Idea for Experimentals!!!

The original SupCom encouraged turtling because map control was largely irrelevant due to mass fabs being too good. If that was the most enjoyable way to play the game, vanilla SupCom would have a lot more players. As it is it died well before GPGnet and the vanilla mod on Forged Alliance Forever is played extremely rarely compared to the standard FA rules (and compared to BlackOps for that matter).

You're never going to be stopped from playing whatever rules you want to play, but if the majority wanted a turtlefest, vanilla SupCom would still be played. Arguing that it's down to the influence of StarCraft is ludicrous. TA and its successors are the absolute antithesis of StarCraft, and whilst I can't speak for anyone else I doubt I'm alone in objecting to StarCraft on every principle you can imagine.

The only reason for vanilla SupCom was superseded with FA is that modders moved to the newer game core version, which is obviously in FA. With BlackOps, 4DC and TVg, FA is pretty well turtleable, without any need for vanilla balance mod. As to stock balance, vanilla is better than FA.

Not exactly. The core principle of Starcraft is aggressive play enforcement. I once heard that during Starcraft 2 development, Blizzard asked some top players to help make game more punishing to those with lower APM. If that principle not questioned, entire Starcraft doctrine still holds, and if so, the game that conforms to it, will always be in Blizzard's shadow. That's why I keep reminding of importance between offensive and defensive play styles.

I think you'll find more than a few people will disagree with this. I know me and Hawk wouldn't have started BlackOps for FA if it wasn't the better game.

Mike

Aggression has nothing to do with APM. Case in point: Revenge of the Titans. Finishing it on Hard pre-patch required 1337 micro skills, but it didn't encourage aggressive play, since it's a Tower Defence game, and was literally nothing but turtling for its entire campaign.

What have Perimeter and Starcraft got to do with Top 100 replays on gpgnet or FAF?

Of course, this topic dates back to an ancient times, and there will be many who will take both sides in this argument. But I still believe that gameplay diversity is better than a single playstyle available. I don't call for insanely overpowered defences either, cause having no "Hold the line!" experience is as boring as being killed by rush in 5 minutes.

FA still have many advantages aside balance, that's why I'm not playing vanilla for 3 years now. BlackOps is tha awesome mod BTW, and for that you and entire mod team have my highest gratitude. BlackOps is the heart of our LAN party FA mod pack since it was built for the first time.

In general APM and aggressivity is dfiierent things, but in RTS games correlation between micromanagement intensivity and balance shift towards aggressive play is traditionally very strong. That's not only historical influence, but also the general tendence of defensive RTS games to be much less intense and to have much more automated UI, corresponding to the wishes of respective players. And by the way, tower defence games is nothing to do with turtling, because there is no frontline to block enemy advancement and hold it. It's more about killing enemies before they reach certain point.

That was the samples of games with balance geared towards different playstyle. And stock FA is closer to second than to first. Even despite that shift towards aggressive play is small compared to many games, it's more than enough to fill top 100 or even 1000 replays with that style: top segment is the most sensetive to balance.

There is a mod on FA Forever that puts the vanilla balance into FA, so you get all of the refinements of FA's engine and all of the balance of vanilla. Hardly anybody plays it.

Sometimes in a way completely different from vanilla, but other mods still cover everything that is needed for turtling, so I see no point in a separate balance mod. When properly equipped with a combination of popular and actively maintained mods, it is so well suited for defensive play that I most probably wouldn't bother that much about PA balance, if not FA with our mod pack was rendered totally unplayable due to 0xc000005 error after recent hardware upgrades on all upgraded PCs. So aside of very old games with a range of possible compatibility issues, PA is our last hope now.

Blatantly untrue. Revenge of the Titans was all about forming a front line with which to block enemy advancement.

Or it could be that passive play styles are inherently inferior to active ones, and one has to deliberately skew the balance to avoid this. IRL this has been shown again and again since the invention of the tank.

This looks as though it is getting a little off topic, I think this subject of strategies probably deserves it's own thread.

There is exceptions to any statistical observation, cause statistics shows corellation, not a dependence itself. Most of tower defence games involve unblockable path, target to defend, emplacements around the path and no destructible frontline defences or base itself. Most of APM-dependent RTS games tends to be aggressive.

Underlying axiomatic framework of this objection, implying that playstyles can be superior or inferior depending on aggression level, rendering any arguments, except already proposed argument against framework itself, ineffective and meaningless. It always was useless to question others' dogmatic positions. As to balance itself, the only limit to it is the developers' vision of the game, and it deliberately skewing it in favor of any playstyle is the part of that vision. Vision itself, however, can be skewed due to pressure from community, regardless of being real or simulated.

