Is the game going to have unit modifiers so that units can be individually buffed against a particular unit?

For instance CoH has a very good implementation of this. I would really like this to be implemented in K&C as it would allow the game to be fine tuned without any of the massive problems that arises from buffing one aspect that has global consequences.

And/or maybe give them different attacks for different things. So a sniper unit would use its rifle when an enemy is far away and then use a short sword when they are nearing melee range. That way, the different weapons can have different damage and balance the game in a similar way bonuses will. If necessary bonuses can also be added so that the sniper does more damage to heavy infantry than other light infantry. But try not to go overboard with the bonuses.

I'm pretty against the concept of buffing one unit against another; it's one of those things that a player has to remember (counter intuitive, how is a new player expected to know what counters what).

That said, I am all-for having multiple weapons for different tasks.

Balance. It is better when you can selectively nerf it's damage against whom it appears OP against. Take AA. You could selectively buff it against gunships and not against bombers. So it is an EXTREMELY useful tool.

I don't deny it's a useful tool - I'm just saying that it's noob-unfriendly, and counter intuitive.

Also, there's other things that determine balance - front-loadedness, accuracy, movement of the thing you're shooting, etc.

I'm advocating this for fine tuning, not for overall balance. And in that instance it isn't noob unfriendly as they just wouldn't see the subtleties anyway.

You will never have both good balance and deep gameplay if you cater to noobs.

Multiple weapon rules.
Using swords against buildings is not how things should be done.

Different blast templates, firing speed and weapon trajectories would do the balancing. For example, a cannon could hit everything in a narrow fan and turns slowly which make it advantageous to flank it. skirmishers might hit every unit in a straight line, making them effective at breaking formation, ect ect.

Would you care to use a recent game as an example of this? Perhaps one we would all likely to have experience with? >_>

Wow guys stay on topic here. I'm not talking about what or where to balance. I'm talking about implementing a mod table for each unit so that the subtleties can be ironed out later in the games lifespan.

So keep your arguments about actual balance out of this thread.

Whilst I can see the advantages of such a table, I'm wary of creating someting so arbitrary, especially if its only for one unit vs. one unit rather than unit type vs. type. It just seems "wrong", I can't really find the right word, somewhere between "not usual" "less than optimum" and "frowned upon".

To my mind, "Gadgeteer Cogwrights do 150dps to all targets except Ulfserker Warriors to whom they do 225dps" comes accross as if the game is slightly broken and can't stand up by itself, as if it has been sellotaped up instead of fully repaired. Once or twice may be fine, but if you do this multiple times the game will be a mess.

The trouble, with projectile speed, fire arcs and accuracy as balancers is that a lot of combat will be in melee where none of that is relevant.

I love the idea of multiple weapon types, TW series did this very well indeed.

This is purely about balance. I would think balance would be MUCH more important rather than something a bit "arbitrary". Think about it, how otherwise would you solve a particular unit vs unit imbalance?

Supcom balancing always has been a pain in the *** because everything affects everything else pretty evenly.....gotta admit that much at least. :/

Taking balance out of context and looking as an absolute is very dangerous. Would you rather an uninteresting but (nigh) perfectly well balanced game, or one with some slight imbalances that's interesting. Neither, you want a fun and well balanced game, like me (I presume).

Consider factional balance in Supcom2, someone, (one of the AZ's I think) wondered what would happen if you artificially evolved a balance between factions by running repeated simulations and randomly tweaking stats between each iteration. Easy, it would make all factions exactly the same. Perfect balance, yes, but also a bit pointless.

Mainly this: A unit vs unit bonus table could quickly get out of hand. If there are 5 factions with 20 combat units each, you have a staggering number of possible matchups, (I suck at combinatorics, and so refuse to try and work it out). Whilst you would not need to have modified for every possbile pairing, perhaps only 5% of pairings, you still have a lot of arbitrary things that don't come from any of the mechanics of the game, nor natively from the units statistics. If I have to learn 40 or so hard-coded, unintuative and presumably not UI accessible pieces of information to do well in the game, then the game strikes me a bit as boring really.

Before a "noob, l2p" or similar comment, I like games that require me to think, I dislike games that require me to memorise, especially if that which I am memorising is in no way related to anything except to make a match-up slightly more fair.

The idea isn't bad at all, its certainly an easy way to solve balance issues between 2 units without affecting the rest of the game. I feel however that it should never be the first thing to try. Much like sellotape for fixing things.



