Competitive player

That's the crux, isn't it. You use the words "Little effort"; I use the word "Lazy".

If you have a stronger position on the map, say with a lot of surrounding blocking terrain for natural walls, convenient ocean nearby for a fast naval expand or something of that ilk, a terrain feature that gives an advantage, then you explicitly DON'T want "equal" amounts of resources when comparing start locations.

"Easy" starting locations should have less abundant natural resources. In contrast "Hard" starting locations should be rich in resources to make up for their otherwise poor tactical and strategic positioning.

You can't really compare RTS with FPS without committing intellectual dishonesty. The spawning mechanics(and lack of player control over it) is reason enough by itself to disqualify them from any fair comparisons.

As for the argument that 'in real life' something may happen, it isn't very convincing either - 'Realistic' isn't synonymous with fun/fair or balanced.

Checkbox should still be there if you want to attract a serious competitive scene.

Ahh, so symmetrical maps are the only way to play "seriously" now?

Really, this has only been a trend in the current few years. Take, for example, Command & Conquer Red Alert 2. Still played online today. It had lots of assymetric maps, including a random map generator. And it all worked fine! Brilliant game, really.

It really is too sad that there are so few RTS games with assymetric maps, in my opinion.

i think biomes and how they affect units will be very engaging regardless of map symmetry.

symmetry is not necessary for competition, the only FPS i ever played competitively were halo2&3 and IIRC almost all the most popular maps were asymmetric (lockout, zanzibar, burial mounds, etc.). but as others pointed out you can't really compare FPS and RTS.

Sounds nice in theory, I just have my doubts that a procedural system can balance these things.

That's why you include the option to let a player pick his starting point (along with all the other suggestions on the topic to make sure they don't start right next to each other, but that's been discussed and solved before) so that the player can pick which place he thinks will complement his abilities best.

You realise of course that "Procedural" and "Random Generation" in this scenario is not actually completely random, yes?

You can program algorithms that only accept specific kinds of layouts. Hell you could have a slider that ranges from "Balanced" to "Put Anything Anywhere" that simply controls the range of acceptable outputs by the generation engine.

This stuff isn't exactly "easy"... but it can be done.

How do you know that they can be done? Do you know how to do them? I have a pretty technical background, I make my living by programming, I fully understand what procedural means and that's exactly why I am so doubtful. UBER has already shown that they are capable of quite advanced technical achivements (the replay-system already shattered a barrier in my mind), so maybe they can do it. But a mapgenerator like this is different in that it is not only a technical problem. It is a balancing problem. It is already hard for a player to answer the question of: "Is this map balanced?". Programming an algorithm that can answer this question will definitely take time, a lot of fine tuning and it will probably have to be patched every time somebody finds a hole in the balancing.
So yeah, somebody prove me wrong, please. If it is possible I'll be happy to play on those maps.

Giving players a free choice of their start-location ofc solves all these things pretty much, but that's not really what I am talking about. It is basically just another workaround, just like symmetrical maps are.

Why wouldn't it be possible, then? Look at Red Alert 2, or, heh, what about Civilization IV or so?

My understanding of those games is far to small to comment on them.
I just wrote why I am doubtful. If it can be done, do it, surprise me, I'll be happy. I am just doubtful.

Civ games in general are a good place to start looking at procedurally generated maps and how they remain balanced (in a relative sense).

I think this entire thread is what Neutrino has referred to as "A problem that is already solved by the scale of this game." EVERYTHING in here is ENTIRELY based on single planet play, both the arguments for and against, and most are automatically assuming anchored starting bases.

We have a commander and an egg, as far as anyone knows, the commander is the only base, and I'm guessing that the egg is what the commander lands in.

My picture of the game right now, is one of a procedural generation that creates a handful of ALMOST equal, available starting areas, the egg is what you use to select one of them, and the commander can travel to wherever you need it from that point, and becomes the only thing that matters after that. It doesn't have to be totally balanced, just mostly balanced in a way that creates tactical and strategic variation. And then, by adding in half a dozen different maps also generated with some semblance of fairness, and encouraging expansion, you crush the unfair noise in that system with scale.


Also, if you watched the kickstarter video again, it's basically a pitch for how they plan to make expansion become important: Red team won every individual skirmish by thinking in a classical RTS way, until the yellow team stepped up and introduced their expansion. And since that is Uber's muse for making this game, I have no doubt that their intent is to make the strongest, most "competitive" play styles, to be ones of expansion and innovation, not of perfect economic dominance.

Competitive games can be played on completely random maps, it's been done before.

I don't see why this game HAS to fall into the same category as every other rts (or rtt) game and have symmetrical maps, they are nothing but bore fests, doin the same crap on an almost identical map for the thousandth time.

It takes a good player to master his build, it takes a great player to master his environment.

... Or something like that.

In any case, "Down with StarCraft!" and all that jazz *waves flag's 'n such"

^ya know, symmetrical maps doesn't mean that they are no longer random. What OP is asking for is option to mirror random maps, not to introduce a fixed pool. So dunno what you are rambling about.

ya nobody is asking for a map pool, although i could see a partial map pools being introduced as favorite seeds/custom maps develop

I personally hope they implement features to make the game appeal from casual players all the way to the ultra-competitive ones. Mirrored planets seems like an excellent idea to accomplish perfect game balance.

Has adjustable game speed ever been discussed?

There are tons of viable build orders available in forged alliance. It all depends on the map, your opponent, and how good you are at execution.

Completely true, there are better builds than others for certian maps, but planning anything past the first few buildings is generaly a mistake. Even then the nature of the game makes it so it is impossible to have Bo's past the first few minutes, there are simply too many variables. However, sadly there is still an advantage you gain, by knowing how the game will generally play out. However you will still have this factor, even with randomly generated planets.

Randomly generated planets will be fine, as well as mirrored ones in my opinion, however.

It still depends on the implementation.

A good point from supcom that I would like to bring up is early recliam. Working rocks into your build order was critical to succesess and opens up many diverese build orders, such as building no mass extractors with your commander.

Recliam, such as dead units and rocks creates locations to fight over initialy, and can funnel the action at the start, making for interesting gameplay. Im not talking about maps with STUPID amounts of recliam in one location, the amount can be balanced.

However the crux of the matter is that this will simply not be possible with PA. Completly evenly dispersing the reclaim over the entire planet would almost defeat the purpose of it entirely, however there is too much variation for clusters to be distributed randomly, eg craters, oceans, ect. This would no doubt give one side a large advantage in certian seeds.

This is only assumeing spawn points are predetermined however, and the problem becomes even worse, when players could potentialy pick their own spawn positions.


I am not agianst this, but I am unable to see how this could be handled, bar removing concentrations of recliam entirely, something I believe should be avoided if possible.

(Edited for shocking structure and typo's -_- )

I don't even know how this thread has gone as far as 10 pages, this is very simple and there's plenty of proof out there both in real life and in video games (also it's common sense), symmetrical maps are a must for a truly fair competition. Now yes we would like to have randomly generated maps to spice things up, but deep down, we know they aren't as fair as symmetrical ones.

Sins of a solar empire handled this very well, they gave us the option of choosing symmetrical systems, problem solved.