Randomness in early game

I see, well I will try to put my opinion in that thread I don't think it is a simple answer, and it is even a bit subjective.

What are your qualifications for an answer to that question? You can keep asking forever how does one become better at that.

Which is fine.

Lot of people seem to mix the two together. So I thought it could be good to clarify that.

Their ability to think into the future and plan accordingly.

Exercise your creative and critical thinking ability.

Ok **** exams ill try to make it as short as possible.

I think those are general elements of RTS game (I think it covers it relatively well, cba to find more):
1. Knowledge of units
2. Knowledge of economy
3. Army movement.
4. APM
5. Micromanagament of units
6. Map control
7a Macro scouting
7b Army movement scouting.
8. Adapting to scouting
9. Predicting future happenings

1. You know what composition and what types of units are best for certain situations and moments in the game. Skills involved:
Experience, Experimentation, Observation, Memorization.
or
Copying from pro, Memorization.
2. You know in what order you build buildings and create units. Again
Experience, Experimentation, Observation, Memorization.
or
Copying from pro till certain point in the game, EEO, Memorization.
3. Knowledge where and when to send units.
EEOM or copying and memorization. Trust me, it can be copied.
4. The speed you manage all of your stuff, limited by UI.
This is only marginally copied, you have to learn it yourself.
5. The way you maximize efficiency of your units if you managed to build them in best compositon, in best order and fastest way possible and the best way possible to certain place.
This has 2 parts - Knowledge of how to micro something and then how well you execute it.
6. This is 3 and 2 combined, you take territory, then secure it. Can be copied and memorized.
7. You need to know what your opponent is doing.
You need to remember to do it, then you need to know how to read what you see and then you need to know how to react to it. Memorization.
8. Whatever, Memorization.
9. Can be memorization too, based upon what you know about the game.

To sum up, in theory if you play perfectly, everything except APM and micromanagement is memorization. This is why I got bored with starcraft 2. Most of build orders and reactions to situations are already invented and right now it's mostly about memorization and apm and micro. I like to develop new strategies and new build orders. It's only one time process. Once strategy is invented it is copied and memorized by everyone. The more RTS game is developed, the more it is about memorization and execution and less about smart thinking.

I would say strategy are the points 1 3 6 7 8 9.
Economist is 2 and 6
Tactician is 5 and partially 3.

Starcraft:
Heavy on Tactics, mid-heavy on economy and strategy

Supcom FA:
Relatively heavy on tactics (micro with commander and units) , very heavy on economy, quite heavy on strategy

PA:
mid on tactics (I think it will be high apm demanding in future when we get better), heavy on economy, heavy on strategy. People want to lower tactics even more leading to more memorizing.

How other games coped with the problem of memorization of strategy and economy elements:
1. Chess and to certain extent supcom - Insane number of possibilities in order to make it impossible to memorize them all (This is good but it actually pushes it away in time from what i see from absolutely sick loki's post). Supcom died and at the end it was a bit of memorization. Chess didnt die and it took a couple of hundred of years to have this problem appeared.
2. Starcraft - We introduce a lot of APM and Micro requirements to make it more sporty, less strategy.

Both are not satisfactionary after a couple of years of development of game.
HMMM

Conclusion:
It seems PA is going in the direction in which game will die before we invent all the answers and that's where game leans right now - more planets, a lot of units, million of mex spots, thousands of units. It's relatively decent answer for those who dont like to click fast and micro heavy.

What cola colin previously suggested and I disagreed but after longer consideration this actually might be relatively reasonable solution is FAIR randomization. This would force you to invent strategies on the fly and take away memorization. But this must be fair, you can't have randomization like current when one of guys get random advantage and the game says "deal with it". I have no idea how would fair randomization look like and even then, im not sure whether that would end up in just memorization of possible closest scenarios.

It's not short at all and I didn't even cover 1/4 of topic lol

Yea but some dense metal clusters aren't actual spawn points, they need to actually confirm where all the possible spawn points are at first.

This game isn't for the people that are going pro.

