Author Topic: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF  (Read 3564 times)

Offline x4000

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Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« on: March 22, 2014, 02:57:05 pm »
Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2014/03/behind-scenes-iterative-combat-design.html

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out its game page for details, or swing by the forums for the game.  This is Arcen's largest title ever, and we're really excited to share it with folks.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in progress, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.

One concern I've seen lobbed our way every so often at Arcen in general is that some folks don't like the idea that we "crowdsource" our design ideas.  Aka, that we listen to player feedback, really.  The common way this is phrased is that we should step up and "be the designers" properly, with a singular vision that we won't compromise for anyone.

That's... all well and good, I suppose.  If you have a singular vision for a game, go right ahead and do that.  And if it's perfect on your first try, that's amazing.

But the thing is, we're not "crowdsourcing" our design ideas at all.  We get feedback.  It's the same thing that authors of novels do when they show their rough drafts to their spouses, to their reading group, to their test readers.  They aren't trying to pander, they aren't trying to get other people to help write the book themselves, or anything like that.  They want more sources of data from which to consider their creations from alternate points of view.

To the specific matter at hand, the changes in TLF's combat system from the earliest RTS-like versions to the current system have all come squarely from me, in the end.  Players were enjoying the RTS-like stuff in alpha, sort of, and were giving lots of feedback on things that were annoying them or that needed to be refined to make it better.  There was a sense that "something is really missing here," but the feedback was all really in the vein of "how can we fill in the missing links with what is here."

 The old RTS-style combat model with ship deployments, from earliest alpha with player involvement and our first public video of the game.

I looked at all that feedback and felt something else.  Familiarity.  It was getting too similar to AI War, and to solve the problems we were having here, we'd have to move increasingly in the direction of AI War.  Which is all well and good -- I still love AI War -- but the battles here were supposed to be a lot shorter than that, and not always against an entrenched enemy, etc.

One player in particular, I believe it was Cyborg, had noted (to paraphrase from memory) "the combat has this really different feel from the main game, where you are a little guy doing things in a wider solar system; the combat is more about clashes of equal forces."

So I took a step back, and said.  "Okay, we're supposed to be 'Batman in space' here, so that's clearly a problem."  We were in territory that was familiar in a way that I didn't want to get into again (there's more we will do with AI War, but I don't want to try to do that in this game as well).  And any solutions I thought of with the combat as an RTS would make the individual battles take longer, be more complex in terms of controls and keybinds, and in general be way more divorced from the solar map sections.

Originally this game had 1v1 ship combat from a side view, and it was more of a minigame.  This was before we had any players testing it at all, it was just us.  We were excited about the ideas, but eventually we ran into problems I felt were intractable, so we had shifted to the RTS model.  I really loved what the RTS model had brought to the table... except I really wanted to get back to having just a single player ship.

 A very early prototype screen from when the game was still side-view 1v1 ship combat.  This is the first time we've ever actually shown screenshots from this version of the game at all!

So that's what we did!  And players had also noted that they wanted to see multi-sided battles, which has been something I've always loved, too.  That was one of those "why didn't I think of that?" sort of moments.  So we made that a big focus, too -- again it made the combat more like the solar map in terms of the overall feel of you being the little guy caught in larger scuffles.

We spent about a month working privately on this, without giving any new builds to our alpha players.  I wasn't happy with it enough yet to bother getting feedback, because they would just be telling me things I already knew.  If I didn't enjoy it yet, then nobody else would, either.  That's one of our mantras, is that somebody on the staff has to enjoy the game or else we're really doing it wrong.  Almost always, that person is me.  The exceptions are when I'm not the lead designer, which has only been on Tidalis (which I did quite enjoy) and the aborted Exodus of the Machine project.

Anyway, we got the multi-faction stuff working, the combat scenarios, the single-ship stuff, etc.  All of that was my design, it wasn't "crowdsourced" or even discussed with players.  Though Josh Knapp (former staff member) and I did discuss it quite a lot during the first week or so, and he was instrumental at that period.  But it evolved from there.

