Expanding the Energy as Ammunition System

I'm sorry, what?

Air support is a force multiplier, for crying out loud. Force multipliers are literally the linchpin of all modern strategy.

If you think an aura that increases HP by 10% is a "force multiplier" because it is a stat multiplier then you are very confused about what that term means. Aura stat multipliers have no place in PA as far as I am concerned. But to say that there should be no force multipliers would reduce PA to liquid wars. There is a game with absolutely no force multpliers of any kind.

This depends immensely on implementation. A lathe-equipped logistics unit might refill the energy/ammo of a target unit, with exactly the same CPU footprint as a constructor.

If you bothered to look up what a force multiplier is, you'd realize that most of it doesn't apply to a robotic army or this game. There's no morale, no veterancy, reputation, weather effects, and the technology is equivalent on both sides. The last two things, strategy and tactics, are obviously the foundation of making any strategy game work.

Perhaps my expression was a little too far reaching. I meant stat multipliers, which in the RPG world is designated by the "support" or "force multiplier" class. There is nothing a stat boost can do which can't be accomplished through the means PA already has available.

I know Ledarsi is a huge fan of comprehensive logistics, but there is nothing in PA's roots that shows it working well. It did not exist in TA, did not work in any meaningful way in Supcom, and has only managed to grow in complexity while offering very little in return. The best an RTS game has managed was by using ammo, which is used to condense the high firepower of strike craft/bombers into reasonable bursts.

Here is how force multipliers work. You have the option to get a regular soldier, or a force multiplier, for example some kind of long-range artillery.

If you have zero forces, you are going to choose to get your first regular because just the force multiplier by itself doesn't really do anything for you. It just gets beaten by anything with a gun. A squad of soldiers comes in and blows up your artillery piece. Having your own squad would be much more useful.

So suppose you have a small army. You can defend that artillery piece now, and it would undoubtedly be useful. But looking at the cost of the artillery and the number of soldiers you could purchase with the same resources, it just doesn't make sense. Your army gets stronger by getting larger than it does by obtaining that force multiplier functionality.

But once you have a good-sized army, that dynamic changes. Just adding another regular doesn't really increase your strength by that much compared to your current total strength. Out of your entire army, adding +1 just doesn't justify its cost any more.

But that artillery piece which gives you the ability to reach out at range and deal damage for free? That becomes extremely appealing now that you already have an army. You have enough army to be competitive, you can defend an otherwise helpless asset without problem. And the ability to deal damage to the enemy for free will multiply the effectiveness of your existing army. Anything your other troops can see can be targeted by that artillery piece, giving you a lot of tactical flexibility everywhere. It lets you bring a lot of resources to bear on a single target point without redeploying large numbers of troops. It lets you make aggressive moves with your existing troops, and it lets you destroy targets behind enemy lines that your regulars can't get to, but which are huge threats to your regular army.

Now let's suppose you have a large army and quite a lot of artillery. Now, it starts to make more sense to increase your army's size than it does to get even more artillery. The artillery is extremely useful, but adding more artillery gives you more stuff you need to defend without increasing your ability to defend it. Too much expenditure on artillery and you risk losing it. Either because the enemy has more troops, threatening defeat on the front lines, or because they can use their small amount of artillery to efficiently destroy your over-investment in artillery.

Force multiplers' effectiveness is derivative of the strength of your regular army. Adding regular army increases your force's strength by a flat amount. Plus one. Force multpliers are named such because they multiply the strength of your regular army instead of adding to it. If you have no army, they add nothing (or very little). If you already have a substantial army, they can add far more than their cost in just more troops. But if you get too many of them, you would be better off spending to get more troops than to spend more on even more force multipliers.

While this includes morale, training, technological superiority, intelligence superiority, and so on, they by no means the only force multipliers. Air support, artillery, and MRLS are force multipliers. Aircraft carriers are HUGE force multipliers by acting as mobile airbases. Tactical nukes and combat-ready missile strikes are force multipliers. Antinuke is a force multiplier.

