General Category > Stars Beyond Reach Beta Discussion
SBR v3 Thoughts
Rythe:
As a fresh v3 tester, and me being me, I'm going to do the expected in voicing some dissent.
1)I really don't agree with changing how the economy functions at present. What you seem to want is concrete, explicit connections between the consumption of services and the generation of crowns whereas SBR v3 makes it an implicit relationship (lack of required services hurts efficiency and generates crown eating problems) if with a few possible logic gaps. So my impression is that you want detail for the sake of detail with a dovetailing assumption that crown sinks can be squirreled into those details.
This seems contrary to the spirit of the game's overarching design where Chris appears to want to streamline the experience a great deal, highlighted to me by how he designed the latest combat model and the buildings only bit.
In short, v3 has you meet service demands (needs) and your buildings will function well, including the ones that pump out the crowns, which is the essence of a needs-based economy, is it not? Ptarth seems to concede this with bullet six but then goes right on to asking for more of a needs-based economy with bullet eight, and I really don't see the point.
2)The point I do see is that without sufficient opposition from AI Factions/Planet, the economy is missing a purpose. Ptarth appears to be trying to fix that by making the economy itself the purpose, whereas I get the sense that our economies are suppose to fuel player advancement and interactions with the various AI Factions/Planet. If my sense is correct, then convoluting the economy is going to detract game focus from player advancement and interacting with the various AI Factions/Planet.
The answer to this problem I'd like to see is for player engagement with the various AI Factions/Planet to require that the player carefully weigh each and every crown they have against those possible interactions vs developing their civ vs expanding their economic base. I'll also note again that most of these things are broken or unfinished or completely gated behind Acts 3 & 4 in the current build.
3)Which leads me to abilities. I'd prefer that they be a combination of all the main options - 1: Direct fired action with an instant resolve and then cooldown period. 2: Directed activity that resolves some turns in the future. 3: Sustained activity that continues until ceased.
Each has a niche, I think. A commando raid should be a short-lived thing like a combat phase. Also trash/body dumping. Espionage/Spy activities should be directed and eventually resolved in some fashion so they would require some strategic pre-planning. And then sustained activities like propaganda.
This would also add some flavor and cater these activities to associated play styles, especially in regards to the instant resolve ones which would provide some direct feedback to the player that otherwise generally gets lost in the forest of notification popups at the start of each turn.
And winding back into point 2, appreciable crown costs in doing all of them. So likely some difficulty scaling based on concrete factors.
4)I do agree that there should be more building adjacency and terrain bonuses/penalties with the direct aim of mixing up building compositions, but I'm getting the sense from discussions that v2 had them just for the sake of having them - like police knocking down crime from adjacent buildings or something, just to have some sort of positioning bonus attached to the police building. That I don't agree with, if that's what v2 did. What I want is a little more of the sort of bonuses we currently have and that there be very strategic if straightforward goals for those bonuses. Again, possibly some penalties to help that along too.
ptarth:
--- Quote from: Rythe on October 17, 2015, 05:37:46 am ---As a fresh v3 tester, and me being me, I'm going to do the expected in voicing some dissent.
--- End quote ---
Fair enough. As a v1 tester I have some preconceptions that may be influencing my ideas.
--- Quote ---1)I really don't agree with changing how the economy functions at present. What you seem to want is concrete, explicit connections between the consumption of services and the generation of crowns whereas SBR v3 makes it an implicit relationship (lack of required services hurts efficiency and generates crown eating problems) if with a few possible logic gaps. So my impression is that you want detail for the sake of detail with a dovetailing assumption that crown sinks can be squirreled into those details.
This seems contrary to the spirit of the game's overarching design where Chris appears to want to streamline the experience a great deal, highlighted to me by how he designed the latest combat model and the buildings only bit.
--- End quote ---
* I'm not completely sure what you are trying to get at here.
* Chris has not made public sufficient design docs for me to really understand his goals. I can (and have) guessed, but much of it is pure conjecture.
* In v2 one of the biggest problems was combat. The main issue was attack range given fixed position units. If you had a military building with X range, for an opponent to attack your building, he would need to build a military building within range of it. If his building had longer range, you would lose because you couldn't hit it. If his building had shorter range, you would win, unless he kept you distracted with other targets long enough to finish construction. In addition to that there were the differences in building health, attack power, and technology level required to obtain your races' optimal military buildings.