We got all that working... but still it just felt "off" to me.  It was doing everything that I wanted, but I found that without the need to order squadrons of ships around, there wasn't enough for me-the-player to do.  I was setting courses for my ship, and watching it auto-fire, and so forth.  It was... boring.  The overall tactics of the battle were there, and working perfectly, but the moment-to-moment stuff was dull as dull could be.

The solution quickly came to me, really -- based on our past work with things like the A Valley Without Wind games, it sprang readily to mind.  I needed a gun that I could point and shoot myself.  That sort of rotational shoot-anywhere gun from Valley 1 is just super fun.  So we put that in, and suddenly I was having a blast.  It took more balancing and tweaking, but after another week or so we finally released that version to our alpha testers (and let in a new batch of alpha testers) after a month of being incognito.

This is how the combat looked around that time.  We already had the special abilities in place, but note that there are only 5 of them, and none of them are equip-able weapons.

So this is the point when I created the hour-long gameplay footage video of the game, which showed off not only the new combat, but also showed off the solar map stuff for the first time.  Alpha players were by and large loving the new combat just as much as I was, and much happiness was had.

But.  There were still two issues, both of which were niggling at me personally, and also which some players picked up on and commented on.

Firstly, the combat felt a bit shallow in the moment to moment bits.  The tactical aspects were still there, but since you could only have one gun at a time, your solution to any incoming ship was "shoot it a lot."  That is fun in a bubble-wrap-popping sort of way, but it's not something that is sustainably interesting.  And it cuts out some of the moment to moment tactics.  Yes you had 5 special abilities to pop off here and there, but your main gun was in general so effective (and had to be) that this was only of some real use.

The solution to that did come from a player, not from me, and it was another of those head-smacking "why the heck didn't I think of that?" moments.  Histidine pointed out that having only one gun, and not being able to switch guns, was limiting.  Durr.  In that short space of time, he was the only one to comment on it, and I didn't see it yet.  I'm sure I and the other alpha testers would have figured it out before too long, but he saw it immediately.

So within two days I put together a new build that had a bunch more guns, rebalanced combat around specializations, and six overall "abilities" on your bar, although 3 of them were just guns that you could switch through (reducing the former trigger-style abilities from 5 slots to 3, in other words).  I put in a bunch of other things to differentiate the flagships from one another, and really beefed up the uniqueness of all the classes.

This was over a weekend, and I was working alone, incognito, away from players and staff during that period.  I'm not saying that to brag -- great ideas come from all sorts of sources, and often those sources are not me.  But to someone who thinks that we're "crowdsourcing" our games, I feel like it's important that they actually understand what's going on.  This is how you want game developers to work.  You want them to listen to you, and you want them to then use their feedback to fuel their own vision, rather than just blindly following what you say, or sitting you down in a conference room to have a design-by-committee.

This is a screenshot I took 5 minutes ago, of combat with the new weapon-switching at the bottom and the various other enhancements.

So here we are.  The combat is really fun in the moment-to-moment bits, and it's also much more mentally-involving in terms of making sure you not only use the battlefield properly, but also use the right weapons for the right enemies.  You can adjust the play speed to whatever you want, so it doesn't have to be a twitch game if you need time to aim.  Me, I like it fast and twitchy, and play on a more moderate difficulty level to compensate.  Play as suits you.

This brings us to the second problem that I mentioned (a while back) above, and which is as-yet unresolved, but next on my to-do list: identity crisis for the game.  Is this a thoughtful 4X, or is this a SHMUP-like?  Valley 1 and 2 both struggled with this exact same identity crisis.  You could love one part and loathe the other, and that would make for a challenging time.  Personally I loved both in both, but limiting our audience to the intersection of two rather disparate genres would be... well, stupid.  That's a good way to go out of business.

It was worrying me from the start, and players all immediately brought it up, too.  In all their cases except for one (Cyborg, as it turns out), they were loving both sides, but were worried others would not.  Cyborg tried to like the new combat, but just ultimately can't stand it.  And I understand that -- I loved the Total War titles, for instance, but I loathed their realtime parts.  So I just used auto-resolve and played it as a 4x and had a great time.  For everyone else who liked the realtime parts, they were free to play that, and that's great.

