Renowned Explorers: International Society

[zespri]

The guys who did REUS just a few days ago released  Renowned Explorers: International Society. I've played it quite a bit and while graphics is nice and the concept is interesting, I feel it will require a few patches to "get there".

The game play is quite simple. You choose a team of 3 explorers, one of which is a leader from a predefined pool of explorers. Explorers have different attributes, which can be improved during an adventure. Once you start and adventure you have to perform 5 expeditions. You gain different resource on expeditions and you manage them between expeditions. After 5 of those one of your resources (renown) is compared with some predefined value, and if you beat this value you won. Strangely enough the game does not have difficulty settings, which I think a part of the major problem with this game as it is right now. During each of the expeditions you are present with FTL-style of a map. You have a limited number of resources so you cannot possibly visit all nodes of each map. You need to choose which nodes to travel through. Each node indicate what types of resources it may contain. Some nodes contain encounters and the goal node (which is revealed at the very start of an expedition) has a boss encounter. Encounters are grid-based combat. The grid is irregular, so it's not squares or octagons, which makes it quite interesting. The combat mechanics bases of 3 "elements": aggressive, devious and friendly which trump each other as in RPS. Each of your attacks is in one of these elements. Attacks change your and your opponents stance (which are also  aggressive, devious and friendly) and the combination of your stance and your opponent stance produce certain buffs or debuffs for you. You can change the element of attack to affect these and you also can somewhat predict what kind of stance your oppent will end up too because they tend to use similar types of attack.

Explorer attributes are used in combat. They are:
 - Speech Power
 - Speech Defense
 - Attack Power
 - Attack Defense
 - Movement
 - Grit (evade)

I think that Speech/Attack dichotomy is a bit linguistically confusing because all your attacks are either speech attacks or physical attacks, so Attack Power/Defense, should have been called Physical.
Opponent pawns also have the same attributes. Both them and your explorers also have Spirit which is the life value of each individual explorer. These are reset at the end of each fight. If an opponent spirit goes to 0 they are dead, if an explorers goes to 0 you lose 1 resolve (see below) and the explorer is knocked out (can be revived to continue the encounter by a team mate).

The resources that you can find in an expedition are:
 - Resolve (your life. Run out of it and you lose the whole game. This is not per explorer this is yours (players). It does not get replenished between encounters)
 - Renown (victory points, these are what you need to win in the end)
 - Supply (these are what you need to move between nodes. Ususally a move require 0,1 or 2 supplies)
 - XP (you use these to add "perks" to your chosen team members. They reset every game. Some of the allows new attacks/abilities but there are not many of these)
 - Research (you use these to navigate the research tree which provides different benefits to you)
 - Status (these allow you hiring retinue. Retinue helps with a particular resource generation in a particular way, say get one more research after each successful combat)
 - Gold (these allow you buying items. Each of your explorers have three item slots: trinket offence and defense. As a rule items are improving your explorer attributes)
 - Insight (a wild card resource, can be exchanged for Research, Status or Gold as needed)

I like this game because it aims to be short and focused. You have only 5 expeditions per game and you need to get the most out of them, and you need to manager your resources wisely. The game feels difficult (I have not won so far), but it looks like there is a learning curve on many levels so you can meaningfully improve.

However the game it looks fails to deliver in the balancing department. Your chances in an encounter greatly depends on your team compositions. Some encounters are much easier with a friendly team and some are with aggressive. The problem is that you cannot change your team once you started your playthrough, which means that in certain encounters you are at a very serious disadvantage. The developers admitted that they do not know how to fix it right now, because toning it down would mean making encounters that are better suited for your team trivial. They are working on it. I think a difficulty slider can help a lot here.

So my verdict is wait a bit and see if the balance problem is fixed. I would not be surprised if it turned out that the thing is beyond salvation. Players report, that if RNG likes you and you happen to get a lot of resources on your very first expedition that can make the game exponentially easy on the subsequent ones. It snowballs - the more resources you start an expedition with the more you can get out of it, so the very first expedition is disproportionately important, and if you don't get a good RNG out of it, you won't be able even finish all five expedition at all.

