Should Units Be Durable or Squishy?

I want to raise the question of how units in PA will play, in terms of how long they will stand in battle before dying.


War Tension

The way I see it, we have two conflicting gameplay desires. Firstly, we want combat to be an interactive struggle as much as possible. Players fighting will be constantly locked in long, protracted engagements- not standing apart for most of the game, with the occasional very short battle. However, by itself, this would mean we should have units with tiny weapons and tons of HP that spend hours shooting at each other to little effect because they are technically "fighting."

We also want to have massive casualties. The more stuff dies, the more fluid the game becomes. However, if too much stuff dies too fast, then we are going to have very short battles and then long periods of buildup to another short battle. Eventually one of those battles will be won decisively enough to end the game. However this is boring also, as players are spending the majority of their time and attention building units to try and have more for when that one big battle happens that decides the game.

We want the war to be a constant grind to try and gain inches, where both players are pushing their war machine to the absolute maximum all the time, like monster trucks head to head, revving their engines trying to push one another back. This means we always have units on hand, and we always have incentive to use them now, rather than wait for an even bigger army. And any time we use them, we are going to sustain casualties- and so will the enemy.

In this context, setting aside enough resources for a superweapon is a massive challenge, because every unit you cut to finance the project could be critical.


Deathball Syndrome

A lot of RTS games, especially SupCom 2, became very absorbed in the idea that big, powerful units are cool, and lost their way with regard to what is actually fun to play. Big, powerful units obviously have to cost more than weak units. Which, rather obviously, means that for the same level of economy, you will have fewer units if you choose expensive ones. And having fewer units is less fun.

So here is the problem- when both players are building expensive units, there are fewer pieces on the board. I have fewer pieces to move, and so does my opponent. Each of my pieces is more powerful, sure. But power is relative, and if both players are using more powerful pieces, that extra strength cancels out.

Strategy games are more interesting when you have more pieces to move. You can cover significant amounts of area with multiple large forces. You can task small groups to defend outposts. You have more fine-grained control over your composition.

And most importantly, your units are largely expendable. Throwing twenty cheap units at an enemy base and having them be completely destroyed is not really a big deal. In big army battles, the marginal utility of each additional cheap unit drops. Those 20 cheap units won't contribute much to the total strength of the huge army. However, if you only have 10 units of the big, powerful variety, then that 11th unit represents a big increase in your effective strength. So having big units contributes to "deathball syndrome" because you cannot effectively split them up.


Cheap and Squishy

I support having the main line units of PA be the cheapest, weakest unit that can reasonably be used in the game. And these units should be (relatively) high firepower, and very low HP units.

Cheap units give you more pieces to use on the board, and more options on how to use them. Most importantly, cheap units have natural diminishing returns in a localized fight. Building ten thousand little units and throwing them into the same battle is inefficient. Most of them won't even be firing for a significant amount of time, and your casualties will be egregious. The vast majority of your units will die so quickly they dealt minimal damage in such a big fight. And what about splash damage?

Little units want to spread out across as much space as possible- they don't want to fight together in huge groups. They can, but it is highly inefficient. That is a job for big units, and is the original meaning of an "assault" unit.

Big units let you fit more power in a smaller space, which means bigger units are less affected by diminishing returns from increasing expense. The same metal that got you ten thousand tiny units will purchase 100 units that are 100x more expensive. Even if those units are only 25x stronger, that is still a huge advantage in a direct fight, as 100 units can fight effectively together, and their additional durability means each unit has more time to deal damage.

The role of bigger units is to provide an absolute increase in power concentration. Bigger units should be less efficient for cost, and categorically worse in most respects, than cheaper units. Better once you have an army of them, sure, but the most bang for your buck should come from the smallest, cheapest, weakest units available.


Conclusion

Long story short, I come down on the side of big guns, little HP. And I qualify this with saying that the units we should be using the most of are small, weak, cheap units that have high firepower, and are extremely squishy. More expensive units, depending on their role, might tend towards higher HP.

Speak for yourself. This is a strategy game. Any combat paradigm analogous to two big dumb trucks trying to brute force each other back does not sound like one with much room for strategy. "Robot meatgrinder simulator" doesn't sound like a very long lived genre. Knowing when not to commit your forces is an important part of strategy, and if the answer is always "yes", you've just taken away a lot of the game.

Hardly a universal principle. Metal maps in TA involved a lot more units than non-metal maps, but they weren't more fun.

This too is bad for strategy. If your units are largely expendable, the concept of the "exchange" becomes rather meaningless. There's a skill in balancing how much an attack is expected to lose with how much it is expected to accomplish. If one side of that equation is always "basically nothing", you can't have exchanges. At some point in a typical game (presumably right at the start), even a loss of a single cheap unit should have a noticeable effect on the strength of one's position.

This also removes an element of strategy. If weapon damage and unit HP are moderate, there exists the front-loaded/middle-loaded DPS tradeoff, but if damage is high HP is low, most attacks will be one hit kills anyway, and you lose the tactical dimension of DPS loading. The mathematically optimal ratio of damage to hitpoints is one where some units can one-shot units of their approximate toughness, and others cannot (but have higher average DPS).

