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Murtak
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Post by Murtak » Mon May 04, 2009 1:25 pm

> PhoneLobster wrote:Things like RC was describing like manually retreating meat shields to make them actually perform their role as meat shields?
> NOT FUCKING INTENDED DUMB ASS.

No goddamn it, you wordtwisting motherfucker. As someone who "used to program" (which includes 90% of the western world by now), you may have heard of time constraints, money constraints, memory constraints and CPU constraints. Not getting to write the perfekt AI you want is NOT a goddamn fucking bug you imbecile, no matter how many insults you sling my way. Erratic pathing is a bug, game crashes are a bug and some unit having 100 times the HPs it should have - these are bugs. Units not behaving like you would like them to behave so you are spared the horror of having to actually issue them orders IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING BUG. I have played games where units liked to move by themselves and that sometimes sucked for me when they stepped into artillery range but that wasn't a bug either.

> PhoneLobster wrote:Because you just sat their straight faced and said "Really Bad Unit AI was intended all along."

Define "bad unit AI". Oh, right, there is no definition. You may think every game has to relieve you of every decision, but this is lazy-ass, too-dumb-to-click, i-want-the-machine-to-cover-my-butt thinking. Starcraft has too much micro for my taste too, but I don't cry about the unbeatable killer Zergling rush. And no, your units failing to autocast a limited-resource spell is not a bug. Go ahead, i double-dog-fucking dare you to describe me a perfect algorithm for casting that protoss mana storm thing. Surely a great programmer such as yourself must be able to do so, right? Pseudocode will do. And if you can not in fact write that algorithm kindly piss off or admit that you were in fact absolutely and utterly wrong about less automatism being a UI bug.
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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Mon May 04, 2009 7:09 pm

> PhoneLobster wrote: Star craft, and the craft series in general are all micro and little or no macro. That pisses me off.

Ok, that's false about SC. Warcraft 3 is tons of micro, but in SC, macro is absolutely required, and it is very possible to simply power your opponent into the ground if you outmacro them. In fact, one reason I prefer SC over WC3 is that macro is a big part of the game, where in WC3, they put on bullshit upkeep costs to fuck over macroers. In WC3 I can perfectly understand people complaining that macro doesn't mean enough, but that's Warcraft, not starcraft.
In SC, macro is evenly balanced with micro. You can be an awesome microer and lose to some guy who has outexpanded and outproduced you.
In most RTS, you just see macro as being the only thing you ever care about. Like Command and Conquer. It's just all who can pump out the most tanks. You don't have to micro them at all it's just a constant attack move towards the enemy base. And that's boring. One of the good things about Starcraft is that it allows micro to swing the battle as well.

> Micro continues to exist because there are hard limits to just how good you can make your AI for path finding and target selection. Though the TA line has ALWAYS been better at that when units are left unattended (something which in star craft is just plain suicidal despite your claims that it is "OK") and requires less and more appropriately supported micro in order to improve unit performance.

Well, unattended units are going to get killed probably against a guy who sets up a well microed attack. but if he attack moves his siege tanks into your dragoons, then your dragoons are pretty much going to defend themselves okay. If he goes up and sets a seres of sieged tanks and spider mines and fires on you, then yeah, you have to counter his micro with micro of your own.

> But more importantly things like active only spell casting are very severly limited in the TA line. And with the exception of a puzzling decision regarding stationary tactical missile launchers FA reserves such interfaces to only the rarest of units in roles where it is appropriate (the commanders gun of last resort and nukes basically).

That kind of sucks if you ask me. Having units with powerful limited use abilities are good for the game and add more strategic depth, since you've got mana recharge issues and resource management. Having units that can just do their schtick all the time leaves you with fewer real strategic options, as opposed to trying to set your opponent up for that perfect psi storm, or figuring out if you want to use your mana to irradiate his lurkers or to irrad a patrolling science vessel in his worker line.

> Choosing not to cast some spell right now is not the same as being unable to have it cast in ANY automated manner. As much as TA:K had failings (primarily issues with melee units) it got spell casting right.
> You could turn it on auto. That was a big deal, that's the way it should for the most part be. Target selection for every other damn unit is like that, auto return fire, auto aggressive, no automatic fire at all, and shoot anything you tell it to.

