Discuss game development here, from a distinct game project to an accessible third-party mutator, down to the interaction and design of individual units if you like.
KDR_11k wrote:A proper balance would mean that e.g. flash spam would be an instant loss if your opponent perfforms a different strategy.
Then you have people whining: "Oh noes! Paper-Cissor-Stone is the suxxors! I haet Starcraft! It's dumb!" etc...
And, like I said with my exemple with the HLT and the MT, I think it's normal, even for a balanced mod, to have units meant to be built in mass and others meant for niche role.
Counterstrategy, not counterunit. E.g. large AoE weapons may not be all that effective against individual flashes but with enough flashes you can use enough of them to blast a whole chunk out of the rush with each volley. Or, say, concentrating a bit more on defense and teching while the flashrusher wates his ressources on loads of units that get eaten by those defenses, leaving him open to a T2 assault (I'm not saying these work, just examples of how a strategy is countered by another strat without having any unit-unit counters).
I don't like unit specific damage, it just dosn't feel right. Armor based like starcraft is good however. There is 3 different unit types, large medium &small and 3 weapon types, normal doing 100% to everything (marines, melee weapons, air units), concussion doing 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100 to small units (vultures, firebats) and armor piercing doing 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small (siege tanks, dragoons). This kind of system makes a lot of sense to me, and feels right, at least in starcraft, unlike the specific bonuses (like AoE). There's also a lot of other factors that are well implemented in starcraft that decide what happens, like weapon range, aoe and more. So siege tanks somethimes beat zerglings even if it's the "wrong" weapon type in the right situation. This makes it interesting. Other games may have the same, but in starcraft these things are more finely tuned, they did it all right. Melee combat for example works very well in starcraft and adds a lot to the tactical/strategical landscape. The unit ai is excellent, and units interact with eachother in a very smooth and predictable manner, allowing for more thought and less randomness. What makes starcraft so good is that you can theorycraft stuff, and there is a lot of stuff to theorycraft about.
EVERYTHING is rock paper scissors. Like anti air beating air units. Saying rock paper scissors is bad is just stupid, but I think ppl who do it have the units specific dmg in mind, so I forgive them.
I think that the concept of "counter-unit" somehow being different from "counter-strategy" is somewhat off, tbh.
Units, and their placement in the gameworld, is strategy. Interactions between units is tactics. People often get these two things confused, and your example is just about perfect. Using high error-rate, high-AOE units to directly counter spammed masses is a strategic decision by a player, who is investing his/her resources and micro-time into the static defenses.
Whether it actually works depends on whether the unit is tactically able to do the job. A well-balanced game design for a RTS is therefore going to focus on two main areas:
1. Strategy. Strategy in RTS contexts is tied directly to the core gameplay of the design. Spring allows us to twist OTA's design in a lot of ways it previously couldn't deal with, but it's still basically OTA behind it all, mainly because of the lack of upgrades (both global and unit) and because the economy is completely inflexible and assumes a lot of things.
All of that aside, within a Spring mod, you can make very important choices, like:
A. Metal can only be made, not mined.
B. Units cost neither metal nor energy.
C. Units cost metal and energy, and buildtime is directly proportionate to the supply of both.
D. All units can capture.
E. Units can't repair.
Etc., etc., etc. ... and that's just a few fundamental choices about the strategic aspects. There are dozens of gameplay variations that nobody has even built mods for, apparantly because either they look like terrible ideas or because very few people really think beyond what kinds of guns an attack unit has. Most of the serious part of game design, in a large mod, is looking at buildtimes for the tech tree and looking at the progression of the economic structures players are building. TBH, when I get around to per-unit balance, that's after I've looked a lot of other factors.