But it comes down to even more than that.  Much as I love the action-oriented combat here in TLF, sometimes I just want to get on with it.  That's another thing with Total War: by auto-resolving all the battles, I could just play one continuous, fluid strategy game.  I wasn't constantly interrupted by 5 or 10 minute battles where I would then have to go "now what was I doing again?" when I finished them.  If I clearly had the superior force for a battle, I also didn't just have to go through the motions, either, it's worth noting.

So that's currently my thing: making an alternate combat mode that is a little more involved than your traditional Total-War-style auto-resolve, but at the same time quick and fluid and cerebral-only.  In other words, keeping it a pure 4x if you use that instead of going into the action bits.  And you know what?  Much as I love the action bits, I plan on using that feature quite a bit myself.  Sometimes I just want to get on with things, as noted above.  And this way I can play the action-y combat exactly as much as I want, without ever having to weary of it.  Which is important.

The solar map portion of this game is a big, beautiful 4x simulation that is way more involved and interesting than anything Arcen has ever done before, in my opinion.  I would hate to exclude the very type of audience that most appreciates that simply because they hate SHMUPs.  And I also don't want every game I play to take me 12 hours because I'm in combat for half the time.  I want to play it the way I want to play it, when I want to play it, based on how I'm feeling at that moment.  That's what's coming.

And that's how we listen to our players.





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Offline Cyborg

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2014, 04:03:26 pm »
Good write-up. I don't know a single business that doesn't get feedback. Movies, music, television, games, newspapers, magazines, politicians…we live in a connected world.
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Offline Mick

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2014, 06:34:45 pm »
Is the idea to still have "auto-resolve" (for lack of a better term) be a difficulty mode, or is it something you will choose based on the battle?

Offline Wingflier

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2014, 07:52:19 pm »
So if I'm to understand this correctly, you only control one ship now in battle?

What about your fleet? Is that controlled by the AI? Do you have any influence or ability to command it?

Sorry I think something may have been lost in translation.

Another thing: Are you really going to include a difficulty (or difficulties) which will make the game, for all intents and purposes, a bullet hell? Watching some of the gameplay footage that's been released so far, it's been kind of a one-sided slaughterfest. It's nice having an advantage over the enemy ships, but obviously there will be people who want to be faced by opponents who can actually destroy you.

By the way, what is the penalty for losing your ship in battle?
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Offline x4000

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2014, 07:59:31 pm »
Is the idea to still have "auto-resolve" (for lack of a better term) be a difficulty mode, or is it something you will choose based on the battle?

It's now going to be the default way that you handle battles, and it's called "Command Room" combat mode.  It resembles the rest of the game more, but is a lot more graphical than just being text-based.  I've attached a screenshot of super early, very unfinished version of it.  I should be done with it by Monday, though, at the rate it has been going so far.

As you can see, there is (currently a big, tacky) button that says "switch to action mode."  You see this screen immediately on entering combat, and you can either start taking turns on this, or switch into action mode.  If you go to action mode, you can't get back to this.  If you start taking turns here, you can't get to action mode.

So nobody is going to miss the fact that this mode is here.  If anything, they would miss the SHMUP mode, but even that should be hard to miss in the main.  Even if you always want to play the SHMUP mode, though, this screen is useful to you because it lets you get some pre-battle intel on what is around.

Please pay no attention to the "destroy enemy X" buttons, those have nothing to do with anything.  That was just from an earlier prototype, and is completely divorced from how the final thing will work.  The rest of the screen, on the left and bottom, though, is set up close to how it will be in the final version (missing some key pieces of data, though, and having some big ugly buttons in place of real ones for withdraw and switch modes).

Anyway, so it's no longer a separate difficulty level.  The reason that was required in my previous thinking was that there would be no good way to carry the weapons and abilities over from mode to mode in terms of making them relevant.  As you can infer from the screenshot, however, I've figured that out.  Their functions will differ somewhat between the two modes (since one is turn-based and has no concept of position of ships, it kind of has to), but all serve thematically the same functions on both sides.  Since that works, we can make it an either/or thing without breaking the flow of gameplay.  The difficulty of combat can even be something that applies to both, as the same difficulty would be applied to the turn-based command room or the realtime action mode.