For spells like healing, this makes sense (medics do auto heal). For a lot of shit, like irradiate or psi storm, it does not. These abilities are costing you nearly 1/2 your mana, meaning you only get two of them. you don't want to be wasting that shit on trivial opponents. Honestly if I could set psi storm to autocast, I wouldn't do it, because ti would make it wasteful. It also hurts your own troops, so again, if i place one, I want to know exactly where its going.
I don't really know what you expect out of a game to micro for you.
Pulling wounded zealots back is not something you want the game to automatically do. It's something you do, not to have the zealot fight better but to save its life by having it retreat so it can recharge and heal. Some battles, you may not want to do that. Some fights in fact, pulling back to retreat may very well give up a choke point that you want the zealot to hold. So seriously, I don't always want my zealots to fall back.
And of course once you get into the whole automicro argument, then the zerg player is going to say, "well why can't my hydralisks auto focus fire?" or "why can't my zerglings autofollow his wounded zealot that autopulls back and try to surround him?"
And then pretty much you're left with a game that plays itself and you've lost basically everything except just pumping out units from your barracks and ordering all your units to attack move to the enemy base. In short, you're left with a pile of shit like Command and Conquer where you have no tactics, and probably not even any strategy. It's all who can click the produce unit button the fastest.
And seriously if I want to automate anything, it's not going to micro, it's going to be macro. Micro is the competitive meat of the game, because its a direct duel with your opponent. Macro on the other hand is just a test of speed seeing how fast you can jump between multiple factories and barracks. That has a lot of tedium to it. Though seeing what happened with warcraft 3 when they tried to cut down on that, I'm okay with having to do macro myself as well. The dynamic of having to balance micro and macro and having player attention as an additional resource also serves to add another balancing mechanism. If you're going macro heavy, you can't afford to go with too many micro heavy units and vice versa.
The micro is the interesting part of the game. Why you'd want to replace that with a pure fire and forget control system is beyond me. That's just going to produce a shitty game, like automating combat and dodging in an FPS, but having the player control his character just so he can run around picking up weapons after combat is over.
Part of RTS is haivng stuff happen if you don't react fast enough. That's what real time is all about. It's supposed to be fast paced and exciting. If you wanted a game with a slower pace, that's ok, but again, it doesn't mean Starcraft sucks, it just means that it happens to be too fast and adrenaline packed for you. You'd probably like turn based strategy better if that's the case.
I mean I don't like MMORPGs, so it's not like I can necessarily say if WoW is a good MMORPG or not, because I simply don't like the genre. So basically all the changes I'd make to a MMORPG would be to make it less of a MMORPG. This seems like what you're doing to Starcraft. You want to make it less of an RTS and into something slow and almost turn based by eliminating all the quick reactions that are required. However RTS fans actually enjoy those quick reactions required because they make it a fast paced adrenaline game as opposed to a relaxed game. Eliminating that would make the game worse off.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Mon May 04, 2009 7:42 pm, edited 12 times in total.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster » Tue May 05, 2009 12:04 am

> RandomCasualty2 wrote:That kind of sucks if you ask me. Having units with powerful limited use abilities are good for the game and add more strategic depth, since you've got mana recharge issues and resource management.

I'm no more a fan of point based mana "resources" in RTS games than I am of them in RPGs (including both computer based RPGs and table top).
It's a silly and annoying distinction that one guy shoots lightning and another guy shoots different lightning and drinks blue potions.
Ideally the vast majority of the spell casting model from the craft games including mana should just go away.
It's a non productive complication, the RTS already has time and resource over time management, "spell casting" should tie into the same pool as the rest of it. Which oddly TA and FA do very nicely for the minimal amount of that which happens, and Supreme commander actually did that with some of the heavy weapons that didn't include manual only fire too (a questionable decision to some but pretty acceptable if you ask me, the removal of that in FA was a bit, "I don't know?").

> For spells like healing, this makes sense (medics do auto heal). For a lot of shit, like irradiate or psi storm, it does not. These abilities are costing you nearly 1/2 your mana, meaning you only get two of them. you don't want to be wasting that shit on trivial opponents. Honestly if I could set psi storm to autocast, I wouldn't do it, because ti would make it wasteful. It also hurts your own troops, so again, if i place one, I want to know exactly where its going.
> I don't really know what you expect out of a game to micro for you.

