Competitive player

And yes, I sure hope one can manually paint biomes, heightmaps and whatnot on planets. Solid design just can't be beaten by any kind of random generation.

But I think there is variety to be gotten from randoms. AOE2 had great success with random generation I feel.

You can always agree on where to spawn in the chat. But if you want to keep it a secret then that's a choice too.

sounds like he didn't say anything like that. pls dont republican his post

also i do agree that the necessity of build orders are what ruined RTS games

yeah, some people like build orders and that's what powers the sc esports scene.

A build order really should be selected based on what you want to do.

In supcom in particular this was crazy. In vanilla you didn't have enough resources to start with a factory no matter what, in FA you had more than enough resources that not starting with a factory was suicide. There was never a balance where factory first could get you units quickly at an economic cost or eco first could give you more stability. That choice should exist but it never did. So you just build the same thing every game.

So basically, at each choice you have to make each option should be viable in some way or another.

symmetrical "maps" are a must if you're looking for any kind of real competition... Imagine playing a sport where one side of the terrain was drastically different than the other...

Baseball.

Mike

No, both sides get to play on the exact same terrain in the exact same way (take turns tossing and hitting), so does one team have a terrain adv. over the other? No

But they don't have the same terrain at the same time, it's similar to two players doing different Strategies, they don't particularly need the same terrain, a player stuck on an island can go navy, while a player stuck in the middle of a desert can go Land, they don't need the same terrain to do that.

And because there is one Unit Pool, all strategies are available to everyone at any time, so they can easily adapt as the terrain calls for it.

Obviously the Generator needs oversight to make sure it doesn't create imbalance, but Asymmetry doesn't necessarily equate to unbalanced.

Mike

They take turns having the "same terrain", that's how it's balanced (that's how almost every sport i can think of is balanced).

What you're suggesting is something like this:
One team is always throwing the ball and the other always catching it. Now would that be fair? of course not.

They don't take turns though.

Someone who is on an inner-orbit will always be on an inner-orbit.



Besides, even if they did take turns; someone has the advantage first.

True, IF you naively assume the rules aren't accommodated for that. In the Rules as they are it's only possible(from my understanding) to score points if you're batting, but what if a team got points from 'outs'?

In the end, what we're dealing with here is not quite as constricted as most sports, or rather, the exact terrain isn't as constricting as one would assume, unlike say Starcraft2 where resources are centralized into specific 'bases' and the maps have to accommodate that, but in a TA/SupCom/PA map, resources are much more spread out, and not forcing the player to play in the same fashion and allowing them to adapt to the local terrain in a very organic way.

Mike

People. Maps are going to be procedurally generated AND constructing custom maps is available... There are more than enough talented game designers in the PA fan club that there absolutely will be balanced and formulaic world set ups available for "competitive play" rather rapidly. It is not an Either/Or, situation, both possibilities have been confirmed. And even compromise options have been discussed.

--Cool side note: Variation could still arise even on a select set of predetermined "competitive maps", if there are like 50 maps like this and competitive play is based on multiple planets in a random assortment, then you have a game where you have to react to new planets with a variety of build orders, and it's not likely someone would have a singular, perfect build order for ALL the planet types, so some of the game could be based on getting to where you have an advantage, which could throw monkey wrenches in your build orders.

On that note, I'm personally against build orders, because moving my units one centimeter to the left or the right sounds so painstakingly trivial. And I think the only way to really counter it, is not randomness or set map designs, but by providing strategic and tactical options that have nothing to do with economy, so that tiny percentage differences in eco efficiency don't matter as much in the long run.

more linear eco will help abate the supcom style run away resource production

i also really hope they scrap metal fabricators and use something like the zero-k overdrive

I admit that a more adaptive approach is better when maps are changed or when one stops to play for a year. It is pretty simple to forget BOs, knowledge about X pgens for Y factories is easier to remember.

I do not admit that my BOs were not essential to my vistory in any way. I am only saying that my BOs, while very optimized from my point of view, definitely still were far from perfect. They probably had bigger problems than a 1cm engie to the right, but I failed to see these problems.

i have another thought to add on competitive play. it's been said that elegance in design, i.e. simple mechanics for deep gameplay is the ultimate design goal. i would argue that above elegance the game should be accessible to new players. i think Uber has that in mind considering they're doing away with variable BP and resource drain.

It feel like people are missing the point. Its about competitive players not wanting to play maps which can easily cause a loss which is out of their control.

While people may argue for adaptive play style it will never be as fair, its just not possible. The thing you need to remember is that when you say 'no mirrored planets' you're not saying you don't want to play them, you're saying you don't want anyone else to play them.

Love them or hate them thy should be in the game. There's no good reason to not have them, it shod be at the players discretions as to whether they use them.

Not with that attitude, no.

I wrote this in an other thread already, but I think this maybe helps the discussion a bit.
First of what is the difference between a good/bad competitive map?
For ME that would be the possibility to win 50% of the time in an 1vs1 equal opponent match.
That is quantifiable. Imagine this: A map gets randomly created and played 100 times (same start positions/ same everything). I guess that the system will be able to tell how good the players are based on History(like trueSkill in FAF). Also the system will know what the probability is for a win on the same randomly created map after 100 times (or more ).
In theory you could even use this to try balance games out (that would be fun).

So the question for a symmetrical map or not would not come to existence because the possibility to win is equal.

Keep in mind that this stays true even for different play stiles. Maps giving a player only one specific way to play would naturally fall in the rating (Because the enemy could predict the strategy ...).

Well you need to identify advantages and disadvantages and weigh them out on each other so that each player has equal opportunity to win.

Metrics are bad design. Metrics cannot by themselves make good design. Metrics can help identify bad design, but it cannot make good design.

I'm pretty competetive and I'd love to play on non-mirrored maps, just because it keeps the game fresh. I'm pretty sure that if you make tournaments play out on non-mirror maps you'll just have different competetive players going at it, but there'll still be plenty.

You're saying it like there's only type of competetive player, and they all want the same thing.