So, needless to say, I'm quite excited about this. :)
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Offline x4000

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #5 on: March 22, 2014, 08:05:12 pm »
So if I'm to understand this correctly, you only control one ship now in battle?

Correct.

What about your fleet? Is that controlled by the AI? Do you have any influence or ability to command it?

You don't have one, it's just you in your flagship.  You can spawn drones from time to time if you use Operational abilities, but those follow preset routines depending on the type of drone (going on attack, or staying on orbiting defense of you, etc).

Sorry I think something may have been lost in translation.

I think you've missed some intervening posts and videos, yeah, heh. :)

Another thing: Are you really going to include a difficulty (or difficulties) which will make the game, for all intents and purposes, a bullet hell?

Right, that's the action mode.  More or less.

Watching some of the gameplay footage that's been released so far, it's been kind of a one-sided slaughterfest. It's nice having an advantage over the enemy ships, but obviously there will be people who want to be faced by opponents who can actually destroy you.

Bear in mind that I'm playing on normal difficulty, which is below my real skill level, and I'm also playing the earliest battles in the game.  If those battles were destroying me, that would be kind of a problem.  The enemy is definitely capable of wrecking me on the appropriate difficulties.

By the way, what is the penalty for losing your ship in battle?

The game ends in a loss, ala losing your home command station in AI War.  You're on the ship, and when it blows up you die.

Your reaction of surprise of "is there really an action-y sort of game for combat??" is a big part of why the command room thing is being made so prominent.  The action mode is super fun, but if you don't like that sort of thing, obviously it's horrible.  The best sports game in the world is horrible to me, but people who like sports games will obviously love it.  Anyway, the odds of liking both genres is not high among the hardcore grognards, so being able to completely skip the actiony bits is the idea.
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Offline Mick

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #6 on: March 22, 2014, 08:33:57 pm »
Hmm, so is the non-action part going to play out something like a tabletop RPG space battle?

Offline x4000

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #7 on: March 22, 2014, 08:41:43 pm »
Hmm, so is the non-action part going to play out something like a tabletop RPG space battle?

That... is one way to describe it, I guess.  In some ways it does remind me of something like Descent: JitD or something along those lines.  I hadn't intended to do that, but I do love those sorts of games.
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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #8 on: March 22, 2014, 08:53:16 pm »
This is a more updated look at how the data will actually be presented.  Right now the data sheets on the armadas and so forth are still blank, but you can see that it's doing it by armada and then with individual civilian or powerups separately.  The turrets will add into the armadas that they get assigned to, in terms of their working power.  So you can see how this is a bit more graphical than the prior screenshot indicated, and it's also something that doesn't have pages and pages of options.  It's the same data and same fight, just condensed.  There will be multiple buttons in each little panel there, most likely, but we'll see exactly how this evolves as I continue testing with it.

Anyway, you get the idea.  It's all about the numbers and the decision making, in this one screen, and not something where you get involved in the action mode at all.  Unless you click the button that takes you to the action mode.
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #9 on: March 22, 2014, 09:04:38 pm »
I think that if you're going to make the "Action Mode" a bullet hell, instead of a tactical RTS combat simulator as before, it will have to be incredibly polished. If people enter action mode expecting "bullet hell" level quality, that's a high standard to try and meet. Not that I have any doubt in Arcen's ability to do it, but I think the precision and importance of this part of the game may have risen dramatically.
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Offline Cyborg

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #10 on: March 22, 2014, 10:03:30 pm »
I'm liking this new screen. Much more ponderous.


For what it's worth, I also auto-resolve total war, except for once in a while when I want some kind of Steven Spielberg historical combat show.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #11 on: March 22, 2014, 10:27:56 pm »
I think that if you're going to make the "Action Mode" a bullet hell, instead of a tactical RTS combat simulator as before, it will have to be incredibly polished. If people enter action mode expecting "bullet hell" level quality, that's a high standard to try and meet. Not that I have any doubt in Arcen's ability to do it, but I think the precision and importance of this part of the game may have risen dramatically.