TA:K actually did let you put spells on the pure spell caster units on autocast.
It actually worked fairly OK on auto, if you placed the caster at the right location with other units appropriately placed you could just set them on auto and they would decimate incomming attackers rather nicely. Sort of set up and forget.
But as nice as the auto managament was there were issues with limited casting, I can't recall, I think it was mana but it might have just been a really slow fire rate. That was somewhat aleviated by the fact that a starting caster could pretty much auto fire freely with the lower level spells and would be able to gain experience and once a full veteran could chuck down the big spells with a frequency that made them a lot less depressing than the just short of one shot sad sacks from star craft.
So if you want to talk about a rich "deep" mana mini game then I think that one actually handled it well as your mana mini game was basically pokemon raising your caster with some regular troops to protect him until he turned into a Charizard. Which is certainly a lot "deeper" than the protoss caster "mini game" of "wait for it... NOW!, well that was basically it..." which when you get right down to it ... wasn't much of a mini game now was it?
Mana units in SC basically are inherited throw backs from out of the RTS genre that Blizzard added in just because that's the way people represent magic at least back then, and if they are stupid. Seriously, the blue bar is there because retards don't think you are "casting spells" unless they spend "mana points". Blue bars are as much a derivative unthought assumption that was being added hell or high water regardless of playability impact as having a faction of bumbling brutes called "Orcs!" was.

> So seriously, I don't always want my zealots to fall back.

Sounds like a job for a toggled automatic retreat behavior switch. Like skirmishing archers in total war and every other damn game in existence.
I'll give star craft a bit of a pass on that one since it is purely derivative and I can't specifically name anyone who had implemented that to be stolen from at that time.

> And of course once you get into the whole automicro argument, then the zerg player is going to say, "well why can't my hydralisks auto focus fire?"

That's a hard one due to technology issues. You could give better or selectable target selection options, but even if it does as well or even better than you the computer is going to select different target priorities than you will.

> or "why can't my zerglings autofollow his wounded zealot that autopulls back and try to surround him?"

That's just well executed "aggressive mode" and should be implemented to some degree, and plenty of RTS games do so.

> And seriously if I want to automate anything, it's not going to micro, it's going to be macro. Micro is the competitive meat of the game, because its a direct duel with your opponent.

Again, you clearly demonstrate you don't want to play an actual strategy game. It's all action click fest, there is a reason I described it as a game for obsessive compulsive teenagers lacking in imagination, and that is it.
About all I want out of actual manual unit management is to set up a path/patrol/attack point, arrange a formation or set of attack waves to put the artillery and AA up back, and maybe do some target selection.
The rest is basically a bitch, I've got a whole map full of god damn STRATEGY to be dealing with, at the same time I should be able to execute cunning pincer movements and distractions, there should be a capability for me to have more than one such attack going off at once, I need to be able to time it in conjunction with fixed artillery or nuke bombardments, I have a long term economy, other enemies, base defenses, some other master plan strategy this attack is just buying time or resources for...
Star craft is about microing that Single Decisive Encounter, and it's about a Single Decisive Encounter in part because of excessive micro demands. And it removes, or at least severely harms, the richness of truly strategically complex unit management like combined attacks, feints and pincer movements.
But if you are an obsessive compulsive teenager lacking in imagination, you don't care, you never were going to do anything genuinely strategic and clicking shit with cowardly marines for ten minutes is what it's all about for you.

> Part of RTS is haivng stuff happen if you don't react fast enough. That's what real time is all about. It's supposed to be fast paced and exciting.

You can play a game of supreme commander with all its rich strategic diversity, even to full tech progression without some early rush ending... in about 25 minutes. In that time you will have killed or lost (or both) hundreds of units and made any number of actual strategic decisions. And that's just a small map.
You can have strategy and pace at the same time, star craft does not deliver on the strategy. And it's "pace" is mostly accidental and annoying.
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cthulhu
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Post by cthulhu » Tue May 05, 2009 1:06 am

Hey, name a single game where the unit AI actually spots situations like "I'm being kited into artillery/base defense/by a highly mobile unit" and responds?
Because no games do this, top players will always turn

> Star craft is about microing that Single Decisive Encounter, and it's about a Single Decisive Encounter in part because of excessive micro demands. And it removes, or at least severely harms, the richness of truly strategically complex unit management like combined attacks, feints and pincer movements.

This just isn't true. You haven;t even watched any SC tournament matches, as evidenced by the fact you don;t understand the gurellia warfare dropship strategy before, which is a strategy infact premised on fighting as many encounters as possible. The dropship strategy depends on setting traps, feints, gurellia warfare, hit and run and seizing the high ground.
Watch some SC tournament matches that are close

> You can play a game of supreme commander with all its rich strategic diversity, even to full tech progression without some early rush ending... in about 25 minutes. In that time you will have killed or lost (or both) hundreds of units and made any number of actual strategic decisions. And that's just a small map.

This makes it sound like early rushes are bad? I think you just don't like the starcraft style of gameplay - which is a knife fight with a small number of units - compared to the SC style of gameplay which is absolute masses of units in a much slower game.
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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Tue May 05, 2009 2:35 am

> PhoneLobster wrote: It's a non productive complication, the RTS already has time and resource over time management, "spell casting" should tie into the same pool as the rest of it. Which oddly TA and FA do very nicely for the minimal amount of that which happens, and Supreme commander actually did that with some of the heavy weapons that didn't include manual only fire too (a questionable decision to some but pretty acceptable if you ask me, the removal of that in FA was a bit, "I don't know?").

