One race = perfect balance!

I never really saw capturing employed at all in multiplayer TA. It wasn't even available in Supcom, but it wasn't really missed, probably because the scope of Supcom was so large that capturing was less effective than just blowing the thing up.

And don't forget the scope of PA, which is substantially larger. Will capturing really be all that effective at that size, especially since there's so much more to think about?

You're saying the game is worse for allowing you to perform any strategy at any point in time as opposed to forcing you to capturing tech(in which you are limited by which faction/race your opponent(s) are) so expand your strategic options?

Mike

Actually because of the big scope in PA it would be a good strategy to capture. For example: your enemy is able to build engines on an asteroid to crush it on your "home planet" before you. You could try to take over the asteroid and capture the engines and crush it on his planet, instead of destroying them and building yours. That would save time and resources.

No, I didn't said its worse. It's boring to me. Capturing is optional and I think it is more fun.

Another example, playing your favorite sports game against another guy online. What's more interesting, playing against him with same teams or him having another one with different players but almost equally stats?

If the factions are diverse enough to not create an influential limit on strats, then there's no way to label better/worse.

It's just personal preference, which is all he's getting at.

It is boring. If basic common sense need empirical demonstration, I fear for the game.

All really longlived strategy games(RPS, chess, Go etc) in the world have only one faction, the only main reason that the most RTS games have multiple factions is the story.

If basic common sense didn't need empirical demostration, there'd be a lot more of it. But considering you posted this (and thus don't have a lot of it) we do need to empirically demostrate it.

Jeez, is it that hard to detect sarcasm?

Capturing was available in supcom.

You are not accounting other side. If every side have equal strategic options, you got reduced strategic options.

Factions are about game style. Some faction is fast, but weak. Other is bad in offense, but good at defense. Third is cheap and stealthy, Forth is expensive, but very advanced in everything, and so on. With that you simplify the choose of faction, you reduce the amount of knowledge required to play game efficiently, you actually increase number of possible strategies by different factions.

Yes, you can't be fast, cheap, stealthy, good on defence and offense and everything else. And you can't switch fast from one strategy to another (without asking engi and building base). So your opponent has a lot of options to beat you where you are weak. And you have a lot of options to prevent this and beat him. It results in greater dynamics and more strategy with smooth learning curve. So it's win-win.

Problem is it's hard to make all possible variations available so everyone will find their perfect match. And it's even more hard to make good factions with matching art style for it's playstyle.

That's why it is one unit pool. Not because it's better. It's not. But better variant is just very expensive and very hard (near to impossible). So it's better make something "good" than try to make "perfect" and fail.

This is not true. If both sides have X amounts of strategic options then you still have X amounts of strategic options. This is a matter of careful balancing in order to make many different strategies viable with the same unit pool.

Here we need to separate some things:
"Amount of viable strategies in a given matchup" and "amount of viable strategies in all matchups".
Even if faction A only has 1 viable strategy against faction B it increases the amount of viable strategies that faction A can perform overall. The matchup between A and B is still strategically shallow because there is only 1 viable strategy for faction A.
You can look at Zerg vs Zerg in Starcraft 1 as an example. I'm going to say that there is only 1 viable strategy in ZvZ at top level. It is Zerglings followed by Mutalisk. All other Strategies have a very small window of opportunity or are just variations with Zerglings followed by Mutalisk.
Adding more factions doesn't necessarily give more viable strategic options in each matchup. It makes balancing harder, forces the players to learn the different factions and understand which strategies are viable against each faction.

You might get a more dynamic meta game. In Forged Alliance, Seraphim got a hovering t1 arty that is pretty good and makes Seraphim able to harass other factions early safely from the sea except Aeon that have a hovering tank that with a little micro can beat the t1 seraphim artillery. On small to mid sized maps with water I'd argue that Aeon are stronger than Seraphim but Seraphim are better at harassing the coastline and supporting their navy with their hovering units. So do you choose Seraphim or the counter to Seraphim being Aeon on small to midsized watermaps?
I fail to see how this is easier to learn than 1 faction and how it would smooth the learning curve.

