Two things that must happen for balance

Pawz and I were discussing the issue (which we agree is really important) about the dilemma between space travel and terrain obstacle validity. I'd appreciate some thoughtful feedback on this, but please not just dismissive or poorly thought out comments. I really do think its something that needs to be addressed carefully.

This is a RTS game taking place on multiple planets. It stands to reason that often players will start the game on separate worlds, as opposed to starting all on the same world and then branching out from there. So I'm going to be working with a premise here that players begin the game on different planets.

Point 1: Traditionally in RTS games, the map's terrain has a major impact on how the battles progress. Hills, cliffs, islands, ramps, lakes, mountains etc all have a big impact on the mobility of your forces. These terrestrial obstacle features have a value in the game that would really reduce the variety of the game if they became meaningless.

Point 2: RTS games are games of escalation. Armies are built from nothing, progressing from light raiding and scouting units, all the way up to super powerful fighting machines and everything in between. Escalation management is very important in RTS games because you need to be able to defend against an army of ever increasing strength, and your forces will be up against ever more powerful defenses. When one player makes a mistake in his escalation decisions, the other player can take advantage of that and often win because of it.

Ok, so in a game where the players start on different planets, one of the most important aspects is going to be getting your units off your world and onto the enemy's. When does this happen?

Lets say space travel is more of an "advanced" thing, where you start out the game with ground forces, maybe a bit later build up a navy and air force. Boost your economy, tech up some and then get to the point where you can launch your units into space. Ok well guess what? This means that by the time the first skirmish takes place, both sides are going to be very teched up, and also likely have built a massive base and strong resource economy by taking advantage of all the time being unmolested by their enemy. In TA often a player who isn't all that skilled or competitive would request a "build time" of 20 minutes or something where the players would agree to not attack one another till they were "ready". Most people found being forced to play "sim city" for a half hour before they could even fight to be boring or just not what they wanted to do. Others like that sort of thing. Well, in this scenario, that won't even be an option! It will be every game. Not a good idea, as early skirmishes and even scouting won't even be an option.

Ok so lets say space travel is not an advanced thing, but an "early game" capability. Tech 1 stuff. So the above problem is solved, but what consequences are there? Suddenly you can launch units into space and land them anywhere you want on the enemy planet. No worries about his perimeter, or mountain ranges, or sea obstacles or anything like that. In fact, lets say you want to get to another spot on your own planet without all that messing about with walking or driving. Just launch your units to another spot on your own planet. Granted disabling that option in the game directly is likely a very good idea. But it still leaves the problem that you are permitted to land anywhere on the enemy planet, bypassing all terrain obstacles.

So we discussed this dilemma for a while and came up with the idea that perhaps space travel should take a long time. You launch your units into space, and they are not available for fighting for a period of time while they travel. This is one way of handling the problem of launching units onto your own planet vs just airlifting or driving them over. We figured that lengthy space flight (or disabling launching to and from the same world) is going to be necessary.

Next came the realization that if it takes a while to get your forces from your base, across empty space and into the front lines on the enemy world, what's likely to happen is you will be met with superior defenses. Why? Because in most RTS games escalation happens rather rapidly. If you send units off into space at the 5 minute mark, and they get to the enemy at the 9 minute mark, everybody's teched up by then and there's a fair chance these units became obsolete en route. The solution to this is to slow down escalation. I've always been a big fan of slower escalation anyway, and in our supcom mod we did just that, and it was great. Teching up should be a big deal. Both in time and resources. This means you'd launch your units into space and by the time they got to the other side, the enemy won't have advanced a huge amount. There's lots of reasons to slow down escalation but this issue of multiple planets really drives the point home. If escalation happens too fast, then it'll be fairly impossible to invade another person's world unless you make space travel super cheap and easy at which point you've nullified terrain features as valid map obstacles.

So the second thing that must happen for balance is to slow down escalation. There's a lot of ways of doing this, but this is not Dawn of War. The games are not 15 minutes long. And those short games which ARE that short will not be seeing advanced units. I think it requires the devs to make the mature decision (that many game devs don't) to accept that their more advanced units simply won't be built in "short" games on "small" maps.

Please discuss.

Why is there discussion of balance on a game that hasn't even been made?

I doubt that each player will get their own planet on most maps. The concept video shows two players on a single planet with a single moon and a few asteroids and the proposed 40 player mega-games discuss 10 planets. Two players with a planet each would be like playing an eight player map 1v1.

