Developers requesting feedback: Warfare Points (Return of Points)?

[x4000]

Well, that is definitely better than anything else that's been suggested thus far.  But I think it's still more complex than a simple placement restriction.  And what does "totally isolated" mean?  Defining that can be super complex.  Also, players clearly have demonstrated a liking for setting up a town as a barricade to have other towns behind that.  That's fun, and in the end I don't want to rob them of that.  I mean, I would if I had to, but I think I found a way already where that isn't required.

What I'm trying to avoid are basically two things:
1. The super-stacks, where towns get super far away from the front lines and there's no hope of touching them ever.
2. The super-blockades, where you have a frontlines town that is providing complete protection for everything behind it.

With those two things sorted out, then players have the ability to still have a frontlines and a rear guard, so to speak.  But the frontlines will inevitably fall, and then the players have to deal with that in some fashion.  That seems more interesting to me, really, and it's something that doesn't really require explanation or special code; it just kind of happens.

Now, granted, this may not work out like I hope; but from what I've seen in my limited testing thus far, it seems encouraging.

[Penumbra]

Yeah, I was wrong about the meteors.

But I really think the middle management thing should be shown off more. All the other players are our co-workers. Maybe we are vying for a promotion? Instead of an "account level" we could have a job title!

By encouraging the correct behavior with score also limits your need to stop exploits (for victory that is).

The middle management could also be increased by putting the unlocks in an upgrade shop. Even if each win were to give enough money to buy the next rank, it wouldn't change the balance. Then, the player who really "gets" the game might unlock things a little faster.  A player who is still struggling with it might win a game, but only get, say, 80% progress to the next unlock. That person might not be ready for new tiles just yet.

Also, I want to see the backstory you come up with for this! Your tutorials become training sessions. Much more room for snark, too I think the attitude and tone of the writing would fit really, really well as coming from HR. 

_{Edit: Remove functional change suggestions}

[x4000]

Wow you're describing a lot of work that I don't think adds much to the actual gameplay itself, which is the central thing here.

But we are going to be including the comic strip in the game itself, if that makes you feel better.

[LaughingThesaurus]

What if the game just looks for an uninterrupted path of commonly traversable terrain to link one color town to an opposite color town? You place a town, the game tries to pathfind a way to an enemy town using the enemy's movement rules (only counting plains, hills, forests, etc) from there. If it can't, then you can't place the structure there or there are some problems.
And I do really want warfare points man. I like points. Those make me do crazy silly things. You should see me play Xotic.

[Penumbra]

No, you're right, I got carried away

I'll just say: Middle Management needs to be emphasized, score should be bonus pay.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Oh yeah.
In Xotic points are purely a bonus, but the game does give you stars to make sure you know how well or how badly you actually completed the level. Really the only goal is to not die but the game is about score attack in the long run. I wonder if you'd need anything more to make scoring truly compelling. Awarding bonus stars or something would make the score work closer to Xotic rather than closer to AI War. Something that keeps me playing for score even longer than it takes to get 5 stars is actually the possibility of getting top 10 on leaderboards... but really how far you'd take it is up to you.

[x4000]

Okay, I really don't want to continue this conversation, personally, because:

1. I'm really short on time and I think there are bigger issues more deserving of all our attention, honestly.

2. The arbitrariness of any rule is something that often appears in direct proportion to when a player encounters it.  IE, rules that were there prior to you first playing the game you tend to take as "just part of the game," whereas later rules are often viewed as "arbitrary."  Look back at my post about the alpha prior to starting it, and I mentioned this very thing.  Would AIP in AI War have been accepted if it had been a post-1.0 addition?  I don't know; it would have been rocky, I think.  People like taking all planets, and suddenly robbing them of that changes the whole game.  Etc, etc, etc. 

Or on the arbitrariness front, why can't you build allied town centers closer together than X in this game?  Nobody has complained about that, except to suggest that the distance be increased even further (which it was) to avoid a landscape of uninterrupted cities.  And so on and so forth.

