Factions, like in Age of Empires II

I think it's great to see that there is a single unit base, and not two or three different factions with different, though basically equal, units.

One thing Age of Empires II did very well was sharing a common unit base, and then have the different nations differentiate themselves through tech-trees (bonuses) and a few unique units to each faction. I think this system worked very well in Age of Empires and if PA evolved in this direction, I think it could be a very good thing.

Only if it will be awesome.

And on a more precise node: I would like to see the "nationalizational division" made by the players themselves:
-I start on the planet A and remain on the planet A. I have ballistic missiles and stuff (Red faction in the Promo).
-You leave, and go on the moon and asteroid (Yellow faction in promo).
-The third guy goes underwater.
-And the fourth colonizes the closest gas giant ASAP.
This kind of division will be great

[redacted]

No thanks, bonuses and such applying to specific unit(s) is a good way to lock into or be locked out of certain strategies, and when I'm fighting across entire systems, I wan t as many effective options as I can get.

Mike

i could imagine different factions in PA use different experimentals or something.

But out of limitations comes creativity.
Debbie Allen

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Orson Welles

zombo.com

From Wikipedia:
Green Eggs and Ham is one of Seuss's "Beginner Books", written in a very simple vocabulary for beginning readers. The vocabulary of the text consists of just fifty different words and was the result of a bet between Seuss and Bennett Cerf (Dr. Seuss's publisher) that Seuss (after completing The Cat in the Hat using 225 words) could not complete an entire book using so few words. [...] Green Eggs and Ham was first published on August 12, 1960, and became the fourth-best selling English-language children's hardcover book of all time.

I could keep going.

I would be for factions in this style as long as their unique units don't drive their strategy and only serve as an interesting options that is unique to the faction (basically an excuse to have more units).

pantsburgh, we are talking about a video game, we are already under countless limitations, adding more that can effect eh balance between players it not a smart move. Don't try to get cute with quotes and such, actually give REASONS why further limitations are a good thing.

Mike

Im on your side in this.

It's enough work to balance the units of one faction.
It happens enough in other RTS that when i see an opponent with a special race i know he will use one of the 2 possible strategies with this race.
It's more fun to see (in my opinion) who is better with the same units available.

It's a good way to expand, once a solid foundation of units is established. Because it adds a lot of depth with with relatively little effort.

I assume, once the game has been out for a while, people will start to ask for more variety.

I would like to know what you mean by "expand". There are a lot of ways to do that.

I don't really know.
But I think it's more work than some people think: new gameplay, units, building have to fit in your universe, have to be balanced and so on

I agree, but it depends on the game and player. I prefer a simple well balanced and thought-out game over some games that throw features and lots of bad balanced units at you.

I have the feeling most RTS games need to have 3 races so the players are happy. Thats sad.

I don't think it should be a priority now. I thought it could be a cool expansion or DLC, once the core game is done and stable.

I'm sure you're right. I've played plenty of RTS's with unbalanced units, Command and Conquer comes to mind. Even TA had plenty of units I never used because they were under-powered. Something I liked about Age 2, was that there were only a handful of basic units, which were pretty well balanced, but definitely not perfect. But as you said, adding factions adds a lot of balance problems. One faction is always fairly balanced against itself. I guess gathering statistics makes balancing a bit easier.

True, I definitley prefer quality over quantity when it comes to units and factions.

I LOVE AOEII. I especially like the way civilization bonuses and unique units were handled. It added variety to the game and required you to atually pay attention to your opponents.



One thing I hope is entirely impossible is a "zerg rush".













(Civilizations, not factions)

There is nothing wrong with any strategy as long as it can be beaten.

Mike

Let me add a more relevant example then. Guild Wars 2 has a trait system that adds passive bonuses to characters (the equivalent of choosing an overall strategy in a RTS game). In beta they had a set of 60 traits for each class, of which players could pick 7. Everyone had all traits available immediately, and the majority of players ended up picking from the same set of 10-15 traits because there were clear top-tier traits and clear "best" ways to build each class. The rest of the traits were essentially waste due to the impossibility of balancing such a massive amount of data points totally equally.

On release we saw changes to this which included breaking the traits up into tiers. Now players could only get ~2 of those top-tier traits. Immediately there was tons more build diversity as everyone more fully utilized the entire set of 60 traits, and much more creativity in how people were building each class.

Total Annihilation and to a greater degree SupCom both had this in the form of choosing your faction. The OP is right in bringing up the Ages 2 system, as that is probably the best RTS example. Adding this extra layer of decisions is key to the depth of any heavily tactical/strategic game and it is something I definitely want to keep.

Sorry, but I disagree with the claim, that factions like those in Age of Empires add an extra layer of depth to a game.

Deciding which faction you choose is essentially forced by the strategy you want to follow, since you obviously choose the faction, which provides the best bonusses for what you want to do. It's basically a minmaxing decision and as such more of a mathematical nature, than of a strategic one.

It also works the other way round, if you want to play a certain faction, you can't use certain strategies, because they don't play to your factions strengths.

My point is: With AoE-style factions, the process of choosing a strategy and choosing a faction significantly effect each other, which doesn't make it two choices, but rather only one. In fact there are even extreme cases, where just seeing which faction you take can already give away your whole strategy.

True.

Less is more in this case. More factions or tribes or wahtever gives you just an illusion of choice at the beginning. You can't really go back and use another strategy because your faction (and its buffs) binds you to this one (or two).

Maybe people think the games is less complex/ too simple with just one faction?

Which is silly. To make factions like AoEII and have it not be a glorified pre-match round of rock-paper-scissors takes a lot of time and work, and to be honest even when done properly it doesn't add a lot to the game other than some flavor. I don't think it's appropriate for a project like PA.

But sadly thats how it works today. "Our RTS has 3 factions and gets 2 more with an expansion. Thats 1 more than the others have" or "1000 different units" (ok thats a bit extreme).

When did the last RTS advertised itself with "Best balanced units and tec tree, ever. Have fun with our two factions, maybe we add 1 or two well balanced units later."?

The main point today is: get the most (quantity: more units; factions; uninspired pointless campaign, whis is nothing more than a bigger tutorial) instead of the best (quality, well balanced units, concentration on important elements of RTS) out of your money.

How much RTS games are even advertised? Starcraft 2 and End of Nations are the only ones I know of, because they are pretty much the only AAA RTS games which came out in a long time.
Also, you can't advertise with balance, because no game launches completely balanced. Additionally if PA is advertised, they will also most likely advertise it with the massive scale of the battles, which also is advertising quantity.

But I think this is getting a litle off-topic here xD