Infinite Factions with Commander Profiles

Hi Uber Ent.,

Back in the #6 Kickstarter update Nick Goodenough made the following suggestion

I thought this was a great idea but a little unbalanced so suggested the following.

I've been thinking about this and believe there is a way for Planetary Annihilation to have a near infinite number of factions with little development overhead. Take a moment to shift context to role playing games of old like Morrowind. These games gave every player a unique character by allowing them to allocate a collection of experience points and specials to the character's abilities.


Commander Profiles
Now switch context back to Planetary Annihilation. Instead of experience points and levelling up, as in RPGs, there could be some other fixed number of points (attribs) that you assign to a commander profile and then save. This happens outside of the game and you can create as many commander profiles as you like. Note: There is no levelling up or gaining additional points. When you enter a game chat room or setup you select one of you saved commander profiles to use for the duration of the game; no changing commander profile once the game starts.

So what is a commander profile? This is a collection of common global unit attributes and research tree specials.


Global Unit Attributes
All units will have some ability attributes like; Speed, Armour, Targeting Time, Power, and Damage. Each unit will have a different value for each of these attributes. For example a scout would have lower values for Armour and Damage than a tank would; a tank also having higher values for Armour and Damage then a scout. The values of these attributes also imply some cost to build. These build attributes are, for example, Metal, Energy, and Time. Each unit will have a formula where its build attributes are calculated from its ability attributes plus some fixed cost for the unit's special ability.


Creating the Commander Profile
Creating the commander profile is giving the user the ability to adjust the ability attributes by a factor. That is instead of a unit having its normal Speed the unit gets Speed*SpeedFactor. There could be both an upper and lower limit to the ability attribute factors.

How do you balance the factors? Well you would get a set number of unassigned factor points. These points are evenly spread across the ability attributes in the default commander profile. So in the default, instead of all your factors having a value of 1 (one) they would have a value of 1.1 (if there where 5 ability attributes and 5 unassigned factor points in units of 0.1). However, you can also reassign some of your other ability attributes' factor points to other factors. So you could decease your SpeedFactor from 1.1 to 0.9 and add the 0.2 points to your DamageFactor. Having upper limits on these factors is key for balance.

In addition to the ability attribute factors you would get a fixed number of research specials. These reduce the research cost of a particular sub-branch of the research tree. With two you could, for example, make all items in Tanks\Light and Orbital\Heavy cheaper to research.

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So there you have it. A framework for implementing near infinite factions in PA without the overhead of designing additional units per faction. In all these RTS games the faction units are nothing more then different skins on the same base unit with tweaks to ability and build attributes. Lets do away with the single digit factions and their costly visual implementation. Instead build a framework where every player can have as many factions as they desire. Its revolutionary!

You get the benefit of personalising your faction to your specific play style like no other RTS has before (as far as I am aware). This coupled with Custom Insignias takes your personal ownership of your commander and its legion to new heights.

I hope this makes it into Planetary Annihilation.

Rebuilt

No.

Not this again.

Aside from the research bit everyone always throws in (not that I dislike the idea, but everyone else does so it's not happening), unit profiles and commander profiles seem like cool ideas (if indicated properly).

Throwing in a few stat differences adds all of the balancing problems of multiple factions with none of the interesting qualities of multiple factions.

Better than a bunch of stat differences would be the Civilization approach of each faction having a couple of unique units, as this is actually significantly easier to balance than juggling the numbers for a whole host of minor stat changes. But if there's not the budget for unique units, then I don't really care if they don't make the cut.

No thanks, for all the reasons we've already talked about in countless threads.

Mike

No to hidden modifiers. I don't want to have to guess how other people's units will perform.

I am going to ignore your comments about unit modifiers, because that has all the potential of creating endless fantastically imbalanced problems with none of the interesting strategic implications of finite faction roster unit selection.

If I am understanding your idea correctly, essentially you want each player to select a pool of N units before the game starts which they will be allowed to build that game?

Why not simply have all the units be available, and you just build the ones in which you are interested?

I suppose this feature would be extremely trivial to implement as a mod, just have each player "pick" up to the specified number of units. But why would this be an improvement over just having all units available for the default game?

Interesting backlash from the community.

My intent is diverse gameplay. Though neither my idea or this really captures that yet.

So how might PA allow for diverse gameplay?

What I've heard so far is units will cover many play styles (offensive, defensive, subterfuge) so just build the units you want. But can't we do better? Doesn't this option lead to players having mildy different tactics in a game?

Why not shoot for diverse combat? How about an all naval army that dominates it's water home world and assaults land planets by very slowing crawling on land (like the Supcom Cybran unit). Imagine that force assaulting what they thought was a turtling land force, yet turned out to be a subterfuge force that set up a decoy hologram base and is now moving in for the kill without being detected on radar what so ever. Wouldn't it be interesting to see how the players adapted? How they leverage their strengths and weaknesses. Will this kind of specialization be likely with access to all units? Or even possible?

The point is diverse gameplay is fun, it keeps the game fresh.

So how would you achieve diverse gameplay?

I heard some kind of "different ways to play", but dont know if they are just a strategy to play or if they are filled with effects.

"You are more specialist in exploring, your units have bigger exploring view and faster, but less impact and strong units."

This sounds like a work around for the fact that there will only be one 'faction'

{R} Multiple factions: #1 #2

red = NO

There is a single pool of units, there will be multiple factions. Uber are not sure yet exactly how this will play out, I imagine there will be play testing once the initial pool of units exists.

did you read the links too? "work around" actually, I read somewhere they want try to do more a work around instead of multiple factions, but I am not completely sure. We will see.

Good point about factions not being possible. With that option out how else can we achieve diverse gameplay? If we can't have different unit lists, then how about a single unit list that has specialized play styles in mind?

How about making an entirely orbital force viable? Or even encouraged, through some game mechanic. Perhaps synergy between similar units to reward specialization. Or choice of what type of home world you start on to kickstart a specialized strategy.

Let's encourage diverse strategic gameplay. Let's encourage awesome!

I like the home world tending towards a particular strategy idea.

There are other threads on here that have other suggestions to "encourage diverse strategic gameplay" some that I recall are orbital mechanics and submarines.

No, no, no.

I propose a new rule: Every time anyone uses that word as some kind of appeal to popular opinion, they have to pay Uber another $10. It's been used so much it doesn't mean anything any more.

Awesome: asteroids as KEW, 40 player matches, death stars, thousand-unit meatgrinder battles, general carnage

Not awesome: ideas from children, artificial factionisation via arbitrary statistics, powergaming

I second that. It's getting old, I'm also thinking word filter it out and/or hour bans (but may be i'm just tired)

I say the next time someone backs an idea based on teh fact it's awesome we link them to my Realism VS Awesome PSA.

Mike