2. Tactics.
Tactics are created, in the context of a RTS, by the interaction of thousands of variable conditions. I think people who actually think that they can somehow write out a magic formula or whatever are complete morons, because they obviously do not understand the sheer mathematical complexity of what they're dealing with, and are just putting barriers in front of their eyes, instead of seeing clearly. There is no substitute for doing as much playtesting as you can. I use AIs a lot, because I am frequently not able, for various reasons, to playtest with humans, but even that is far better for getting a grip on most balance issues than doing nothing but stare at some stupid spreadsheet.
Wanna argue the point? Go right ahead. But you're still a moron.
If you understand that when you get into issues of pathfinding, turret-speeds, weapon engagement styles (i.e., LOS, indirect, ballistic, guided, lightning or starburst, which are all very distinct and have their place) and the many, many, many other variables that form the cute little tanks, etc. that players see and interact with mean that no matter what you do, you still need to playtest the hell out've whatever you do, you have achieved wisdom.
I hate grand theorists. I hate assumptions about what is "best". People who talk like that have obviously not actually built anything for the real world, and those folks tend to base their comments on whatever game it is that they happened to like. It's retarded to think like that. I'd vote, for example, that Final Fantasy 7 and Fallout II were both wonderful RPGs. How much do they have in common, as game designs? Truthfully... not a lot! They're fundamentally different animals. But you get people who argue if a RPG doesn't use SPECIAL, it must suck... I hate that kind of nonsense. There is no single "best" design. We just have what works in a specific context.
If nothing else has been taught to me, after all this time, it's that what the game designer expects and what will happen when the rubber meets the road are two different things. Expect everything. Plan for everything. Be open to what is happening, not what you wanted to happen. Be a curious artist.
And whole idea that units should not have other units that are more-or-less meant to counter them in certain situations is just silly. IRL, a guy with an AT rocket and a handgun is pretty much dead meat if he takes on a guy with a battle rifle. There aren't any real exceptions to this- if the guy with the rocket gets lucky, well, he got lucky... but he isn't going to win 99% of the time. That's just reality. However, the AT rocketeer has at least a middling chance of defeating a tank, if they're both in range of each other, whereas the rifleman has zero. That, again, is just reality.
So, design the game around your expectations. Then start messing with it. With each new build of Spring, it's become more and more possible to get things to behave like we want them to. Take full advantage of that.
One rule I stick by, because I think it's a good one, is that no matter how strong something is, it must have a weak spot. I think this is a big thing that many modding newbies fail to see.
If a unit has no real weak areas at a tactical level, then it is always over or underpowered. Never balanced. Always. Why? Because, with no weaknesses, it is either not worth building, because while it is adequate at everything, specialist units are better, or the inverse is true... for the cost, whatever "the cost" is (this goes back to the real heart of the game design, of course- the true cost of a thing).
So, you'll never see me put a unit into a game that is decently armored, has a weapon that can kill swarms of weak things, a weapon that can kill armored things, and has its own defense against aircraft as well, unless it has some sort of tragic, horrible flaw.
Tragic, horrible flaws are the core of good tactical gameplay. For example, the artillery tanks from Starcraft, which weren't terribly great unless planted, were awesome examples of this. While they appeared to function OK as mobile units, even newbies working through the single-player campaigns quickly discovered the obvious fact that they simply weren't that great as straight-up tanks, but were a lot more useful as offensive, creeping artillery.
One of the reasons that those of us who are serious about this whole game-design thing look at Starcraft far more than we do OTA is that OTA's balance was terrible. Nobody who's not a moron disagrees with me on this point. OTA was game that quickly devolved to MT forests, sparking, nuke-flooding, flying-your-planes-off-the-screen, Pelican spam, etc., etc., with anybody who knew what they were doing. And Cavedog never got around to fixing it up. I don't know why, and it doesn't really matter.
