Robot Wars

Ok. Putting aside the actual state of the game, and the fact that to have non trivial mods we should wait at least until there' s a complete product ( ugh, bizness terms..), here' s an idea:

Robot Wars:

Many people here will probably be familiar with the this tv show. in Italy it was transmitted years ago, and i thought it was pretty cool to have teams battling each others with their home backed killing machine.

So, today i thought of an abstract way to implement this philosophy on a mod.

The idea is having an API (we will return later to it) that allows a person (or a group) to develop his commander and unit pool.

Ideally speaking, the "team" should be able to configure a lot of things of his robot faction: models, animations, sounds, weapons, stats, AI, etc... and this can be done in multiple ways, depending on the level of expertise of the team. for example i immagine peoples using API built-in/downloadable assets and scripts to assemble his army, and geeky teams making the assets by themselves/sharing them with the community.

Returning to the API. This hibrid between graphical and codebased interface must give the tools to make an unit that can stick with how the game world works. In this case i am not talking about assets related limits. there' s not much to do if a team decides to use ponies as units. It' s more like sticking to the fact that every law of physics working on PA units will have to work on these custom units. So a unit will have turning speed, aim time, and other limitations common on the original PA units. a specific example?

you can' t istant aim and kill 50 enemy units per second, or you can' t istant move in 2 different locations if not without proper explanation.

To implement this, i thought that we should stick with a categorization of the units to have the native types and decide what variables are needed to script the characteristic of the unit. For example, an air unit would have a variable that decides the time needed to steer, while a submarine would have a variable for the time needed to return underwater.

That said, an unit could be both a plane and a submarine unit, and could need both the variable sets of the air and submarine archetypes.

The same thing can be applied to weapon. PA will have a certain number of ways to inflict damage or interact with other units, so there will be so much archetypes as the number of said interactions.

The API has also the job to manage the drawbacks. so, every archetype and customization will have bonus/malus , and an right cost in resources/time. Yes, you can design am experimental with a ton of life and strong AoE damage, but you would pay in speed and turning time, and also you would need a lot of resources to make one of them.

also, the API puts a limitation to the maximum total output (in terms of stats) of the custom robot army.

Basically you would have a "budget" that you spend on number of units on your pool, kind of units , kind of weapons, stats, etc..

You can work around this budget and decide how to make your army in a high variety of ways depending on your war style.

then there' s the AI. we could take the Topia Online approach and use some scripting language that we apply to the unit and/or weapon. this script language however will have voice in merit only when there' s to know how the unit/weapon works, not about how much damage it does or the like.

i don' t think there' s a viable way to quantify the "cost" of the AI, nor i think there should be to worry. i think that the ability to smartly program an unit should be premiated in any case.

that said, you have now a lot of tools to make your favourite robot army

do you want a handful of sturdy and strong units with high defensive capabilities and a steady skill in secure new areas?
Maybe you are more for the aquatic life, and decide to make underwater units and structures, capable of stealth movements and powerful missile based surprise attacks?
Do you think you can manage an orbital fortess that drops weak but steady forces from the sky, and a difficult target to defend from attacks?

or you are igncom1, and you want to make battle engineers with swarmlike tactics, fast self replicating machines that don' t need a real base to conquest a planet?

....well, i don' t know if this kind of things will be possible. Heck, i don' t even know if this mod is doable, nor if people would enjoy games with units developed by an unmanned balance system.

What are your thoughts, lads?

note: i said that every team has his custom unit. actually said armies could be published to the community and normally played by everyone on dedicated servers. And talking about dedicated server, and admin could decide what robot factions are allowed, to add a manned layer of balance to the game

The problem lies mostly in determining abstract unit stats (health, firepower, etc) that cannot be calculated. Likewise, resource cost.

It's certainly interesting, but a HUGELY complicated system. Even to build this as a mod (properly) would probably take up as many hours as the whole deveopment of the game. And it would probably be too much work for most people, which is a shame. It's an awesome concept, but I think a bit held back by reality.

Those are, like, the LEAST abstract parts of a unit. That's all pure numbers. Numbers do whatever the hell you tell them to.

The really abstract parts are things like unit role, theater interactions, and specifying where things succeed or fail. It is those traits that determine how a unit's numbers get assembled. If there are fundamental flaws in the core concepts of unit design, then the numbers will never line up and the roles won't work.

We call this "resources". The most explicit resource is metal, with an honorable mention for infrastructure and time.

Welcome to dev design! This is basically what Uber has to figure out.

I am sorry, i didn't quite understand what you mean here. could you make an example?

Budget here is not intended as cost to make an unit on a game instance, but more to make a blueprint. putting aside reasonable caps, one could decide to have an unit pool of 5 units , wile another could make 20, 30 unit types. the more budget you spend on an unit, the more the ingame cost will rise, and that' s the same for the ingame potential to be a good unit. I say potential, bacause even with lot of budget, a bad designed unit can still lose badly.

I agree with the fact that at the moment there's nothing solid enough to support speculations about how unit design in PA will be implemented, much less about how custom units design would be effective :S

Yeah. My basic point was "What prevents people from just setting the cost to 1 and the HP to 1 billion". It would be an unplayable mess. You would need a system intelligent enough to scan a unit and faction and calculate its metal/energy cost from there.

That is, for all practical purposes, impossible. It's easy to set numbers. But the goal is a playable game, and you won't get one if players can mess around with their own units like that.
If such a balancing system were possible, where it can make a fair guess as to what is balanced, making an RTS game would be a lot easier.

Balancing a game properly is one of the hardest parts of competetive RTS gaming, and that's with actual people playing and tweaking. There's no reasonable way to get an algorithm to do that.

To take this idea one step further- allowing for easy, extensive AI scripting could be really interesting. Where players write a side AI, and have simulated tournaments where many AI's are matched against each other hundreds of times in rapid succession, to get a statistical picture of which is the stronger AI.

This type of play is a very different form of competition, where instead of human players facing off in a battle of wits, each player codes their own AI and pits them against each other to see whose is better.

I would love to have competitive AI design for PA in addition to playing the game myself.

i love that idea cause when i fight on either supcom there's not much choice of what units use cause when you set them to land they use air and in PA that could turn out cool because say like slow conqueror or research fast, etc.