Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Future of RTS

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 275 posts

Re: The Future of RTS

#231

Post by noxvilleza »

qznc wrote: post #102
noxvilleza wrote: post #11

Whilst I certainly have huge respect for HuK, I feel that either his use of the categories in the article as perhaps a bit simplistic. Many of the points he mentions are really intertwined - most importantly balance vs variety: it's very hard to score highly on both. SC2 has 3 very distinct races (he gives it a 8.8 for variety), hence there are just 6 possible matchups. AoE 2 (DE) has 35 (he gives it a 3), making ove…

In my opinion those matchup counts are a red hering in game design. It is nice for the theme and visuals but adds nothing to the core game loop. It is more extreme in fighting games like Street Fighter or MOBAs like League of Legends. It splits the meta-mini-game of race/character selection out of the main game. The downside is that it makes balancing nearly impossible. As an alternative, a game could use positions f…

Definitely not directly comparable - since every civ has access to some common/baseline technology, but certainly differentiation (peaks/dips) in specific areas. That said, SC2's races are more different but not enough IMO to say the game is overall way more diverse.

Why do you say 'The downside is that it makes balancing nearly impossible.' when referring to MOBAs?

Re: The Future of RTS

#232

Post by chongli »

wgerard wrote: post #194
chongli wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how to make the next big e-sports RTS hit, instead of a game that many people will want to play The problem is that we want to do both. The competitors to RTSes, games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, and Hearthstone, are all (very different) games that are enjoyable to play across the full spectrum of skill levels. RTS games really seem to be split into two categories: indie games that are appealing…

> The competitors to RTSes, games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, and Hearthstone... are enjoyable to play across the full spectrum of skill levels. I'm mostly kidding, but I do think it's worth pointing out that most (if not all) of those games have been accused of being extremely unfriendly to new players and generally being miserable experiences until you acquire a baseline level of knowledge. I t…

Team play is definitely something I missed in my comment which is a big part of the picture. There’s a bit more nuance to it though. Solo queuing a team game can be miserable at any skill level simply due to a lack of accountability for team members. Playing with a group of friends, as you pointed out, can be fun at any skill level.

For competitive games that are inherently one on one, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they feel like work. Yes, StarCraft definitely falls into that stressful category. Hearthstone would seem to not do so.

Chess is a pretty interesting example. It’s one where you can have fun games even at very low rating, provided you’re appropriately matched. Low rated games may even be more “interesting” due to volatility in the evaluation, where high level games might be much more likely to result in a draw. Of course, high level players online tend to play a lot more at fast time controls, bringing blunders back into the picture.

Re: The Future of RTS

#233

Post by Eupolemos »

etempleton wrote: post #54

I felt that Company of Heroes was a nice evolution of the genre and minimized the need for incredibly high APM. For those who have not played Company of Heroes it is more about unit positioning and microing those units effectively. It requires a different set of skills than other RTS games. Unfortunately I have not seen this catch on. Relic, the developers of CoH are working on Age of Empires IV and so I hope they wi…

Yeah, vanilla CoH had "The stuff" IMO.

It was more about decissions than APM. The resouce system was very cool too.

It was super streamer friendly; any viewer could look at it for 10 seconds and understand what was going on - zero nerdiness required. And it was gorgeous for its time.

Then Relic started making a lot of mistakes:

- New factions with units a viewer would need to "learn" to be able to understand what was going on in the match.

- Introduced a super defensive faction which could fight the old defensive faction, resulting in long, abhorrently boring games.

- CoH2 which sold new mini-DLCs each month with special units purposely not balanced for online play. Top scummy.

- A plethora of other things I won't bore you with. But Relic became a customer-toxic company in my eyes.

But vanilla CoH could be examined to find gold, IMO.

Re: The Future of RTS

#234

Post by the__alchemist »

IgorPartola wrote: post #227
Ntrails wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts: You've missed some obvious issues around balancing range, special moves etc. All of which are hard to price and balance. Also, some things will not scale linearly, I expect. A particularly strong mob might only be attackable by 8 melee mobs at once. If it's a 16x strength mob itself, then maybe it wins an even "points" battle. How damage is applied is also interesting, for example. Slow big hits vs fast sma…

Interesting points. I suppose damage vs range can be a big thing if your melee units can’t even approach the ranged units to deliver the damage. But are there no formal analysis methods that can be applied to this problem?

