Start with Why, always. I've been taught this for a few years now, but have been unable to appreciate it until recently. When I applied this to PA's balance, I realized that something was seriously missing: a clear and concise WHY behind past decisions and future plans. Yes, we all want to "fix it" or make it "more diverse" or however you describe the result of a well-crafted balance. The issue there is that we are describing WHAT the end result should be, not the WHY. Individual decisions have had their own personal WHYs, but there wasn't an overarching vision. This is why balance mods continue to outperform Uber's balance - most of them were created with a vision in mind - a clear WHY. RCBM went for the older, TA-esque style. Statera originally went for diversity, but went overboard after a healthy period of functionality. Uber's Balance lacks this essential piece. We can debate what Uber's WHY might be, but they haven't jumped out on a stage and said WE WANT FAF ON A PLANET or WE WANT TA ON A PLANET or anything else. They've mentioned why they have stayed away from certain features, but the clear and concise WHY is still missing. Some would say the WHY is buried in the kickstarter and Alpha periods of development: PA is about big armies, big battles, and smashing planets together. The issue here is how far we have strayed from that easily understood WHY. Micro wins games more often than not, Orbital warfare is a drag, and spam is the word of the day. The vast scale of an entire solar system at your fingertips is absent because you are too focused on moving units to the right spots in formation then moving the army to the right spot on the battlefield. Basically, while this WHY worked out well for the first few months of Beta, it deteriorated over time as decisions were implemented that undermined the existing WHY. If PA's balance is to be considered a successful, fun, and fair creation, then there needs to be a clear WHY. The WHAT will follow from the WHY. People rally behind a vision, not a result. We all want the result, but few have any vision, much less the right one. Uber, we need a clear understanding of WHY for the balance of PA. It will require some introspection from many people on the balance team, but the end result will be worth the effort. We shouldn't shy away from huge changes - they could be necessary. After all, much of the balance is based on legacy changes made over 18 months ago. Let's keep an open mind. The WHY might put the competitive scene in the backseat - at least for now. It might even completely annul orbital. Regardless, it needs to be there. The standard will be easy to identify and anyone trying to criticize or defend the balance will have a clean set of facts to work with. Lastly, if anyone's agenda is implemented into PA's balance, the game will suffer. We need to work on what is best for the game, not our own personal wants. Let's put that aside - a common ground could be reached sooner than you think
Competitive balance is fine if you ask me. T2 still a little too expensive and t1 air could be a little more expensive and the 1v1 game is fine. The problem I see is that people enjoy the game, but there is not enough glue. Features, stats, a goal. To me if these are implemented the game will see more people playing. Multi planet needs a complete rework. However just because rcbm and startera had a goal or a why doesn't make them better. A game doesn't have to be like TA or FAF to be popular. PA is PA
I'm not saying it has to be like those at all. I'm simply saying that those mods had a clear WHY that was stated early in development and they stuck to it (Statera strayed a bit in the end, but it did a good job in the beginning) I use the FAF and TA references as examples, not as suggestions. And you're proving my point by pointing to specific balance issues. We've been doing that for two years now with quick fixes and some bigger changes to underlying problems. We've just never seen a WHY that was adhered to. I have no doubt the folks at Exodus will disagree with me - they tend to on everything anyway. Regardless, we need a WHY, and it needs to be clean of any personal agenda.
T2 should be cheaper. Why? Because it is nowhere near as efficient as t1 units and that's after you spend 5k on the factory. Cheaper means t2 will be used. Which opens up more opportunities and more choice. More choice is better. Air should be more expensive. Why? Way too mobile on planets. Bases need to be defended from all angles, units are super slow. Air snowballs unlike no other type. Larger maps you win air control and expand with aur fabbers in all directions. Enemy's slow land units( the will have more land units because less air most likely) can't attack as fast as opponents builds, can't spread out too much or they will be ineffective against turrets. Air guy can also kill these raiding forces, see a danger back at base and come back and kill it. The whys are common sense, for what purpose? To make each unit an option on most planets, that's what most people want. And they are real close. I have used every t1 unit for a reason over my last 5 games and I'd be one of the more stubborn builders that would normally span ants. I still do obvuously.
