[WIP] The Realm Community Balance Mod

Challenge accepted.

Tested it semi - properly and i feel like the skitters are good but not OP.

Actually skitters probably shouldn't be able to kill a dox 1 on 1 regardless of metal just due to the fact of their skitters extreme speed, maybe lowering their damage slightly would do the trick.

Also I think the best way to find any balance issues would be to hold a tourny or something, statera gained a lot of insight due to theirs and I bet it would also help the situation here, even though I feel RCBM has nearly no balance errors besides a few units that may need slight tweaking.

A tourney isn't fair unless everything is balanced and if it isn't fair, then it isn't fun and that's not what we want. Also we don't feel the mod is developed enough where holding a tourney is even sensible.

I'm waiting for the results. I personally have played with and against skitters and they are indeed devastating if you are too greedy, but not so if you are sensible and expand slowly. The main problem with skitters is that vanilla teaches you to expand or die, so people tend to expand in multiple directions at once and leave their expansion unfortified. And that works in vanilla, because mex provide more, they are cheaper and also the factories are much cheaper. In RCBM however, factories cost a lot to run and expansion is slower so units like skitter that are designed to stop Vanilla like expansions are much more devastating, however leaving a couple of Dox or building a couple of towers will prevent early raiding. Note that the enemy can still take 10 skitters and just wreck your defences, but they will need to invest a bit more that just 3-5 raiding skitters.

IN terms of the tourny I guess you're right, considering how the Statera tourney was governed by how had more gunships.

IIRC the plan is to hold a tournament to celebrate release when that does eventually happen.

A Skitter's purpose explained in one sentence.

Greed must be punishable, harshly and effectively, otherwise the person who wins is always the one that can be the most greedy.

Had a 6 way FFA earlier, jeez using the one day I use my crap PC is the day thousands of units are being used in the battle. Also stuart quickly found out that skitters are in fact not OP lol.

Not entirely true. Uber themselves hosts unbalanced tourneys and they're alright.

I would say a tourney is a good way to find out about balance issues, though you guys get a lot feed back and have a lot of players already. We hosted that tourney because we needed to get some real hard feed back that we could actually see and observe. It was great, none of us were aware of the UP anti-air nor bout the error with the T1 gunship. (We accidentally gave it's anti-land machine guns the ability to shoot air and vice versa.) The tourney was a great experience and a great way to learn about issues. I hope the players had a nice time, regardless of the obvious power of the basic gunship.

Anyway, can't wait to see your tournament, I for one will be watching.

Really, it could go both ways.

You can have tourneys focused on "it has to already be balanced" in the hope that it is already balance, and you can have a tourney hoping to increase testing to see what to focus on balancing. You could do both, make it as balanced as you feel you can do yourself and afterwards tourney with it to error check.

I think either is viable.

As far as I'm concerned, although tournaments do generate a wealth of play-testing data, they do so at the expense of participant enjoyment. Playtesting is for Playtesting. Tournaments are for those players who wish to play in a competitive and tuned series of games. If tournament players were interested in playing a buggy unbalanced mess, then they would be joining us when we do playtests. To be fair some do, and they have our thanks for providing feedback. However, at some point, playtesting the game has to give-way to just playing the game.

Obviously this will be a joint decision between all the people involved in the production of this mod, but I for one will not be sanctioning a tournament until we have a few more things polished out.

How about a playtest where that goes over multiple matches in which players can be eliminated...does that sound better?

That is technically a tourney. We are all thrilled that there is interest in RCBM tourney, but there is a reason why RCBM isn't on PAMM yet. It's not done yet and will not be for some time.

Also I currently am not actively working on it because I have a final round of tests that I have to pass or I fail the year and get kicked out of university, so work is progressing even slower.

Work is progressing fine Zwei; but since it's all "behind-the-scenes" nomenclature changes, file organisation and unification efforts... there's not much to show to the casual observer.

We'll be moving to PAMM soon... ish. But we really want this polished before we open the floodgates. There's been some recent games that have grabbed my attention in terms of performance and I'll be looking into trying to solve that.

Just spotted a Roflness video of RCBM:

Cool video, really fun to watch, there was similar game earlier I beleive as well on the same planet that was also REALLY fun until Killerkiwi and Posidian decided to double team me and my secondary PC decided to die lol.

Just wondering, what are the plans for balance around the new death star metal planet and gas giants?

Death Star - probably just a cost balance. I'l like to make the laser cost energy to fire, but that isn't doable yet.

Gas giants - not sure yet. I don't like the fact that getting to one means that you can just keep building jibs in an exponential economic explosion. My instinct is that a jib should be extraordinarily expensive, but produce an absurd amount of energy. I don't know though without thinking about it. As for metal from gas giants, I believe any metal should be territorially limited. An idea I have been toying with is that gas giants may have a couple of storms on them, which act as placement locations for a fractionation plant, which produces lots of metal. Just an Idea though, so don't expect it too heavily.

I just wanted to say, I hope they make metal point type terrain formations to be more moddable.

If they can make red metal points that form at the tips of a metal planet, I hope modders could make "geothermal" points or "gas giant storm" points in your example of an idea.

Just a little off topic, but it would be a great addition to the modhooks.

Where can I find the project page for this mod? Are you guys hosted on Github?