It should not be copyable and memorizable, that is the thing.

Knowing what territory to secure and how to best secure it should be different every game depending on map, scouting, and timeframe, and other factors. I'm not saying it is right now, but that is the ideal that should be striven for.

Memorizing a big bag of rock paper scissors should not make you good. If it does then something is wrong.

There will always be some kind of memorization, its how we work; when a player gets into a game of PA they're going to assess their mex points and make a preliminary decision on what stat/build they might aim for and start building towards that. Where randomization shines is when they discover that they might be a little closer to the enemy than they liked, or one of the mass clusters is occupied and then they have to adjust their strategy/build a little/a lot /or not at all.

Fair starting metal would be a good thing, but consider that you can choose one of multiple start locations, and one of those locations might have less metal, but more of a different kind of advantage, ie it's defensible, or its closer to a prime metal cluster (this was and is the devs intention (re early live streams). The player makes this decision at the beginning, as do other players and they should lump it if it doesn't turn out like they hoped, and adjust. PA is more like war this way: the plan doesn't survive the engagement.
There is no reason to insist on seeing the or possible start locations of opponents (except as an option would be nice) as scouting is frankly easy, build and air-fac que some scouts set the fac to planet patrol, build base...or micro your scout if you feel this will perform better (probably will), either-way you will find the enemy(ies) quite soon, long before a crisis looms unless you've been particularly late in getting some kind of scout unit out. Incidentally you can do this with bots, scout-cars etc... Whether you scout early or late is entirely up to the player and is another one of those choices each player makes, there are merits to either or and plenty of chances to claw back from certain defeat anyway.

Wait, thats almost exactly what I said earlier!

I'm....ok....cool?

I also mentioned something vague about this being improved by Uber, etc etc.

?

It has currently 4x more player than PA after a patch release?

if you spawn one planet each with the same stats the two planets will be exactly the same and spawn points too so in that case there's no more randomness at all...

Maybe that's because PA still has performance, balance and implementation issues and people don't want to play. The Youtube viewers market is significantly bigger and the game hasn't been released yet.

FAF has 4k players? Really?

He has compared the size of the viewers from before, not the size of the player base on the games.

After the last patch released, PA had about 500 players on peak time, while FAF had about 900 and about 800 on the steam FA. Yeah, more like 3x than 4x, it's true

The point was that FA is far from dead

Well, that's not exactly what I said. Please reread last 3 sentences. Ultimately tiny degree of fair randomness might not be terrible.

The question is however, how do you make sure that randomization gives equal chances to both players. Or to rephrase, how do you achieve FAIR randomization, because I myself have no idea and I'm not even sure if it's doable at all.

It's simple - or simply complex.

Step 1: Give each player the same number of mex in the starting area for each size planet. I believe a scale 2 gives 6 per at the moment.
Step 2: Assign each mex cluster to have the same *value* as each other mex cluster of the same size. For example, give a larger mex cluster less cracks/water/mountains around it, make the little ones more defensible. That way they all involve a strategic decision to either go for the bigger, less defensible location or the safer bet, but smaller payoff.

There are many possibilities here. Just realized how complex this could become.

D:

Maybe not so simple. I'll leave it to the experts

Maybe (just maybe) you guys could take this discussion to a new thread? This one is about randomness in the early game.
There definitely is a problem, but it's not big enough (IMO) to need fixing for regular play.
For competitions (presumably 1v1) I think the best way to tackle this problem is to generate half the planet and then mirror it (each player spawns in the middle of their half of the planet). That way you have to adapt your build order on the fly and it's still completely fair.

I feel like choosing spawns is tactical.

If you know where the possible spawns are, which is optimal for you and which is optimal for your opponent you can then decide your scouting order, and adjust your spawn for similar reasons.

As long as players start up with the same amount of resources and metal spots it's perfectly fair. After that it is the player's decisions that matter. At the competitive level those players should be able to deal with it. Besides that Uber is not designing planetary annihilation for e-sports any features for that are secondary not if tertiary.