This is a perfect example of what I mentioned in the OP: "Individual decisions have had their own personal WHYs, but there wasn't an overarching vision." You're making those decisions through the lens of your substantial experience with both PA and RTS balance in general. And I agree with your points on principle because our lenses are fairly similar. That said, we can't make decisions based on that lens. That's what has been happening for the past two years - the balance guy has been calling it how he sees it instead of taking a step back to find the vision governing the direction of each balance decision. If each solution to every problem in the past two years was measured against a clear WHY, the decision would have been obvious. Little debate would have been necessary.
Its the micro that gets at me, you have to babysit your armies to get the most value out of them like in starcraft 2. (It works for starcraft 2, but for a game that takes its roots from subcom and total annihilation this is not a good thing) There is also not a wide variety of units and the ones that we do have are quite generic and can be found in any other game. The maps/planets are quite featureless and of poor quality, each planet feels very similar if you are randomly generating a planet, and custom planets barely fare better. The UI in the game is some of the worst ever, PiP is quite cumbersome to use, there were so many tactical improvements in supcom1 and 2 that are missing (like selecting a squad of units will give this little gray button above them that shows the amount of units and whenever you hit that button it selects the entire squad) And usually there are just 1 or 2 ways to win, Spam this unit....or spam that unit. No real interesting compositions or soft-counters in the game, its just spam-to-win and make sure your units path well and dont get destroyed (formations needed) =P
I don´t think Balance is the reason PA is lacking in the "sucess" department. Hell I think a game can have phases of bad balance and do really well.
Normally I never mix myself in with these balance topics since its mostly opinions and after the discussion Uber always has to decide how they can influence balance and besides that, they will change balance if there is a good reason given on the forum or through pm's (treeconomy example). I do however think that Uber is getting the feel right since I play the balance and it just feels good (again my opinion). Economy handling can be controlled but if you don't think about it then you'll pay for it. I'm sure that Uber asks themselves WHY they would change balance here and there. They're just not going to take the time to explain everything in detail on the forums. If I think about how much time and money stuff like that is going to take and cost then I think they're making the right choice. There just isn't a guy that can ramble constantly on the forums about each balance change and discuss if its good or bad with the community. They'll read the forumposts and take some ideas into consideration. This is my opinion about the balance. t1 economy feels good t2 feels like you get to much income from it. I like how tanks and bots are getting balanced. With the speed reduction I actually thought dox would be useless because of bombing runs. They're still good at raiding though. A couple of small dox packs raiding everywhere can be really annoying (you can't keep building turrets anywhere and bombers will get shot down eventually by the dox). Grenadiers are an interesting unit and the buff definately did a lot (more then I first thought). They're good at macro games or for lobbing projectiles over obstacles (early game with trees you can get some really interesting confrontations). Now if the suicide walk against turrets can be fixed they're even better. The problem is that balance for the grenadiers is on hold because of that suicide walk. They're not responding how they should in those kind of situations. Same goes for the whole orbital layer at the moment. @tvinita had some really interesting orbital balance changes but the whole problem was getting intel and having a good sight on whats happening in the orbital layer. There is no fog of war and we can't see how much cover radar gives in the orbital layer. It can get really confusing if you don't have this kind of intel. (suddenly a jig pops up on the gas giant? wtf). Naval is pretty solid balance. I'd only like a bit of a nerf on the leviathans since they can lockdown beachheads close to lakes really easily (they can lockdown a huge area). Or maybe its just the land vs naval combo thats not working. You just can't really get close to a lake without t2 units outranging the t1 naval units. I don't know what they should change in that situation. And as last I think balancing a game like this is more of the harder things to do because of the variation in scale. The difference between playing a 1v1 on a size 400 or a size 900 is immense. It just feels like a completely different game (macro vs micro). Also in my example I didn't had orbital play in it. Believe me I get