Largely mana fits in nicely. A unit can generate mana the longer its alive, so recharging time is a nice mechanic that works in RTS well, especially if it's a fast paced RTS where every second counts.

> So if you want to talk about a rich "deep" mana mini game then I think that one actually handled it well as your mana mini game was basically pokemon raising your caster with some regular troops to protect him until he turned into a Charizard. Which is certainly a lot "deeper" than the protoss caster "mini game" of "wait for it... NOW!, well that was basically it..." which when you get right down to it ... wasn't much of a mini game now was it?

Are you talking about leveling heroes? cause that's exactly what I didn't like about warcraft 3. Super units are not good for the game.

> Mana units in SC basically are inherited throw backs from out of the RTS genre that Blizzard added in just because that's the way people represent magic at least back then, and if they are stupid. Seriously, the blue bar is there because retards don't think you are "casting spells" unless they spend "mana points". Blue bars are as much a derivative unthought assumption that was being added hell or high water regardless of playability impact as having a faction of bumbling brutes called "Orcs!" was.

Actually mana is a good resource in an RTS. It doesn't work in actual RPGs because time just isn't a real resource like people think it is. But in RTS, time is perhaps the most important resource, so recharge times can easily work and be balanced well.

> That's a hard one due to technology issues. You could give better or selectable target selection options, but even if it does as well or even better than you the computer is going to select different target priorities than you will.

But honestly, I don't even think we want the computer determining targetting priorities and ordering retreats... at that point, are we even playing anymore or is it just my script versus your script instead of me vs you?

> About all I want out of actual manual unit management is to set up a path/patrol/attack point, arrange a formation or set of attack waves to put the artillery and AA up back, and maybe do some target selection.

So basically you don't want to do micro at all, and just sit at your base building units while clicking a vague area on the minimap to declare where your shit is going to attack?
That sounds incredibly dull. Basically all you're doing is playing economy management (something that could be handled easily by a script) and letting the computer handle the actual stuff that requires thinking and counters.

> The rest is basically a bitch, I've got a whole map full of god damn STRATEGY to be dealing with, at the same time I should be able to execute cunning pincer movements and distractions, there should be a capability for me to have more than one such attack going off at once, I need to be able to time it in conjunction with fixed artillery or nuke bombardments, I have a long term economy, other enemies, base defenses, some other master plan strategy this attack is just buying time or resources for...

Good starcraft players can do that. And pincer attacks are micro. So I don't know how you want the computer to both handle micro and not handle micro.

> Star craft is about microing that Single Decisive Encounter, and it's about a Single Decisive Encounter in part because of excessive micro demands. And it removes, or at least severely harms, the richness of truly strategically complex unit management like combined attacks, feints and pincer movements.

You just don't know the game well enough honestly. Feints and pincer attacks are what Starcraft is all about. There are lots of strategic decisions to be made. But I just don't think you understand it well enough to get beyond the "omg br0k3n, I just got zergling rushed!!1!!1" stage.
Yeah admittedly there isn't mcuh strategy in a Starcraft game with a much superior player, because the superior player is just going to outplay you early with micro and macro and it doesn't really matter what you build or do, because he handles his units better than you handle yours.

> You can play a game of supreme commander with all its rich strategic diversity, even to full tech progression without some early rush ending... in about 25 minutes. In that time you will have killed or lost (or both) hundreds of units and made any number of actual strategic decisions. And that's just a small map.
> You can have strategy and pace at the same time, star craft does not deliver on the strategy. And it's "pace" is mostly accidental and annoying.

From what I've heard of supreme commander there isn't much in the way of harassment, it's just two sides building big armies and having them clash. Because the maps are so large, it basically means you can't rush or harass the foe at all. So it's like playing a "NO rush 20 minutes" starcraft game.
And yeah, it's suited towards bigger armies and more units.
But ultimately Starcraft proves itself in its legacy. We'll see where Supreme commander is in 4 years. Most of the games you mentioned are hardly even played anymore and they came out years after Starcraft. Because the majority of RTS are crap. They're flavor of the month games that have minimal depth and are so "user friendly" that there isn't any real options to them. And while such games have a few nice concepts from time to time, as an overall game they tend to suck.
And if this sounds familiar, it should, because this is the same story with D&D 4E.
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cthulhu
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Post by cthulhu » Tue May 05, 2009 3:33 am

> RandomCasualty2 wrote: Are you talking about leveling heroes? cause that's exactly what I didn't like about warcraft 3. Super units are not good for the game.