Good ideas, nice graphics, but some serious mechanics problems.

[x4000]

These sound like extremely simple problems to solve from an outsider perspective:

1. On encounter types that would be unusually difficult for your team composition, adjust some variables downward to make them artificially easier. Otherwise leave them alone.

2. Put better clamping on the rng so that it can't give you early resources that are too valuable.

The challenge in both of those is identifying the problem cases, and that's a whack-a-mole sort of problem. One general code path probably can't solve either, but rather specialized rules like "you know, when something along the lines of X happens, tone it down by Y." This is the final stage of good procedural code in my opinion, which is basically "smoothing out the edge cases." (Or not so edge, as the case may be.) in our procedural generated levels in the Valley games and Bionic Dues, we had far more smoothing code than generation code.

Again, the big problem is not fixing any one case -- that tends to be relatively easy if you can come up with good rules to detect it. The massive problem is finding all the cases. But! That's where players come in. With any sufficiently complex game, players are going to find and report things that they did to game the system. At that point, specialized extra procgen smoothing needs to be added. Rinse repeat.

Pretty quickly the most common cases that loads of people are reporting get smoothed out. Then there's a low grade ongoing occasional complaint that needs smoothing, and eventually that stops all together. If anyone thinks that's a failure of central design, I would point out Starcraft 1 and its 11+ year balance patch history. Get enough complexity and enough advanced players and that's just the way of it. It's not a failure of the devs unless they choose not to act.

So definitely nobody should be going "oh how can they release a game in that state" or something. Even if they had 200 testers, player 10,000 always finds something new.

[zespri]

These sound like extremely simple problems to solve from an outsider perspective:

1. On encounter types that would be unusually difficult for your team composition, adjust some variables downward to make them artificially easier. Otherwise leave them alone.

2. Put better clamping on the rng so that it can't give you early resources that are too valuable.

The challenge in both of those is identifying the problem cases, and that's a whack-a-mole sort of problem. One general code path probably can't solve either, but rather specialized rules like "you know, when som thing along the lines of X happens, tone it down by Y." This is the final stage of good procedural code in my opinion, which is basically "smoothing out the edge cases." (Or not so edge, as the case may be.) in our procedural generated levels in the Valley games and Bionic Dues, we had far more smoothing code than generation code.

Again, the big problem is not fixing any one case -- that tends to be relatively easy if you can come up with good rules to detect it. The massive problem is finding all the cases. But! That's where players come in. With any sufficiently complex game, players are going to find and report things that they did to game the system. At that point, specialized extra procgen smoothing needs to be added. Rinse repeat.

Pretty quickly the most common cases that loads of people are reporting get smoothed out. Then there's a low grade ongoing occasional complaint that needs smoothing, and eventually that stops all together. If anyone thinks that's a failure of central design, I would point out Starcraft 1 and it's 11+ year balance patch history. Get enough complexity and enough advanced players and that's just the way of it. It's not a failure of the devs unless they choose not to act.

So definitely nobody should be going "oh how can they release a game in that state" or something. Even if they had 200 testers, player 10,000 always finds something new.

Very interesting, thank you. I kind of hoped that you would chime in with your perspective, because this kind of things is something that you should intimately know and understand. Boy, I was not disappointed! =)

[x4000]

It took me a few years to figure this out, and a ton of very frustrating experimentation.  I hope that the Reus devs have an easier time of it.  If you want to pass along any remarks, since it sounds like you've been talking to them, feel free to.  I don't want to get up in their business, and I have no idea what precisely is going on there beyond what you've told me.  But you mentioned it sounds like they may be stumped, so if this helps spur some ideas for them, then I'm happy for that.