I agree that it is hard to balance several factions and keep many strategies viable in all possible matchups.

I am very excited to see only one unit pool in an RTS game.
No more bitching about the strength and weakness of the other faction.

Wups, you're right. I even used it myself frequently enough . . .

But if both sides have X amount of strategic options, but they are different, than you have more-or-equal than X strategic options overall, as you got additional options from your opponent weakness/strong points.

SC is not good example here, as it's actually overbalanced game (it's "perfect balance"). And second, how exactly that proves your point that one unit pool is better than multiply? Aren't Zerg.vs.Zerg one unit pool (it's just bad example, yes)?

1. Yes. That's why it's better to have one good all-rounder unit pool than few bad pools.
2. Yes. Players are required to learn faction.vs.faction strategies, but not unit.vs.unit, which is why it's better. With single pool it's unit.vs.unit.

That's "bad balance". In original SupCom Aeon was OP in most situations, especially on water. Good balance example from FA is Cybran navy vs UEF navy. Cybran navy is tough, fast, stealthy and very good t2. On t2 cybran may beat any other faction. But is UEF got to t3 than it may crush Cybran navy as it has nothing to counter it's t3 battlecruisers (efficiently). That's good balance - UEF may survive and evolve to t3 by smart moves, drops and bombings, or by smart use of jamming frigates, so enemy is afraid of direct attack. Or to lure Cybran fleet while it's not yet overpowered into trap and destroy it, buying some time with that.

Race.vs.Race is easier than Unit.vs.Unit. Even if it's SameRace.vs.SameRace it's still simpler as races has strong good and bad sides.

Nightnord, completely agree with you. You made some very good points.

If you, as a player, still got the same number of strategic options as your opponent you got the same number of strategic options whether or not some of theese are shared and some are different. Yes there are "more-or-equal" strategic options overall but you still only have access to thoose in your faction.

I googled "overbalanced" and "overbalanced starcraft" and it didn't come up with anything useful. You would have to provide a link because I haven't heard the term overbalanced refering to RTS balance.
Zerg vs Protoss have alot of different builds and strats. Zerg versus Terran have alot of builds and different strats. Still Zerg vs Zerg ended up with just 1 prevailing strat. You say that more factions bring more overall strategies but how should we avoid matchups that have very limited amount of strategies and still keep the faction balanced across the board?

Battles are fought with units. If there are more factions that you fight against you have to learn to fight against more types of units and/or strategies.

This would be an example of a local faction imbalance that you say is even in the grand scheme. Getting this balanced for all matchups on land, sea, air and orbital could become a headache.

I'm going to argue that local imbalances can be player induced and I'm going to call that Player Induced Imbalance, PII for short.
Both players use the same faction/unitpool. Say that early sea is typically dominated by a unit combo. If player A grabs sea first. Because of this player B might not be able compete with the ordinary unitcombo and he might be forced to deploy a counter to the early unitcombo. This counter might mean teching up, making beach defence, harassing on land or air, ecoing and then going into the sea.
Similiar to a faction local imbalance, this player induced imbalance forces the players to react in certain ways to counter the enemy depending on the starting buildorders, force composition, planet and terrain.

Battles are fought with units. So knowing unit interactions is always vital. I don't see how a game could be get easier from having more factions unless some matchups lack strategic depth.

No, you didn't get it - you got your ordinary strategic options from your faction (strong sides of your faction) plus strategic options from weak points of enemy faction plus strategic options for preventing enemy using your weak points with his strong points. So, actually, you got more-or-equal amount of strategic options than your ordinary strong points. Yes, it's a bit more harder as you need to take all three groups of options into consideration when building your strategy, but it's still easier (see below).

Google for "perfect imbalance" from penny-arcade (link). What they say are rather arguable, but they explain why starcraft is overbalanced.

Zerg vs. Zerg is same unit pool, so it's not actually supporting your point.

By balancing. (And we don't need to - we are going with single unit pool, so it's more theoretical argue. Just to remind).

Not exactly. To play mid you need to know more or less strong and weak points of every faction, not particular units of it. For pro level you still need to know every unit, of course, so pro-level is harder then with one pool. But pro-level is a top of learning curve, so it's always about "you should master everything".