Probably the biggest reason warcraft 3 is not a competitive breakout success in the way SC is.
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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Tue May 05, 2009 3:48 am

> cthulhu wrote:

> > RandomCasualty2 wrote: Are you talking about leveling heroes? cause that's exactly what I didn't like about warcraft 3. Super units are not good for the game.

> Probably the biggest reason warcraft 3 is not a competitive breakout success in the way SC is.

Yeah, it's one thing I actually kind of worry about in Starcraft 2, because they seem to want to make a few super units, like the Protoss Mothership that they showed, which you can only have one of.
Honestly, I don't think that shit belongs in an RTS game, and it'd be a huge mistake to do that. Anything that you can build should be based on the assumption that you can mass it (assuming you can afford to do so). Things that are super awesome and have to be limited by a hard cap are bad for the game.
I really hope they drop that whole concept. Super units are fine in single player, but suck for multiplayer gaming. Nobody wants some uber thing that can't die, like the WC3 heroes were at high level. It's funny because a lot of Lobsters complaints about SC don't actually apply to SC, but do apply to WC3, especially the "one decisive battle" thing. Pretty much when your main hero goes down in WC3, it's over.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Tue May 05, 2009 3:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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cthulhu
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Post by cthulhu » Tue May 05, 2009 4:31 am

The biggest problem with WC3 imho is not the heros, it was the pointless grinding before the first engagement to level up. It delays the first engagement and doesn't really accomplish anything.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules » Tue May 05, 2009 4:44 am

The Starcraft discussion reminded me of a couple of Twenty Sided posts.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1637
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1579

> For me, the actual combat is secondary. The game appeals to me inasmuch as it allows me to design a well-oiled machine that will begin by devouring vast quantities of resources and end by delivering large groups murderous vandals to the doorstep of my enemy. My goal is to design and optimize this machine as challenges present themselves. I’ve often thought that the process would be so much more fun if someone else could take the units and oversee their actions once they enter the field. I could be perfectly content managing supply lines, delivering troops, and erecting systems to bestow a gruesome demise on anyone that tries to enter the base while wearing the wrong color uniform. My ideal base is one where, once built, there is nothing left for me to do but watch the troops march out on their way to bloodshed and glory.

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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Tue May 05, 2009 4:51 am

> cthulhu wrote:The biggest problem with WC3 imho is not the heros, it was the pointless grinding before the first engagement to level up. It delays the first engagement and doesn't really accomplish anything.

If only that were the case. Sadly, grinding creeps is probably the most important part of the game. I've lost so many games of WC3 simply because I was outleveled and for no other reason, because high level heroes can literally take out your entire army, so it doesn't matter what else you have, so long as your heroes are powerful. To make matters worse, creeping gives you gold too.
Thanks to the upkeep system, macro can't really win at all, because you get diminishing returns if you try to make a huge army. This further makes hero levels all the more important because while you get charged tons of money to have a bunch of frost wyrms, you don't get charged anything to have 3 high level heroes.
Even worse is the fact that against high level heroes, having an army can sometimes be bad, because it's like free experience for the enemy heroes. I've seen a lot of people just go three hero with a few caster support units and it's stupidly hard to beat, because if their hero micro is good, you can't kill the heroes and they wipe out your army and teleport away. And they've gained xp, you haven't. It isn't so much losing the units that's bad, as it is leveling up the enemy. At times i've pondered killing my own units just so he can't take the kills.
And that just sucked. It's not even worth expanding most of the time in WC3.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Tue May 05, 2009 4:57 am, edited 3 times in total.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster » Tue May 05, 2009 6:45 am

> RandomCasualty2 wrote:If only that were the case. Sadly, grinding creeps is probably the most important part of the game. I've lost so many games of WC3 simply because I was outleveled and for no other reason, because high level heroes can literally take out your entire army, so it doesn't matter what else you have, so long as your heroes are powerful. To make matters worse, creeping gives you gold too.