it. I would love to read up about why they changed this or that in the balance and go in discussion with the community of how to get balance even better. I just don't think they have the manpower to do stuff like that. Besides that if I recap on tvinita's balance changes on naval then I think they're doing a really good job. EVen if we don't get the why's explained @mjshorty Have you ever tried a combo of 3 inferno's up front 3 combat fabricators and like 7 tanks and 3 spinners. You'll have an army that'll tank insane amounts of damage. The only problem you're going to get with it are commanders and maybe turrets behind walls. You can reclaim those really easy though. It is a lot of extra micro so I do agree with that. But that all depends again on what kind of scale your playing (you're not going to do that with a huge army) I don't agree with you about that mered. The balance guy makes some choice here and there and checks how the community responds to it. If we take clopses example of the snowballing air. Uber added PBAEO death effects to make air less snowbally. Why would you add death effect( more air = more air bunched up = more airloss = makes balance between two airforces even out quicker). Again translating the vision behind each choice is a lot of extra work and it won't stop there. Discussions will happen and if Uber needs to respond to that again it'll be more and more work. I just think that they don't have the resources for that and thus doing it this way (which works quite well in my opinion).
I think it's fine other than: Dox and their OP raiding niche Air is cheap T2 air is useless SXX spam can snipe a commander no matter how many umbrellas they have Grenadiers suck, their wall role was forced and requires 9002% more micro. Increase bullets velocity pls Sniper bots shoot through terrain and CSG Vanguards and infernos are only good for close quarter combat, how about a suicide weapon that is user activated when they get close to something to deal high AOE+damage? Everything else is fine imo. But the fact that units can arrive anywhere on a gas giant is both annoying and funny
You can't make individual decisions and let the community think about each one. You have to have a whole overarching idea that you're going for, get the entire gameplay to the state that you want it and then let the community criticize the whole big picture. If you criticize a particular aspect then when you change it your whole vision falls apart. I'm not saying that community input is bad but asking for community input on a single aspect when they don't know the whole picture of what's planned simply doesn't work. Anyone who thinks the balance is "fine" hasn't seen how good balance can be if you go for a vision. RCBM had some really nice gameplay once you got used to its pacing and Statera Naval gave me some of the best PA matches that I've ever played. The modding scene has simply died down since then though, which is disappointing. Statera kinda fell apart, in part because of some poor changes made by me (BEEF? Really?) and RCBM wasn't approachable to someone used to the vanilla balance, which is the primary reason both of those mods failed. ModX hasn't had enough effort put into balancing it into compelling gameplay and I don't know that other mods have put enough effort into compelling people to go there. I've heard slow annihilation (kinda bad name IMHO) is good but it doesn't really add things so why should I play it?
Again, that's only relevant to the individual balance problem. If we were trying to compare it to a WHY, we would say the following: Do T1 Bomber snipes with 14 - 18 bombers mesh with our WHY? If not, we need to list our options and choose the one that best fits the WHY. What actually happened (or appeared to happen) was the following: Do we (Uber) and the community find T1 Bomber snipes with 14-18 bombers an issue? Yes. This is apparent from the wide consensus from the community's leaders and extensive testing. What can we (Uber) do to fix it? 1. Add an on-death AOE with incredibly short range (the width of a dox) to stop air stacking completely. 2. Add an AOE to all AA weapons of the same size. 3. Buff all AA against Bombers or Nerf bombers and their T2 counterparts. Etc. They focused on the individual situation and are now seesawing between options because there is a lack of WHY. I never said we (the community) needed to be involved. And this isn't something that you can just skip. Either find a WHY and stick to it now or pay down the road. It's the same principle from programming. Uber has already spent tons of time on balance that could have been spent on other features because they didn't spend the time to make a WHY and articulate a clear vision for PA's balance. Instead of beginning with the end in mind, they jumped in and said they'd get to it after they finished this project or that one. That isn't a problem normally - but anything in the extreme is harmful. They've put this off for almost two years, consciously or not. Do the work now or do twice the work later. That's how I see this turning out.
