I really need to stop and actually get some work done, so I'm just going to respond to a few of the points here, but I'm sure that the discussion may continue without me for a while. I've now spent approximately 3-4 hours responding to these various threads this week alone, which means a 10% loss of coding time to just this one conversation. This is the reason I tend not to want to reiterate my past arguments in general, is that getting mired in the weeds for too long is damaging to development of the game itself.
It kind of forces me to relearn the game each time I play (Not necessarily a bad thing). And I find myself flailing about at first trying to relearn a system that has a lot of nuances without a solid framework to fall back on.
The flailing is not intended, but having to "relearn" it every single game very much is. A primary complaint for me with most RTS games is that basically I can learn a build pattern and what works best, and then apply that to all future games. Then it's just a matter of optimizing that pattern I've come up with, and getting as fast as possible, and using that to win. That's fun for a while, but it gets old and then the game is pretty much dead to me past a certain point.
So with AI War, having the ship mix be so radically different in each campaign makes it almost like a fresh game each time, where you have to both anticipate what might work well, test your hypotheses, and then observe the results and react accordingly. I think this is very similar to how a real commander might have to observe the various effects of a given platoon or a given enemy, looking for the "hidden bonsues" of those various groups (especially veteran or motivated soldiers, lack of supplies or factors that make them more poor than average, or other issues).
In other words, in real life a commander has a certain amount of general knowledge about what to do in advance, but then has to make the vast majority of his decisions on the fly, in the field. The more experienced the commander, the better they are at doing that, but they still have to think on their feet. Otherwise, mathematicians would run the strategies of wars, and just phone in pre-built strategies from home. Of course that sounds ludicrous, but that is essentially the sort of situation you start getting into too much meta-gaming with many strategy games.
With AI War, you aren't
supposed to have a full understanding of everything that is going on. You aren't supposed to able to anticipate every single interaction and what its result will be. That's Chess. And while Chess was certainly an inspiration for me in certain ways, I was really more intent on creating something that simulates the effects of a battlefield and how a commander would really have to manage that, rather than focusing on having a simple, memorable meta-game.
At lot of the calls for simplicity in this or that way are at odds with this, though I try not to make things too opaque. Of course, loosing a troop of 300 guys to a lightning turret or a special forces guard post is not too damaging in the overall game sense, and there really aren't that many traps of that sort to fall into. The tooltips, in general, do a pretty reasonable job of explaining those things, but there are a few rough patches that still need to be worked out. I don't plan on doing a massively new system of tooltips for starships or turrets mainly because I can't think of a better way to handle that based on the data that is currently there, but I will probably explore that more at some point.
They don't take into account things like range (as you point out below). So I've still got to remember that Cruisers say they're bad against Cutlasses but actually have nothing to worry about from Cutlasses unless they're sitting on top of them. And I've got to remember the corner cases when they come up (Things like the aforementioned T-Raiders vs. Turrets = Bad). This is probably more an argument for reviewing the tooltips then anything.
The problem is, everyone imagines there is a magical solution to this, when I think our recent stock market crash has demonstrated that there is not. The magical solution that tells you everything you need to know is that giant spreadsheet export, which is hard to consume because it is too much information. My challenge has been to reduce all the interactions between two complex ships into a single general guide number, and I've experimented with four or five different methods of doing this in the past (most during alpha, but it has adapted some over the course of post-release work). That's incredibly more challenging than I think most people realize (most people didn't seem to understand what was wrong with reducing "financial risk" to a single number, either).
So really, my point is that there is always going to be something wrong with any single number system that can be come up with, and always corner cases or things not really reflected properly, etc. There's simply no way around it, I'm pretty positive. Meanwhile, the system that I devised and that is currently in use has been refined over a long period of time, discarding less-workable alternatives, and the current result has been arrived at. It will continue to be refined over time, I'm sure -- turrets and starships do need some tuning, I'll be the first to admit -- but I don't plan on making a wholesale swap-out of the system unless some sort of magical solution is found (and I suppose that could happen, but nothing anyone has proposed so far comes even close).