It's very complex. AOE2 DE is patched monthly, and most patches include balance changes. I think one of the complex parts is the way balance changes interact with each other. Ie you make one change to address a specific unit being too useful. You unwittingly affect something unintentional, like making it useless against one civ's unique unit.

Some variables for each unit: - Speed - Range - Attack speed - Attack damage - Health - Melee armor - Ranged armor - Pause between stopping and attacking - Attack bonuses against specific units / classes - Training time - Cost - Cost balance among resources

Balance patches may tweak any one of these aspects. Interactions then occur with all other units in the game, econ stats that are also subject to balance etc.

People are very good at exploiting strengths and ignoring weaknesses. A slight advantage will be exploited quickly by experienced players; then others will catch on.

Re: The Future of RTS

#235

Post by candybar »

bluescrn wrote: post #133
jtolmar wrote: post #85

Some problems I'd note for any resurgence of the RTS genre: * There hasn't been a huge RTS hit in ages, so large studios aren't going to push large chunks of cash into them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you may disagree with whether large studios should act this way, but that doesn't matter, because the observable fact is they do. * RTS games are still pretty expensive to make well. There hasn't been a breako…

The obstacles to indie RTS games aren't art style/production related. If anything, the top-down or isometric-ish view makes that part relatively straightforward. The requirement for online multiplayer (while dealing with hundreds of units) is the bigger obstacle. Especially if they're working with Unity. Pathfinding (in a way that lets large swarms of units move smoothly through narrow choke points) is a non-trivial…

I don't think high-level competitive play matters at all for success - the biggest issue with SC2 IMO is that they prematurely optimized for competitive multiplayer. If they spent the majority of their time worrying about how to make multiplayer fun for new players instead of trying to ensure that it works for existing StarCraft pros and would make a viable esports game, we may not be talking about the death of RTS).

The fact that the co-op mode was released in 2015 with LoTV (5 years after the initial release of SC2) despite this being a substantially better default multiplayer mode that's unconstrained by multiplayer balancing speaks volumes about Blizzard's blind spot. They also learned the wrong lesson from DotA - SC2 isn't just a game but an incredible game engine, but Blizzard wasn't very good at taking advantage of this to broaden its appeal.

Re: The Future of RTS

#236

Post by yoz-y »

IgorPartola wrote: post #218
hombre_fatal wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The knowledge you need to come up with the score is the same knowledge you need to balance the game. Just because you’ve devised a simple sounding deliverable doesn’t mean the problem is simple. The whole challenge of balancing a game is that you’re forever wrong about that score. Underestimating the score of a single unit (or a more complex combo of multiple units) is precisely how you accidentally create an imbalan…

That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve? Watch a bunch of games, figure out empirically how effective different units and combos are and try to come up with a scoring rubric that is incrementally more accurate than before. I am not trying to trivialize the problem at all. I don’t know much about it and that’s why I’m asking why it isn’t simple.

> That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve?

In theory. However if you change the balance then the mega game will change as well and you have to throw away the training data and start anew.

Also it’s very important to not change too many stats at the same time because then it will be hard to learn the game and the new meta will take too long to emerge.

Re: The Future of RTS

#237

Post by yoz-y »

IgorPartola wrote: post #220
azureel wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the previous comment refers to player (human) balance. Not in game unit balance. You know Elo rating, as in chess? Something like that is needed in order to match players against each other. An online multi-player game that fails the matchmaker system, will lose players eventually. Because if you match the newcomers with seasoned pros, everyone will be unhappy and churn rates will be high.

No I think we are talking about balancing units. It’s not super satisfying to play a game with hundreds of units if only one or a handful of them are worth building.

Yeah it’s about units. It is also however important to balance the game at most skill points.

