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I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
[0]: https://play0ad.com/
I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
I think its cool seeing what factors are considered in RTS balancing. I guess an equivalent for fighting games would be invincible vs non-invincible DPs or weird things like movement options. In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the charac…
I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.
The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast.
One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start.
Zynga was infamous for a stats driven approach, but there it was all about tricking people into maxing out the micro transactions :(
I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.
Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One…
The opposite to "the enemy's gate is down"
DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His observation is that the side with a 2x advantage almost always wins. If nobody has a 2x advantage, either side can win.
So, real-world war has a "hard counter".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.
I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The performance of the original was even worse, you had to apply a patch to get multithreading. Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I…
There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart.
So, in a way - there are no hard counters either :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One…
> One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phas…
First half of the title got my hopes up as a Magic: the Gathering player, but alas, it was not an argument in defence of hard counters costing only two mana.