We're all a certain amount resistant to change, especially if it wasn't our idea.  I'm as guilty of that as anyone.  Pepisolo made some excellent suggestions about the difficulty options in the menu, and I shot them down before reconsidering.  Same with various suggestions that everyone here has made at various points in time, I'm sure.  So I'm not saying this is something that I don't do.  But it's something that we all have to kind of look at in ourselves as "is this being resistant to change, or actually on the basis of the idea itself?"

And even more to the point, and one of the reasons I think Kickstarter projects run into so much trouble, is this: ultimately, when a game isn't finished the developers are still trying to refine their idea of what it is going to be.  People that buy into the idea early, but then find out their idea and the developers' aren't quite the same, can get disillusioned pretty fast.  Especially if money is involved (unlike here).  Even if it's a game that they still would enjoy in the end, there's this sense of disappointment that it wasn't the game they first played or first wanted to play.  I felt that way about some of the later additions in Minecraft, for instance, so again I'm not immune to this effect.

Anyway, my opinion is that the current rule isn't any more arbitrary than any of the others, neatly solves a problem in a straightforward way, and is something we should leave well enough alone unless there's a compelling gameplay reason to change it.  And that meantime we should rip to shreds the other parts of the design that are actually weak from a practical standpoint, not an aesthetic one.

[Mick]

By encouraging the correct behavior with score also limits your need to stop exploits (for victory that is).

See, I don't really like that. I feel like it's a shortcut to making a challenging game by just saying "Yeah, it's super easy to win, but at the end of the game we will tell you that you played it wrong."

[x4000]

Also, lest my last post be taken the wrong way: my intent is not to be condescending at all, but merely to point out some generalized psychological effects I've noticed.  Psychology fascinates me, and it's something I pay a lot of attention to.  This is evident throughout AI War, for instance, as I play on well-known heuristics of the brain in order to make us all feel like the AI is more alive than it really is.  Even I find myself attributing emotion to it, where there is none, for instance.

I also pay a lot of attention to psychological effects for productivity and other sources.  I've found ways to trick myself into being more productive by specifically manipulating the circumstances around myself so that I can feel like I'm slacking off while still getting a ton done.  It's pretty cool actually.

So when I'm talking about the psychological effects of players exposed to mechanics early in an evolving game, it's nothing specific to anyone and something that I've been observing and pondering for a long time.  It makes me increasingly wary of sharing things too early with players because these effects are so predictable in the main.  But on the flipside I need the feedback for things to really mature in a positive way.  And sometimes players surprise me: the reception to the scorched earth thing really surprised me.

[x4000]

By encouraging the correct behavior with score also limits your need to stop exploits (for victory that is).

See, I don't really like that. I feel like it's a shortcut to making a challenging game by just saying "Yeah, it's super easy to win, but at the end of the game we will tell you that you played it wrong."

My goal would be this:
1. It's hard to win at all, especially on higher difficulties.
2. If you want to go the extra mile, you can show off your mad skillz by having an extra high score.

I think that something like Bionic Commando: Rearmed is a really good example of this sort of system.

[Mick]

I think that if the goal of the game is to cause as much carnage as possible, that should actually BE the goal of the game. It's like if AI War had the winning condition of beating the AI Homeworld (as it is now), but you were rated based off the largest number of AI ships you had in your home system. It would seem weird.

If score is supposed to be a reflection of "how well you played", it should line up with the victory condition. I think, at the end of the day, "Survive for X turns" is just not a very compelling victory condition (unless you're playing tower defense).

You can even have a little background story behind it (which would probably make some sense). There can be an altar of sacrifice or something that you have to charge up for whatever reason and it has to be done through war. When a unit is killed in battle, it's soul flies out into the altar. When a building is demolished, X souls fly into it (to represent all the lumberjacks or whatever).

Killing a bandit doesn't add souls, but having something killed by a bandit will subtract them. I dunno, just a random idea.

I don't like arbitrary score. I don't like a score that doesn't line up with the victory condition. Pac-Man's goal is to eat dots, he gets score for eating more dots. He doesn't get score for brushing his butt against the ghosts as close as he can without dying.

