Noob traps and why we need to avoid them.

The Scathis balance is unworkable.

There. I said it. The Scathis balance will not work because, as I said here, it leaves very few strategies viable. What happens when very few strategies are viable and failing to do a certain thing or doing a certain thing leaves an almost guaranteed death? Noob traps. The nub who doesn't know any better will try going bots first and not using vehicles will get creamed even if dox are balanced to be a raiding unit that's good at it's job simply because he'll be unknowingly using it for something that it doesn't work at. By making it so that only a certain unit composition will be able to win the game you create a situation where 95% of the time the nub will do the wrong thing and get creamed. It's not fun getting creamed over and over without end for reasons that you can't see. All that's going to do is create a situation where nubs try the game, get creamed over and over again because they can't figure out the golden unit composition, and then leave.

Even if the Scathis direction becomes well balanced to the point where every unit has a role, if using the units of a certain fac guarantees death if you don't use them a certain way and don't switch over to another fac at some point then noobs will die over and over again until they quit. A dwindling player base is not a good thing.

The only workable balance with regards to player retention is one where you have a multitude of options and you don't need to find the "golden combination" that will cream anyone not using it. That doesn't mean that all options must be identical, but rather that all options (this is more about factories than about units; units need niche roles) have different ways to accomplish the same thing. An assault on a base should be possible with either bots or vehicles, but bots should involve more flanking and vehicles should be more useful in a full on frontal assault.

Also, the grenadier being the main combat unit for bots doesn't make any sense. That alone is a noob trap even if they get made into a viable assault unit without inferno support. Grenadiers should be a support arty role and dox should be the main direct fire unit for bots. Just putting that out there.

tl;dr The Scathis direction of balance is too full of noob traps and will cause a dwindling player base because getting creamed because you didn't use the "golden combination" isn't fun. Only when a wide variety of strategies and units are viable without having to find some strange combination will the game be fun for those who don't know the "golden combination". In other words, only when there is no golden combination will the player base grow.

Never looked at it this way.

Very well put.

Game balance needs to cater to players of all skill levels and play styles.

I am not sure I agree.

New players are always going to have difficulty with a new game, but by having a large amount of redundancy in every factory type, you reduce the need to make proper choices in the game.

The Scathis balance at the moment is shoddy, and poorly played out, but is by no means unsalvageable, we simply nee alter what we have now, and change the unit roles of several units.

The grenadier might not make much sense as a main combat unit, but that doesn't mean that we should just throw it out of the window, as it currently stands the grenadier is a great all rounder combat unit, good at attacking bases, good at hitting slower moving units like infernos and most tanks, and very easy to mass up.

The bot factory is hamstrung however by it's current balance, making bots have very little effect on buildings, and making tanks very, very powerful.

The lack of AA I feel, isn't a concern overall, as even with tanks based games people prefer the use of fighters to cover the skys, and in that instance a tank factory building AA or a air factory building fighters should cover the bots as well.

T1 bots have poor effect then should be intended due to building HP, leaving any possible attempts to discover their use in most games impossible, dox cannot raid and grenadiers get sniped by 360 noscope tanks, leaving the boom and combat engineer as the only really good choices, and even the boom as it is replaces the use of the dox.


The overall intended balance of the bots is seen in a bad light because of their current balance.

I agree with Stuart, in principle, but I honestly feel that units should be differentiated by role -- they should ALL do something that no other unit does, and that something should be equally viable as compared to all other roles.