Highly debatable. In the last full-scale war Wermacht's blitzkrieg attack, significally relying on tanks, was effectively halted under Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. Things like Desert Storm can barely count, since opponents was on entirely different military power and technology level, but even in such cases defences can play primary role in the conflict - during Vietnam War, Vietkong's system of underground tunnels, Cu Chi, rendered tanks, artillery and aviation ineffective, causing offence to slow down beyond viable (BTW, various underground shelters is the closest IRL analog to SupCom's shields). Generally when calculating estimated losses of defending and offending sides, 1 : 3 proportion is used.

I think you forgot to make a point there. You stated some facts, and then failed to mention how they were relevant to whatever you're trying to prove.

"The only limit is the developers' vision of the game" is blatantly false. If their vision is in conflict with what's practical, technically feasible, marketable or fun, they'll have to sacrifice it, or fail. Guess what? Most developers prefer to make fun games where you do things. Turtling is not doing things, it is waiting for other people to do things.

You will now of course show how these conflicts involved RTS-style turtle tactics. Trading space for time is not turtling. Waiting for winter and the enemy to overstretch their supply lines is not turtling. Guerrilla warfare is not turtling.

They are revelant in the sense that RTS game balance can be shifted towards agressive play (including, but not limiting to making a game micromanagement-heavy) as well as towards defensive play (for example, by implementing additional defense methods, such as shields or strategic weapon protection). And the middle here is the state when every playstyle is equally viable, not when turtlers are easily killed by rush at the start.

Following that logic, all RTS games must be like Starcraft, because they are not technically hard to implement, target widest audience, are very popular, and, therefore, most marketable. I just hope that PA devs are not following such principles.

First, turtling is not waiting. It is strategy of reinforcing defences from start onward, then preparing for massive assault behind established frontline. Second, I'm here becasue I believe Ubers are not one of afromentioned 'most developers', otherwise I wouldn't got interested. Third, I see absolutely no point in attempts to convert PA to mindset used in most RTS on the market, with many of them having budget orders of magnitude larger than PA, balance that polished in conformance with that views, and community containing millions of players. Yet this happens all the time with such a projects. Generally, It's not that strange: history is overfilled with examples of ideological majority being oppressive and hostile towards minority, medieval inquisition being one of examples. But we are living in XXIst century, so why just not leave small indy projects as they are and choose some recent AAA RTS title in a style you like?

All mentioned conflicts more or less involved trench warfare, which is military term for turtling. All major turning points od WWII on USSR territory involved it, including battles of Kursk and Stalingrad. Vietnam tunnels is half trenching, half guerrilla, for example.

You're aiming for an impossible ideal. In order for there to be good strategies, there must also be bad strategies, and it's not possible for every play style to be equally viable. Should Uber also cater to people who only want to build mobile artillery to the exclusion of all other units, or win without constructing any mobile units at all? They're both "playstyles", so they should be equally valid, right?

And here we have a classic case of the straw man fallacy. "Not impractical" does not mean "most practical", "not technically impossible" does not mean "technically trivial", "not unpopular" does not mean "targeting the lowest common denominator", et cetera. Try actually talking about points I made instead of making up another, much less defensible position and attacking that.

You say turtling is not waiting, and then you describe a situation where you wait until your "massive assault" is ready. But in doing so you lose map control and your "massive assault" never comes, because you end up being outproduced by the opponent who actually took the initiative and got some resources with which to build.

I'm "not attempting to convert PA to the mindset used in most RTS (games) on the market", since PA is going to be like TA, and even though TA was unlike most RTS games and couldn't possibly have been influenced by Starcraft, it still made turtles lose to players who could be bothered to attack (except on metal maps, but metal maps basically broke the game).

Oh man this is great. Now you're comparing bad RTS players to oppressed religions. Lose the victim complex, it's not helping.

Haha. Look at the definition of "turtling" you gave in the previous paragraph. You're already contradicting yourself.

Under playstyle I mean more of a global level strategies like offensive, defensive, guerilla and so on. And as to winning without constructing mobile units, I've seen at least two different strategies involving this: sniping and defensive crawling. And yes, balancing all possible strategies is impossible without compromising game mechanics integrity into infinite corner cases, but I don't think it is impossible to balance at least some variety of them, however, even that's far from being easy. Implementation hardness and rarity caused by it is one of the reasons why I regard that kind of diversity as the primary characteristic of premium RTS game.