I'm not suggesting the removal of bonuses and penalties. Far from it.
I know. But there are a ton of varying opinions in this thread, and a lot of it boils down to removing bonuses and/or moving to an armor-based system. I'm trying to address as many of the people per post as possible, so some of the commentary like that was not really directed at you -- apologies for any confusion.
I like a system that very nearly recreates what you've already done. However, the bonuses and penalties (again, this is my suggestion) should be named and codified and based on tags for the units. So turrets have the "Turret Tag" and Teleport Raiders have the "Bad Against Turrets" property that reduces their damage against turrets by 50%. Any other unit that you want to attach the "Bad Against Turrets" property to gets the same tag. Then you just make the tooltip show all the tags. In this way, you could avoid things like the above mentioned secret (but soon not to be;) teleport raider stealth defect. This does two things for you as well.
1) It makes adding 80 new ships a heck of a lot easier (any new ship with "missiles" is going to either have to have a penalty vs. eye bots or eye bots gets a bonus against it... ditto Bulletproof, Deflector Drone, etc.). I imagine some of this has already been done (ala "immunity from tractors")
2) I've got no problem with one off adjustments. Laser Gatlings too strong and you want them to be weaker vs. Cruisers? Give them the "Prone to Missiles" property. This may inspire you to add new ships that flesh out some of these one off properties.
The main problem with something like that is that it is extremly rigid. In your example, if you make laser gatlings "prone to missiles," then that's not only affecting how they interact with cruisers, but also 30% of the other missile-based ships in the game. Again, that certainly drives towards simplicity in some respects, but it also really effs with the balance of the game to a minor or a major degree, and makes individual balance tweaks harder. Also, for some of the more esoteric ships they do have something like 10-20 different penalties per thing, and that's tuned to a very fine degree. I'd need hundreds of tags to duplicate that sort of system if I tried to expose that through the interface.
Obvious, huge penalties such as the fact that tele-raiders are SO terrible against turrets are something I will highlight through description text, as I have been doing. But I think that going tag-crazy is going to just obscure other, more vital parts of the interface while also just adding to the information overload through the interface in general. To some extent this game is about cautious exploration. See some new ship that you aren't really sure about? Maybe send a smaller test force against it and see what happens before you commit your entire fleet. This, again, is something that you have to do as a real commander I think. You need to feel out the enemy and see what their capabilities are compared to yours. The outcome is not perfectly known in advance, and so if things go poorly you need to be ready to quickly retreat or change tactics. Those sorts of cautious-probing advances are common in many other genres (in RPGs, FPSes, etc, you run into a new enemy all the time and have to size them up on the fly and make a decision using the tools you have at hand).
I know that you are not specifically arguing against that sort of thing, I get that, but the secondary effects of what you are advocating are to either a) reduce game complexity in general, or b) clutter the interface to a huge degree, or c) make games more predictable in general, once you have been playing for a suitable amount of time. C in particular is the exact
opposite of what I want to do, because that's the point at which the game dies for most hardcore players (or at least me). That's a huge difference in design goals compared to most other RTS games, I get that as well, but I think it's a valid thing to explore and that largely is what results in such a rich game environment here.
Side Note: Etherjets can't damage Eye Bots (per the chart)? Do Etherjets fire missiles? The graphic doesn't really look like a missile.
Yes, they fire the same graphic of missiles as anti-armor. If you pause it mid-flight, you should be able to see the graphics better I imagine. I'm not aware of any glitchiness with it, anyway.
I apologize, I wasn't trying to imply that it was being rejected out of hand. I was trying to point out the potential appearance of that to new players who are unwilling to search the forums. Given the growth trajectory of the game so far, appearance is going to be as important (or even more important) then substance on some of these issues.
