what type of game are we creating...

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Aquitaine
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#76 Post by Aquitaine »

I sure hope it does not turn out to be rock/paper/scissors. That would be really bad.
Can you name one succesful combat engine game that did not employ this model? (anticipating: MOO2 is not a successful combat engine, at least for our purposes)
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emrys
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#77 Post by emrys »

Aquitaine wrote: Can you name one succesful combat engine game that did not employ this model?
Real Life Evolution? (The basic rule set only has rocks, you have to evolve your own Paper and Scissors :) )

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#78 Post by emrys »

Flippant though my last post was, there was a serious point behind it.

I assume the reason people say "I hope it doesn't turn out to be Rock, Paper, Scissors" is that they are equating that with "set unit designs that you must use in the prescribed tactics".

Equally I presume the reason people say "Of course it has to be RPS" is that they equate it with tactic and counter-tactic, with strategy and decisions, i.e if you don't have RPS, you will have "one design is clearly best and so the guy with bigger numbers wins".

The point is of course that these are not opposing views, they're actually not covering the same ground.

What I assume we ALL wan't is as much flexibility in designs, AND as wide a range of tactic and counter-tactic as possible.

RPS advocates I presume are generally going to be just as happy with a system that gives us Rock,Paper,Scissors,Spades,Post-It-Notes and Ribbons.

Flexible design advocates are presumably going to be just as happy with a system that results in players producing families of units with similar properties, where some of them gain their usefulness in part from their ability to counter other possible designs.

The key lessons we need to take from the two camps are; that we need a system that allows the player to get involved in designing and tweaking their ships, because this is FUN. But, Equally we need to bear in mind that unless we set the game up (through combat engine and tech design) so that there are possible designs with differing/complementary strengths and weaknesses the ship design process is just going to become "micro"ing the optimal version of one single design, which is BORING, and the RPS idea gives you a good start on achieving this set up.

(N.B., there is nothing in the idea of a RPS game that bars "Jack Of All Trades" units, it just suggests that they should get beaten by a good use of (possibly a particular combination of) more specialised units (i.e. "master of none"). JOAT's may still be a good idea if you need flexiblity more than effectiveness, or simply don't like designing ships or devising tactics, since they're never "very wrong".)

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utilae
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#79 Post by utilae »

Aquitaine wrote:
I sure hope it does not turn out to be rock/paper/scissors. That would be really bad.
Can you name one succesful combat engine game that did not employ this model? (anticipating: MOO2 is not a successful combat engine, at least for our purposes)
Moo2 is a good example of no rps. And it was quite good. I just don't want the combat system to have an obvious rps system. RPS at its simplest is A beats B beats C beats A. So we just need to add in more 'beats __'. That way it will not be so obvious that it is rps.

RPS is the thing I did not like about Age of Empires. You pretty much only had three units. Sword, Spear and Bow. For tanks you had three more: good vs men, good vs vehicle and good vs building.

It probably is true that RPS is built in to every combat system, but its the complexity of the RPS that makes a difference I think.

Aquitaine
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#80 Post by Aquitaine »

MOO2 was quite good? You load up your ships with the biggest guns and you always annihilate the opposing fleet or are yourself annihilated. There are little numbers like crew XP and so on, but it comes down to 'who fires first' in the end.

I agree with emrys, though, I think we can keep flexibility of design and still have tha basics of an RPS. I'd actually argue against expanding it too much, because the player needs to know what sort of ships are good against what other sort of ships.
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#81 Post by iamrobk »

Aquitaine wrote:MOO2 was quite good? You load up your ships with the biggest guns and you always annihilate the opposing fleet or are yourself annihilated. There are little numbers like crew XP and so on, but it comes down to 'who fires first' in the end.

I agree with emrys, though, I think we can keep flexibility of design and still have tha basics of an RPS. I'd actually argue against expanding it too much, because the player needs to know what sort of ships are good against what other sort of ships.
I agree 100% with like everything said here. What I meant before is that RPS at it's simplest is not used, but rather a more complex version of it. In Empire Earth, the game basically told you it was all RPS lol.

Aquitaine
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#82 Post by Aquitaine »

MTW does this too, but it makes it interesitng enough (and logical enough) that it's okay. Other factors like morale and terrain can vary the results enough that it's not as dull as Empire Earth. But even in MtW, spears beat Cav, Cav beats swords, swords beat spears.
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#83 Post by That Guy »

My favourite version of RPS is Warcraft 3: TFT. It isn't exactly as straight forward as Empire Earth, but it forces you to either mix units, or learn a very very good massing build that just allows you to overwhelm...

But anyways, There are standard units, that and completely weak against one attack, and deal weak damage against units that do that attack. But then there are mixed units, that don't conform like this. I gives the person massive advantages if you know what they are building, like if they mass a large armour unit, that deals piercing damage, you could use a unit with normal armour (takes less from piercing attacks), and does magic damage (good against large armour). But then, if the enemy knows this, they would build a unit that does normal damage with small armour, to counter.

Anyways, it is really complex, and fun. you can read up about it at http://www.battle.net/war3/.
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#84 Post by luckless666 »

I agree with emrys and aquitaine on this one. Keep a flexible design system, but with a basic RPS system built in too
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leiavoia
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#85 Post by leiavoia »

having only read the last few posts in this thread, i'd like to add this little game design bit:

there is a game called Stratego. it's a board game. There are 9 unit types, arranged by army rank with the private on the bottom and the general on the top. There is a also a "bomb" that can kill the general himself. So each unit type trumps the one below it. A 3 beats a 2, a 4 beats a 3, and so on. Seemingly, the bomb is invinceable and the private (1) is a waste. So guess what? The private disarms the bomb! So basically, it's like "circular trumping" or whatever you want to call it. They all beat the one below them, but the one on the bottom beats the one on the top. This way, even the lowly unit has a special use.