Chris's solution was to switch from a tile-based combat system to a territory-based combat system. This was his "Risk-style" combat system. All military buildings within a territory were considered to be within range of all adjacent territory buildings.
I don't think this means streamlined. Sure it didn't remove much of the micro-involved in military building positioning, but that's because it was going to be a hard problem to solve. It would be akin to fighting the 100 Year War by only building Castles. The unitlessness was causing problems, and this was how he chose to resolve it. The economic system was less affected because it was already at a greater stage of development than the military system.
At this point though, the story-driven, territory-wide, and empire-wide economic system was also introduced. Possibly as a result of switching to a territory-based military approach. I'm not sure. Chris hasn't really presented design docs about it.
* detail for the sake of detail :P. Actually, this is a hard claim to refute because it doesn't provide much detail about what you are complaining about. I'm going to guess, but you'll pardon me if I can't address your concern.
* I want detail for the sake of gameplay. City builders are micro-intensive games wherein the position of a building is really important. In the current system building placement matters little (some, but not much). Optimal economic development does not involve creating an roughly realistic economy, it involves placing the most crown generating worker-efficient buildings, followed by the most crown generating building cost-efficient buildings. City builders are all about placing buildings in locations to optimize production and benefits. They may not have adjacency bonuses in an explicit fashion, but they do in an implicit fashion. In many of these games buildings produce resources which are transported to other buildings in their economic chain. The distance the goods have to travel is proportional to the time, which is effectively building efficiency. In an unitless game, adjacency bonuses mimic this relationship. You want your woodcutters near your lumbermill so that you are quickly producing lumber from the logs your woodcutters make. If your lumbermill is far away it takes time for the logs to get there which will slow down overall lumber production. Or we just give woodcutters a 25% bonus to adjacent lumber mills, its an abstraction but gets to the same idea.
* You suggest that the story- and racial-interactions are the meat of the game. That may be the case. However, they did not exist prior to v3. The mechanics behind them are very undeveloped. I've help added hundreds of events, so I'm reasonably familiar with the system framework thus far. It may be the case that this is what Chris is aiming for, but if you compare the economic system (in all the versions of SBR) to the event/interaction system, the former is much more developed than the later. This has lead me to conclude that the economics is more fundamental to the game than the story.
* This may be wrong. I had the same thoughts about The Last Federation too. I think Chris was wanting to tell a story of events, but he added a mostly functional economic system to the game. One example is the RCS system. As a player he tantalized me with this was to make macro-changes to a planet, but then makes it very, very random. One of the largest frustrations from him was how much players were obsessing with the RCS system, which he didn't/doesn't really care about. So I guess my position is, he spends tons of resource time developing a system, but then only wants to use it for window dressing and have it be background noise. Whereas I see it as something that must be important, because of all the information and tools I have to interact with it.
--- Quote ---In short, v3 has you meet service demands (needs) and your buildings will function well, including the ones that pump out the crowns, which is the essence of a needs-based economy, is it not? Ptarth seems to concede this with bullet six but then goes right on to asking for more of a needs-based economy with bullet eight, and I really don't see the point.
--- End quote ---
* I do think you see the point, the point is: What is the purpose of the economy and how does it interact with the play in the game.
* I have my opinion, which is that SBR is a game about economics, from which many of my thoughts follow.
* Which is also the conclusion you reach in your later paragraphs ;p.
--- Quote ---2)The point I do see is that without sufficient opposition from AI Factions/Planet, the economy is missing a purpose. Ptarth appears to be trying to fix that by making the economy itself the purpose, whereas I get the sense that our economies are suppose to fuel player advancement and interactions with the various AI Factions/Planet. If my sense is correct, then convoluting the economy is going to detract game focus from player advancement and interacting with the various AI Factions/Planet.
--- End quote ---
* Recall that prior to v3 the economic game WAS the game. There wasn't any of this interaction that you are focusing on.
--- Quote ---The answer to this problem I'd like to see is for player engagement with the various AI Factions/Planet to require that the player carefully weigh each and every crown they have against those possible interactions vs developing their civ vs expanding their economic base. I'll also note again that most of these things are broken or unfinished or completely gated behind Acts 3 & 4 in the current build.
--- End quote ---
* You should look into King of Dragon Pass.
* It is a game that does do a ton of what you are asking for. It is highly event/interaction driven and has economic components.
