Enforced Variety, or 'Hey, I like this game better'

First, a note, the topic title is meant to be tongue in cheek, because I may be heavily complimenting another RTS game, and I don't want it to be taken genuinely as 'Hey, this game is WAY better and you should make it like THIS', but more of a 'This is a pretty neat idea, it might be worthwhile' sort of thing.

AI War: Fleet Command. Some of you may know this game, but you are probably already getting a feeling for where I'm going with this, but for those who aren't, the game Enforces Variety in your units. What this means is that the unit cap isn't based on your total units, or structures and units- Each individual unit, starship, turret, and so forth, has an individual unit cap. This means that instead of building an army of your favorite few units, you're better served by diversifying- It becomes a question of 'What do I build first', rather than 'What do I build'. You're still going to be building your favorite units first, but then you're going to want to start building other units.

Now, I'll be using Supreme Commander as a reference. This would be completely nutburgers with Supreme Commander- Either the unit caps would have to be very small, to the point of being kind of ridiculous, or there would be a ridiculously large number of, for example, Scouts running around, doing fractions of damage and being pointlessly confusing. So, let's not take it to that degree- Instead, let's look at Dawn of War. There, you have both unit caps, and vehicle caps- The two don't overlap. That's an interesting idea, but we can take it further.

Supreme Commander has, shall we say, 6 classes of units that could be reasonably capped- Land, Air, Sea, Turrets, Support, and Experimentals. Turrets in this case being any fixed unit that can attack, Support being units like Radar towers, Shields, Landing Pads, and so forth, and Experimentals being all those nice little Level Go To Hell game-changers.

So, make 6 areas of capping. This means that players are encouraged to diversify- You can't just, for example, build 50 Experimental units and pave the rest of the map with them, and building a strong navy doesn't preclude a strong air force. This would also offer the option, in skirmish or multiplayer, to adjust caps individually- Let's say you want a vicious rushing game. You set Experimentals and Turrets caps to 0. Or perhaps you'd like to have a purely naval battle on a string of water-heavy worlds.

The question remains at how difficult this would be to balance and create for the devs. That's something only they could offer.

But it'd be darn cool.

So, who'd be in favor? Who'd be against? An argument could be made to have separate build caps for just units and structures, or units, structures, and experimentals, but I know that in Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, I had a tendency to blow off my land and naval forces when possible to build a more mobile air force, and having an impetus to develop all three would be fun.

I understand your point of view, but for me, PA need no particular unit limit, much like TA with the 5k patch limit. Or, at least, make this a options if implemented.

Well, you can still have a very large cap on everything. My concern, primarily, is that there's a lot of encouragement to focus on just one area- For example, land, or air, or sea if you happen to have a water map. Because the units are more differentiated based on role, rather than transit mechanism, this means that some forces are going to get ignored, because it's more useful to have ten artillery units that are in a single area, rather than 5 artillery units on land and 5 artillery units on sea- It means less micromanaging. There's no real point to having two groups when you could have 1, unless there's a significant advantage.

However, if it's a choice between 10 artillery units on land and 10 artillery units on sea, or 10 artillery units in one, then the additional cost of micromanaging is made bearable by the greater benefit.

Unit variety shouldn't be artificially enforced by caps. It should instead be encouraged by the type of strategies the player wants to focus on. A player focusing on shock tactics would tend to use faster, smaller, high-dps units, but if they needed to change to a more defensive stance, slow, fortified units would suddenly become their area of focus.
It's also important to consider the fact that on different planets/battlefields, the player may prefer to use different tactics, which also encourages variety.

But most importantly, the lack of caps gives the player more choice of how they want to fight. If there were caps, the player would be forced to always build a mixed blob of units in order to get the most firepower they could. Players would also end up attacking only when they had the advantage of an entirely capped army.

For a large scale game, the concept of unit caps would actually kill variety.

Again, Supreme Commander. You are likely to have fast-attack units in various types- Sea units have their frigates and their speedboats, air units have fighters and fighter-bombers, land units have buggies and such, just as an example. The thing is that with an unbounded cap, you're likely to have a gigantic pile of buggies, rather than an even mix of air, sea, and land.

With different unit caps, you could well have an air force dedicated to attack, comprising fast units that can blow in and out, an artillery heavy group of sea units, and a mixed force to act as defense at home, fortifying you and providing defenses to your resources.

I don't disagree with the idea of being able to turn on and off caps- You could simply set all the caps so high that, even focusing on a single kind of unit, you're unlikely to ever hit the cap.

There's always going to be an effective cap- I often hit a max cap in Supreme Commander's campaign, for example, because you go through 500 units at a pretty decent speed. An unlimited cap is certainly worthwhile, I won't deny that there should be them, but as with all other things, it's cool to have the decision.

TA had an option where you could limit any unit to whatever cap you liked. This was absent from Supreme Commander and I would like to see this return.

But as for any enforced limit in general games, that would be an artificial restriction and artificial restrictions are against the ethos of this sub-genre so I say no.

Firstly no.

Secondly, it actually promotes a lack of variety because each player will have to build according to the limits set in the games and will therefore have more similar armies.

