The idea of counters and how they work (now about armor)

Ok. I've seen a lot of talk in the forums about having hard counters, soft counters, and everything in between.

Lets be honest, the idea of counters is obnoxious. If your enemy is massing tanks, you shouldn't have to build kbots just because kbots are good against tanks, that's annoying.

How counters SHOULD work is naturally. For example, in TA, artillery wasn't very effective against short range fast units, because artillery is very slow in getting to the target. Likewise, laser bots weren't good at assaulting bases, because the lasers would usually hit wreckage or walls before hitting the towers behind it.

There were missiles, ballistic shots, and lasers. All of these had their strengths and weaknesses. Not because of damage types (I've seen artillery buildings in TA hit airplanes) but simply because of physics, angles, and speeds of projectiles. I think that's how PA counters should work as well. Take MERLs from TA, they shot straight up and the missiles came straight down, this was very effective versus defenses, but almost worthless against moving units. The damage type wasn't a counter to anything, but simply by the nature of its projectile, became a counter to certain things and weak versus others.

What are your thoughts?

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I don't think many people were seriously considering a Starcraft style enforced damage type system wherein bots trump tanks or whatever because they do 100% extra damage and take 50% from their counter. They were definitely more referring to implicit counters based on weapon and movement properties.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

+3

It's certainly not going to be easy to do, but it will be worth it.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I'm pretty sure this was a given. TA was exactly like this, SupCom and FA had very few damage modifiers (Air units got a modifier so they took more damage from AA weapons, Overcharge does less damage to Commanders and Buildings, but does more damage to units, and the Commander Nuke does less damage to buildings and Commanders).

If PA were anything BUT natural counters, I would be thoroughly disappointed.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

This thread should be called "Damage modifiers and armor: Unwanted".
While I agree with that sentience that we generally shouldn't have any hidden armor types there should be counters.

Zero-K for example has a very explicit counter relationship between land units with Riots>Raiders>Skirmishers>Riot for example where all units have the same DPS to each other.

Whether or not PA should have such an explicit counter relationship or if the counters should be more soft I don't know.
In SupCom there basically wasn't any such system between land units but rather you spammed more or less tanks, teched, ecoed and tried to maintain map control.
There is still plenty of strategy there although unit interactions were fairly trivial.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I agree.

For anyone who doesn't get it, the traditional sense of units beating each other works like rock paper scissors.

In his scenario, units beat each other due to what would really happen. For instance, if scissors are a tank, paper is a wall manned with doods, and rock is an artillery unit, scissors would counter paper with a giant gun while rock shoots over the paper, effectively negating the effects of the paper. In this case, 2 things can happen;

Rock kills scissors before/[very very soon]after paper dies
Scissors kills paper and guns down rock, who cannot fire quick enough to kill the moving scissors.

Option one, however, is very unlikely to happen because, unlike real people, the AI won't anticipate scissors' rate of movement and even if scissors was at one HP it would most likely outrun all shots fired.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

Exactly like this.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

Veteran units in TA would lead their shots. Though I think units should lead shots by default, and I'm kinda glad there is no Veterancy system in PA.

But yeah, so we're pretty much in agreement about natural counters vs. hard counters, right? Natural counters are best.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I mostly agree with the posts above. I dont like multiplier and natural counters would make the game pretty clear and it would feel/look AWSOME. But to make it balanced, i do think there should be some kind of armor System.

My Ideas:
-Flat armor, reducing dmg from attacks by constant amount
-Armorpenetration certain units can ignore some of the armor
-Abilities mostly ignore armor

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I am not sure that anyone here has ever said that hard counters are a good idea, and most have vehemently argued against it (mostly against other people also arguing against it but with misunderstandings so they can both argue with each other and have the same point).

Part of the problem with having armour penetration stats on rounds is that it adds in what is in some ways an invisible layer of extra stats that moves away from soft counters (which is about unit and weapon behaviours making the difference). Every unit will need an armour value so now not all weapons are doing the same damage to objects, sometimes tanks will deal more damage to other units seemingly arbitrarily (although not actually arbitrarily).

Previous things have been exceptions that were few and far between, more or less relating only to the d-gun vs commander or commander explosions... not things that tend to happen often.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

Arbitrary damage or armor types need to be minimized, if not completely eliminated. I think everyone agrees on this.

A universal armor system could be used which applies uniformly. A flat damage reduction against all weapons, for example. HP alone can produce most behaviors, but having a second dimension of unit variation to create hard and soft targets might be a good idea.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

What does this accomplish that can't already be done via the other unit stats?

Want an armored unit? Give it more HP.

Want weapons that penetrate armor? More damage.

Abilities? What abilities?

Mike

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

Flat damage reduction does create an additional dimension of variation. Suppose a unit's armor reduces all incoming damage by 5. A low-damage weapon will have its damage reduced much more than a high-damage weapon. A weapon that deals 10 damage will only reduce this unit's HP by 5. Whereas a weapon that deals 1000 damage will reduce the unit's HP by 995, rendering the unit's armor sort of irrelevant. A rapid-fire weapon which has low damage for each individual shot will be vastly less effective than a single shot with high damage.

If you only use HP, then only the DPS of the weapon matters, regardless of its power. Ten shots at 10 damage as opposed to one shot with 100 damage are exactly the same. It is arguable whether this is an interesting difference, and it is arguable whether it is worth the additional complexity of having damage mitigation. But it is a possibility without having arbitrary damage types.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

Nope, Air units do have the 'Light' Armor type, but no weapons take advantage of that fact according to my Coder. The OC and Deathnuke examples are correct and to my knowledge the only instances of armor type being used. This is for Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance.

Mike

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

They took more damage in TA... however that is probably because every unit could attack air so anti air weapons needed encouragement to be used.

And the implimentation of armour leads to the need for each unit to fire at its optimal target, so you need to allocate focus fire according to unit type and such (so your pee wees don't all attack the super tanks and your tank destroyers fire at their pee wees), even if all this is automated the human hand is always more optimal. At the end of the day while it does add something into games of smaller scale, in planetary annihilation case i think it just encourages micromanagement as well as increasing the amount of knowledge required to play the game properly (such as the example from a while ago about sup com 2's artillery dodging being a required skill).

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I agree with the OP.

No hard counters. Rock paper scissors isn't something i'm a fan of. If it has guns it can hit targets no matter if its flying or not. I still remember how awesome it felt d-gunning brawlers in Total Annihilation, who were head-hunting my Commander. Even L1 LLTs could target and fire at L1 fighters (Avenger/Freedom Fighter).

Of course, missile towers would be more effective at taking down aircraft, and land defence buildings vs land units of 'natural counters' if you will.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

We already have another dimension of variation. It's called the physics engine. Lrn 2 physics and it will be obvious that all the options and possible permutations are already there.

Flat DR matters for making differences between fast and slow firing units, which Starcraft shows quite clearly with its low tech units. TotalA had no such system and PROVED such a system is completely unnecessary.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

If you want an Unit take less dmg from units shooting fast but the same dmg if they shoot slow armor makes it possible! It just gives a little more variation.
(Or an Unit that should do relativly more dmg to big Units than vs small ones)
Commanders got Abillities, don't they?

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

The Physiks are only visual, if they got no effect! In an game you NEED something, that simulates the effects of the Physiks. Therefore you need different weapon/armor.

Re: The idea of counters and how they work

I hope you understand that physical(ballistic) shots can miss.

You don't need armour for that.