Bullet hell is not how I would categorize it.  Yes, there are lots of bullets, and yes, you fire guns.  But you're not going for score or combos, this isn't the entire game, and it's a matter of taking tactical objectives via those mechanics, not just executing maneuvers as optimally as possible within those mechanics.  Aka, you're trying to tactically position yourself the best you can, and make approaches from good angles, etc, and hit key targets.  It's almost like a combination of a team FPS game and a SHMUP. 

Typically my experience with SHMUPs is that you have no such decision making, and instead it's all about execution of your play through either randomized or hand-crafted levels.  That's really not the focus here; your actual execution can be a bit squiffy, as long as you are thinking tactically and doing the larger approaches right.  It's still a tactical combat, just with a single ship, direct firing, and some abilities, instead of a fleet of ships doing essentially the same thing.

Misery can probably speak to this better, as he's super into the bullet hell and SHMUP genre in general, and has played this extensively.  The goal of the combat here is to be fun, and a diversion where you make interesting meaningful choices... but it's not remotely the bulk of the game.  Whereas, as I noted above, with a true bullet hell game that's all there is.  It's kind of like Quake II or Unreal Tournament or something versus DayZ.  Yeah, they both involve guns, but with the former two they are all about precision execution and never getting shot and always making your shots, etc, while moving as fast as possible.  Whereas with DayZ those skills help for sure, but there is other stuff going on as well.  From my understanding, not having played DayZ but having played the former two a ton ton ton (and those obviously being ancient examples).

I'm liking this new screen. Much more ponderous.

For what it's worth, I also auto-resolve total war, except for once in a while when I want some kind of Steven Spielberg historical combat show.

Excellent!  I hope it will prove out fun to play, too, for you.  I am not yet at the point where I can actually test it even myself yet, as you can see the screen is incomplete.  But I have it down on paper, and am should have it coded mostly or completely tomorrow.  I'm big into ponderous games myself, as you might expect from someone who likes 4x games in general, so I can understand where you are coming from.  Boy, I have had 8ish  hour marathons of playing Descent JitD, for instance, because we just optimized the hell out of every freaking move. And I play as the DM, but I'm right there helping optimize with everyone else, ha.  Granted we had 7 players instead of the usual 4 in that particular long game, so that was part of the length added, but still.

Sounds like we are of the same mind on Total War, too.  If Civilization had an action component I'd skip that, too.  But on the other hand, I love me some Tyrian or Raptor or similar.  My main goal with the combat here has always been to provide a fun diversion from the "main game," to keep things from getting monotonous.  But the diversion itself shouldn't become monotonous.  I also needed something more alive-looking that would show well in videos and screenshots, because lots of stillish screens don't make for a compelling trailer or screenshots, which can kill sales.  But mostly, I just like having little breaks and shifts in tempo on stuff.  I like having some bubble wrap popping every so often in Final Fantasy VI, for instance.  I don't want it rammed down my throat every 30 seconds like sometimes they make you do, that is annoying.  But I do enjoy the combat, and would find it a lesser game if it was just the story (the main thing I'm there for).

So it's kind of a fine line.  In some recent builds, combat in general was just taking center stage too much, almost like it was trying to become the main game instead of being the diversion.  Anyway.  It's shaping up in a way that really tickles my fancy from the grognard side of me, while at the same time also letting me get in that bubble wrap fun with the action combat (which I super enjoy, personally -- I foresee myself just unwinding with random combat in the game from time to time).  With all that in mind, I'm trying to make sure that the Command Room combat moves quickly, but at the same time still requires tactical thinking.  But again, isn't something you spend half your time with the game doing.

We'll see what everybody thinks come next week!
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #12 on: March 23, 2014, 12:39:19 am »
Quote
Bullet hell is not how I would categorize it.  Yes, there are lots of bullets, and yes, you fire guns.  But you're not going for score or combos, this isn't the entire game, and it's a matter of taking tactical objectives via those mechanics, not just executing maneuvers as optimally as possible within those mechanics.  Aka, you're trying to tactically position yourself the best you can, and make approaches from good angles, etc, and hit key targets.  It's almost like a combination of a team FPS game and a SHMUP.