IMO I think it's mostly a lateral move in terms of tactics for which model you choose; if you set baselines for relative health to damage levels and the production scale of units, you get to have greater tradeoffs in other areas (range, front-load vs sustained DPS, etc.), whereas if you mess with production scales and relative health to damage levels it becomes more of a question of how much cannon fodder or how many special ops type elite units you want.

You make good points, jurgen. Although I think labeling a game with frequent exchanges a "robot meatgrinder simulation" is a mischaracterization. TA could be fairly characterized that way.

The big point you seem to be missing is that there are lots of different places that players might choose to commit their forces, and to varying degrees. If there was only one contested location, and the optimal strategy was to always commit all resources immediately, that would indeed be boring. And furthermore, forces do not need to be chucked into a meatgrinder to make themselves useful. Raiders harassing metal extractors obviously are earning their keep- you always want them to be doing that job rather than sitting in your base. You are incentivized to send those units out immediately in exactly the same way.

Regarding units being expendable- what I said was that cheap units are largely expendable. Not that cheap units are the only type of units available. More expensive units need to be shepherded, as they are more efficient to invest large quantities of resources in fighting in a single localized area. And highly expensive units are so valuable that losing one is a serious blow.

Cheap, high damage, low HP units are a good type of unit to have in many different locations, as they kill soft targets quickly, and die quickly to longer-ranged weapons with moderate damage, such as defensive towers. The number of hits is not really relevant. In fact, their inexpensive nature means deploying high-power weapons against them is actually very ineffective, due to overkill.

I feel that units should be durable. Rather than having a thousand squishy bots id rather have a couple hundred durable bots and make the battle a drawn out slug fest. But I am a fan of mechwarrior so meh.

I feel like making a player have to worry about too many units can drain them and take away fun from the game. A better way would to allow players who are creating a online game toggle what method of combat they want. If a player wants to toss gargantuan armies at each other let them but if players who may not be good at this method or prefer more drawn out fights they should have an option to.

Modding would probably take care of this also but I feel that will raise issues too due to having to find someone who specifically has the same mod as you. Id rather be able to jump into a lobby, run a slider either forward or back and be over with it.

I don't want a land dominated grindfest. I like the units dancing across the map trying to find a weak spot, somewhere not watched, somewhere not defended adequately. Where raiding resources and gathering intel were important aspects to winning. To fights being resolved based on not just the numbers involved but the unit composition and the correct timing of knowing when to attack and when to retreat.

I don't want units to be generally squishy or durable. I want the variety of units to allow more stategies.

I think there should be both squishy and tough units based on what the units do, having just one or the other doesn't create any depth, think of it like the traditional sword vs shield arms race. The perfect sword isn't intrinsically better than the perfect shield, but both had a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages and having the ability to make use of both allows for a more depth than just trying to artificially limit it to one or the other.

Mike

Perhaps grind was a poor choice of words.

Obviously there will be variation in the durability of units. That should go without saying. The question at issue is, generally speaking for all units, whether they should die quickly or slowly for their weight class. Units that are more durable will last longer, naturally.

Light units have much more variation in the way battles can go, especially if you maneuver to fight unarmed targets, or when it is locally advantageous. Having a large numbers advantage is less decisive, due to inefficiency from having a large, fragile army.

Generally beefy units contribute to a slow, predictable land war. Having a numbers advantage is extremely decisive, as the other side simply can't inflict casualties quickly enough. Individual battles are more predictable, and take longer to conclude. Units that are not completely destroyed, even if much of their HP is gone, pull back and can be repaired, resulting in an even larger force for the victor.

Furthermore, this doesn't apply to just land units. I think flying units should also be high firepower, fragile units, that die quickly when exposed. Good decision making should keep them out of danger, and keep your casualties down, although some losses are unavoidable.

I would prefer there to be tougher units for which you strive to use strategy and tactics to overcome their force. This will be especially true if they are using one set of units for everyone. So if i have 10 bots and he has 10 bots at the end one person will have 1 bot left basically whoever shot first will have that bot left.

So i prefer tough bots but with tactics that i can use to do extra damage to his team or reduce damage to my guys. perhaps there can be building that can provide you with some advantage. maybe if i put a particular building that has an area of effect that can improve my guys rate of fire, damage, accuracy etc. as long as they are in side of the ring, or maybe instead of a building they make a new class of unit called support that does no damage but can enhance the army itself by being part of it. kind of like the supcom shields/stealth generator, but instead increases natural stats like range/ROF/toughness etc.

Squishyness has very little to do with the giant blob of death syndrome.

A G-bod forms when controlling your forces is no longer the best use of your time. A player ends up with more important things to do, so by sacrificing some combat efficiency he frees up a large amount of time to focus on things that will end up winning him the game. In the case of Supcom / TA, it was much more important to have a strong economy than a clever strategy.