Having watched the billion or so attempts to rebalance it through mods, and how most of them are still not even close to being balanced in any real sense of the term, makes me think that Cavedog's design was just terrible- they didn't include nearly enough horrible flaws... and that all of these rebal mods are doomed, because other than the UberHack, which was made by serious modders for serious play, most of them haven't been willing to abandon the original premises of the units or add new flaws. I think a lot of that, tbh, is that most of the people doing rebal mods aren't what I'd consider real modders anyhow- they're just hacks who don't understand that many of the balance issues are within the BOS code and other places, and require real technical skill to get solved. At least Caydr, whereever he is now, was starting to get a clue about that, there before he finally got tired of it all.
Maybe someday the LordLemmis of the world will start actually fixing animation code and doing other things, to address the fundamental issues of balance. But I'm not holding my breath.
one thing about starcraft that really gets me is the potential of units attainable through micro
eg. lurkers = ultimate infantry crowd slaughter
so we have a standard unit mix and its counter
BUT..... a crazy good terran could maneuver his marines and medics out of the spines' paths and kill the lurkers suffering few casualties
if the zerg player was good enough he could have set up a better deployment pattern to ensure slaughter and burrow his lurkers step wise or he might have used zerglings to try and force the marines and medics to clump up or stop them from retreating or lead them into stop-lurker ambush
the terran might then have used even more micro, splitting his mnms into even smaller groups and moving them in even more directions to prevent effective lurker deployment from raping and throwing in firebats to kill zerglings letting his marines focus fire on lurkers
when you throw in zerg defilers with darkswarm to protect the lurkers and terran science vessels to irradiate and scourges to take out the vessels
all requiring large amounts of micromanagement the depth and quality of gameplay is remarkable
It has never made sense to me how that much necessary micro can be seen as a good thing. If I'm playing a strategy game, it's because I want to be in control of the battle as a whole, not individual units. Making every unit useless unless micro'd to perfection means I never get to appreciate anything I do, because I'm too busy doing all the thinking that my units should be doing themselves.
Micro on that scale is like telling your soldiers to move to the side a bit because a steamroller is about to flatten them. If they were really soldiers, they'd move themselves without waiting for me to give them an order.
There's a lot to be said for encouraging players to use combined arms, ambushes, flanking maneuvres, and so on, but forcing the player to micromanage every single unit movement down to the metre scale, order focused fire on every target from every unit group, all while managing base expansion and economy at the same time, is not an RTS any more. It's a clickfest, and becomes all about who can click fastest and use experience rather than tactical thinking to make decisions (since recalling a successful plan from a similar situation from memory rather than developing a new one on the fly is much faster, and also much more likely to succeed in that environment). And frankly, if I wanted to play a game like that I'd play Minesweeper.
I slightly disagree with argh there.. using some sort of inaccurate high AOE unit to counter spam is a tactic not a strategy in the military sense of the word.
Strategy is the overall plan by which you are going to attempt to accomplish your long range goals.. Things like planning where to attack, what points to control and the control of resources are strategic level sorts of operations. Force composition and the movement of said forces is tactics. The utilization of terrain for advantage and the tactical attack as well as the proper utilization of unit assets and how you decide to set up the composition of these units these are all tactical level operations.
Micro as it is so called is a method of controlling finer tactical operations, it essentially exists for one reason alone, when games came out they have and still to this day have not really made a Unit AI with the level of complexity that would be displayed by a squad level commander in real life. Soldiers in real life have a complicated rules of engagment orders and other various configurations defined. Essentially In spring I cannot assign a command to a selection of units to hold a position at all costs while attempting to minimize casualties and destroy enemy targets of oppertunity first. The AI just doesnt have that level of complexity, because of this I have to use "micro" to achieve the same effect. In this sense micro is just a method of applying tactics. I feel however that some people place to much emphasis on micro believe it to be the be all end all of gameplay and thinking that the more they can put in the more superior their gameplay is. This is a fallacy, the inclusion of more micro is essentially attempting to approach the level of control of a simulator game or First person shooter, where you have Absolute control over what your unit does, usually at the expense of only have 1 or a handful. Applying a mass amount of mirco to a game that is intended to have quite a lot of units essentially reduces the amount of strategy possible except for those with excellent reaction times. Most people will be to busy trying to order around all their troops and fail to realize that this will be all for not because a superior twitch gamer can utilize a small group of units to devistating effect due to the fact that all units are now "stupider". While not exactly poor gameplay, it is not strategic minded gameplay and should never be confused as such.