It can be the same with ship combat

guiguibaah
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RPS and other stuff

#86 Post by guiguibaah »

... well that's a little bit how Starcraft worked - Un-upgraded zerglings are useless in the late game, but fully upgraded cracklings (zerglings with all the armour boost, attack boost, adrenaline glands, X2 attack, etc) become your main crack force for destroying buildings in a hurry. Though the game they evolve from an attack unit to a support unit (when paired with ultralisks).

My proposal with the Beamships, Distruptor ships, missile ships and all was basically to put a little more tactics in the game. Granted a battle should not be predetermined, as in "Oh, he's attacking with Rock and all I have is scissors. Well, I'm dead". I hate games like that. More like "Hmm, okay he's attacking with Rock, this isn't going to go well, so I'd better do XYZ to beat him".

Aquitaine is right about moo2 though - there was very little point to put in all these specials in a ship when a 50+ armada duked it out with another - that ship would explode before it had a turn to fire.

- - - -

Another suggestion.

Ships could be in 3 states. Running, Disabled, and Destroyed. Example: A ship has 100 hp. You attack it until you reach the disabled mark (only 20 hp remaining). At that point, the ship goes adrift. Once a ship is disabled, it becomes very difficult to completely destroy it. (It's easy to disable a car with a small semi-automatic, but it's pretty hard to destroy it outright.) As a result, the remaining hp will seem like 200 hp (or it suddenly gets a large boost in armor).

If all your ships are disabled and your enemy still has some running ships, you loose the battle. Disabled ships could have a small chance to retreat the battle (more if they are veteran or have a leader). An uncessussful retreat causes them to explode. Disabled ships could still fire, but at 10% the damage they would normally do.

This would be an idea to prevent what I call the 'tin can syndrome' of ships - ships that basically explode without even having a chance to do anything in the late game because everyone concentrates fire on 1 ship. You can't send them back to get fixed because they're currently being scavanged for parts.

(Of course, if you hit his ships hard enough with a very strong weapon, IE: Stellar converter it would explode, and maybe some ships can "Jumpstart" disabled ships to keep them running in the battle. Maybe that could even be a race trait - organic ships that stay disabled for 10 turns, then regenerate back to life?)

Just an idea.
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PowerCrazy
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#87 Post by PowerCrazy »

basically overt vs covert RPS. I prefer covert. And not hardfast rules for RPS. A carrier is naturally stronger vs a giant ship because its swarm of fighters can overrun all of its turrets. However against a tactical fleet of flak ships or equivalent the fighters get obliterated and the carrier is useless. While a fleet of flak ships is almost useless against a battleship because they can't hurt it. there are no hard and fast rules employed in this model. Only the assumption that the battle ship cannot destroy all the fighters because it only has so many beams. And the assumption that the flak fleet has LOTS of guns that are low powered. And we assume that all the fleets cost the same.

So there is a covert RPS system. No where in the rules of combat does it say X ship is good against Y. It just happens that the players figured out through playing the game that a good "counter" to battleships is a fleet of carriers, and a good counter to carriers are a lot of cheap frigates. And of course these all depend on the weapon specifications. And the more varied the weapons are the more varied our fleet design will be.
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utilae
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#88 Post by utilae »

PowerCrazy wrote: No where in the rules of combat does it say X ship is good against Y. It just happens that the players figured out through playing the game that a good "counter" to battleships is a fleet of carriers, and a good counter to carriers are a lot of cheap frigates.
That is true. Ships are not what we should be looking at (from an RPS point of view), but the weapons on those ships (maybe the armour too).
PowerCrazy wrote: And of course these all depend on the weapon specifications. And the more varied the weapons are the more varied our fleet design will be.
So we don't need ship classes (carrier, missile ships etc). Unless the class was automatic, ie if you had more than X% missiles your ships is a missile ship (this would just be for appearance).

So we could have ships with different armour types:
Anti-Missle Armour
Anti-Laser Armour
etc

And ships with different weapons:
Missles
Lasers
etc

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#89 Post by iamrobk »

Personally I think having ship classes like "Fighter" or "Titan" or whatever is good. Each class could only be different in their weight capacity, maybe.

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#90 Post by Sandlapper »

utilae wrote:
So we could have ships with different armour types:
Anti-Missle Armour
Anti-Laser Armour
etc
Nice, I like this.

Perhaps have an average armour(good at all things), Missle armour(great at impact defense, poor otherwise), Beam weapon armour(great at deflecting beam attacks, poor otherwise), and how about anti-corrosive armour designed to go into a corrosive nebula (player-made nebula mentioned earlier). (Toward that end, how about missles that disperse corrosive acid clouds?)

As for ships, I think the Mark I-IV classes should be multi-purpose. Any combo of weapons or armour that fit, and if no warp drive, then it's a system only ship with additional space for weapons, specials, generators or bigger in system engine.

Fighters, scouts/minelayers, colony ships, carriers, outpost ships?, transports?, freighters? are very, very limited in options.

Two more things, how about cloaked ships and tiny spy insertion ships (if not the same thing),perhaps just an added option for scouts?

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