Scale Megathread

You have been reading this thread wrong, then. The topic of this thread says that planet size is mostly irrelevant. It is purely about unit size in relation to terrain. Unit speed is easily altered and unimportant to discuss. Planet size is easily changed and unimportant to discuss in detail.

Planet size is important because planet size:terrain feature size ratio matters too.

You can't just shrink units & speeds, because then planets are effectively bigger.
You can't just make terrain features much larger, because then it can strange compared to planet size.

Changing pretty much any variable here (planet size, terrain size, unit size and unit speed) affects the others. You need to adjust them all together if you want to change them, because some ratios just won't work.

Yes, this is very much true.. which is why I think a poll like this is a bit misleading. The poll question is too vague, or rather the issue is too complex and far reaching to just say yes or no right off the bat.

this is what cracks me up about criticizing polls x'D ... you've got a bit of everything in the bag. Binary polls upset more people than just you.

in anycase I cannot add, edit or remove a poll with xenforo's options, so what we have is what' we'll stick to.

I bet binary polls tend to upset pretty much everybody. Nothing wrong with binary polls, it is about how you pose the question. Not really sure if I feel the one in this poll is too specific or too vague. At least you could have had one option for "increased a whole lot" just for sake of balance. But whatever, it is what it is.

hey "increased" was a joke originally, for the longest time we had 0 votes to increase. We had a comment in the thread for everytime someone voted to increase. look at the beginning of the thread and look at the first poll results. the first poll results didn't warrant the creation of an extra category for increased... clearly not, on the other hand they definitely did warrant the creation of an extra poll option for the opposed.

Oh, I completely agree. I am not saying that they are not effecting each other; I am saying that it is unimportant. These scale issues that you bring up are only problems on very extreme cases (planets that are too small or too large). The problems are null in this case because they are broken anyways. Changing the scale of the props would just change the minimum planet size a bit. Hell, why not even have prop sets that only work on small planets or large ones?

All I am trying to say is that the arguments in this thread are off-topic. You can keep talking about how unit size vs planet size would change, but that is hardly important in all but the most extreme circumstances.

I'd agree if it was only a small change, bu people are arguing for reductions in unit size of half or more - this means either a) double planet size (which has many gameplay effects), or, if this is corrected, b) double feature size-to-planet size ratio, which is not just a small change visually.

I don't see how it warranted the creation of an extra option, because you have no way of distinguishing what votes for "decreased" or "decreased a lot" mean. How much is "decreased" vs "decreased a whole lot"? The amount can't be determined from this poll, so the two seperate options may as well just be 1.

Edit: Apparently my brain wasn't working.

it's in the freakin mock up. raevn ? common.

One fun approach would be to make terrain features scale with planet size.. this way you would have all the scales from the mock up pic in OP in the game, 1.3x on really small planets and 0.3x on huge planets. I know it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to make sense.. it's a game.

no that makes scene and it's been suggested a good number of times.

I don't know why it isn't that way, if it is hard to do or not.

That would help out, that's for sure.

I'm no expert, but judging from the dev posts in this thread, messing with scale in general seems to be quite a bit of work. I can imagine how that would be the case with all the procedural generation etc, must be a pain.

Anyway, having terrain features scale with planet size would probably mean maximum zoom level would vary by planet due to camera clipping issues, which would be a bit weird. And boring to watch, having tiny illegible units on larger planets.

I'm not sure what you are getting at. I was responding to broadsideet's statement that small changes don't need to take into account the other affected size ratios, and simply stated that this isn't necessarily a small suggested change. Furthermore, mockups can't show the gameplay impact of such changes.

Edit: Misunderstood what tatsujb's previous post was referencing.

That is exactly the point: gameplay impacts from these changes. Also, the only real changes that would happen in terms of planetsize:terrain would be that planets smaller than 300 would look wrong instead of 200. IMO, bodies that are of a certain smaller size shouldn't have terrain on them in the first place; or they should have their own asteroid terrain...

I am not saying there are no side effects of the suggested changes, just that the side effects are small and totally worth it.

@tatsujb: I had a (hopefully temporary) case of the dumb

Changing planetsize:terrain has more effect than just at which size it looks bad at. There's also decreased buildable area and a correspondingly higher chokepoint count. You could reduce the number of terrain features, but that could make the planets look sparse. Trees and other small objects would also present a far bigger obstacle to both movement and weapons fire. Also, if terrain is effectively twice the size, it may require making the models and/or textures for these more detailed, so they do not appear out of place.

To be clear; I'm not disagreeing that they (unit sizes) should be lowered, or even saying that they shouldn't be lowered by a large amount. I just think the variables are a lot more interconnected then they seem, and therefore discussions on the effects on other parts of the game (Such as planet size) are worth while.

I would also suggest that changes of this kind shouldn't be tested until at least the trees are included in the physics simulation.

yes we agree with all this, it requires work, that's why we're making such a big racket about it. also constantly pushing this back won't make it easier to do.

how about implementing tree physics with the correct final scale?

That would be like trying to balance the current units before adding the rest of them. You don't know what effect it will have (and therefore what the "correct" scale is) and you may just have to re-do the whole thing.

but can't the same be said for the opposite order?

If you've balanced a game when all the parts are in it, why would you need to re-balance again?
On the other hand, if you balance a game and then other parts are added, you need to re-balance again.

This comment baffles me. Mr. raeven, are you expecting a perfect balance on the first try? Unlike pretty much every other RTS that has ever been released?