Zeech, would you like to win a game due to luck? If 2 armys of the same type clash, would you like it if yours lost because the opponent was having a luckier time? And you had better tactics, but that +20% random DPS increase just killed you!

Like I said, when the randomness is applied many times quickly, then it will rarely affect win/loss so directly. You never want a single dice roll to have a large effect on the game.

ie. The king should not have an ability "Overcharge strike. Does 10 damage. Has a 10% chance of doing 100000 damage. Cooldown: 1 minute."

Noone has a problem with accuracy randomness, it's the same sort of principle.


Of course, what if a person gets lucky dice rolls for an entire match, just one of those 1 in a million chances? Akin to building some artillery and having every shot landing on the enemy ACU accidentally or something like that.

Maybe that will suck... but it feels like it's so rare that its not worth worrying about.

20% is too much variation for an entire army. You should take a stats/probability theory course first (unfortunately my university is making me take one *sigh*).

Personally, I'd keep DPS the same and make a chance to do a crit. accumulate damage and make that increase the chance of a crit. That way, units start out in a nice, predictable, manner, but end up dying more randomly when they're hurt. It is also about the damaged unit, not some random cannon or bow or sword magically doing more damage.

[EDIT:] ninja'ed. The comment about taking a stat course was directed at Grim.

Yea, go off topic guys.

Zeech, please god no. If I send my legendary dragon against my opponent, I expect things to go roughly even. Even if his wins, it'll barely win, and then my army can probably take down the last sliver of health without taking too much damage. If the dice roll wrong for me and let it win with a fourth of its health left instead, and that lets it roast a third of my army, I'm going to be extremely pissed.

I think it would discourage innovative thinking and just turn the game into a minimization of probabilities.

I see it turning into this:
"I could split up my forces and attack in two seperate groups, but then I'd have a higher chance of something going wrong in one of the groups because they have half the numbers. I need to keep them together so the randomness will average out more and I have a lower chance of getting screwed royally."

And don't tell me "but the enemy has the same chance of getting screwed over, and you have an equal chance of getting a super bonus!" because that's still exactly the wrong thing you want to happen, in principle. The more the randomness swings in either direction, the less you can rely on your strategies because you can never know if you're going to get that bonus or detriment. Only the most general of strategies that have a wide margin for recovering from a bad dice roll will be used.

The creative thinking would turn away from clever strategies into minimizing the chance of getting screwed over, because that's more important in a competitive situation. So please, no. Just no.

I like the idea of damage modifiers against certain units. Starcraft 2 did this pretty well; 3 completely unique races, pretty much balanced.

Starcraft 2 has excellent balance, deep gameplay, AND works well for noobs.

The simplest solution is just to design the game properly in advance so that the units actually counter what you think they counter, then, you can put it in the tooltips and the help menus and stuff. It's amazing how noob-friendly you can make a system when it's documentation actually works.

Tool tips. and accurate tool tips. Because what is intuitive an transparent to the designer is Byzantine and arcane to us.


Don't really think the special damage table is a good plan. The most important thing to balance the game is early heavily populated and (cough) reasonable beta.

Sounds like you are talking about hard counters, I'm not a fan of hard counters and I don't think most CT fans are either.

No, the most important thing to balance the game is a game design that works, not just, throw in every unit we think is cool.

Personally, I love the concept of if it sounds cool lets do it. Eric can make it work, and if I am part of his 'helper team' it will be even better.

I think the "throw everything in thats cool" method can work, as long as you:

- cover all the possible roles
- eliminate any OP stuff asap
- accept that some units will be lesser used / made obsolete by other ones.


Sure, its a bit wasteful to have unused units, but people might still like and use them just for variety or for fun. (they just wont get used in serious competition.)

There will be an audience of players that think its good to have lots of cool stuff. Minimalist design is not for everyone.

This is, however, the balance thread, not the fun-for-morons thread.


This pre-assumes that you actually have pre-designed roles and that they interact as they should do. If you fail this, which SupCom and FA definitely did, then #2 and #3 won't give you a balanced game. And #3 is not just a bit wasteful, it's horrendously wasteful. Do you know how much it costs to produce a unit? All the art, mainly. It's a lot of money that could have gone into, say, making the other units look cooler.

Shrug, a game can be considered balanced as long as there is a core of competitive viability. Having a bunch of fun stuff thrown in doesnt need to hurt that.

As for wastefulness, cost/benefit of such things is never clear. Presumably someone can show statistics saying a new cool useless experimental actually generates more interest and sales than using the manpower on existing units.

Although probably since GPG historically follows this philosophy maybe it is indeed better to wish that they spend more effort polishing and balancing things before adding stuff ;)

Please, PLEASE, for the love of god, implement something like this. A system like in RA3 (different damage types, and every unit is more or less susceptible to certain damage types) would be SO totally awesome! (And nescessary..)

The only way I can see damage types work is with really obvious things:
- fire damage
- magic
- piercing damage
- crushing damage

That would require that the damage type are used in a logical way:
- stone walls are vulnerable to crushing damage and magic, not so much to fire and piercing
- dragons are immune to fire damage and resistant to piercing damage, but fall victim to crushing damage and magic
- mages are resistant to fire and magic but will die easily to physical damage and so on

This could work in a fantasy environment BUT it has to be plausible!

What needs to happen: When designing units, the devs need to say "what is this unit's niche, what niches do we need to fill"

Instead of, with supcom2, it seems like "this is cool, lets have it!" This spawns units like the kraken, which is 100% uselss. Starcraft 2 has very few, if any useless units, and that, imo, is what marks a great RTS.

I concur.

I agree as well. I'd just like to point out to others that damage types aren't necessarily needed for this.

Balance is MUCH easier to change selectively with damage types and modification tables.

That is why I want it implemented. It has NO downfalls other than process time and implement time. After it is set up it's a brilliant feature of any game.

Your not really wrong, but it could be argued your not looking at the big picture either.

Seeing how much KnC seems to take after the Supcom Franchise, it seems to me that having a more transparent balance method would be better for the user.

Mike

What big picture? How do you propose that balance moves forward without damage types and mod tables? If we look at supcom2 how it is right now it's generally balanced, but not competitively balanced. The argument that Eric put forward was that he wants the game to be balanced for noobs and pros (whatever that means) so if he is very stubborn about changing things on a fundamental level at least this would allow some changes that are in dire need for competitive level balancing to filter through.

The same way SupCom1/FA/SupCom2 have?


Um.....I'll be honest and say I'm not sure what to make of this, do you mean to say damage tables is the only way to balance a game meant to be competitive? Sounds more liek you have an issue with the basic fact that SupCom2 isn't an Esport like Starcraft is.

Mike

Balance tables make it easier to balance a game to make it competitive. Supcom2 just failed at fine tuning balance purely because it couldn't balance one thing without screwing up something else.

I am obviously talking about small percentages here, but there is where a really competitive game becomes well loved by the professional community.

This kind of approach also lets you be able to balance units on a more fundamental level: For example you could make a tank destroyer good against tanks but rubbish against bots purely by changing the modifiers. This allows for a massively diverse unit combination to be rapidly balanced as the game matures.

Anywho, what actual points do you have against this approach? Also I am not familiar with how supcom1 or FA were balanced, so feel free to enlighten me.

?

It may be possible to be a hell of a lot better than a noob, but the game is pretty damn enjoyable for them too, especially with all the custom content.

Haven't, more like.