I've been reading quite a bit about fears of death balls. A huge number of ideas have come up, complex systems to moderate units and restricting their ability in large numbers. Some of the ideas are pretty neat, but it neglects the most obvious solution of all. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Some units may have gifts that separate them from others. They might be ultra fast and difficult to defend. They might provide extreme resources at a low price. They might be behemoth monster machines. When a player comes across these kinds of units, the first observation is that they're simply better than other units of their type. The next step is to build these advantageous units above all others. This leads to a huge number of units that are faster, stronger, or simply more efficient than anything else around. How can you deal with these units? Splash damage. There are two major types of splash. The first type comes from weapons. However, it is very limited against the units in question. This is effective against any unit cluster they can hit, gifted or not, so it can end up overkill unless you want to stifle an entire theater of war. Unfortunately it is not effective against units that benefit from large scale efficiency, as they are much fewer in number and splash damage is difficult to stack. The second major type of splash is from a death explosion. In TotalA, a great number of units dealt damage around themselves when they died. Casualties among the army were compounded, as singular deaths could quickly become chain reactions among units. Where it worked great was with air units and efficient units. Air blobs took massively boosted damage as exploding craft could injure many others. Direct damage AA was especially helped by the free splash damage they could not otherwise deal. Fusion plants were poor choices to cram into a base as they'd chain detonate. They had to be spread out, limiting the level of economy that can be packed into a single base. Even the mighty Krogoth was stifled in quantity, as their nuclear explosion would destroy any escorting army and severely damage surrounding Krogoths. Splash damage pushes units apart. It punishes overkill. Overpowered unit blobs can balance themselves out by chain reacting into oblivion. And the best part is, that explosions are fun! Who doesn't like it when things blow up?
I must say i do not fear air blobs: Neutrino hates clipping units and i think this alone is enough evidence that the typical Air blob will not see a return.
Ground blobs in SupCom 2 were eaisly killed by AOE artillery (Shells) but I often felt that they were too slow to get to target. SupCom2 had no counter to air blobs, so that game defiantly needed flak artillery. SupCom1 didn't have as much as a problem with this on the ground due to the amount of AOE weapons, but even with AOE flak aircraft could still eaisly blob up. So I dunno, maybe if fighter weapons had a small AOE then overall aircraft would have a massive reason not to clump up or ripped to shreds by a few fighters. But I can't be sure.
That has more to do with how the tiers were handled than anything else. The T2 flak units were great against T1/T2 air units, but had a hard time with the tougher, higher flying and faster T3 Air units. Mike
Oh, boy. Here we go. Having a problem with too many units in one place? I know, let's just put a whole bunch of splash damage into the game! That will fix it! Theoretically this sounds brilliant. But it doesn't work. Starcraft II takes exactly this approach. Deathballs of units get countered by splash damage, right? In fact, SupCom 2 did also, as most types of artillery deal quite significant splash damage. Which theoretically would work. Except players are smart. Here is the problem with splash damage as the solution to deathballs. Splash damage only encourages unit separation out to the precise radius of the splash damage. Case in point- Banelings in Starcraft II. Marines are terrible against banelings if both players just A-move. Except players are smart. Banelings are small units, with small splash radii, which means if the marines are spread apart just so then the splash damage is ineffective. Consequently, it is still advantageous to have a huge deathball of marines- they just need to be spread out far enough to mitigate the splash damage. SupCom 2 had the same problem. Ground unit artillery's splash radius wasn't the problem, however. It was the projectile travel time. The arcing projectile meant there was a good 1-2 seconds from the time the shot was fired to the time it landed. And the AI led the shot automatically. Which works fine in A-move situations. However players are smart. Players would dance their land units back and forth in random directions very rapidly, causing the artillery AI to utterly miss every single shot. Now I know what you're thinking. Well then, we can just fix the splash damage dealers so they aren't micro-intensive, so they don't force ridiculous counter-micromanagement to mitigate their effectiveness, and they just work to discourage deathballs. Except that doesn't work either. If a splash damage dealer of this type is effective, then that unit itself becomes a deathball unit. Splash damage stacks much better than direct fire DPS, and splash damage units get exponentially more powerful as their numbers increase, much more so than direct DPS units. Consequently, rather than discouraging deathballs generally, this type of unit just discourages deathballs of any other unit, and makes deathballing itself mandatory. And this is now much worse because now it's a vanilla deathball monoculture- and not just deathballs of various blobby flavors. Theoretically, splash damage does act to discourage unit clumping. For example, cheap nukes with huge blast radii would greatly discourage clumping into giant armies. And it is functional where splash damage dealing individual units are not because each individual explosion has a price tag attached, and also a direct nullification counter exists. And the blast is so big that splitting forces to just outside the radius accomplishes the intended gameplay goal of splitting armies up so they actually cannot fight together, where smaller splash damage fails. Unless that smaller splash damage is sufficiently effective, at which point it gets massed, hard, and takes over the entire game. Great, great care must be taken with gameplay factors that can run away as quickly as splash damage, and which can completely devolve gameplay into a splash damage monoculture.
