Those hard counter unit types and damage types in Star Craft like 'armor' or 'light' with units that have +damage vs. these types give noobs a better sense of control and empowerment, without creating an OP unit.

SupCom2 doesn't have many gimme counters and some of the SupCom2 gimme counters don't work well or require a lot of management, which can be more frustrating than not having a gimme counter at all.

I am not suggesting using the same system as StarCraft, but if something is made of stone, wood, water, fire or flesh maybe we could have different damage types. There's a lot of directions to go with damage types. This is just an example idea. Maybe a Tier2 unit could be really good at damaging Tier1s in melee combat. Maybe walls and stone creatures only take damage from damage designated siege damage. There are a lot of possibilities.

That's why I push for this system to be implemented. If it is implemented and not used at all then it was at most a small waste of time, but if it ends up being used it would have been worth the investment.

I think starcraft 2 is actually really bad when it comes to this. The armor system makes it difficult to approach because, honestly, I have no idea what units have damage bonuses against other units. What I do know is that most units can shoot at most other units and they all have practically the same range... so if I build 5 of something it will almost invariably be able to kill 2 of something else... but 5 of one thing versus 5 of another thing? How the hell am I supposed to figure out which will win? The damage each does to another may as well be arbitrary.

Most small things with low health are light units.

Most large things with armored surfaces such as steel or thick carapace is 'armored'. If it is a vehicle it is armored.

It is actually easy to pick up, because like you said most units are so simple.

While we are talking about balance and Star Craft in K&C:
One of the big elements I expect to find in K&C is lack of radar. Lack of radar actually adds an element of strategy to the game. One must visually inspect an enemy base to determine how to counter him. That comes at it's own perils. It makes sneak attacks far more viable, and it increases the odds of success of make or break strategies that could help an underdog get back into the game. I have no idea what K&C will actually be like, but this is an expectation I have, and I am curious how GPG will develop it. Will they tailor in unit types and structures that benefit from the element of surprise?

Some concepts that immediately come to mind are:

Assassins. Fast units with low armor/health, some kind of stealth and good damage.

Experimentals. Once unleashed can you stop the monstrosity?

Flyers. Both for sniping, raiding as well as for scouting enemy bases.

Spells. Spells should be game changing and shift balances of power. Warhammer does an excellent job with spells.

High Ground/Strategic Locations. High Towers to have vision to fire cannon, cast fire balls or to spot incoming enemy soldiers should play a big part in the game.

Sneaking your army around the back. Do like Z Germans and blitz through Sweden or do like the Fellowship and adventure through Moria. Just watch out for the Balrog. You don't want to lose your commander.

Corner Wanking never felt so good. Without radar you can build your Wizard's tower in a reclusive corner of the map and build the IronDragon/Death&Decay/LightBringer/DemonicHorde spell in peace, so that your opponent will rue the day he ransacked your castle.

What if I play vampires and get a saguinemancer, able to detect the heartbeats of living units from miles away? Or Azuric Eye swarms as the gadgeteers, drone like constructs that sweep the battlefield for enemy movement? What about auspices, devices that can locate nearby magic sources, with more powerful magics (I see you lightbringer) being detected further away.

You missed the magic bit in KnC... Scry/Farsight are possiblity two of the most commonly used spells/abilities in fantasy.

@warhammer: Damn right, my Skink priest's Comet of Cassadora didn't show up for 5 turns, and when it did arrive it destroyed 4 entire units that were in melee around the marker. 75% of the remaining units on the board (on both sides) gone.

MTG has some fairly awesome spells/creatures that could be used for inspiration, maybe.

I think I won that one in the end though....

Hellions being the only exception- they're Light units. Ghosts are also neither Light nor Armored, same with Banelings, Queens, Archons. But those are exceptions, not rules.

Starcraft 2's system is pretty good because each unit receives at most one modifier unless they have a dual-weapon like BCs or Reapers, and that's very rare and shouted at you on the unit's selection. The simple fact is that for Starcraft 2, Marauders counter Roaches unless you have a shitton more Roaches, and it's pretty invariant. Especially since the game tells you everything about a unit - it's types, it's weapons and bonuses. Unit A vs Unit B can mostly be theorycrafted off the visible stats. There are a couple surprise units like Mutalisks, but that's the only one I can think of offhand. Knowing each unit and what it can counter is pretty easy.

I was playing campaign and there was no way for me to tell him enemy units received bonuses against my units or visa versa. The whole armor system just sucks.

1. Click on unit
2. Mouse over weapon
3. Read text
4. ???
5. Profit

The descriptions say which armor type the weapon is effective against but there's no way for me to see which enemies have which armor types. Further, there's no way to see which enemies have which weapon types.

If you click on the unit, all it's armor types are listed at the bottom. Enemy units that are in visual range give the same information as friendly units, so it should be pretty simple to just click on a couple of units. Failing that, go to the battle.net site, it gives all of them.

I see a couple of problems with this approach.
First you are argueing that a damage table will make it easier to change the balance of the game. I don't think that is a good thing. We want a level of inertia, so the balance doesn't change every week. If it changes too quickly that makes it to hard for casual players to compete. Especially against the pro's that know what the best counter is this week.

2 you are talking about hard counters. I don't like hard counters. I hate loosing a game because I went scissors and my opponent went rock. Intel is important, unit choice and micromanagement also key, but the harder you counters are the more your game leans towards a guessing game.

The Fun in games is directly proportional to the number of meaningful decisions. If your counters are too hard you only have 1 decision. He brought paper did I bring scissors or rock. (I can wander into deep stuff here that is only slightly on topic.)