[x4000]

@Mick:

Regarding score, I hear you, but I'm not sure I'm swayed at the moment.  In terms of score for, say, AI War, that is there and is based on number of ships killed and produced.  It's a pretty good metric of your performance, but it doesn't predict if you actually won or not. 

The same is true here, in some senses: your guys are going to fight whether or not you want them to, because you have to make them in order to fight off bandits and so on.  So having survived a lot of carnage and actually lived to the end is a good thing and shows success.  The tougher the situation you survived, in many senses, the better your score.

Then you get into stuff like the Burnout series, where you're kind of rewarded in terms of score for having spectacular crashes and doing other stunts.  That's kind of where the metagame aspects of getting a super-high score come in here.  That's a different game unto itself other than just the "can I win" part of the game, and only some people will find that metagame compelling and play it at all.  The trick is that some people find that sore of score hunting REALLY compelling, while others don't find it compelling at all.  So having both be compelling on their own for each camp is a big thing.

THAT said, you are correct that the goal of the game was originally "cause as much carnage as possible while still living."  I mean, that's what was in our original design doc, and was always our intent.  And it's an idea that I like... but I'm not sure if the game has moved on from that.  I think some of the players who talked about the game getting too impossibly hard if we combined woes with a score cap have a really good point.

But since you're the primary player who has been just destroying the upper difficulties thus far, I'll be super keen to hear about your experiences in the latest version.  At the very least I expect it will be a lot harder and more interesting, knock on wood.

Somewhat side note: we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow, so I'm flipping the heck out.  I'm not worried about having this solid by 1.0, I think we're getting close.  But tomorrow?  That fills me with some terror.  We could push back the press build date, but then we shoot ourselves in the foot in a different way with not enough pre-release publicity.  So I'm kind of in a stuck sort of situation unless what has already been done actually solves the core of the problems.

[Penumbra]

. . .you are correct that the goal of the game was originally "cause as much carnage as possible while still living."  I mean, that's what was in our original design doc, and was always our intent.  And it's an idea that I like... but I'm not sure if the game has moved on from that.  I think some of the players who talked about the game getting too impossibly hard if we combined woes with a score cap have a really good point.

Totally last minute ideas, yes. Sorry about that. But, to continue what Mick said. The rounds could have a time limit, say. If, not enough carnage is caused by turn 40 (or whatever the turn option is set to) then you lose. So the phases go by as is, but you might get some more feedback earlier that you aren't doing well. Then the phases could be used as checkpoints.

we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow, so I'm flipping the heck out.

With that, then, I am going to stop. Best of luck, we're all rooting for you.

[x4000]

. . .you are correct that the goal of the game was originally "cause as much carnage as possible while still living."  I mean, that's what was in our original design doc, and was always our intent.  And it's an idea that I like... but I'm not sure if the game has moved on from that.  I think some of the players who talked about the game getting too impossibly hard if we combined woes with a score cap have a really good point.

Totally last minute ideas, yes. Sorry about that. But, to continue what Mick said. The rounds could have a time limit, say. If, not enough carnage is caused by turn 40 (or whatever the turn option is set to) then you lose. So the phases go by as is, but you might get some more feedback earlier that you aren't doing well. Then the phases could be used as checkpoints.

This actually is something I'd been considering, too.  It sounded like there was some strong resistance to this idea from other players.  But here again... this is coming right back to what the original point of the game used to be.  I'm pretty tempted to do this.

we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow, so I'm flipping the heck out.

With that, then, I am going to stop. Best of luck, we're all rooting for you.

Please don't stop!  I mean, I don't need stuff that can't fit in that timeframe at the moment, but if there is something wrong I need to know.  Delaying the press build is better than giving them something even mildly crappy.

[Cinth]

You know... carnage took an arrow to the knee awhile back.  Now you want him to limp back out into the open?

Before we had to many units out and about.  Now we have more barracks to get enough units out to combat each other and bandits   Now we might need to have even more to meet some level of expected carnage?