* A key is that the importance of each aspect of the game is proportional to your access to and awareness of information about the aspect.
* In SBR we have tons of access to economic and building placement systems, but virtually no access to race/planet interaction systems. If the later is the focus, then this ratio needs to shift.
--- Quote ---3)Which leads me to abilities. I'd prefer that they be a combination of all the main options - 1: Direct fired action with an instant resolve and then cooldown period. 2: Directed activity that resolves some turns in the future. 3: Sustained activity that continues until ceased.
Each has a niche, I think. A commando raid should be a short-lived thing like a combat phase. Also trash/body dumping. Espionage/Spy activities should be directed and eventually resolved in some fashion so they would require some strategic pre-planning. And then sustained activities like propaganda.
This would also add some flavor and cater these activities to associated play styles, especially in regards to the instant resolve ones which would provide some direct feedback to the player that otherwise generally gets lost in the forest of notification popups at the start of each turn.
And winding back into point 2, appreciable crown costs in doing all of them. So likely some difficulty scaling based on concrete factors.
--- End quote ---
* I think you are focusing on the details too much at this stage.
* I will now pose some rhetorical socratic-style questions to frame my thoughts.
* Let's say there are 50 abilities. How many of those do you want to have to be manually fired every Y turns? How many updates do you want each turn about them?
* In a functional empire of 10 million people, how much impact should a single 8-man commando squad make?
* In my mind, that is a ton of busy work I won't want to deal with. I'd rather have a switch that engages all of my commando squads on a target. They do their things and I get turn updates on their progress. If I have 50 commando squads (which is not an unreasonable number given barracks density) then I want to be able to use them and without interface trouble.
* Minor details like ability costs have occupied too much development time. Chris has changed costs for various things many times, only to discard the entire mechanic later. In many cases the cost doesn't do anything beyond add an additional step to the process of using that ability (e.g., repair costs, building activation costs, attack costs, etc). Another explicit example: Attacking costs, it costs 1k crowns to attack with a barracks. In my last test game it took over 400 individual clicks to destroy a target building. I had to click 400 times and pay 400k crowns. I think a better solution would be to completely remove the cost, shift the economic requirement (if necessary) back to the underlying building mechanics, and then have the entire combat resolved with 10 or fewer clicks.
--- Quote ---4)I do agree that there should be more building adjacency and terrain bonuses/penalties with the direct aim of mixing up building compositions, but I'm getting the sense from discussions that v2 had them just for the sake of having them - like police knocking down crime from adjacent buildings or something, just to have some sort of positioning bonus attached to the police building. That I don't agree with, if that's what v2 did. What I want is a little more of the sort of bonuses we currently have and that there be very strategic if straightforward goals for those bonuses. Again, possibly some penalties to help that along too.
--- End quote ---
* You are getting things backwards. SBR v1 & v2 didn't have territories. All buildings had effect radii. The adjacency bonuses were a way of adding more depth to a system of citybuilding.
* I don't know what system "bonuses we currently have" is referring to.
So one of the biggest problems with helping in SBRs development is the lack of specificity on what our job is. At one end, if we are to assist in design, then we need access to design goals and documentation, which has been absent. This is also the biggest egoist problem. This is Arcen's baby, with Chris as lead dev. He may not actually want anything from us in this department. As players we "know" how things should be done and will happily take our limited understanding of what the goal of SBR is, and tell Chris how to get there. Chris is also very nice, which means he isn't going to say "shut up, I don't care what you think". On the other end we have bug testing where we test systems and report our experiences with them. This is good for bugfixing, but horrible when it comes to design changes, because feedback is about the player experience, not metadevelopment comments.
I'm, tragically, "forced" to give both types of feedback. I try to limit my suggestions about how SBR should be designed and provide straightforward player experience reports. However, sometimes I do have to give my two cents, I try to leave that in this forum (which few people read, and Chris doesn't usually) and in suggestion reports on the mantis.
Summary and Conclusion
There is a discrepancy in what people believe is the game in SBR. SBR design goals are not well understood. Game systems are being developed from a bottom-up perspective, leading to situations where a system is not directly supportive of the playing experience but of a standard coherency within the individual mechanic. Chris should meet with me one day each week on SBR, because I know exactly what needs to be done. :P
crazyroosterman:
well id say to that that Chris should share his plans with us on this but as we know he's locked this game in the closet for the time being so that's not really a thing.