Can't agree in particular context of gameplay design. One following half-measures or compromises in taking fundamental design decisions gets mediocre result, which is neither best selling nor conceptually revolutional. That may be OK for market survival, but for any other purpose it's not. Such RTS thrown into market each year, all going into oblivion within months after release.

Waiting for assault to get ready is not the same thing as doing nothing and waiting enemy to kill you. Even offensive players rarely attack with a single unit, and in that aspect there is no difference between gathering 20 t2 bombers ang building 20 GCs except scale. As to map control, I think there should be a trade-off between extensive expansion (map control), which is good at not having a single point to attack, but bad at establishing rigid frontline, and intensive improvement (massfabs and other resource generation), which is easy to defend, but have no backup if defences are breached, with equal resource output (like in vanilla SupCom).

In TA's case it's not Blizzard influence. Warcraft and Starcraft themselves, as well as all Blizzard games, are commercial products, tuned for maximum money output with pinpoint precision. They were first grounded on already existing popular trends in RTS genre, and ther own influence, that built othrodoxy around them, is secondary. TA was a non-extreme modification of exactly same trends. SupCom completely left old ways in terms of balance, and I consider this as its most valuable contribution to the genre. I'm representing SupCom side here, in order to protect that achievement.

First, I believe that when game is not enforcing some predefined way to play it, there is no bad players except ones who don't know game mechanics, object purposes and controls, deliberately taking meaningless actions (like countering ground assault with AA), playing non-effectively economic-wise or don't do any battle planning at all. Second, my comparison was attributed to mechanics of othrodoxy phenomenon, which is appearing on all levels of society organization (especially in religion aspect, that's why I referred to inquisition), and wasn't supposed to identify my own group's oppressed state. And third, your statement is involving wide assumptions about my personal characteristics, which is not only irrevelant but is also offensive. I hope that debate ITT will not degenerate into flame war.

I see no contradiction here. Trench warfare usually ends with defending side mounting a counterattack or being overwhelmed, which is pretty much the same as I described above. There is also a corner case of defensive crawling (pushing frontline by establishing new lines of defence after enemy attack wave repelled), but I cannot say for sure if it was used somewhere beyond computer games.

And yet turtling is a subset of defensive play, so even under your own stupid definitions, a game does not need to cater to turtlers.

Oh, I get it. You're actually insane. There's no arguing with the position "all compromises lead to mediocrity", because it's not even close enough to a logical position to be argued with.

Completely untrue. At the very start of the game, single bomber raiding, fights between single scouts, LABs and engineers are practically the bread and butter of decent SC play.

If you don't think "denying resources to the enemy" is an indispensable part of all strategy, you have no business playing strategy games involving production.

Heh. You have no idea what you're talking about. TA was revolutionary when it came out. At that point the state of the art as far as RTS games was Warcraft II, where you could select nine units at once, had no order queuing, and if you were one gold piece away from building a castle, you couldn't even start construction, long ranged "artillery" units could barely shoot half a screen, projectiles moved in straight lines and hit automatically, and mobile units all existed on a coarse grid and had no concept of acceleration, turning or shooting while moving. Calling TA "orthodox" basically means the only criterion you have for quality in RTS games is how turtle friendly they were (and TA had metal maps, which were so turtle friendly it's not even funny, because they made map control worthless). And calling Vanilla SupCom's accidental massfab farm-friendly balance an achievement is just crazy. It was a mistake, one that FA rectified.

See above. Neglecting to do anything to limit your enemy's expansion or production is deliberately playing ineffectively economically. If your poor oppressed underclass of passive players want a game to play, just play against an AI that's programmed never to attack. It's basically equivalent to playing online for you, since you don't actually want to have to react to anything the other player does.

No, that's not what you described. The Russians didn't hold the border of Russia until they'd built a crushing army of T-34s and rolled over into Europe all at once, they retreated to trade space for time, which isn't turtling. The Vietcong certainly didn't build a secret army of Mammoth Tanks in those tunnels and sally out to crush the US, they actively hampered the US's ability to maintain a fighting force, which is the exact opposite of turtling.

Let me interject here.

What's the issue with turtling? Is the argument about buffing a turtling player?

We all know map control is one of the most important aspects of the game, since it gives you the initiative and ability to respond without undue consequence (both proven IRL to be advantageous).

This WAS a thread about experimentals... it must have frayed.

EDIT: Wow, that worked well