Commanders and what we know so far.

... in hindsight that's not terribly complicated at all. I didn't really realize the content of the main post would be taken from the thread itself (I thought it was more a summary of things said elsewhere) and assumed that the information in the posts would be the more recent. Hence the confusion.

So does this mean that when I pick the ability combo, the Commander will be stuck with that set for its entire existence? That would be kind of unfortunate - I feel like it would be hard to know before playing the actual game which abilities I'd actually want to permanently attach to a Commander I'd like to call my own.

I understand what you mean, but chances are if I was Uber, I'd let the 1K backers mess around with planned abilities, and might not force our selection to be locked until launch.

But due to the nature of abilities, I think with a good description I think we'll have a good grasp of what they are and what they do, not to mention we'll see some of them on the "stock" commanders more than likely, I don't think it'll be that much of an issue.

Mike

Maybe they could work it out so that the abilities aren't 'locked in' until the game comes out of beta or something? That seems to me like a fair way of doing it, assuming all the available abilities are in the game with time to spare in the beta testing period.

That's pretty much exactly what I said.

Mike

...so it is.

I'm just having no luck with reading comprehension and first impressions today, am I?

I blame lack of sleep.

I guess you're right. We should wait and see. Anyway, thanks for taking the time for such a considered response. I can fly off the handle sometimes, I know.

No worries! I wouldn't consider that flying off the handle. It is always good to have reasoned discussion that doesn't divulge into an insult match or something

If you don't like a Commander's set of abilities you can just like, run a mod or something.

For example, a mod may give every commander a completely random kit. No input at all, and you may not even know what you have until it's used. With very minor abilities there's little problem, but if there are major abilities it could end up pretty crazy!

Only thing I wonder is if we can create our own Commanders (or even just models) and use them online. I would definitely love to make something based on my namesake.

You would be able to as a Mod I'm assuming, but that wouldn't apply to any ranked or un-modded servers of course.

Mike

The issue is that players have permanent, different access to the commanders they can choose. Balancing different commanders against each other is fine (at least for now) but not when people can play with commanders which other people cannot.

I should say that I am looking at this from a 1v1 perspective.

I think this is false, we can make conservative estimates of the abilities and then discuss whether they are reasonable. Everyone can come up with these.

Here is an estimate of a subset of the abilities system:

• Modify HP.
• Modify Speed.
• Cloaking (to me this is not conservative at all)
• Weapon range
• Weapon DPS

Weapon range and DPS are not implemented directly as passives. These would reasonably occur as a result of different weapon types.

The balance of the ability system will not depend on whether everyone has access to the same abilities. Particular combinations of abilities are extremely important. For example if your commander has more speed and range than your opponent's you will be able to harass the opponent's commander to death. Of course such a commander would not be released, it is just an example showing that you cannot treat each ability as possessing innate powerfulness and that everything will be fine if powerfulness is equal. The strengths and weaknesses of a commander will depend on how it's abilities interact.

Commanders don't have to duel for their abilities to have a large impact on the game. A speedy commander allows you to rapidly expand and fortify positions. Cloaking dramatically reduces your vulnerability to snipes. Weapon range reduces base defense requirements.

Yes, multiple commanders could be balanced against each other. It is very difficult and would probably degenerate into some simple choices depending on map type but it should be possible to have an interesting system.

The biggest issues arise when there is uneven access to commanders. If commanders are well balanced then their use should be situational. For example if the starting planet is set to watery and ship constructors are fast then a speedy commander for expansion is useless.

In a perfectly balanced system the special commanders (custom and backer) would have to have no situation in which you would want to take them over a commander that everyone can use. This includes personal preference regarding strategist use. Maps will presumably have many reasonable starting strategies for players to choose from. It would be reasonable for those players to choose a commander which complements their strategy.

A possible solution is for the backer commanders to have a duplicate among the free access commanders. But this doesn't do anything for custom commanders. If each custom commander is a duplicate of a free access commander then there will be situations when 1k backers will want to play with different commanders. I think this is poor, if I backed 1K I would want to play with the custom commander all the time.

Anyway, perfect balance is never achieved (in non-trivial cases) so I will put forwards some more practical concerns.