Thirdly, the thing with encouraging player specialisation is that it's actually a good thing. It promotes teamwork in order to cover all the bases. If a player can do this effectively on his own because he knows his enemy will have a cap on how many units he can produce of a certain type, then it removes the need for players to work together in the traditional sense. By which I mean the usual, you go air, I'll go land type of gameplay seen in many a SC:FA game. Players would obviously still have to work together because it would double their pop cap available of each type of unit.

Fourthly, when we are here talking about caps and Uber are talking about having no caps what-so-ever it all seems completely off beat to me. As well as this I just can't see how it can work in such a massive game. Look at it from the point of view that we have such a large total quantity of units available to each player -say 10k units per player rather than no cap at all- and imagine how a cap of a certain type of unit is going to effect the game. It's just not going to until the very late stages. I don't know if this was the intended effect of the OP, but it's going to take a long time for any kind of cap to come in to play.

Well, this seems like a decent argument- It sounds like the primary limiter is going to be less of a cap, more a combination of resources and space.

The concept is still significantly flawed, especially in the case of PA. If you make the cap so broad as to only cover land/air/naval/etc, then the game starts to restrict you based on the situation rather than variety. Naval units are useless if there's no water. Land units are useless when there's no land. Air units cover land and water, so they'd suddenly become the most sought after units.

Also recall that there are multiple planets involved, and each planet may have a different amount of land/water/etc available for these units. Since asteroids and gas planets don't contain water, suddenly naval units become less useful. And consider what would happen if you want to expand to an asteroid, and yet you suddenly hit your land cap. At that point, your air would likely be capped too, because air is such a multi-arena unit group. So your only option is to transfer your valuable army over, or destroy some of them.

And if you do make the caps large enough that the player is unlikely to hit them, then why in the world would you have caps in the first place?

This concept "worked" for AI-War because as the game was set in space, where features like terrain didn't affect unit strategies. That game needed a method of adding more control to how the units would gain strategic importance. PA will have a greater variety of situations, so unit caps wouldn't be needed.

The worst part of it is that this tells the player that they must play a certain way, rather than letting the player have the freedom to play the way they like. Remember in the TA days, where some players would play using only air units? It was strategies like this that made the game interesting. Unit caps would just result in more homogenized gameplay.

A cap is a must. Without one, the memory usage will continually increase until the game crashes.

The only objective is that they can get this cap high enough that it'll never effect normal gameplay.

I believe you can set a unit cap, the default is just off for the people who have super computers.

As for variety, different unit set are good for different terrain types.

Swamps do well with hovercraft and aircraft who don't have to deal with the constant transition between water and land.

Open fields do good with any tracked or wheeled vehicles who can get up to top speed and maneuver in a fight, but leaves aircraft with nowhere to run from AA.

Hills and cliffs are best dealt with by bots and spider legged bots who can cross the inclines like no problem at all, aircraft who have to spend time going up and down due to the terrain can often miss units who are in cover behind the terrain.

And so on, and so forth.

The debate isn't about an overall cap, but about capping specific unit types.
For example, a game might be set so that players can build a max of 1000 land units, 700 air units, and 500 naval units, or something like that. It's similar to how caps are handled in the game AI-War.

Needless to say, while it's nice to give players options for customizing their games, I can't imagine this method being a good one, except for very specialized games.

If there was a cap per type it would be cost, making aircraft and larger ships more costly to build then the average tank.

Like in past game, but I do understand the posters dilemma as I have played plenty of games where aircraft dominated.

Hopefully aircraft will be more like real life or TA then like the ones from SC, and especially SC2, bloody planes with more HP then buildings!

All I am saying is that a planes defense is its speed an maneuverability, not its HP as real life aircraft are even taken down by bloody birds, let alone heat seeking missiles the size of the aircraft itself.

No enforced variety just a (adjustable!!) cap on the total amount of units you can have

One of the basic pillars of design for the TA family is to avoid artificial, arbitrary limits wherever possible. Game play emerges naturally from the interaction of the units. Players should build mixed forces because they are more flexible and capable as the characteristics of the constituent units complement each other. Not because they hit some fixed limit and the game forced them to build something different.

I dont think anyone here is debating a hardware cap set for games, most understand that such a limit would be in place to ensure the server and players computers could handle it. That is an adjustable hard limit on the number of units and Uber have confirmed it I believe.

Rather people are against having a unit cap as a mechanic to consider as a core part of game-play. An arbitrary unit cap which isn't related to what players computers can handle. I agree with the arguments in this thread against this idea and they have covered pretty much all the points that I would make. It would reduce strategic complexity through arbitrarily limiting what players can do. I would rather have combat situation variables such as enemy forces/allied forces/resource availability/terrain/solarsystem layout/player distribution in a solar-system govern what a player can and cant do. It is always jarring to me when I have a load of resources and a thriving economy and yet I cant build another tank, ship or aircraft simply because the game says so.

Congratulations OP you've come up with an idea nearly as universally hated as removing strategic zoom.

I feel so proud.

Well, how about, since there IS going to be a cap, for pure hardware purposes, having some option in what is being capped where being available? IE, caps being available for specific unit types, rather than as a universal cap on 'things'?

Again, as an option.

So basically you want to limit the viability of certain gameplay strategies in favour of others?

I feel that he more would like people not to spam a certain unit type like aircraft.

Especially considering their balance in games like SC2