Agreed. Although the changes to the game were always fairly conservative, minor stat boost here, a nerf there. DOW2 for example, the Tyrannid faction was almost completely rebuilt from the ground up several times. Units moved tiers, units were taken out, put it, split up, added as summonables, have loadout changes, role changes, new abilites etc. In the end they had a faction the was radically different from what it started as but agrred by the majority to be much better balanced and more fun to play.

Fundamentally, its very important to remeber that changing stats is not the only way to balance things.

Balance ≠ uninteresting.
Balance ≠ no factional diversity.

Why do you think this though? It's rather annoying when people basically advocate for an unbalanced game. Why is an unbalanced game better in any way? I am completely stupefied by your post.

And this would be a way to FINE TUNE balance. Rather than the main mechanism. You still haven't answered how otherwise we would solve unit versus unit balance.

I don't see why having different types of modifier would be noob-unfriendly.

Take supcom 2 - if this had been implemented, the basic concept is unchanged - AA is used against Air.

Then if gunships need to be tweaked, then the AA tower damage is increased vs gunships.
The basic concept, which a noob will get (or else he really IS retarded), is therefore unchanged, whilst helping the game balance.

As for the argument of "what unit is best vs what", that falls under the title of "that's waht the high-skill players go after", that all out "getting best edge" on the battlefield. IF a noob gets concerned about it, then he's either not a noob, or just trying to be difficult.

In TA Spring units have groups they belong to, self being the most obvious, so if you want to spesify bonuses/handicaps against certain unit, you just state it's name in appropriate place. If I remember correctly these were, BTW, spesified per weapon. You can add how many of these you wish, so the allaround unit X does basic damage against infantry, less against cavalry, even less against air and because it was so weak against dragons even when mass produced it would do high damage against dragons (being only one unit, not like there was multiple different dragons in the game). This way you could give anti-air to all units, like infantrymen throwing rocks at dragons, hitting very rarely and when they actually manage to, they deal ridiculously low damage, but when you have 2000 infantrymen they actually help the handful of archers left.

You could also mean normal gunships and sooprizers, ACKs, AForts etc. at the same time but after a while of testing decrease the damage against sooprizers because they suck overall.

(Altho, realistically speaking in that kind of scenario it would be more likely to see the people run and hide rather than provoke by throwing rocks.)

How could it get "out of hand" if it's helping balance?



Exactly, which is what this set up would help accomplish.



Lack of enjoyment? From your first sentence you imply that lack of balance => less enjoyment. But you deny balance => enjoyment? I would think that balance leads to the game being much more enjoyable as all strategies are possible!



How would this be possible. AA would still attack gunships and all the common sense stuff would still follow. It's just that 1 AA tower wouldn't be able to be UP against one particular air threat concerning it's necessary balance with other units.

CT has never had this as a matter of principle.

So, I don't think so.

I think he did, but I cba to find the source.

The only time he's had it was so that Overcharge didn't pop ACUs in one hit in Sup1/FA.

Which I was cool with, it was simple and easy to understand, OC was god agasint any UNITS aside from ACUs(SCUs? I forget) and it only does 500 Daamge to Buildings.

Nice and Easy.

Mike

As a slight aside, I've always thought it would be more friendly to have a game where it's not useful to learn about hard statistics.

One aspect of it, would be a degree of randomness in the game. Put away the pitchforks for a moment :P Randomness is ok when it's applied many times rapidly (like the firing randomness of projectiles.)

So rather than a unit having 104 DPS, for example, you just know that it has "Heavy" damage. (and its DPS is variable between 80-150 DPS, for example.)
And rather than 500 HP, it just has "Average" health, etc. (and possibly each produced unit of a type has slightly different health too!)

But, at the same time, you have the unit vs. unit adjustment tables, which further alter the numbers anyways. Plus a bunch of other modifiers for terrain and situation. (eg. unit does less damage when HP is low.)


So in the end the point is to muddle up the numbers so much that you can only think of it in terms of general trends, rather than being able to theorycraft with precise statistics.

Would it work? Dunno. People still use averages to compare statistics when randomness is present, and presumably people will examine files and do tests to work out exactly what the modifier is in every situation, so they can still play with their statistics (since internally the game cannot avoid stats). But perhaps making it so fuzzy and complicated will discourage them :P


Anyways, I mention this idea because it means you can have unit type vs. unit type adjustments, and it won't impact on how easy the game is to learn (because you're not suppose to learn about precise statistics under this system).

As long as the table is being used for small balance adjustments rather than a brute-force way of enforcing RPS, then I think it's fine.

Wouldn't work with ACUs nor Kings, otherwise I'd love to try it.