There are a huge variety of things that behave like force multipliers. Not just "aura buffs." To say 'force multipliers don't make sense in a world of pinnacle technology' just does not make sense. You're saying there's nothing at all within this ultimate level of technology that is powerful, but is defeated by regular troops?

I know you're talking about something entirely different but that's really just not true. There are critical mass points at various blob sizes where different interactions occur.

I think he was more so talking about the army as a whole. Obviously if you lump all your artillery together and its range means that only the middle 1/3rd of an army see the effect while the two outer 1/3rds don't thinks get awkward, but if you average it out It'd still be similar to if the Artillery was split up into 3 groups, one group for each 1/3rd.

Mike

You are correct that it isn't technically true that adding one additional regular soldier adds a flat amount of strength. But in the context of force multipliers, it makes sense to talk about one regular combat unit as the unit of measurement of an army's strength.

When you want to talk about measuring the effective strength of a group of combat units of a particular size, you have to go into more precise detail about the strength of a single unit. Speaking only about regular combat units, without force multipliers, groups of combat units get stronger with each addition by a variable amount. Each additional regular combat unit has an increasing effect on the force's strength, up until a certain point, and then it has a decreasing effect.

Below the tipping point, each additional unit actually adds more power to the group than the unit before it. Two combat units is considerably more than twice as strong as one unit of the same type. Case in point; it will defeat two units in serial. Bringing more firepower to bear simultaneously means enemy units are killed more quickly, which means the group takes less damage. As a result combat units don't actually add a flat amount of strength, but rather an increasing amount as the force gets larger.

The tipping point at which an army stops becoming increasingly effective with more regulars is determined by how efficient those units are when they fight together. Units with short range, little HP, and a variety of other factors such as whether they can fire through each other, how accurate they are, etc. will determine when this threshold is reached.

After the tipping point each additional unit still makes the force stronger. However because not all the members can fight at once, or because they cannot fight effectively at once, adding more regular troops increases the army's strength by a decreasing amount. At the extreme end of the spectrum, very excessively large forces will have relatively few units actively fighting while there are lots of replacements to advance into battle as the units in the front die. Usually it is a good idea to split such large forces to operate independently. Splitting them allows more of your units to be active instead of waiting to get into battle, and allows you to be active in two or more places at once instead only where the very large group is located.

It is my opinion that in order to have a game of large scale, it is necessary to design the units and gameplay mechanics such that the player is incentivized to create multiple organized armies consisting of a large, mixed-role set of units. Not a single huge deathball, and not a monoculture of a particular unit type. And certainly not both at once. To this end, I advance having squishy units with short range, short vision range, weapon inaccuracy, path and shot blocking by other units, and so on. The reason for this is because it makes very large groups of units more inefficient, encouraging splitting them up. And it also creates a strong incentive to mix many different roles, including various weapon ranges, indirect fire support, using recon elements, air strikes, assault groups, etc. because these different units can fight together efficiently where a huge number of one type cannot. And these different unit groups working together is much more interesting than a giant blob mindlessly attacking all at once.

This game HAS to use multicores and multithreading. You already have units that do a "Is the enemy close to me" check. That takes exactly the same amount of CPU resource as a "can I repair others?" or "Can I detect others using radar". It's really no different, so your technical objection doesn't stand. CPU resources are cheap. If it can't manage that, it can't manage RADAR, unit sight radius, unit auto fire or anything.

Excellent. Now count the number of games which use culling methods to keep aura counts and tests low, because CPU resources are so cheap:

AI war: Low unit caps on buff units. Target caps on just about everything including buffs.
Sins: Buff units are all capital ships, with explicitly low unit caps. Still lags like a bitch in high player games.
Supcom/FA/F: Commander upgrades only. Lags in any large scale game.
Supcom2: Perhaps the only game to have a fodder unit that also buffs. Doesn't stack, and is worthless beyond a few units. Also has absurd late game lag.
Warcraft 3: Heroes only, along with very low unit counts.
Starcraft II: Actually, a huge number of abilities use area checks. However, SC2 keeps unit counts typically under a thousand.