That's part of WC3 having even worse tipping point issues than all three of its predecessors, including star craft.
Because it has all the same tipping point resource crap that star craft does, then it gets XP so incredibly wrong that it just makes it way worse.
Now meanwhile the entire damn TA dynasty, TA, TA:K, Supreme Commander and FA, ALL have had unit experience/veteran unit stuff in game.
And theirs works well because the balancing of the actual power progression is fairly sane.
So while grinding up a TA:K spell caster was a damn good idea and the best way to make them effective it didn't make them so massively good as to break the game.
And in FA if your bigger units, like a commander or experimental grind through enough low level units (usually by virtue of defending against them or trying to wade through them on attack) the levelling up will give some extra hit points that just barely alleviate the damage taken to achieve the level up. What extra improvement there is in long term damage output or max HP (assuming repair actually ever happens) are notable but not massive.
So a maxed out five star experience FA Monkey Lord will beat a no experience Monkey Lord or even a no experience Galactic Colossus (which is usually just a tiny bit tougher in direct match up), but two of either will still take him down easily.
Throw in Supreme Commander and FA commander upgrades and your commander can potentially go from being a moderately good last ditch defense and token contributor to your economy to being a combat powerhouse as big as top tier mega unit or the staple of a major tech 3 economic powerhouse. But those are pretty balanced as well, it takes about the same resources to make your commander the equivalent of an experimental as it does to make an experimental, and similarly the economy investment option is about the same as just investing in your economy.
Yeah so just having a unit experience/leveling system in an RTS is OK, getting it badly wrong isn't. Having your army led by a powerful hero unit who potentially gets better is part of my favorite franchise and works well in it. But that's because they got the balance right, and for all Blizzards vaunted "supa balance powers" they totally failed on that in Warcraft 3. It's almost like they don't really have super balance powers at all.

> Probably the biggest reason warcraft 3 is not a competitive breakout success in the way SC is.

War craft 1 was a success as it was among the first PC games to exploit the corrupt magazine review plus free demo disc promotion tool that soon came to dominate it's era.
War craft 2 was so hot on the heels of that to basically be the same thing.
Star craft lucked out with the opening up of the Korean market.
War craft 3 had to stand on its own merits, it had no lucky breaks and the only lucky star it was born under was whatever momentum that the Warcraft brand name gave it. Which if anything was only depleted at the time by the stronger association of Blizzards RTS lines with Star Craft and sci fi, and before the potential boost that WoW might have given it.
Oddly it lacked the merits to stand on. I wasn't surprised because I know that Blizzard is largely incapable of good game design. Most Blizzard fans were (edit: surprised that is).
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Murtak
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Post by Murtak » Tue May 05, 2009 7:56 am

I actually liked the heroes in Dawn of War. Ok, the faction balance was bad, and the orc heroes were too strong, but the concept worked well overall I thought. Have you looked at the game PL? It certainly is less micro intensive than Starcraft.
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Post by Draco_Argentum » Tue May 05, 2009 8:05 am

PL, what is FA? Expansion for SupCom or something else?
Speaking of UnitAI, I miss the scout mode option from Dark Reign (the first on, not the shit sequel). Being able tell a bunch of units to randomly patroll until they need repairs, come back to repair then go back to their patrol was really neat.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster » Tue May 05, 2009 8:24 am

> Draco_Argentum wrote:PL, what is FA? Expansion for SupCom or something else?

Sup com expansion. It added a new faction, a smattering of new units, a complete rebalance of mass fabricators vs extractors (so extractors and thus territory are a bit more valuable), reballanced stationary defenses to be cheaper, added new experimental units, fixed commander upgrades so they were worth it, made most experimentals cheaper to make and with faster movement speeds but slightly less good at combat.
And it fixed the default GUI so it was usable and pretty rather than ugly and clunky.
It was all in all a good move, but it somehow screwed up the actual performance of the game engine so it became even more demanding for no discernible reason. And apparently trouble with the publisher screwing them over somehow made it difficult for them to release patches. (strange but apparently true, there is a major publisher out there that doesn't like its developers providing post release technical support)
All in all if you have a reasonably fast modern system I suggest you play FA rather than vanilla Supreme, it is better. Try Coremaximizer and Sorian AI if you have difficulty with performance, especially playing against computer opponents (where there is unjustifiable slowdown all over the place).
Also Scout AI is the number one thing people always mentioned about Dark Reign, and I suspect a big feature(or indicator of the types of features) that made it an unexpected success. It shows how far some actual helpful UI/Unit AI design can go with players.
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Post by Username17 » Tue May 05, 2009 9:04 am

I want to point out that having the micromanagement of unit orders make a big difference s a sign of a mature tactical field. whatever unit AIs do, they will be doing something. And there will be things you can get units to do that will be relatively effective against whatever the unit AI normally does. Maybe it's moving a resilient unit into enemy range first so the focus fire algorithms get confused, maybe it's shuffling units around so that units don't fall very often, whatever. In a robust tactical field that ha been analyzed by thousands of Koreans, there will be orders that you can give your troops that will beat the default unit AI. at least, there fucking better be.
That means that whatever the unit AI does, and however good it is in the abstract, the unit AI will always be "bad" because the default tactical actions of any player of even passable skill will always be ones that are relatively good against the unit AI's default choices. tactical one-upmanship builds from there.
You can't make a good unit AI. Because player skill in the tactical arena is defined by its ability to make the unit AI look bad. If you can't make the unit AI look bad either the game sucks or you do.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Tue May 05, 2009 9:43 am