For example if a strategy that is easy to implement and relatively strong emerges, then you will have very boring games at low level and the only way to get out of the low rank would be to learn to counter one specific strategy. (This is for example what happened in the beginning of SC1 with Zerg rush and SC2 and M&Ms)

Re: The Future of RTS

#238

Post by meowface »

gamblor956 wrote: post #230
IgorPartola wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So the Zergling is a weak individual unit but when amassed into a large group they become overwhelming and the overall effect is that the Zerg rush is emergent behavior.

The Zerg Rush is not an emergent behavior; it was part of the fundamental design of the Zerg. Hell, the "Zerg Rush" was part of the cinematics released with the first SC.

It's funny that in SC2 high-level competitive play, the roles tend to be reversed, now: the Zerg usually turtles up until the mid-to-late game and the Terran usually harasses very early on. Zerg tends to be the defensive, macro-heavy race and Terran tends to be the offensive, scrappy race.

Though some Zerg players like Reynor are starting to buck this trend a bit and are known for more aggressive, agile approaches.

(Or at least this was all the case as of about a year ago; haven't followed the game much this year.)

Re: The Future of RTS

#239

Post by candybar »

ajuc wrote: post #188
jtolmar wrote: post #85

Some problems I'd note for any resurgence of the RTS genre: * There hasn't been a huge RTS hit in ages, so large studios aren't going to push large chunks of cash into them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you may disagree with whether large studios should act this way, but that doesn't matter, because the observable fact is they do. * RTS games are still pretty expensive to make well. There hasn't been a breako…

In my opinion Starcraft 2 killed RTSes (just like Dota 2 and LOL killed MOBAs). With multiplayer games people can play the same title forever if it's deep enough. So new games in the same genre have to compete against a game that was made by Blizzard in 2010 and constantly developed ever since. So what happens is - people check out the new game, and either get bored (it's too similar and worse) or get discouraged (it…

Trying to appeal to a very small number of people that are still playing multiplayer SC2 and think of SC2 as the gold standard for RTS is a dead end. SC2 fundamentally failed with their multiplayer design due to their irrational focus on the esports and competitive aspects of multiplayer. The point of multiplayer isn't to allow hardcore fans to find ways to enjoy the game for 10+ years. The point of multiplayer from the developer's perspective is to lure in casuals and create a network effect (all my friends are playing X, so I'm gonna also learn and play X). It's more important for multiplayer games to be accessible to new players than single-player campaigns because it's part of your growth flywheel and repeated failures are easier to deal with when you're playing by yourself but SC2 gets this completely backwards. Competitive multiplayer is absurdly challenging for new players, while single-player campaigns are significantly easier even at the hardest difficulty settings.

Re: The Future of RTS

#240

Post by IgorPartola »

yoz-y wrote: post #236
IgorPartola wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve? Watch a bunch of games, figure out empirically how effective different units and combos are and try to come up with a scoring rubric that is incrementally more accurate than before. I am not trying to trivialize the problem at all. I don’t know much about it and that’s why I’m asking why it isn’t simple.

> That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve? In theory. However if you change the balance then the mega game will change as well and you have to throw away the training data and start anew. Also it’s very important to not change too many stats at the same time because then it will be hard to learn the game and the new meta will take too long to emerge.

I think I’m starting to see the picture. Since we so far don’t have an AI capable of playing as well as the top human players, in order to figure out what’s out of balance you have to watch a sufficient amount of PvP games. And then you rebalance and must start the process from scratch. And unless you hit the perfect balance by accident you will always need to keep rebalancing.

The only other way I can think to do this would be to either change units incredibly quickly to not allow players to get too far into any particular strategy development before the unit is retired. Or introduce things like variations between units: two different marines might have different stats to not allow their 0.2 DPS advantage to add up, etc. Or I guess introduce acts of god type situations that might throw off a specific strategy. Napoleon supposedly lost at Waterloo partially because of a stomach upset that required him to keep running to the latrine and unable to focus on the battlefield. Imagine if you suddenly got fog of war over the area of combat because of “broken communication”. Basically more variability that would require the players to not concentrate on a single strategy and instead having plans A through Z for various eventualities. I’m not sure if that would make for a more exciting experience or not but might be fun to experiment with.

Post reply on HN