Agreed with Ledarsi. Also would like to point out that fixing a problem by slapping the player on the wrist is no way to fix the problem. "The best way to play is to make a death blob? Well BAD PLAYER BAD *slap*" Players blob units primarily, imho, because the control scheme does not scale well. The most effective fighting method is to click like mad as you micro your units around. This is true for 10 units, and it is true for 100 units, but it means that while you're madly clicking, you cannot click elsewhere. If you could assign orders and have units effectively carry those orders out without issuing another click, I believe you would see the 'all units in a big blob' phenomenon be vastly reduced.
Well ledarsi, you certainly did a good number on weapon style splash damage. In a battle between 2 forces, the splash damage units will naturally deal more damage as overall numbers grow. In effect, splash damage from weapons causes units to scale up. Your argument does not address splash damage from dying units. This is damage that a death ball does to itself. It provides diminishing returns on huge masses of units, effectively scaling them down. They are not the same thing, and they do not create the same outcomes. The latter has been very effective at discouraging specific blob plays without creating new blobs of its own. Protecting against unit clipping is a great way to help moderate splash potential. Sorian has also mentioned that he wants smart air units, such that they spread themselves out naturally. Both of these factors are huge for mitigating weapon style splash, as the maximum field space is used. It is not a major issue to allow splash damage against units that naturally spread themselves out. If the player overloads the area with an obscene number of units (like blocking out the sun), it's his own fault. Similarly, it is not too bad to allow weapon splash between different theaters of war. For example, a coastal bombardment boat might use splash damage. Splash naturally hits more of the smaller land targets, while not being effective against more sparsely packed ships. As long as the boat can't move inland(limiting range also helps), it can't be death balled against the land units. However, you do not address any answers against Supcom2 style death blobs. The optimal configuration of units is always a firepower singularity, and the biggest units lend themselves to the most firepower in the smallest space. Without some kind of splash damage, there are few ways of breaking it up.
Death explosions are functionally the same as weapon splash. Suppose the unit that died was just struck with a weapon that matches its death explosion's damage profile. Still, I 100% agree with you that there is a role for splash damage to play in PA, including as one prong of a multiple-component approach to acting against deathballs, and creating more interesting gameplay than "firepower singularities" which is an excellent word, which I shalll steal. I think splash damage is extremely important to have- but it does have a few pathogenic considerations which must be watched carefully at all times. Splash damage is the canonical way to make a small number of units effective against groups of smaller units. This includes any kind of big weapon that fires infrequently, from Big Berthas to battleships. As long as its cost-effectiveness is carefully monitored, this is desirable due to the much higher cost of the bigger guns. Regarding the firepower singularity case- in a single confrontation between two direct dps "dot-armies" of units with no size, a single stack or "singularity" is indeed the absolutely optimal configuration. It simply inflicts the most damage and kills possible while minimizing its own damage exposure. It is much more interesting to have a textured board with space-consuming, space-controlling armies with low stacking limits, or high inefficiency when stacked. Producing additional forces gives you assets to put in more locations, rather than a higher power-coefficient attached to a single force. It creates battles lines, as the optimal arrangement for such bulky units is to arrange them in a line to minimize their surface area, as opposed to a dense blob army occupying essentially one location, where the entire army can fight together. Where battle lines meet, all sorts of interesting things can happen over and above one side winning and the other losing. Pulling in troops from the side (at the risk of weakening the line somewhere else), using reserves from behind (incentive to have reserves), breakthroughs, actual flanking (units on the edge of the battle line have little support- getting T-boned is BAD), and significance to maneuvers like orderly retreats or advancing at less than the maximum possible speed.
A classic case of the above is the move in Civ 5 to remove unit stacking. This really changed the dynamic of combat in Civ5, and suddenly you had to think a lot more about terrain, how long it took for a unit to engage the enemy, and your 'supply line' of units ready to attack. Here's a thought - what if units were not able to shoot through each other? It's computationally & conceptually more intense obviously, but it would seriously impact the ability to create a firepower singularity. (I'm stealing that term too ). I don't mean that friendly fire is on, but rather that units are prevented from firing at all if their weapon will pass through a friendly to hit a target.
Zero-k and BA prevent units from shooting through allied units (and trying to do so will cause friendly fire, I have seen many a penetrator destroy an allied bot that wandered into the path of its beam) The result of this is that the optimal configuration for firepower is now a dense line. People arrange their units into lines that try to outflank each other, civil war style. Certainly looks alot better than unit blobs in starcraft.
Yes! This is definitely something to consider. It encourages smarter positioning and, in my limited ZK experience, it's more advantageous to use multiple groups for flanking and positioning attacks, due to the arrangement of the formation. (And the drawable-formations help too.) Of course, it's slightly different for indirect fire weapons, but because of the fact that a blob tends to be more vulnerable in any case, it's still advantageous to use groups and positioning.