[Mick]

I don't think they are stumped on the problem. Their stance seems to be "the balance is pretty much where we want it to be, but we're pushing out an update that includes an easy difficulty option for people who are frustrated by the mechanics."

However the game it looks fails to deliver in the balancing department. Your chances in an encounter greatly depends on your team compositions. Some encounters are much easier with a friendly team and some are with aggressive. The problem is that you cannot change your team once you started your playthrough, which means that in certain encounters you are at a very serious disadvantage.

I think you're intended to focus on being strong in two areas. So if you are good at rock and paper, you can counter scissors and paper hard, and if you come across paper you just have to go paper as well and accept it will be a tougher fight. If you enter the game with, I'm going rock and nothing but rock. You're going to basically lose 1/3 of the encounters (and therefore the game, since you can't lose a single encounter).

[x4000]

Ah, okay then.

[zespri]

I don't think they are stumped on the problem. Their stance seems to be "the balance is pretty much where we want it to be, but we're pushing out an update that includes an easy difficulty option for people who are frustrated by the mechanics."

Yeah, I did not mean that they were stumped. I was specifically having this following post in mind:

Yes, we've found the boss to be quite spikey. Especially they are a few of the enemies that really use and abuse their state/emotion/mood and have reinforcements. For example, the caribbean boss becomes so much easier with a good tank and a solid terrify, while the fort cultists get easier with sadden and/or impressed to take out the mobs. The bosses themselves though, don't deal that much more damage than the mobs.

The design was to make the bosses pretty edgy unless you have a good team. Turned out they're pretty edgy, and simply cruel with a non-matching team. This is pretty sad, because it means to solve it we need to lower the difficulty (making it a cakewalk with the right team) or make all bosses or characters more "neutral" so the difference between a bad match-up and a good match-up becomes smaller.

Because we prefer not to do both (unless too many people experience this), we are currently looking into making a difficulty setting (current difficulty is balanced at hard) and add more content so you have more option to choose your boss - better matching your team.

[zespri]

I think you're intended to focus on being strong in two areas. So if you are good at rock and paper, you can counter scissors and paper hard, and if you come across paper you just have to go paper as well and accept it will be a tougher fight. If you enter the game with, I'm going rock and nothing but rock. You're going to basically lose 1/3 of the encounters (and therefore the game, since you can't lose a single encounter).

I'm wondering what a good Aggressive team means then because there are no special Aggressive attacks in the sense, that the only difference in Aggressive attacks between explorers is sometimes different ranges. Otherwise they are identical. In most cases even the range is the same. It's devious/friendly attacks that differ a lot from one another.

[Mick]

I don't know. I do think from my limited attempts at the game, that aggressive seems to be the weakest of the three, since speech attack applies to 2 out of three attack types. The marketing for the game focuses a lot on the non-aggressive combat gimmick, so I wonder if this is intended.

[zespri]

An update is out. Let's see if it made any difference:

Renowned Explorers has been out for just a week. We're glad and proud to say that there are many players enjoying the game. The community already welcomed a lot of people posting their adventures, helping each other and discussing balance. The subject of difficulty came up often. Many liked it, many found it too hard, and some of the more masochistic people found it too easy.

A perfect fit for Difficulty Options. We now offer Easy, Normal, Classic and Impossible to make sure that every player can adjust the experience to their liking. You select it at the start of every game, and it will be shown in your score screen. For the people that liked the game as it was: Classic has exactly the same balance as the game at launch.

To make sure that ambitious expedition leaders always have More to Explore, we also added in a bit of new content in the existing expeditions. You'll have to discover it to know what it is For the rest of our intentions, please consult the Game Roadmap pinned in the Community Hub. Patch notes can be discovered there as well.

Other than adding in difficulties and content, we fixed some issues that people were experiencing.

We wish you many more happy and appropriately hard adventures!
- Abbey Game

I'm not entirely convinced that the difficulty slider is all that was needed. We'll see.