Why did Suikoden 2 have to continue after Luca Blight's epic death scene? And not just for a little bit, either, but for a long while.
That should've been the entire game. Part of the story after that was fine in bits, but the entire game was an anticlimax after that point.
No fucking mincing Mary Sue villain whose antics don't really fit into the game. Give me Luca Blight's ludicrously evil badassery or give me a damn ending. None of this Neclord bullshit.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by PhoneLobster » Tue May 05, 2009 9:46 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:You can't make a good unit AI. Because player skill in the tactical arena is defined by its ability to make the unit AI look bad. If you can't make the unit AI look bad either the game sucks or you do.
> -Username17

That isn't an argument against the existence of good unit AI, it is an argument against the existence of perfect unit AI.
It's not just perfect or perfectly bad, its a sliding scale. Star Craft unit AI is... not high.
I've seen worse, but the point is I've seen better (and contemporary or predated examples of better at that) so holding Star Craft up like a shining example is bad.
It's like saying "check it out, 2nd edition D&D experience points, greatest XP system eva!".
Worse still its people actually saying being lower on the sliding scale is a better thing than being higher on the scale.
Like when people say how 4E MM monster social details are so much better because they don't exist.
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Post by Username17 » Tue May 05, 2009 10:06 am

> PL wrote:Worse still its people actually saying being lower on the sliding scale is a better thing than being higher on the scale.

How is that worse? It's true. The more options that are available for a human's orders to outshine the unit AI, the "worse" the unit AI is. By that metric, the game is objectively superior when the unit AI is "worse."
I get that you don't like micro. I don't like micro. But that's not important. The important part is that there are lots of ways for a player to out maneuver the unit AI. And for the kind of game that it is, that's good. It means that there are a lot of viable methodologies for playing the game. And that is ultimately why they still have Star Craft tournaments in Korea and Total Annihilation is basically forgotten - despite the fact that I like it much better personally.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Tue May 05, 2009 10:41 am

Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, Suikoden 2 wasn't all that great of a game. Luca Blight is really the only thing the game really had going for it and without it you have a pretty unwhelming game that both takes itself way too seriously and yet doesn't.
I know this is kind of hard to explain, but the game goes into a lot of detail wanking about sacrifices of war and racism and political espionage and all that but still has things like superhero squirrels. I half-suspect that the reason why they threw in all of these races and wackiness was to disguise the fact that people don't really go anywhere or do anything. It's just the same boring-ass medieval towns and villages with a mine, a mountain, and a forest thrown in for good measure.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by Neeeek » Tue May 05, 2009 11:24 am

> PhoneLobster wrote:

> > Murtak wrote:Look, one thing is 100% certain: Microing in Starcraft is not a bug. It is a design decision.

> HAH!
> Stupidest thing ever.
> You know the whole "Its not a bug it's a feature" line?
> You know, the one they use to avoid fixing glaringly obvious bugs.
> The whole justification after the fact thing portrayed in microcosm on the medium of the world of software?
> I used to write software, so I can smell it a mile off.
> Things like RC was describing like manually retreating meat shields to make them actually perform their role as meat shields?
> NOT FUCKING INTENDED DUMB ASS.
> Now you can walk RCs path and declare it good in retrospect but if you dare to suggest that things like major UI and unit AI short comings are intended then I'm going to call you a moron in variously insulting ways and point at you as proof of my claim that Star Craft fans shouldn't be listened to about game design.
> Because you just sat their straight faced and said "Really Bad Unit AI was intended all along."
> And you know I thought it might be hard to actually demonstrate the point that liking star craft is indicative of poor game taste. But you guys are suddenly just rolling it right out there...

Let me rephrase. You are an idiot, have no idea what you are talking about, and remind me never to listen to you about games.
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Post by cthulhu » Tue May 05, 2009 12:07 pm

I think the key reason starcraft has more longevity than War 1, 2 or 3 is that it is actually a better game, rather than lucky breaks it received or otherwise.
Heck, lets contrast it to the C&C games competitive history.. actually lets not because all the C&C games have best been characterized by sucking balance wise.
Incidently, that is another key reason SC has done so well, blizzard has balance patched it a bazillion times, and artfully managed to both listen to the community AND still give sufficent times between patches for the metagame to sort itself out.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Tue May 05, 2009 6:02 pm

> cthulhu wrote:I think the key reason starcraft has more longevity than War 1, 2 or 3 is that it is actually a better game, rather than lucky breaks it received or otherwise.