In the Spring game NOTA, units can shoot through eachother but spreading out your units is very important and deathballing is quite rare and is ineffective in most circumstances. I think the 2 biggest reasons for this is Custom formations and that most weapons have splash damage. Custom formations makes skirmishing with lines of units is very effective against proposed deathballs since you can maximize firepower by making all your units get in range of the enemy at once and your units might not take splash damage at all if they are spread out while the units in a so called deathball takes longer time to get in range and they are likely to take much more splash damage. As a gameplay mechanic this is very good in my opinion as spreading out units is good and as the conflict escalates you want to spread out units over a larger and larger front. It also gives more room for escalation in unit weight as a unit which would lose for cost against smaller units will be much better once once the battlefield is cramped as they take less splash damage and allows you to gain firepower superiority when you use them vs smaller units. Friendly units avoiding to shoot through other friendlies makes the game much more complex. This complexity are likely to give the game more depth but using this to your advantage requires a lot of micro in many situations. Examples are hiding behind enemy structures to avoid their defenses. Maximizing firepower however becomes a lot more complex. Say you are telling your units to attack a single target. Unmicroed they will go in a clump towards the enemy. The first units will be infront of the other ones and block their Line of Fire. Even you are in range with all the units, the ones in the back will be blocked. There is also the decision where units should move when their Line of Fire is blocked. If they goes straight towards the enemy they will probably go behind a friendly unit that block their Line of Fire and might go really close before they can fire. If they move sideways they are more likely to be able to fire earlier. Moving to the closest spot where they got free Line of Fire sounds like the optimal solution but seems computationally heavy.
This is true only in the most strictly technical sense. The actual gameplay results are completely different. TLDR at the bottom. One scales against the enemy, giving the advantage to enemy units designed around multiple hits. The other scales against yourself, creating a direct penalty for packing high explosives too close. When a unit starts hurting allies, then it is a bad idea to clump them together against ANY unit, no matter what type of damage the enemy does. In general, a death explosion hurts units that depend on long range, and favors units that like to get in close. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Does a death explosion have to be huge? Of course not. There was hardly a TotalA unit that dealt more than 5-10% damage to nearby units when it died. A single unit dying like that isn't a big deal. When a dozen or more die, then a significant portion of combat damage is coming strictly from casualties. Either way you crack it, casualty damage is going to hurt the bigger army more. Obstructing wreckage helped to keep the units spaced apart, so an injured army couldn't collapse back together and completely chain react. Does every unit need to explode? Nah. There are already a few alternate ideas for preventing unit blobs. Obstructing fire is a very good example. An assault unit like the peewee would depend on strong fire lines to be effective and could not simply be blobbed. They would ill need a death explosion. An indirect unit like missile launchers or artillery would not be hurt by firing lines, thus a death explosion can be used to dial down their blobs. A bomber might be something that wounds nearby aircraft when it dies, making huge bomber blobs a terrible idea. Just as a death explosion can be negative, it can very well be a positive part of a unit's design. For a base raider, dying is a chance to deal extra damage to the enemy base. A super heavy assault unit like the Krogoth can clear enemy lines without firing a single shot. Nukes exist only to explode. For these units their death is a perk. It is something that is explicitly bought and meant to be used to full effect. And unlike a long range weapon that deals explosive damage, a walking bomb does not scale well in large numbers.
Splash damage is always a good Idea, to get rid of units tend to clumb up. To prevent to large deathballs you should set an appropiate unit cap. I dont like the idea on exploding units damaging friedly units. It requires HUGE amout of micromanagement to minimize the damage. It would be VERY frustrating for new players.
Unit cap? There probably will be a very high or an arbitrary unit cap in every game. You will probably be able to change it ranging from 500 to 3000 units or who knows how many. It requires a HUGE amount of micromanagement to maximize firepower as well. It is balance between maximizing firepower and taking splash damage and/or friendly units exploding. In some situations you would want to concentrate your forces and in others you would like to spread them out even if units do damage when they explode.
[/quote]It requires a HUGE amount of micromanagement to maximize firepower as well. [/quote] not realy avoiding dmg is much harder
Dodging shots might be hard but spreading out your units so they don't damage eachother when they blow up is fairly easy if you have tools like Custom formations in the Spring engine or if you can keep the units in different formations where they aren't so close to eachother.
If AI can be used to force units to not clip, that would mitigate the problem somewhat. Another way, though a slightly harsher punishment, is that if ANY unit comes into contact with a unit of its OWN size, both are destroyed. Scale up and down accordingly (bigger/stronger units don't get hurt as much from little units). Would harshly discourage forcing deathballs, but the AI would have to be good enough to regulate the spacing of units unless directly interfered with by the player, causing death to, generally, their own units. Would have to be well balanced, or maybe remove the component against enemy units, otherwise there will be tactics that are "build the biggest unit and just run into the enemy"...