In a game that is attempting to realize strategic gameplay, as many provisions as possible should be made to reduce the neccessary level of control required to utilize individual units effectively. In otherwords if you want more strategic gameplay you need to reduce micro as much as possible. There is a difference between strategic thinking, tactical thinking, and individual twitch control situational awareness. None of these is superior to the other in some level, and in reallife it is when indivduals that excell at all 3 areas are combined into one fighting force to achieve a superior army. In games however we have yet to combine all 3 levels of thinking into a singular game, and most games only represent one level of this thinking, either be it strategic (RTS), tactical (squad based games) or twitch situational awareness (FPS). Different people excell at different things, and as with all people always attempt to adapt their surroundings to suit their abilities. What you end up with people who are actually more suited to tactical control attempting to make "RTS" games that focus more on tactics (have more micro than some might consider neccessary), some even fo as far as to make micro the almost be all end all. None of these is "best" however you should be aware of what you are actually trying to achieve and label it as such so as to not confuse others, this is usually where the argument takes place, when one says a game is something its not and people on one level or another accuse it of not having what it says.
Everyone seems to have this problem with micro and acts like having good micro and being a smart player are mutually exclusive.
To micro at 60cmd/m you have to be able to think of effective orders 60 times a minute.
If you've ever watched a pro starcraft match they aren't simply following memorized patterns on a tactical level, they are thinking of how they can trick their opponent out and get the better of them in every way.
Chances are if someone is outmicroing you they will also have better strategy as well.
Clicking is the easy part in micro, knowing what to click is where skill comes in. Knowing how you can utilize your resources better than your opponent is the core of RTS
I think the issue that people take with it is that micro is more on the tactical level in a game that is more designed for strategic level. This is a clear difference between starcraft and jstf vs TA and supcom. Although as argh pointed out, having a zomygosh next-to-unstopable unit is really quite amatuer. That is one of the major things I hate about supcom. Starcraft's rock paper scissors balance comes in with crap like the dark templar that require a spotter to stop them(very lame imo, the dude is punching me in the face). We are not saying that X unit needs X squad to fight them. That simply isn't true. No matter how many zerglings or even ultralisks a player has that one darktemplar will kill them all unless you have a spotter. That is the sort of 1 to 1 balance counter balance that makes starcraft fail. Also to the starcraft player who says that countering a lurker is hard.. not really spotters make the lurkers dead.
As a note: thanks for all the discussion guys, I am really enjoying the thread. There are limited personal insults and everyone is discussing for the greater good. :)
smoth wrote:...Starcraft's rock paper scissors balance comes in with crap like the dark templar that require a spotter to stop them(very lame imo, the dude is punching me in the face). We are not saying that X unit needs X squad to fight them. That simply isn't true. No matter how many zerglings or even ultralisks a player has that one darktemplar will kill them all unless you have a spotter. That is the sort of 1 to 1 balance counter balance that makes starcraft fail. Also to the starcraft player who says that countering a lurker is hard.. not really spotters make the lurkers dead...
1. build 1 mex
2. forget e as no good player needs it, continue building vech, and only vech factory (or air sometimes)
3. Q up 5 wezel
4. realise u r e stalling, but dw, solars r free
5. Q up 2 cons, send them to build unprotected mex
6. Q 200 gator
7. forget t2, just Q another 200 gator
8. move com to enemy base, surround with llt, and progress to dgun whole enemy base
9. If by any chance failure is result, Q another 1000 gator
If your mod does not follow these 9 basic steps, don't count on it being played.
KTHXBAI
