221–230 of 275 posts
Surprising to see no mention of Supreme Commander. This game isn't just alive, its thriving and getting popular(the FAF mod, not the base game). Maybe RTS games are not being actively made but the mods are very much alive.
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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'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 small hits. Obviously continuous damage is far easier to balance, but plays un-engagingly.
Finally, whilst you could argue that health and damage are interchangable. How do you balance speed vs health? What are reasonable distributions of numbers? At what point do you create a fast ranged unit which can kite melee indefinitely etc.
basically even in a boring game, there's a lot to think about - and your playerbase if you get one will jsut be better than your devs at finding power spikes/discontinuities.
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…
Surprising to see no mention of Supreme Commander. This game isn't just alive, its thriving and getting popular(the FAF mod, not the base game). Maybe RTS games are not being actively made but the mods are very much alive.
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Also there is an RTS which all about economics, Offworld Trading Company.
True, though logistics is not a particularly deep part of it (basically the only logistics part is the further you're transporting stuff the more you'll use of a particular resource, and there's one technology which just removes that cost).
The outcome is too momentum-based. Once a player builds a solid early game lead, there is pretty much no way to stop them. There aren't really any offense tactics besides monopolizing resources, which pretty much has to happen early on. The various "black market" sabotages are pretty weak and expensive. None of them will stop a late game player with momentum. It feels like your starting position and the decisions you make in the first 1-2 minutes of the game pre-determine the outcome 30 minutes later--which is boring.
The stock trading system (which is ultimately the only way to win) is simplistic and just not a satisfying way to end the game. You're sitting there trading, making tons of money, doing everything right, then suddenly Game Over--someone had more money and decided to buy you out, which you can't defend against, even if you pre-buy all your own stock. You get a warning a few seconds before it happens (the red percentage number next to your opponent) but there's literally nothing you can do to stop them.
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> Soldiers and creatures running into their death because they didn't get an attack command. I wouldn't say that's there to make the controls more challenging. You should default to doing an attack move instead of a non-attack move. > Creating control groups and adding units manually. While I would like to be able to make factories assign units to groups, that's still manual creation. What do you have in mind for aut…
F2 is an anti-pattern. It can be OK if you play casually in bronze/silver. But if you want to play more competitively you need to be able to have units split in different locations on the map executing different orders.
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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?
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…
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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.
I'm truly shocked that he just describes the economy as too simplistic only because it has just 2 types of resources.
I don't get the comments on APM, since "playing faster" isn't a function of "my fingers don't have strong enough muscles" but much more "how much processes can you handle subconsciously or purely on muscle memory".
Also I really liked day[9]'s take on it that Starcraft focuses on Real time aspect of RTS instead of the strategy aspect (while that also goes incredibly deep!).
But let's face it, 1v1 esports is dead. Nobody enjoys mechanical heavy games anymore and that sucks!:Give a world where the top esports would be any starcraft, an arena fps like quake/diaboticals and GunZ and I would be happy.
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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…
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.