said we win.. if you dont believe that then you dont believe in walking and chewing gum..
PLEASE DO NOT BRING EE INTO THIS I DONT GIVE A FLYING FUCK IF YOU THINK IT LOOKS UGLY AND NO ONE ELSE DOES EITHER SO DONT SAY IT CAUSE IT PISSES ME OFF TO HAVE MY HARD WORK INSULTED BY A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING...
Baby murdering robot? Are you out of insults or what? 
People have to express their opinions and, im sorry, that includes mod insulting :) . And explosive reactions like that one makes people hate you and want to insult you more and then you start exploding more and...
Personally I think that EE looks fine, except that units look a little too much with each other but gameplay is what matters.
People have to express their opinions and, im sorry, that includes mod insulting :) . And explosive reactions like that one makes people hate you and want to insult you more and then you start exploding more and...
Personally I think that EE looks fine, except that units look a little too much with each other but gameplay is what matters.
What have I missed?
Balance is relative. I have said it before, and I am saying it again. You wish to approximate balance, seeking it outright is lunacy.
Pxtl, you want qualitative and quantitative feedback, in essence, on each "stat screen". That is time consuming, subjective like everything else, and an idea which appeals to me.
Balance is relative. I have said it before, and I am saying it again. You wish to approximate balance, seeking it outright is lunacy.
Pxtl, you want qualitative and quantitative feedback, in essence, on each "stat screen". That is time consuming, subjective like everything else, and an idea which appeals to me.
I think we had a balance article somehwere on these forums once. What it boiled down to is that all (intended) strategies need to be equal in effectiveness and cost, both ingame and out of game (meaning how much the player has to do). If spamming one unit is more effective than spamming another unit and neither unit is meant more for spamming than the other that's an imbalance. If someone spams one unit it should be possible to counter that in ways other than "spam more of it". If you have two long-range units you want both to be useful in the right situation, not one be better at all times. A proper balance would mean that e.g. flash spam would be an instant loss if your opponent perfforms a different strategy.
If one unit e.g. Flash is far superior for cost to anything else, then the mod is unbalanced, pure and simple. The fact that other players can also spam Flashes means it is playable, not balanced.
What you are left with in that scenario is a few hardcore players who love Flashes and are happy to keep playing, while players who want to use varied strategies are disappointed and give up.
You especially can't make that argument if there's two sides and one is blatantly better than the other. Why even have Core at all if Arm wins on every front?
What you are left with in that scenario is a few hardcore players who love Flashes and are happy to keep playing, while players who want to use varied strategies are disappointed and give up.
You especially can't make that argument if there's two sides and one is blatantly better than the other. Why even have Core at all if Arm wins on every front?
I have a feeling that we are goin in circles...
Nope.. Flash spam, they should have a fightin force. A decently good fighting force, but that's what bombers are for.. I've never seen a flash kill a bomber. But of course, flashes are unbalanced.. So they are ineffective. Perhaps if levelers were balanced, they could slaughter flashs...
Those would be good tactics if it was balanced! It's not balanced!
Balance is a modder's problem and one CANNOT have a decent argument on it. There are too many aspects to take in! If a modder cannot try to balance his mod decently, he shouldn't be a modder. Balancing requires a lot of effort, not as much time, and of course, player input.
Like smoth has stated, there are so many things to bring into account.
Nope.. Flash spam, they should have a fightin force. A decently good fighting force, but that's what bombers are for.. I've never seen a flash kill a bomber. But of course, flashes are unbalanced.. So they are ineffective. Perhaps if levelers were balanced, they could slaughter flashs...
Those would be good tactics if it was balanced! It's not balanced!
Balance is a modder's problem and one CANNOT have a decent argument on it. There are too many aspects to take in! If a modder cannot try to balance his mod decently, he shouldn't be a modder. Balancing requires a lot of effort, not as much time, and of course, player input.
Like smoth has stated, there are so many things to bring into account.
Since we're on the topic of balance let me cross post something from somewhere else that i wrote about balance in ta-based mods
Preface: When I say balanced in the context of a unit, i probably mean "Not Overpowered". When I say balanced in the context of the mod i probably mean Balance
I've been doing a bit of thinking about why I like AA so much more than BA and its led me to thinking about TA-Style mod balance in general and some problems that have plagued spring TA-mods since I've been playing.
The main problem as I see it is a case of tunnel vision.
When you look at the last 20 versions of AA you see a boatload of trivial 2% stat changes and tweaks. All of them in response to a problem the community has with certain units. There is no reason to go into this further cause everyone know what i mean here.
The thing that the mods lack is direction. They are like 100 seesaws that are riding other seesaws.
When a unit is being balanced it shouldn't be an issue how well X unit does fighting Y unit. The real thing that needs to be considered first is "Why does this unit exist" and from there we get:
If this unit has no role, why is it in the mod?
If this unit has a role, does it do its role better than any other unit (for time and cost)?
Can its role be completely circumvented by another units role? (ie, bulldogs so good assaulting defense you don't need artillery)
If every unit did its own role better than any other unit (Which implies there is no overlap in role because each is the best) then the units themselves are then balanced to their role.
The problem here is, "What if the units role is too good".
Here is where the real mod design comes in, a good mod maker/balancer isnt vigilantly making sure hovers can beat kbots in metal cost when fighting on a slope greater than 27 - Its making sure that every unit's role is sensible and a good addition to the mod.
For example you could make the peewee's role, 'an invisible unit for destroying the opponents base from the other side of the map in the early game'. If this is the case then the unit would be fine in the context of the mod, but the mod would be awful.
The problem is that so far AA and BA haven't been balanced toward an overall design goal, but from what is wrong with the previous version. (BA I think has far better planning and goals than AA, but is still based on AA and its flaws carry over)
What mods need is absolute goals rather than relative ones. We need to get out of thinking "X is too good, so our goal is to make X worse" and think "Does X fulfill its role and not overlap other units roles as stated in my overall design goals"
we needs cloakable AKsOkay that's it, N00berhack needs cloakable Peewees!For example you could make the peewee's role, 'an invisible unit for destroying the opponents base from the other side of the map in the early game'. If this is the case then the unit would be fine in the context of the mod, but the mod would be awful.