Cyborg:
And therein lies the problem for gamers like me. I realized very quickly that this was a complicated management simulation, but all of the normal methods of simulation feedback do not seem to be active. For example, other races don’t respond. The buildings don’t change in appearance. Your citizens don’t react to you. The world doesn’t react to you. So you spend the majority of the game plopping down buildings and feeling awfully lonely because you're playing an optimization game that’s not really a game yet.
When it came to the military, it was rather fiddly with the building ranges. However, this is the part of the game that rewards all of the economic simulation bits. You see, there has to be some kind of carrot to play an optimization game. You need to either gain territory, some visual feedback, some political feedback, something to do or strive for. We don’t have that yet, and we are not privy to whatever Chris’s long-term goals are. I don’t know. It’s hard to complain about something that is so unfinished. If this is the game- micromanaging crowns and worker efficiency- I don’t see where the game is. Because there’s no point to doing those things right now. We don’t have a defined victory condition.
Here are some ideas:
1) make a space victory that rewards you with escaping to outer space, which starts a game on a harder planet
2) Make a military victory which rewards you with a race to unlock that is especially warlike
3) make a territorial victory that doubles the map size, and adds incredible monsters or extraterrestrial attacks in greater numbers than we usually see
You see where I’m going with this? You can reward the player and provide them new plateaus and new challenges. You give them something to strive for, an island to set sail for. You set a challenging bar to reach. And that way, we can play out these five acts and achieve some end reward.
In addition, I think that the building tile graphics need to be more moddable with placeholders for growth. Having a title like this without modding is a bad idea. This title lacks some of the direction that some of the others had, and I think that they might need the community to give this some life after the initial release. It’s interesting to me that the ability for modding has been what it is for the other games in the catalog, and yet I have seen Arcen asking for community submissions more and more before release. Why not expose hooks for after release? And given our community being extremely talented, it’s a shame that it hasn’t been done already.
I’m not going to make that a mantis post until I can make a coherent, succinct post about it. But those are my thoughts.
crazyroosterman:
--- Quote from: Cyborg on October 19, 2015, 09:26:27 pm ---And therein lies the problem for gamers like me. I realized very quickly that this was a complicated management simulation, but all of the normal methods of simulation feedback do not seem to be active. For example, other races don’t respond. The buildings don’t change in appearance. Your citizens don’t react to you. The world doesn’t react to you. So you spend the majority of the game plopping down buildings and feeling awfully lonely because you're playing an optimization game that’s not really a game yet.
When it came to the military, it was rather fiddly with the building ranges. However, this is the part of the game that rewards all of the economic simulation bits. You see, there has to be some kind of carrot to play an optimization game. You need to either gain territory, some visual feedback, some political feedback, something to do or strive for. We don’t have that yet, and we are not privy to whatever Chris’s long-term goals are. I don’t know. It’s hard to complain about something that is so unfinished. If this is the game- micromanaging crowns and worker efficiency- I don’t see where the game is. Because there’s no point to doing those things right now. We don’t have a defined victory condition.
Here are some ideas:
1) make a space victory that rewards you with escaping to outer space, which starts a game on a harder planet
2) Make a military victory which rewards you with a race to unlock that is especially warlike
3) make a territorial victory that doubles the map size, and adds incredible monsters or extraterrestrial attacks in greater numbers than we usually see
You see where I’m going with this? You can reward the player and provide them new plateaus and new challenges. You give them something to strive for, an island to set sail for. You set a challenging bar to reach. And that way, we can play out these five acts and achieve some end reward.
In addition, I think that the building tile graphics need to be more moddable with placeholders for growth. Having a title like this without modding is a bad idea. This title lacks some of the direction that some of the others had, and I think that they might need the community to give this some life after the initial release. It’s interesting to me that the ability for modding has been what it is for the other games in the catalog, and yet I have seen Arcen asking for community submissions more and more before release. Why not expose hooks for after release? And given our community being extremely talented, it’s a shame that it hasn’t been done already.
I’m not going to make that a mantis post until I can make a coherent, succinct post about it. But those are my thoughts.
--- End quote ---
1 I like the idea of being able to unlock certain races with persifick play styles perhaps some of the ai only races could made unlockable through certain victory conditions? for example by winning through a military domination you unlock the thoraxians by winning an economic you unlock the acutions and so on.
2 I've already pitched the idea of mod support to Chris weather he ever goes along with the idea is something well have to wait and see.
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