Why Winning Should'nt Make Winning Easier

Ive been trying to think of an alternative to reclaiming of enemy unit wreckage and the only thing I can think of, without re introducing wreckage, would be a new building that could reclaim an exploding unit within range, every couple of seconds for a % of the metal cost of the unit.

This would give the defender a boost in metal income to get their economy back on track without falling too far behind similar to reclaiming wreckage.

Yes !

Wreckage !

Imo this problem is due to The lack of tactical depth. In The game most of The time The bigger army (mass employed) wins regardless of unit com position. That is The origin of The snowball. If u get more mass you tend to win, because unit composition plays too little of a role. Wrekcage could help but a more rock papper scisor approach might work better. Make comback more possible cause if your enemy is producing only one kind of unit, u build its counter, And bam, that early mass advantage evaporates. It forces players to scout, build mixed armies and it gives a small advantage to The defending player.

Kinda a side note here, but every time I think about stopping deathballs with base defenses I always think back to the pelter. IMHO with laser turrets doing direct fire damage, I kinda want to see the pelter used to soften up these big clumps of units. Ever since way back in beta (or maybe even alpha, but it has been a while) the pelter was changed to use that ridiculous looking high angle / high arc, I've felt it has had a much reduced ability to deal with clumps of units. I actually have no idea how much of an aoe it has, because I never see pelter shots land in unit clumps, by the time the stupid thing lands it's usually hitting trailing units.

I admit, I don't really use pelters anymore so maybe they aren't as bad as they used to be (I know they got some buffs recently), but I would love to see the pelter function more like the punisher / guardian from TA, shooting at a much lower angle so the travel time of the shot isn't so high, give it a good sized aoe affect and relatively low damage, then it could actually soften up these big blobs of units so that LTs won't have such a hard time dealing with what is basically a full strength blob. A solid line of pelters could actually take chunks out of of these blobs.

I think the same about the Holkins, but I'm more understanding of the higher angle because at long range on a tiny planet you might get visual weirdness if it used a lower angle.

Another thing that might help is target priority adjustments. On the Holkins side of things, there has been way too many times that I've told a Holkins to fire on a blob of units in range, it shoots once and then turns off to fire at a lone mex, I feel like I have to constantly micro them to get them to hit what I want.

still want the damn like again feature.

Keep being reminded how punishing mass donations are in FA.

Had plenty of "comebacks" in my 1v1 games, wouldn't say PA is much different to other RTS games in this regard. Like getting t2\orbital earlier, raiding, or simply defending cost efficiently against larger army using walls and turrets until that army is not larger any more. Adding wreckage back would be great though ofc.

I didn't read all of the comments because I only care about my own opinion, so here goes:

This can achieved solely by adding unit wreckage. I understand the problems with pathfinding around wreckage but in that case just make wreckage a flat texture. It would be nice if it was a bit easier to defend but the only alternative is increasing the effectiveness of base defences which isn't ideal.

Enjoying this thread. I like the OP's willingness to go and get some data, so many props there.

I would add two points to the general tangle of ideas here:

1. Player skill is not a fixed quantity. Players are human beings, and they may excel at some aspects of the game whilst still being merely competent or better than average in others. Their skill can change, and it can fluctuate over time: watch how two Starcraft pros' play changes over the length of a 1-hour 'epic' battle, and you'll see that their abilities change as the game progresses due to factors like fatigue and morale. When we say that 'player skill should be the deciding factor in determining the winner of a game of PA' we're making quite a complex assertion: we want the player who demonstrates the highest level of skill, in all of the skills that we believe are important to the game, over the duration of the match, to emerge as the winner. The problem is that this puts the cart before the horse, because only the game decides who is the winner; to tackle this we then have to break down exactly how all the skills we think the game should 'select' for will interact with each other. And boy does that require hard work. Game design is a brain-hurting operation.

2. Following from (1), what we want is for all these different skills to have a suitably proportionate say in determining the outcome of a game. This might mean that we need to introduce gameplay that acts as a damper on the positive feedback loops generated by one of the skills, in order to ensure that that single skill does not become the dominating factor. This is where things like 'mass donations' from Supcom come in: the idea (however successfully it was implemented - I'll let other people be the judge of that) was that an economic advantage invested in building units would only result in strategic progression (moving closer to a win) if the player picked a fight carefully and was able to cause damage proportional to the amount of reclaim their opponent could be expected to reclaim from the wreckage of any units they lost. Its overall effect was a damping of the power of macro play, but it also made connections between macro skills and players' decision-making and unit control skills.

