Well I certainly disagree with that part. Based on this (KS), the game ain't advertised as being a game where we're losing all the time:
Variable Difficulty!
The game has options to tailor the game to your skill level and playstyle:
Whether you're a masochistic ultra-hardcore grognard
Someone who enjoys RTS games.
Or just a space game fan!
I can’t help but notice you left out the paragraph explaining those bullet points, here allow me, I’ll even highly the relevant part of it.
Generally speaking, if you're winning all the time, the usual suggestion is to 'up the difficulty a notch.' Most players tend to enjoy the game best when victories are hard-fought or just barely lost. It's not about winning or losing, but about finding the right balance so that each campaign is an epic story of accomplishment.
Now continuing on to the rest of your post.
If someone with decent RTS experience starts at the "regular" difficulty level, or if someone with low experience starts at "easy" level, he should win the game.
Comparing AI Wars to a traditional RTS is a poor fit and I’ll explain more on that below, however, even regular RTS players starting at regular difficulty expect to struggle and possibly lose their first games or two. Why? Because they don’t know what counters what, they don’t know what is valuable and not, unless they go through some sort of tutorial that teaches them those lessons. They might amass a massive army of ground units, only to have them decimated by air units that they couldn’t hit because they didn’t know that, or they didn’t realize the importance of resource “C” in later tech and built their empire out without strategically keeping “C” handy.
Thing is the people that look forward to losing a game are few, but they CAN start the game at high difficulty if they feel it's too easy. The whole "max diff level meant to be unwinnable" should certainly bring those guys in. But, the people that look forward to winning a game don't need to be shunned out for no particular reason.
I’m not sure if Keith has laid out his plan for difficulty levels yet but that’s what 1-5 was all about in Classic, having an easy space game where you just do what you want regardless of strategy. 6 was where the AI started actually playing a little, and 7 was “normal” and the computer would stop phoning it in if I remember the tooltip correctly.
If you want the attrition rate of people to be higher (lower ? well, better ?), you'd have to make it so the first experience is fun. Being snowballed because of a single mistake with little to no hope of recovery, after a 10 hour game ? Yeaaah, no. They won't learn anything if they feel the game is unfair, if they feel that you need to know the game before you start, and if they can't bounce back from some major errors at low diff level. They'll leave. That's all.
I don’t think any of us are saying a single mistake should cost you the game, what we are saying is that a single mistake should be punished like any other mistake. If you can throw your entire fleet at the AI, lose the fight, and not be punished for it, then that’s what you’ll always do. That’s what the game will have taught you, to simply throw everything you can at a system, and do the best you can there, and if you win “Huzzah new system!” if you lose, rebuild and try again.
However, if you are punished for losing then that lesson becomes more potent. It becomes like I said, a lesson in recognizing a failing attack and retreating to not only reduce your losses, but to also prepare for the counter-attack that will be coming back at you. It will teach you to maybe not commit your entire force to an attack, so that you have reserves should the AI take that moment to hit another border, or your attack fails and you need to play defense for a little bit.
One thing the people on this forum must remember is that Arcen games attracts particular kind of people, (with tendency to masochism, as a whole), but that does not mean that they should shut out people with other aspirations.
While I agree with that statement, you must also remember that Arcen games already has a dedicated fan base, and changing their flag ship game away from what got them that fan base is no guarantee of new fans, and generally will cost them existing fans.
I can literally only think of a single IP that has changed their game massively and had success doing it, and that was Blizzard’s switch from Warcraft being a RTS to a MMO. Any other IP that has strayed too far from the path of their core game mechanics has had their game flop.
=> So yeah, for me 2 needs => kill netflix time, & bounce back possibility even in the case of a major blunder at "lower" and "regular" diff level. Of course, at high diff level... kill'em all.
Bouncing back on lower level, sure 100% I’ll agree with that. Regular level... not so much.
Are those any of those games relevant ? Like are those with 15 hour long campaigns ? A Civ game is 5-6 hours, from civ1, if you know a bit what you're doing.
In any case, my point is that the game isn't being advertised as a "you're going to lose". So the player does lose at lower diff, you've subverting his expectation from how the game is sold, so it's a bad idea to make him lose.
That said, that does not mean make the game too easy.
Players that pick up a game and without knowing anything about it can win their first game on regular difficulty, I assure you aren’t going to stick around long. Making a game for them, is only beneficial if you want your game to sputter out after six months / a year.
Actually Civ is a pretty good comparison game wise for a modern game, probably better would be stuff like Endless Space, or Masters of Orion but they are all also turn based, which does change the feel and challenge a lot, but they all have that 4X strategy part to them, the same as AIW does. Something that games like Starcraft and Warcraft don’t do at all.
Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but yeah, my preferences goes to games you can play at a simple level to start, then grow more & more intricate as you learn them and advance in them. Gemcraft, the starcraft & warcraft campaigns, the whole of the Civ series is based on this concept. Ergo, you can win first time "lower" difficulty levels, depending on your previous experience in video gaming.
I’m skipping over the rest of this post because I generally agree with it, it has and always will be my biggest issue with AIWC, is that luring new friends into the game is an extremely daunting task, even when we play co-op because there is just such a massive learning curve to the game. They first few games they are essentially just tagging along while I play a solo game with two homeworlds.
My problem with comparing a game like AIW to something like Star/War-craft as opposed to Civ, is exactly the reason you pointed out, Campaigns. Those massively change the way you can teach the game. If you wanted to truly compare apples to apples for something like Starcraft vs AI Wars, you’d have to do it as a “buy the game, and jump immediately into a skirmish map with the AI” without playing a campaign first. Then you would have a small scale version of what AIW does.
Civ doesn’t let you do slow grow, it simply has more difficulty levels as opposed to SC2 Easy/Medium/Hard/Insane to make the computer more forgiving of your mistakes. You still get bombard by all the features at once, you have to manage your city, the happiness, diplomacy with other factions, resources, strategic resources, luxury resources, an army, an economy, the list continues on. Your first mission in SC2? Take a squad of 5-10 marines and move them through the map killing things. Second mission? Basic economy management with marines, supply depots, and bunkers if I remember correctly. You were taken baby steps through most of the different mechanics for the first 4-5 missions, which was in essence the game’s ‘tutorial’, once you were done that you continued to grow through the campaign slowly unlocking new things as the story advanced. AIW’s tutorial, I’m not sure if it was ever updated for the new expansions or not, did very much the same thing. Taught you about production queues, and resources, and tech, I want to say it even taught you about gate raiding and similar simple strategies. However, when it was finished the rest of the game is literally dropped on your lap and they say “here” is everything else, sink or swim time.
The other fundamental difference between something like SC2 and AIW is that SC2 is such a smaller scale type game. You have your starting area, and maybe one or two expansions on the map. A game of AIW you could conquer 40+ systems, that all need deal with resources, and defenses (usually), you have to factor things like supply lines and just the sheer vastness of defending such a large area.