Isn't that an increase in strategic options? Yes, balancing that all is very hard task, but I think it's possible. You just don't want to go with "If faction A have good t2 navy force, than every other faction should have good t2 navy force". You may counter good navy with good anti-navy air, or with cheap and tough T1, or with shields and powerful t3.

With that, every faction vs. faction matchup is unique and game more interesting, yet easier to start with.

See above.

It's clear to me that many of you want a deck-building game. Why don't you go play rock-paper-scissors, or any of the myriad of card collector and deck-building games, which all have the stigma of being sh!tty.

Earlier this year I picked up Alpha Centauri for my very first time. It's a fun game and all but what hampered the pure gameplay aspect for me was it was played under silly 'idealogical' factions; "With THIS faction you will play economically", "With THIS faction you will play militaristically", "With THIS faction you will play environmentally", etc.. This bothered me because my playstyle had to be pre-determined before the start of the game; I couldn't survey the map and my situation first and then make decisions, or decide mid-game whether I need to reallocate all my efforts elsewhere; "Play the path you chose before the start of the game or be fu©ked".

Why don't you go off this forums and stop telling people who disagree with your position what they should do? Really, man, your opinion equals zero if it's expressed in that way.

Also, to who you are saying that? Because deck-building game is nothing about any sides of this argue.

Hm, from this part I may get the idea that you saying it all to me. But really, how exactly deck-building is about multiple factions? How the hell it's about anything here? How the hell Alpha Centauri Civilization-style non-realtime strategy game is about RTS? Are you drunk or what?

Let me specify my previous statement even more:
Yes there are "more-or-equal" strategic options overall but you still only have access to thoose specific to your faction in the matchup you are playing. Some strategic options might not viable in a specific matchup. When I say

this could include cases that are not mirror matchups.

Extra credits say that Starcraft strategies are optimized and set and that there is little room for strategic innovation and mostly boiling down to being good at APM and execution.
Read Sirlins response here.
He pretty much agrees about Starcraft having little room for strategic innovation on a pro level.
But he and I agree that a game can't get too balanced(very important difference between local imbalance and imbalance).
Extra Credits argues that "Perfect imbalance" is good for the metagame that happens before the game starts. Legue of Legends is a teamgame, you pick a hero that you are stuck with and certain combos of heroes are counters to other combos of heroes. I guess you could argue that Legue of Legends would become stagnant after a while as players "discover" the best combination of heroes and that by nerfing or buffing different heroes you can keep the metagame vibrant and continually evolving.
Using "Perfect imbalance", like Extra Credits say Legue of Legends do, in Starcraft or FA would be like nerfing Mutalisk because Zerglings followed by Mutalisk is the prevalent strategy in Broodwar ZvZ or nerfing Seraphim T2 bots because they are too strong against Aeon Aurora. These balance changes affects other matchups aswell. Adressing optimal strategies that overshadow other strategies is good but it gets much harder with several factions.

It does support my point because if you try to make other strategies in ZvZ more worthwhile you might severely affect ZvT and ZvP. Balancing becomes harder with several factions and if you add the criteria that every matchup should have alot of viable strategies then it gets even harder to balance and keep lots of viable strategic choices.

I'm glad to have a theorethical arguement.

I don't agree. Can you point to specific weakpoints of Zerg in Starcraft? Can you point to a specific strongpoint of Aeon in FA? How much does a new player need to know in order to make use of these strongpoints and avoid weakpoints?
Cybran have strong tactical missiles. They split up after they get hit and that makes overwhelming tactical missile defence easier.
Aeon have another type of tactical missile defence that diverts tactical missiles.
So how do you overwhelm Aeon tactical missile defence? It is very different from other factions and requires you to know how you do it. It increases learning curve.

Starcraft is all about local imbalances. That is what timing attacks does try to exploit. You try to build up and find a window of opportunity when you can overwhelm the enemy or when the enemy lack tech to be able to deal with your forces.
Can local faction imbalance be balanced? Yes.
Is it hard to balance? Yes
But my point is that similar local imbalances can happen without factional local imbalance.