We can also add to (1) that extending the average length of a game (or at least, the portion where the game is in contention) is likely to do 2 things. First, it will make player skill more volatile, in that some players will sustain their skill levels well over the length of the game, and others won't. Second, it will increase the sample size of skill-based decisions/actions that the game uses for determining a winner - so that players who have a poor opening minute have a chance to hit their stride properly in the fourth minute and begin to gain an advantage.

This is also one of the reasons that LoL uses skill-damping mechanisms: it's marketed to players with 'lower' skill levels - but this actually means that their actual skill levels within a given game are more variable and more volatile; bad players are, in general, less consistent in their play, so a long match gives them time for moments of brilliance or synchronicity that can alter the outcome of a match, long after their generally poor skills would have doomed them to a loss against a more consistent, but not necessarily vastly more skilled, opponent. This can be good or bad, depending on the design objective. @stevenrs11 @elodea, I'd be interested to hear your responses, if you have the time.

Edits: added clarity.

The problem is there aren't really any game changing units that can turn the game around.

Like experiementals

Yeah it could be experimentals or stronger t2 units. The other issue is defenses just aren't really that strong vs t1 zergs. I think defenses need a buff. This would definitely increase game length and give some breathing room.

But not too much- there was a time where turtling was the dominant start and I'd care to avoid that.

In my opinion defences should be handled like they were in TA, as in... Very, very strong, yet even more expensive. They'd be worse than the equal metals worth of units but would absolutely slaughter anything below that certain number of equal metal per damage/health/etc... At the moment it's better to just station mobile units around your walls than to use turrets and artillery, which is a bit odd.

I also don't entirely agree on t2, t2 is actually better hands down than t1. It's more worth it for the metal, which I see as a problem. You see the balance right now is a bit wonky by making t2 so dang expensive. T2 needs a very large nerf in most areas, except key roles, and these roles their stats will excel at. (The leveler could have very high damage per shot yet a very slow fire and turn rate, meaning it'd be great at taking out targets with lots of health but would be easily swarmed for example.)

T2 prices as well as most of its power needs to be dropped significantly, except in some key areas that would make each t2 unit very unique. While all t1 units are much more broad and general purpose. As well as spammable. (So you'd see like one t2 unit out of every 5, 10, maybe even 20 t1 units later in the game.)

T2 should be a strategic choice. There shouldn't be any "right time" or build order to get t2. It should all be fluid and the need for t2 should come when your assaults call for its virtues. Like if the enemy is all walled up you'd build t2 so you can get out mobile artillery, and etc...

I agree with rolls but I think t2 should also be outright better. You just balance it by having much longer build times and cost. You could have a low damage high damage soak unit for example that is good at breaking sieges.

I also agree turrets should take longer to build and cost more but be significantly more powerful. that would offset turtling some, but really late game units like experiments or stronger t2 could break turtling if done right. You could still keep t1 viable by making them lower hp but still high dps so if they aren't picked off in a fight they can overwhelm. There is a lot of balance tweaking that could be done that just isnt.

The points aren´t that relevant for anything other than duel encounters, so they aren´t THAT important at all, as duel encounters (like 1v1 or 2v2 on a small map or 3v3 on a medium map or...) aren´t the most important thing in PA and in big systems with lots of players in each Team you can just do so much crazy stuff with your shared strategic power that these little economic details doesn´t really matter that much anymore...

...but this doesn´t change an important thing: The general things the TE mentions in his opening post are simply correct...
...only the details (like the LoL-comparison and so on...) are optimiseable! And, well, if somebody got a point...

Longer build time and cost with strong t2 just delays the game, and replaces t1 ultimately. It's just no fun in my opinion. T2 being such an expensive thing just ruins the game at times as it gives the game a huge risk vs reward That makes it almost impossible to come back if your t2 is denied.

Yes, the relative balance between skillsets is good to consider, but you would seek to do it not by dampening an aggregate outcome (like metal income).

Just like turning down the tap in my shower does not lessen the effect of specific parts of the shower head, but rather the entire shower head.

If you want to address micro, you address micro specific mechanics, and same with macro. Decreasing the ammount of metal income that a winning player has achieved through his own actions relative to the actions of a losing player indiscriminately reduces the effect of both micro and macro skills to the same degree.

*There are better ways to do this anyway besides direct intervention. Again, people should really check out the pte where this has already been done in a genius way for a few weeks now.