The problem is, all the major roles are covered by vehicles:

• Close-range combat / meat shield / splash damage: Inferno / Vanguard
• Anti-Air: Spinner
  
• Mid-range combat: T1 tank / Leveler
• Long-range combat: Sheller

This means that your bread-and-butter comes from one factory; any other build will put you at a disadvantage because you will need two factories. Scathis has tried to address this by making bots specialists who are intended to act as support for vehicles. The problems with this approach are twofold:

• Going bots-first becomes a noob trap -- they don't have enough combat units to support themselves if raiding fails
• The specialists themselves aren't doing their jobs

In response to the above, we can:

• Clone vehicle stats on to bots (or add bots with vehicle stats), making the choice of bots-versus-vehicles irrelevant
• 
  
• Clone vehicle stats on to bots (or add bots with vehicle stats), but modify the stats just slightly to differentiate the two; the problem is, if there is an advantage to be had, players will find it, making a new Golden Composition
• Remove some of the bread-and-butter units from vehicles and give them to bots -- I don't think anyone wants that
• Differentiate vehicles and bots by role, but make the two intertwine

I am in favor of the latter.

Discuss?

I've said this before when talking about AA, but I'm fine with Bots and Tanks having units that both do something like AA, so long as they do it in a slightly different fashion or even better if they do it in a complimentary fashion. It's fine if both have AA options that are good in different respects so long as one isn't better overall. This can apply to basically any role so it's easy to make sure that each factory has the "Core" essentials to be viable while still leaving ridiculous left over room for "unique" units on both sides.

Mike

As I said, I don't support having multiple units that work the same way and are used the same way. I support having different units that are used in unique ways to accomplish the same thing. I also support a mixed army having advantages and disadvantages over one composed of fewer unit types. If you're mixing bots with tanks then the bots may contribute more DPS to the tanks but they won't be able to raid nearly as well and the tanks won't be able to get as much damage in before getting blown to bits as instead of high alpha you get a higher DPS.

This says to me that you've missed my point. At high level play the Scathis balance could work, but at the lower levels it doesn't matter how well balanced it is because the direction ensures noob traps.

I like the grenadier, but feel that it should at the very least get a rename if it's going to stay like this as the name is not at all WYSIWYG.

The main issue with bots lacking AA is that going bot first becomes another noob trap as you'll have no way to defend against bombers. A noob who goes bot first will get pwned 90% of the time by one who goes air first as long as bots lack AA.

I agree with this, but again I'm not saying that I don't think the Scathis direction can't be balanced, but rather that it can't be made fun for players of all skill levels.

I think here it's a semantics issue that we're disagreeing on. The different units should be used in unique ways to accomplish one of several different things.

i agree entirely. This balance will never work.

Im not sure how you make a balance for new players and competitive players without having things that would be considered new player traps.

Obviously noobs will do stupid things. That's unavoidable. The current direction means that there is too much that isn't necessarily stupid that will lose noobs the game though, too few correct ways of doing things.

There are no units that currently counter going all in with t1 air and a sheller aa mix. I've said this so many times even i'm starting to get annoyed with it.

Oh i dont think its unworkable, its just not there yet. Currently indeed, the balance favors T1 Vehicles, but for a long time it favored T2 rush. There was also Turtling, Dox used to be as dangerous as tanks, but cheaper and faster, Anchors won orbital wars, and other odd things. right now however, Naval is viable instead of air on water planets, and Navy in my opinion is considered balanced complete until subs are added. Also, Air is pretty decent, it is your grounds priority to take out AA, not air, its simply strategy to have a counter, that being said, the T2 bomber/tactical missile launcher is very strong.

Correct though that bots....are hopeless at this point xD (besides bomb bots, they dont need to change)

The game isnt finished, far from it

I don't think this premise makes sense. On a very, very basic level, players in PA need to be able to effectively engage in combat with both bot units, vehicle units, and air units. And players almost always need to be able to do that simultaneously, even if in different proportions. Failure to do any one of those things leaves an almost guaranteed death. This is good.

The bad thing is that dealing with bot units is essentially a foregone conclusion.

On a perhaps more basic level, players in PA need to be able to expand, harass, and scout. Failing to do these things will leave an almost guaranteed death. This is good.

