211–220 of 275 posts
It's sad to me that this author's only view of RTS is as an esport. If that's how it is then I'll be fine if there's never another RTS, and 95% of the public doesn't care about esports either.
I would love to play another RTS with a nice campaign. I don't care if my game is a poor esport. But no, everything must be an esport now, with ladders, seasons and whatever, unless it just can't.
Most linux distros have it in their package repositories.
Age of Empires 2 Definitive edition is thriving. I play regularly with a group of friends, and found out this week that several of my colleagues play it too. DE really is AOE2 in its finest form: Fixed netcode, responsiveness, matchmaking, and continuous patches and balance tweaks. It's a 20-year old game that gets monthly patches, and is active enough to match you to opponent[s] in minutes. Compared to SC2, I miss t…
And I think the game is hands down played mostly by casual players. As of today there are over 40k people that have played at least a rated multiplayer match (how many more that never hit the multiplayer button?), and from those more than 75% have an ELO lower than 1200 which is on the lower end of the spectrum (best player of the world has 2500 ELO and one starts with 1000)
The game is still pretty challenging for newcomers, my 12 year old nephew loves watching me play, but whenever I offer him a chance to play he is "scared" because it looks to difficult, and says he prefers to just watch. When I was 12 (or even younger) I loved playing. Nowadays it seems games are designed intentionally to not being too difficult to play/learn
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could eschew online multiplayer and just make a single player or LAN game. Most RTS games never got any real competitive play anyways because balancing is a very long and costly process. For indies it also matters that this process must be mind-numbingly boring.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could eschew online multiplayer and just make a single player or LAN game. Most RTS games never got any real competitive play anyways because balancing is a very long and costly process. For indies it also matters that this process must be mind-numbingly boring.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
A contrived example obviously, but you really do have to see how the units interact with all other units, and how players actually use them, balancing damage etc is not enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could eschew online multiplayer and just make a single player or LAN game. Most RTS games never got any real competitive play anyways because balancing is a very long and costly process. For indies it also matters that this process must be mind-numbingly boring.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
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 imbalanced metagame where that unit/combo can be spammed.
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…
Company of Heroes 2 is fantastic. I bought everyone in my Steam list that game -- it was €1 a few months ago. However flops like Dawn of War 3 (a sister game to CoH) are why publishers are slower to risk on RTS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
I think you are underestimating the difficulty of the problem. The interactions between all the stats you listed can’t be distilled to to a single number. For example maybe a very slow but powerful unit gets a normal score, but when paired with fast units to protect it from getting kited becomes unstoppable. A contrived example obviously, but you really do have to see how the units interact with all other units, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?
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.