There are a significant number of rarely used commanders.
Apparently there will be 100 potentially unique commanders which are accessible to only about 500 people. It will be an immense amount of work to track ability balance to ensure that those commanders are reasonably balanced. Most of those players won't do anything competitive so the custom commanders will probably sit as UP or OP without anyone noticing. But surely some of the most enthusiastic backers would play 1v1 competitively so there will always be a balance case for those commanders which the devs must take into account.

Balance discussion and testing.
When discussing balance I find it useful to play games from both sides of a strategy. Commanders will not start out balanced and lack this balance testing mechanism so they will be harder to balance.

E-Spots possibility.
Even if it is a long shot I think it is silly to close off the possibility of E-Sports. Can anyone imagine a situation in which it is fine for a pro player to have more commander options than their opponent? To me it is ridiculous.



The counter to the 1v1 perspective is of course to say "agree to play with commander X". This doesn't work because as a backer I want to show off with rare commanders. But this is solved with an idea I wish I had half an hour ago. All we need is a game setting which gives all commander types the same set of abilities. They become purely decorative. With this I think everyone can be happy although there is still the question of when to apply the setting.

Most of this isn't stuff that will be changed. I think people are seriously continuing to blow this out of proportion.

The changes are going to be much smaller than you are assuming here. Certainly not going to allow things like commanders that are faster.

In addition every single possible combination of abilities will be able to EVERYONE.

This was mentioned several times already and some people still don't know about this.

Maybe this should be posted somewhere as a sticky...

Or I could just kill the feature which I'm still considering. People don't seem to want it and it actually takes work...

I mean do what you think is best, but just because some "don't get it" that would be a bad reason to kill a nice idea... if you would go that route you have to abandon energy and mass for wood, gold and stone as well.

I don't hunk it should be killed yet, many are crying foul without knowing anything, it's why I updated the first post, because more info has come to light, and while here is still holes in the info we have, it doesn't mean anything yet, like you said people are assuming the worst in a very knee-jerk fashion. The problem is that there is a seed of truth to some of the concerns, because yeah ANY system can be unbalanced, but you are going to do it on purpose, you have a much better fel for the game than any of us will unit the alpha/beta period and to top it off, not only are you approaching this trying to make it balances, not only are you goin to work on the system to make sure it's balanced, you also have the good sense that if the system does end up being flawed somehow you will rip it out if you need to.

Neutrino, you guys can do it and I will support you guys in whatever way I can just like I am here trying to make sure all the relevant info is available so we can make better assumptions and have proper discussion taking into account all the info we have.

Mike

You're the only professional game designer in the room (AFAIK) so if you feel strongly it will add positively to the gameplay back yourself and keep it in.

But to my mind this discussion has gone on long enough and looks to have become a serious distraction.

I say make the in/out call now, and make it clear you won't enter in to further discussion until Alpha where others can play test it for real, instead of panicking themselves with speculation.

I'm going to simply continue with what my plan was but if any part of it starts to smell I'll nuke it.

I think that is a fair enough way to go about this. Just keep in mind that people that don’t like something are nearly always more vocal than those who like something. If someone doesn’t like a feature they will actively post all their issues with it. By contrast someone won’t usually post a blow by blow of why they like an announced feature (unless it is in opposition of the former).
I guess what I am saying is twofold:

1) Definitely Go on what you think is best (whether it is for or against the feature). While I think it is awesome that you take our input and consider it, it sure as hell isn’t gospel.

2) Forum threads like this aren’t necessarily representative of the entire customer bases opinion. Nearly every game forum I’ve encountered has vocal minorities in feature debates, and it can be difficult to see which side of the debate the minority is on (and as I’m sure you are aware, discussion isn’t normally as polite and reasoned as it is here)

If it doesnt work and needs scrapping then I can accept that, but I would hate to think that a feature never got tried because a group of peope (who are possibly a minority) cried foul of something they didn't have the full details of.

Yeah, honestly it sounds like your subconscious is trying to tell you something Neutrino

Everything else aside, I hope commanders come with 3 standard functions - Nanolathe, UberCannon, and a personalized AOE attack.

I really really would like to see the delta commander fire off a swarm of missiles from his wing pods

The Theta commander having a ground-pound attack would be cool too. That, or his chest opens up to expose racks of mini-missiles... you could have so much fun with a third weapon.