I gotcha -- yes, out of hand rejection, or the appearance thereof, would be deadly. That's why this is such a challenge for me, as I could spend all my time simply re-explaining myself and never getting any real work done (look at how long I've gone on in yet another post). My hope is that by referring new players here, they can read my existing arguments and I won't have to reiterate them. If they want to make a
new argument, they can do so, but it's going to have to be something really startlingly new to get much of a positive response from me, because in my opinion this issue has been beat to death over a wide range of possibilities.
I think if they got into the mechanics of it what they'd REALLY have a problem with (the thing I find the most-counterintuitive) is that shields diminish range rather than damage. That was my singular point of confusion with T-Stations and Spec Forces and I need to pay more attention to it.
Well, it makes sense if you think about it, and is consistent with certain other sci-fi franchises (not games). It wouldn't say that it reduces range, per se, but rather that ships with higher range are also having a faster firing rate, and so firing from closer range has a better chance of penetrating shields.
It does result in some weird things as you increase Mk levels on ships. Bulletproofs scale up range and damage whereas Autocannons range remains the same (except for MkIII which is surely a typo?).
What MarkIII are you referring to? I don't see anything that looks out of place with Bulletproof or Autocannons, but I might just be looking right through it or something.
I like games with different mechanics so it doesn't bother me but it is a pretty critical knowledge hurdle to make for the system to be "grokkable".
To be really good at AI War, an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the ships and the underlying mechanics is not required nor encouraged. This alone is a huge departure from most (all?) other strategy titles. Instead, it emphasizes a knowledge of the fundamentals, whatever you consider those to be (I'm sure opinions on that would vary), paired with a certain style of thinking -- lots of observation and being able to put to use what you observe in any given game.
Part of me is tempted to give randomized minor invisible bonuses to ship types in every game, just to remove any semblance of people being able to memorize interactions between one game and another, but that's not something I think would really be particularly beneficial. It would frustrate me, even, because I do have a general feel for how the various ships work at this point, and I wouldn't want that to change every game. The point is
general feel, though, and in many cases how a specific ship mix works in one situation is different from another.
One inspiration for this sort of flow, I think, is Magic: The Gathering. There's a game with a lot of rules, and a lot of complexity, and nigh infinite possible combinations of cards (assuming infinite budget, since it's collectible), but you wind up with any individual game using a tiny subset of that whole. Dominions, a boardgame I love, also does the same thing. It makes it so that you have to think on your feet every time, and a primary goal of further expansions to both of those games is to increase the card set to provide more opportunities for both customization and unexpected combinations. I prefer the Dominions model of fixed-size expansions rather than nickel-and-dime collectible model, of course, and so that's what I'm using with AI War, but that's the general idea.
I'm a pretty decent Magic: The Gathering player, but I don't know most of the cards (especially not now, since I mostly haven't played since high school, and mostly I played in middle school), but that's okay because I can look at each as it comes up, examine what seems to be possible and what actually turns out to be possible, and then react based on that. Even if you knew all the cards in magic, you'd never know exactly what is in your opponents hand, or deck, unless you keep playing the same decks against each other over and over (and even then, the hand is always unknown). So there are "invisible modifiers" that can drastically change the game at any given time there, and part of your job as a magic player is to account for that uncertainty, watch for cues in your opponent, and react to the ever-changing situation by whipping out hidden cards of your own.
AI War is not M:TG, but that sort of mindset I think is something that should hold true, especially as expansions are added and the potential piece set becomes ever-larger. The problems come in when people want to meta-game too much, to try to come in and understand and remember every last facet about the inner workings of every unit, and leverage that into success in battle. When instead, all you have to do is send out a small probing force, observe the results, and go from there. Meta-gaming is fine for people who can do it and want to do it -- I'm not here to tell people how to play or enjoy this or any other game -- but it's not something I'm designing the game around overmuch.
Again, lazrulz, a lot of that is not really directed at your specific comments, but I feel I need to go on and write my comments and design goals out clearly and all together here on this thread, or this is going to just keep on being a time sink for me. Now, I really need to go get back to coding.