Furthermore, the need to expand probably isn't what the OP means by "noob trap", since even the normal AI teaches you that you need to do this very, very quickly. Harassing and scouting is very useful against the normal AI, but perhaps it is more necessary to defeat the harder AIs. In fact, by this same reasoning, I don't think the whole "bot first" thing is even a noob trap at the moment, because that is likely to become very evident when playing against even the normal AI.



In my opinion, the cause of the concept of the noob trap is more subtle than this. In fact, I would say that the cause is generally either subtly itself, or an inability to test and compare known options (or at least test the known options in a reasonable amount of time).

I'm not sure that "traps" caused by subtlety is necessarily a bad thing. Subtlety is generally a desirable quality in games, especially strategy games. Furthermore, even if the "mistake" made by the trap happens in strategy that the player will have predetermined before he starts the game, I am not sure if the fact that mistake can be made, or can be easy to make is necessarily a bad thing. Dota (2) is an example of a game where some almost completely unrecoverable but subtle mistakes can be made *while picking heroes prior to the start of the actual game* (and noobs are very prone to doing this, especially certain forms of this, by picking 4 carries, 5 supports, not having any disablers, etc.). Dota 2 is nonetheless hugely successful and I would say that this sort of thing even partially plays into its status as a competitive game, since there have been some tournament matches very much lost in the hero draft. So I guess I'm just not sure these sorts of noob traps are really that bad.

Due to the simplicity of PA in terms of not having a tech tree, among other things, I am not sure the latter cause of noob trap exist, especially since a lot of things can be tested against the AI.



I'm not saying we cannot help new players along by pointing out things you need to do or things that you shouldn't do in-game. Sometimes this may require a specific text block saying "(DON'T) DO THIS", sometimes it can be more subtle. This sort of thing is already done in PA for a lot of things by making things intuitive, and being consistent.

For instance, the main combat unit is always the second unit the factories can make, after the fabricator, with the rest of the units being either specialized combat units or support units.

Wait a sec, if the grenadier is a main combat unit, that's really unintuitive. I have to test that now...If that is so, the grenadier just has to switch places with the Dox.

TL;DR:

I don't think the current status of bots can really make them a noob mistake (bots simply suck too much). And I don't think noob traps are caused by the factors you mentioned.

Side note: If grenadiers are the main bot combat unit, they need to be placed as such in the factory list, so I very much agree.

As for overall game balance or game direction/design, and how necessary variety is in end-game unit composition, that is for another post, probably not my own.

The problem to begin with is the low player base and lack of an official ladder. Noob traps will work against someone of a similar skill as you falling into the same trap. When you get a little better you will then learn that these traps won't work against players that use x units. So then you adapt and start using x units.

I'm not saying what we have now is good balance but noob traps are only an issue when there is no elo or ladder system or enough players to make the transition between noob to a good player an enjoyable transition with a learning curve.

A trap play is still a trap play thought, even with a ladder because not everyone is going to be on the ladder.

Mike

Yeah I was thinking more of a hidden elo system like in LOL. Every player has one and is matched accordingly.

That still only applies to some of the community, people playing off-line or against the AI or in custom games are still "vulnerable" to trap plays.

Mike

Hmm yeah but what you call trap plays I consider a learning curve. Unless I have a wrong interpretation of trap plays.

Is going bots and not realizing they have aa a trap play? Or going t2 veh and not having underwater units?

More so the first one than the second one because in terms of roles AA is something you'd expect while Amphibious feels more like an extra fun bit instead of a "core" role, especially when PA has more of a fleshed out Naval aspect to it than many other RTS really.

Mike

Eh clopse, aren't you the reason why the air transport is a T2 unit now? Took a very big amount of totally unnecessary trouble to get it there remember?

I do agree from playing a lot of games this is not the norm. But after one game where you build bots and get killed by air you should realise that they have none. Maybe the reason is because bots can jink bombs easily. I don't know scathis' vision or reasoning for this move but after one game and seeing there was no aa bot I didn't feel noob trapped was more like ok that's weird and noted.