Map ballance

As planets will be procedurally generated have the devs mentioned anything about how they are planning you balance the map for MP, or could there be a few predefined maps for that as well?

I have not found anything relating to it in my fairly limited search, anyone care to shed any light on the subject?

Someone has submitted a question for the live stream on Friday asking about this very issue.

Cool beans...

I would rather not go on to reddit as that place is such a time sink, guess i'm going to have to now

Edit - Just went on Reddit and it does not mention map balance and procedural generation just if there is going to be premade maps.


I'll throw all my question in there and cross my fingers.

[–]thedbp [score hidden] 6 days ago
you mentioned during the last stream that there will be metal points, will these be randomly assigned on the planet, or will they be assigned in reference to where players start to ensure balance?
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hmmm i didn't see that.... well now there are 2.

We kind of don't know if this is really an issue yet, do we? As far as I'm aware, we don't know how the game begins. Do Commanders start on separate planets? Can you pick your landing point? Map balance may just end up being based on a decision that the player makes early on.

Fact is something like Resource allocation as a balance mechanic is so volatile and dependent on the game play itself I doubt they will be able to 'confirm' any particular method, they might talk about something they could do, but so far Uber seems to try and focus on things they can confirm, so it might amount to nothing.

Mike

This would be an issue on a single planet map. If you start with 12 metal and I start with 3 then I midas well Ctrl-K.

If we play chess and I start the game in check ...

Multiple planets though, that would be different and we would have to see how it pans out

Where do resources come from? How are they distributed? How permanent are they (points vs. wreckage)? What tools will a player have to harvest them, and what resources do they start with?

These questions (and more) will basically define the first 5 minutes of the game, and by extension, how the rest plays out.

I don't think they have made the ability to jump planets yet so at the moment I think you will be restricted to one planet, doubt that will change by the time alpha is released.


That did also make me wonder how resources worked on other planets and if you had to set up a supply route or build something to allow the transfer of mass to another planet or, if it did not matter at all. Guessing it will be the latter though.

I asked a question on reddit about this sort of thing to which Neutrino replied and clarified a lot of my concerns: http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryannihi ... be/c9z82vs

The short of it was that using procedural maps doesn't necessarily mean that maps will be random, most are likely to be authored much the same as any other RTS game, so a human will control the final positioning of things like mountains and resource points to get the balance of a map right.

pretty informative, some of it had been said before but I imagine alpha testers will be the guinea pigs for different approaches

Huh, so their talk of randomly generated terrain...it will not be so random? Interesting.
One thing I have learned in some college classes is the power of geography on warfare, entrenched positions and offensive positions. Map generation will play the greatest factor in this game. No asteroid can fix the problem of a poorly situated base.
One way to do it is to assign a certain number of random mass points to the four hemispheres of the world, then, when the player "drops in" four mass points spawn where they drop. Just like in Supcom you spawned in the middle of four mass points, same here most likely. :|
I was wondering how they would do randomized maps. Answer: They won't. There has to be tweaking or one player might get a easily defended mountain biome and the other gets stuck with less defensible terrain. Unless they have walked upon a brilliant solution to the potential balancing nightmare of randomized terrain. :shock: I would love for there to be a way to get randomized maps to balance correctly. No game would be the same, no map would be the same. It would really work the abilities of the player both strategically and tactically.

I would have to say this will turn out to be one of the most important aspects of the game. Though not many people realize it now. MAP BALANCING look for it when they roll out galactic war in alpha or beta.

The easiest way to put it is that Uber is looking at a semi-randomized solution. I'm sure there will be settings in the planet generator for map balance, things like similar player start biomes, identical player start resources, players starting on opposite hemispheres, etc.

Or, if you are placed in an unbalanced position compared to your enemy, you can just move. I did this in C&C3 alot, just completely abandon my start location and walk my MCV's *** over to some super-rich Tiberium field in a corner of the map.

As I understood it, each player will be given a discreet (that is, non-overlapping) set of spawn options. It's then up to the player to decide where to spawn.

The quote was something to the effect of "if you don't like your spawn point, it's probably your own damn fault."

Yeah, but you would need both sets of spawn locations to be balanced, I mean what good is selecting a spawn location if your options are worse than your opponents? Though as long as maps are authored it shouldn't be too hard to ensure that they are reasonably balanced. But I would like the option to play on truly random maps where starting planets were mirrored, it would make things a lot more interesting if all players had to learn the map while playing, I'm a bit sick of the StarCraft 2 situation where any good player already knows pretty much where the best place to build stuff is, exactly where to check for cheese and where the best place to wall off is.

^ Having a worse selection can mostly be mitigated by a large number of spawn locations. Spawn locations on other planets, moons, close to water, etc. Just imagine Earth; I'm given spawn locations on West cost North America, Northern Europe and Southern South America, you are given Australia (you're welcome), Southern Africa and Central Asia. Would any subset of these locations be more or less advantageous? Further, procedurally generated planets should be able to avoid having over-resourced choke-points and proper distribution (check out Age of Empires II; the random map system was pretty good, and usually quite fair).

However, I agree in that there should be an option to mirror planets, and have mirror starting planets if players are not starting on the same planet. Especially important for tournaments; seeing how two expert players approach the same field, with the same units will make for some interesting analysis. Personally though, I prefer playing asymmetrical; "fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men (and women)" ~Seneca the Younger.

Well Australia is probably the best of that lot, no need to deal with land based attacks, and most attacks will come from the north making defense a lot easier, not to mention there's plenty of room for building with little to no threat from artillery, it seems a bit OP compared to your spawn positions, the alps Europe might provide some good defense from artillery but with limited build space and several land based routes for attack to deal with as well as some good nearby staging areas like Egypt, it's certainly not the sort of starting location I'd want. If I'd had your spawn locations I'd have just quit to look for a better game.

^You'd also be far more limited on resources due to a small, admittedly defensible landmass. It's a gamble in any event (what's more, if it's known we are playing on Earth, Australia is the first place I'm going to scout, but that hardly furthers the discussion).

For argument's sake, let's say the game recognizes said small, defensible landmass (I'm not sure how it'd do that, but then I spend 40 hours a week in webdev, so I'm only a programmer in the sense that scooters are motorcycles), and gives me Greenland instead of Western North America, or Antarctica instead of Southern South America. All of this is hypothetical, of course, but my point is; I don't think it'd be altogether that impossible to ensure a balanced set of starting conditions via a procedurally generated map, and I have confidence in Uber's ability to pull it off... and failing that, the mod community's ability to rectify the oversight. We still might not see it in tournaments, but I'm much more into casually beating the crap out of my buddies than super competitive play.

As 6th largest country in the world and second largest producer of iron ore I'd hardly consider Australia as small or having limited resources, again Australia is really OP .

The problem is that on a completely random map there is no way to guarantee that there isn't just one spawn that's better than the rest, sure if there's two that are equally great and spread far enough apart you could give them to different players but that's not always going to be the case with an unbalanced number of good spawns on a planet you can't ensure a balanced match. Mirroring solves that issue and it's why it's so common in ranked matches of other RTS games, with mirroring no one can blame a loss on a poor start location and it means the matches are determined by skill at playing the game rather than other factors.