3rd. As I mentioned before and many people are mentioning on the last page. Unit purposes must be accessible and transparent. Tool tips are key. But useful tool tips not flavor text. Updated tool tips. So if the unit does bounis damage to non-stone buildings the tool tips says so, and if a balance change comes out and they loses that bounis damage the tool tip reflects that too.
Unit role should also be intuitive. Say the bad-guys army is made up of a couple of big blocks of slow moving forward facing pike men, backed up by cannons and magic. I need to get around the flank and wipe out the glass cannons (arty and spell dudes) and hit the pike formations from behind where the don't have the pointy bits. I'll take horse dudes and light infantry backed by heroes.
A damage table solution would be find the unit that has the bounis against pikes and use that.

It's more fun to have an understanding of how things work and fit together than it is to scroll though the unit list looking for the one with the specific buff you need.

Well, since Ive done some modding for supcom2, I can tell you its very hard to balance a unit against another. This table makes it easy to balance individual units against eachother instead of accidentally breaking balance against some other unit. This doesnt mean you should balance less or more often, it just means you can do it more accurately. That doesnt mean there HAVE to be hard counters. Its just a possibility.

The balance won't change every week because it might actually be somewhat good to begin with. RPS only occurs in a game where unit choice is a stronger factor than other player-choosable factors like position, etc, AND, where no intel factors in. The instant you grow a brain cell, scout your opponent, and change your strategy, RPS is over.

To avoid unproductive flaming maybe the OP or some one else could be more clear what a balance table is, what it looks like how it works.
What it does is balance the game right? By artificially strengthening or weakening 1 unit against another Right?
Could some one explain better, or possibly even post one?

I'm against them because they seam artificial, jury-rigged and unintuitive. But I might be wrong on that, maybe I don't understand them.

Sense

This comment makes none.

The rules of chess seem artificial, jury-rigged, and unintuitive. The rules of Go seem artificial, jury-rigged, and unintuitive. The rules of Risk seem artificial, jury-rigged, and unintuitive.

I don't think chess would really be an example of that. Now if you said Pawns can move an extra space diagonally when attacking Knights, and the king can suddenly do a backflip anywhere on the map ontop of the enemy queen, then it would be a fair comparison. Chess has uniform rules that apply the same way in every situation. A balance chart has specific-situation rules.

Well, the thing is, those are more gamelike (abstract?) games. Arbitrary rules like in Chess wouldnt wash quite as well in a hardcore tabletop military strategy game, for example.

Similarly, an RTS has pretentions to be a little more simlike, so there's bad feelings towards things that are too abstract/arbitrary.

Hmm, slightly unrelated, I'm usually fine with some sort of physics abstraction in the game modeling damage/projectile/armour types (or in the case of KnC, some kind of magic system of protections and damage types.) Even though it boils down to a hidden table of modifiers, I feel comforted by the notion of Tank Armour being almost impervious to Small Arms, and AP Shells being weak against large structures, etc.

I wonder if anti-table people like Funkoff also hate such "simlike" tables?

The rules of Chess are artificial, Jury-rigged and unintuitive. So that doesn't necessary make it bad game, it just takes harder to learn.

There is only 1 rule of Go, put stones on the board, when you are no longer connected to open space you are dead.

Go has the simplest rules possible for a board game. Flipping a coin is simpler but it doesn't use a board.


I'm cool with different armor types, and different weapon types. and a balance table that way, that actually happened with medeviel armor and weapons and still happens with modern armor and weapons. I don't like the Idea of a unit specific balance table.

The trouble with physics-based systems is that they have quite limited complexity.

Basically, you have offense attributes and defenses associated with those attributes. let's say that I want attacks to have either pierce, impact, or slashing associated with them. I would then take a unit, say a crossbowman, and associate his damage with pierce. His base damage will stay the same, only the attribute is unique. You then have a unit, say a knight, and you assign how much damage you want him to take from certain damage attributes, for example, take 50% damage from slashing, 70% damage from impact, and 120% damage from pierce. He will take more damage from the crossbowman, but not swords or axes. If need be, as we are discussing here, you can change one of his defenses, so that he can either take more damage from a certain type of unit or less damage from a certain type of unit.

Basically, you adjust stats based on how they work with certain units, not all units.

How's that? Isn't reality a physics-based system?

You're a physics-based system.

and so's your mom!!!

I don't understand the opposition to this at all; Starcraft's damagetypes are pretty simple and intuitive, because there are only like 3 types of damages and corresponding armors, and very few combinations are seriously strong or weak. If you can't figure out that you shouldn't use Vultures (directly) against Ultralisks, then uh, you're dumb. If there were dozens of damage/armor types, or specific unit vs unit comparisons, then of course things get complicated, and that's undesirable.

Good (or bad, actually) examples of this would be Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends - both good games that had an unnecessarily granular RPS system where each unit was good against one specific unit type, and really weak against others.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a slightly less annoying example, where the armortypes and damagetypes are all hidden, and many units (e.g. capitalships) have multiple weapon types with different damagetypes. It's still somewhat intuitive based on frigate size/role, with capital ships being somewhat universally effective but never specialized, however the lack of clear UI info on this along with the sheer number of armor types are both bad things, and overall I'd call it a poor implementation.

Avoid these pitfalls, and there's nothing wrong with a little armor/damage RPS.


Edit: What DMG is saying about physics-based balancing is that there's only so many ways you can use physics/accuracy to make certain units weaker against others, and it's going to change a lot when units are in motion vs when they're stationary, which is not necessarily a good thing. While I really love SC's fluid combat, the idea that your units are going to automatically lose if they're not moving is a stupid side effect of the game's specific implementation of physics-based balancing.

Nobody's arguing that the game shouldn't use a sim/physics based system, but that it isn't enough to properly balance all unit types against each other, and if you try to use that alone, you'll get some negative effects as mentioned above.