The only way to reduce the formation of G-bods is to increase the reward the player gets from focusing on his units instead of his economy. One way to do that is to introduce better controls for planning & executing attacks, so that the player can control his army with a lot less clicks.

It would be nice to know, what exactly the "Deathball Syndrome" is. You just throw this term out there and never talk about what it means.
I am going from what could be referred to as the "Deathball Syndrome" in Starcraft 2, where the term simply means, that the army of a player mostly is in exactly one place as one big ball of death.

The reason for this happening, though has nothing to do with how squishy the units are, it stems from the fact, that if you keep your units together in one big ball it happens to be the most effective way to battle.
If there is no reason to spread out it won't happen. On a massive scale formations become more and more important, since a blob becomes less and less coordinated the bigger it is and coordination is very important to fully utilize all of the DPS you have available.

Also, you assume all players automatically engage in a total war, which basically means going All-In. If one player invests a fraction of his income into his economy and is able to hold the attack for long enough, he can eventually overpower it and win. In simple terms: Noone will put all his resources into attacking the other player, unless he wants the game to end quick and dirty, which is a viable strategy, but also not a general case.

Additionally, I don't like assigning a main unit as a general theme armies should have in the game. I prefer variety, so players can choose wether to go massive glass cannon or mix big units in, or go for lots of durable units and everything in between.
Strategy games need variety to be interesting.

Yes, you got the deathball syndrome right. It's when the game becomes too complex to make it worth ordering individual squads around and all your units begin to be managed as one. It's a less efficient way of fighting, but you just can't afford the time to do it more effectively, and current RTS games don't have tools for the player to manage things on the large scale required.

A deathball is when every single unit a player possesses is grouped together into the same offensive force, and moved around the map without splitting up.

Deathballs result from a game's design, not player laziness or capability. In a game where your forces become geometrically more effective as the force's size increases, without limit, then the optimal strategy is a deathball. The marginal gain from each unit added to the deathball is greater than if you sent that unit with a smaller force.

In games that encourage deathballs, it is irrational to split your forces, even if there are multiple contested areas. Splitting your forces into two groups results in two armies that will both get obliterated by an enemy deathball. And either half will lose so inefficiently that the enemy deathball can then destroy the other half as well.

Good game design is to have armies become increasingly inefficient as they get larger in size. This encourages splitting your forces into smaller groups, and having a presence in many areas on the map. Or at least spreading your big army out over a lot of space, rather than packing it as tightly as possible for "maximum deathball efficiency."

This army size inefficiency is the primary advantage of more expensive units. They allow a player to concentrate more resources into a smaller package, decreasing the inefficiency of their resource expenditure if they want to put a lot of power to bear in a single, localized area. And, consequently, that power should come at a premium cost.

please ledarsi, explain to me how we wont have to split our units _across multiple planets_

I don't consider one deathball per planet an improvement. We want units to be spread over an entire planet, not one army per player per planet.

The point is if you want to build a super concentrated deathball, you can do that, it just costs. In TA you could construct a ridiculous army of Cans, and that would definitely qualify as a deathball. Or, you could build the one-man-army Krogoth and it practically constitutes a deathball by itself, at insane expense.

You are paying a premium to get more concentrated firepower. Doing so is far less efficient than spreading out with light units and capping mexes. But if you tried to ball all those light units together and attack a single area, it might not work out so well for you. The bigger units give you more absolute power in one spot, for less efficient resource expenditure.

I don't understand why this deathball argument is occuring. unless you're playing no air setons, FA was a constant struggle for territorial domination across the whole map.

There wasn't just a roaming ball of death. If you tried to do that, they'd slip past your forces and wreak havoc on your base/commander.

TA and SupCom don't play like deathball games. Someone asked what I was talking about, I was just explaining what it was.

I don't think deathballs result in games being too complex. I think they result from lack of interesting things on the map.

In a 1 vs. 1 SupCom match, there was only six points of interest on the map;

• Your base,
  Your commander,
  Enemy base,
  Enemy commander,
  Your tankblob,
  Enemy tankblob.

In later stages of the game, it was too dangerous to have your commander out in the field, so you left him in your base. Hence there was only four points of interest on the map.

• Your base,
  Enemy base,
  Your tankblob,
  Enemy tankblob.

Now your tank blob was usually in the same location as the enemy tankblob, so there was only three points of interest. How boring!

Now, in nice 4 vs. 4 games, things were going on everywhere! There were more points of interest than you could poke a stick at. Each base was of importance, fields of wrecks were of importance, any sneaky firebases were of importance. Deathballs were comparatively less common there, just because you had to fight on multiple fronts otherwise you would be screwed.

But in bad 4 vs. 4 games, such as Thermopylae: you had the following points of interest;

• Your team's base,
  Enemy team's base,
  Your team's T4 football scrum,
  Enemy team's T4 football scrum.

The efficiency of a blob of tanks is only a marginal factor in deathballs. Nor is it a matter of tanks being squishy or not.

Watch some replays of 1v1 games. Note how the situation you describe doesn't actually happen.

Wat, no poll? What is this!