Yeah, it really is.
Warcraft 1 was just kinda awful interface wise. And it was pre-battle.net, so there was nowhere to really play it multiplayer except via modem or LAN.
Warcraft 2 was a game of ogre macro. You got ogre magi (because everyone played orc). There was no micro. It was all just a macro pound, similar to C&C. Now WC2 was still slightly better than C&C because dragons, while expensive, could beat ogres and there was a need to expand, something you never did in C&C. But for the most part, every WC2 game was resolved by two orc players sending ogre squads in constant waves. To make things worse, the two races were basically the same, only orcs were better because of their spells. The entire game was RPS. Ogres beat axethrowers, dragons beat ogres, axethrowers beat dragons. That's it. Really I can't remember any units other than those base three, because nobody else used em. There was some attempt to add naval battles which was just a total failure. No balance patches were made to this game.
Starcraft came along and added a strong micro element, while keeping WC2's fast paced gameplay and macro. It also balanced the three races and made them different. SC was balance patched extensively.
Warcraft 3 just took the macro element and fucked it in the ass, and the game suffered as a result. In many ways it was a total reverse of Warcraft 2, because economy was a secondary concern; micro and XP grinding were king. And while they balance patched WC3 extensively, the base concept of heroes just couldn't be easily balanced. It was fundamentally flawed at its core, and nothing short of just ripping heroes out of multiplayer would fix it.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Tue May 05, 2009 7:28 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Post by Sir Neil » Tue May 05, 2009 7:02 pm

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, Suikoden 2 wasn't all that great of a game. Luca Blight is really the only thing the game really had going for it and without it you have a pretty unwhelming game that both takes itself way too seriously and yet doesn't.

The only thing I remember about it is you get robbed by a flying monkey, and the game cheats you out of your revenge. I stopped playing it at that point.
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Post by shau » Tue May 05, 2009 7:46 pm

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, Suikoden 2 wasn't all that great of a game. Luca Blight is really the only thing the game really had going for it and without it you have a pretty unwhelming game that both takes itself way too seriously and yet doesn't.
> I know this is kind of hard to explain, but the game goes into a lot of detail wanking about sacrifices of war and racism and political espionage and all that but still has things like superhero squirrels. I half-suspect that the reason why they threw in all of these races and wackiness was to disguise the fact that people don't really go anywhere or do anything. It's just the same boring-ass medieval towns and villages with a mine, a mountain, and a forest thrown in for good measure.

You go to hell. You go to hell and die.
Suikoden really has a lot to offer compared to most other rpgs. You got your basic rpg game, a gotta find them all character collection game, and a castle builder minigame all wrapped up in one package. Many of the games also attempt a strategic war based minigame, although the results are often poor. Plus each game has a ton of Easter eggs and just generally weird shit in there to figure out.
I don't know what to say in response to the do not do anything complaint. In pretty much every game you get to build a castle, raise an army, and slowly conquer the nation or set of nations you happen to be in. Remember, in the typical rpg you play a group of hobos who wander around and stab things in the face for fun and profit. Sometimes you also have to collect Macguffins.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Tue May 05, 2009 7:56 pm

> You got your basic rpg game, a gotta find them all character collection game, and a castle builder minigame all wrapped up in one package. Many of the games also attempt a strategic war based minigame, although the results are often poor. Plus each game has a ton of Easter eggs and just generally weird shit in there to figure out.

Yeah, Shining Force was a great game.
I didn't say the gameplay was all that bad (though the RPG part is a fucking chore, like all jRPGs of this era), I'm saying that the plot in this game isn't actually big enough in scope. You spend most of your time between two countries in this game essentially; the plot of Suikoden 2 could easily fit into a sidequest of another jRPG--just take out that useless school plot, the useless winged kid thievery plot, and a bunch of pointless dungeon crawling.
The only real purpose to have S2 stretched this far is to space out the time you get the 108 stars of destiny so that the player doesn't feel that the recruitment is more forced than it already is. It's pretty fucking convenient how all of the stars of destiny live so close to each other, huh?

> Remember, in the typical rpg you play a group of hobos who wander around and stab things in the face for fun and profit. Sometimes you also have to collect Macguffins.

Yes, but I don't really give a shit about the typical RPG. That's why I said that Suikoden 2 was average, not bad or terrible or anything.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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