Typically my experience with SHMUPs is that you have no such decision making, and instead it's all about execution of your play through either randomized or hand-crafted levels.  That's really not the focus here; your actual execution can be a bit squiffy, as long as you are thinking tactically and doing the larger approaches right.  It's still a tactical combat, just with a single ship, direct firing, and some abilities, instead of a fleet of ships doing essentially the same thing.

Misery can probably speak to this better, as he's super into the bullet hell and SHMUP genre in general, and has played this extensively.  The goal of the combat here is to be fun, and a diversion where you make interesting meaningful choices... but it's not remotely the bulk of the game.  Whereas, as I noted above, with a true bullet hell game that's all there is.  It's kind of like Quake II or Unreal Tournament or something versus DayZ.  Yeah, they both involve guns, but with the former two they are all about precision execution and never getting shot and always making your shots, etc, while moving as fast as possible.  Whereas with DayZ those skills help for sure, but there is other stuff going on as well.  From my understanding, not having played DayZ but having played the former two a ton ton ton (and those obviously being ancient examples).
So out of curiosity, will there be any advantages to actually playing the battles out in the "action phase" of the game?

I ask because it would seem rather silly if the player could simply auto-resolve every battle scenario and come to equal or greater results than if they had decided to do the whole thing by hand. I would hope that, just as in the Total War series, a player's own personal contribution to the fight would yield significantly greater results on the whole than any kind of auto-resolve feature. Otherwise, wouldn't it make the action kind of fruitless?
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #13 on: March 23, 2014, 12:46:37 am »
So out of curiosity, will there be any advantages to actually playing the battles out in the "action phase" of the game?

I ask because it would seem rather silly if the player could simply auto-resolve every battle scenario and come to equal or greater results than if they had decided to do the whole thing by hand. I would hope that, just as in the Total War series, a player's own personal contribution to the fight would yield significantly greater results on the whole than any kind of auto-resolve feature. Otherwise, wouldn't it make the action kind of fruitless?

The catch to that, though, is that if you do that course of action, playing it out is the preferred choice of action. So it really isn't a choice on higher difficulties / if you are testing your skills to the limit. Only if you make the outcomes equal in the end is it really a choice. For example, when I played total war, any meaningful battle I had to play, even if I won my units were wrecked so I had to play 90% of my battles even if I didn't really want to.
Life is short. Have fun.

Offline Histidine

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Re: Behind The Scenes: Iterative Combat Design In TLF
« Reply #14 on: March 23, 2014, 12:57:09 am »
Glad I could be the 1% of your Edisonian genius  :P

This may be a distraction from work on more important aspects of the game, but if you don't have it already then I think (toggleable, OFC) combat animations for the Combat Room mode (like most TBSes have) would be neat. Short renders of ships shooting, ships launching fighters, ships getting hit, ships exploding, that kind of stuff.

I ask because it would seem rather silly if the player could simply auto-resolve every battle scenario and come to equal or greater results than if they had decided to do the whole thing by hand. I would hope that, just as in the Total War series, a player's own personal contribution to the fight would yield significantly greater results on the whole than any kind of auto-resolve feature. Otherwise, wouldn't it make the action kind of fruitless?
I'd note first that this doesn't seem to be quite the same thing as TW-style autoresolve; winning and losing still depend on your input in the battle.

That said: as chemical_art said, I think the two different modes should generally give results within the same ballpark, with a modest advantage for handling the combat manually to compensate for the time investment.
If there are large differences between the two, you'll end up with people playing "shmup mode" even if/when they don't want to, or skipping shmup mode even when they want to play it, in order to gain an advantage - i.e. they have to choose between playing to win and playing for fun, a big no-no in my game design book.

Of course, there'll be cases with e.g. a player who enjoys the shmup mode but is no good at it and has to avoid it if ze wants to win. But interest/skill mismatches aren't really something that the game dev can specifically eliminate, I think.