All of the above: Nearly every buff aura is slowed down to only test every few seconds.

Please find a game that throws auras around tens of thousands of units with reckless abandon, then we'll talk.

OMG. Why did this take two walls of text? Yes, the power of any arbitrary direct engagement is easily represented by a single formula:

Code:

group_power= summed_health * summed_DPS 

Look at that. It took me one line to explain it. Everything that means something for battle branches off of this one simple equation. I could get fancy by replacing "health" with "combined factors that represent overall endurance", and "DPS" with "everything that results in dealing damage". Thus the equation becomes:

Code:

group_power = tenacity * carnage

Oh look, it's exactly the same formula. If I wanted to get real fancy I could include a stepping function to represent the group losing power as individual units are killed off (a multiplier between 1/2 and 1), and to get really fancy maybe put some dts in there.

But all that stuff is boooooring. Once you figure it out, it becomes obvious who will win or lose every single engagement, now and forever more. So more difficult factors are used. Mechanics such as front loaded damage, kiting, turret ability, density, etc.etc. do not easily translate into tenacity or carnage. They do have an effective power, as seen when they win or lose, but that power depends on a huge number of factors which may make it better or worse. The strategic relevance comes from figuring out which factors excel under what conditions.

In the real world every factor is already in play, and it's up to the commander to figure out how to best use his assets. In the game world, nothing exists if you didn't make it in the first place. That's why RTS design goes to the mathematician, who can tell you what these strategic factors actually are, what they mean and how to use them, as opposed to the tactician, who's only job is to utilize them.

Multiplying the group's total health times its total DPS is not even close to an accurate representation of a group's strength curve.

Actually a group's strength curve is a fairly complicated and horizontally wide logistic curve (mathematical sense of 'logistic' not military), with the following equation;



In this equation, t is the number of units of a single type in the group, and Y(t) is the group's strength.

Where the carrying capacity K, defining the upper asymptote, is based on the maximum number of units that can fight together at once. Adding more units doesn't increase the force's effectiveness by much, if at all.

The growth rate is defined by the HP and DPS of the unit. However the interaction is far more complicated than just multiplying them, and I wouldn't attempt to postulate a unified theory of force strength about all possible values of HP and DPS. I haven't the faintest idea, or even if a single equation could capture all possible values, but I am sure just multiplying total HP times total DPS doesn't do it.

The major flaw with the logistic function representation is that the function is continuous, but you can only have a natural number of units. Partial units are not possible, so it should be a stepwise function. But it's a fairly reasonable approximation, especially for small units.

It is also important to note that this is strictly a representation of a force's combat strength with a specified number of units, and does not represent the cost of the unit anywhere. More expensive units will take more time to build in quantity, and it will be slower to grow the force's size. Very large, expensive units with huge HP, DPS, and range will never reach their carrying capacity just for practical game time purposes.

You're getting technical limitations mixed up with game design. The point of AI War is for you to be scared of theo overwhelming attacks by the AI. If you just have 300 selfbuffing units, which easily take on 2,000,000 units, what is the point?

Sins does not use multithreading. It doesn't use all the CPU resource that is available to it. That is why there is late game lag when there are lots and lots of calculations to be done by your CPU - the thread is full. The CPU could be only running at 13% of capacity, including use by operation.

I stand by my guns. The hardware can make it work. If PA doesn't take advantage of multithreading/multicores, say goodbye to the ability of millions of units to be displayed on screen at once.

i know i´m a bit late on the party ...
but to me this part rather sounds to add some unneeded complexity then depth
it also doesn´t realy sound like adding some sort of choice rather then another neccesity
i also fear it would add unwanted micro to groundunits as you don´t neccesarily want your supportunits to be too close to the frontline ...
i am all for airrepairplatforms or repairtowers like in SupCom
but adding mobile supply to your armies sounds a bit extreme imo as it could mess with your eco badly
fluctuating too much and in the worst case weakening your army too much ...
on the flipside however i could see fabbers doing the same work ... as they repair and support your units they could aswell supply forward mobile artillery and/or built up firebases