First question, could you regale me on the WHY of RCBM and statera? Thanks. Second question, what makes you think having a WHY would stop people from disagreeing with a balance? Let's take RCBM. If it was the vanila balance, how many people do you think would still complain about the balance because they don't find it fun? Really, what I am asking is the WHY of the WHY. The WHYWHY if you will. So what is the WHYWHY of the balance for PA? I think the WHYWHY is FUN, and that is important. When people say thinks like 'air is too stronk on large maps', this is not to address the WHY, it's to address the WHYWHY. The WHY is controlled by the people ultimately in charge of balance for PA. I think Uber has had a vision all along, it was just different to what you wanted it to be so you do not acknowledge it.
The WHY of RCBM: The game is too binary, T2 > T1 = rush to T2. Change that, make T2 closer to T1, more attainable. Game is too fast, too little strategic deviation = open up new strategies, allow for more margin of error in unit usage. The WHY of Statera: Every game plays too similarly, too few units = too much sameness. Add more units, make T2 happen more often = more possible games, more variety = more fun. If RCBM were made the vanilla balance = game is too slow, too economically punishing means less fun.
why are you saying untruths? Hrm. I think what's really important is not merely the whywhy, but the why whywhy? In order to balance the game, you must think about the meaning of life level whywhywhy. Domdomdom is better than domdom. Follow the signs, believe. -- *But seriously, if you think a company who spends millions on producing a product didn't make a design doc or any sort of plan or vision, you are only fooling yourself i guess.
This thread... *sigh* whenever the term balance is mentioned it gets interpreted as 'explain all the reasons why pa sucks, uber failed and the game is going to die'.... The reality is people still play the game, no one agrees on the perfect balance or on how to fix it- I personally think what we have is a decent compromise that plays fine, uber did very well with pa in the context of the resources they had and they're very much still working on it.
That's not true at all. I personally love playing PA and I'd do it more if I had the time. I know plenty of people who would say the same. That said, you have to face reality at some point. This game has about the same level of activity as it did back in Beta when we had bi-weekly updates. From what I've been told by many FaF players and Kickstarter backers, the blaance is their issue. These people bought the game, but left because they didn't enjoy playing it. Casuals that I have met also continue to be confused by the focus on competitive play in a game with such a small competitive scene. If you don't want to be objective or constructive, you don't have to reply. Seriously, you can rail at me on TS and the IRC all you want without bringing it here. It's ok. It's in the OP: "RCBM went for the older, TA-esque style. Statera originally went for diversity, but went overboard after a healthy period of functionality." I never said that - I said: "The standard will be easy to identify and anyone trying to criticize or defend the balance will have a clean set of facts to work with." AND "If each solution to every problem in the past two years was measured against a clear WHY, the decision would have been obvious. Little debate would have been necessary." Let me clarify. When I say little debate, I mean that there will be little to argue about for people who understand the WHY and accept it as the best direction for the game. Everyone else will be waving their arms and yelling like usual. Plenty. But, just like the rest of us, they'd get used to it and start contributing constructive feedback eventually. I'm a bit confused. What in the hell are you talking about? Why we play PA? Why do we need a WHY? Enlighten me, please. When people address individual balance concerns, they are focusing on the symptom of the actual problem in vanilla PA. A goal with a purpose, or a WHY, is unassailable by criticism. When folks get specific about problems, you have a template with which to solve those problems because you know WHAT you are doing and WHY you are doing it. In your example, there are plenty of possible solutions to the problem - but we don't have a clear vision behind the balance of PA. Thus, every single one of those options could be completely viable alternatives in our perspective. We need a WHY to narrow down the choices and show us the path. Having a purpose, a WHY, is like a yellow brick road straight to the best spot in the land. It won't lead you astray if you choose the right WHY.