Because we know the premises to be true. Its an RTS game. There will be escalation. There will be multiple planets, where you move units between them. The rest is irrelevant because no matter what the rest of the details are, this premise and the dilemma it presents will need to be addressed. Doesn't matter that it hasn't been made yet.

I understand that its likely many games will take place beginning on the same planet, but again as I said, the premise in the scenario here is that players are not starting on the same planet. What happens in those cases?

You seem to have written a wall of text and missed the clear case of space travel being available at T1, but rockets being quite expensive. Why build 10 assault mechs and 10 launch vehicles/spaceports when you can build 150 assault mechs? Rockets would still be affordable for commander transport to moons, but not viable as army transports.

In the cases where the players have made the idiot decision to start on different planets they get a boring high level space invasion meatgrinder/race to control KEW game. Congrats.

Good points.

I think this is highly dependent on the extent of orbital units. Will we have unit transports or just engi/commander transports? Are there orbital defenses to prevent invasions?

If transport is cheap and fast and low tech, I could see it turning into ferrying from your factories to outside their base and attack, but that is making some wild assumptions. It could also be that only the commander can go, and it takes huge resources to do it, so have fun dropping onto your enemies planet.

So a question I would pose is:
What is Uber's intentions with the orbital units and interplanetary transports? (i.e. easy and fast, works like ferrying, is a royal pain, etc.) I'm not expecting stone tablets or the such, just something to guide the discussion to be more constructive.

Wait, wait, maybe there's something I'm missing here.

Why would you assume a 1v1 game where players start out on different planets would be a rush game?

I mean, I know we're going for awesome and all that, but come on, that game setup precludes the ability to have a quick game. If you want a quick game, start out on the same planet as your enemy.

Granted, I played more TA than SupCom so my analogy could be off, but that's like saying you want an 81x81 island hopping map to be entirely T1 land-rush based. It's not going to happen. Play on a smaller map.

I don't think the space aspect invalidates terrain, from what I understand there will be little to no 'combat' in space. It is merely a transport medium. the assault force travelling to the other planet must choose a landing zone, what location they pick will depend on
1. the actual terrain of the planet and it's strategic and tactical value.
2. where the enemy base is
3. what anti-orbital defence have been erected.
4. what their strategy with this assault is.

I'd say that space transport adds a layer of terrain, rather than rendering it meaningless. the LZ of any vanguard will be a critical strategic decision, do you aim for the other side of the planet, very far from the enemy base where he has limited visibility, but then has significant time you build force to counter your assault?
Or do you land closer catching him off guard, but weathering the anti-orbital fire? you could also choose to land somewhere isolated, like on an island, or high on a mountain.

The defender too has interesting decisions to make, you could funnel the enemy into predictable LZ's with anti-orbital guns and set up ambushes there, for example. obvioulsy what you can do is dependant on the size of the map and amount of planetary control the player has.

also the scenaio where two single players are vs each other from different planets sounds like plaing a 40k map in Supcom, there is a significant delay in getting to each other.

I disagree that we should slow down escalation. We should seek to keep units relevant from start to finish. T1 units should not be useless*. They should be proportionally powerful to their cost. So 10 T1 units should trade evenly with 5 T2 units that cost twice as much. In turn both should trade evenly with 2 T3 units. T2 should be a touch more efficient than T1 so that you can amortise the cost of teching and eventually make good on it. It shouldn't blow T1 out of the water and instantly be cost effective.

You've misdiagnosed the problem. The problem is that units go obsolete. Not that escalation means they go obsolete before they hit battle.

Tech pacing should be based around the army/economy/tech choices. If you sacrifice economy and units for tech you should die to any sort of aggressive play. If you tech while sacrificing economy to be safe then you should only be in danger against really flat out aggressive play. The various times and cost of teching needs to be balanced so that the timing window of aggressive T1 play isn't too large. At the same time tech shouldn't be so over powering that a player that opens aggressively has instantly lost if someone gets a T2 factory up.

*note you can have specialised units that will not be useful everywhere. Just that your core T1 units should still be good units right up until the end of the game. Proportional to their cost.

We should have complete confidence that when Alpha is released, we're gonna be able to help make things better for release.

This was a thought I had on another thread, can't remember which one exactly, but the essential thought was that one can only balance the game for expected circumstances. It was an AI thread talking about how much involvement was going to be needed in micro/macro, and folks wanted AI that could manage things on specific planets while the player was focusing on other things.

This seems to be a similar situation, where there are certainly mechanics that will feel broken when playing on a map bigger than the players are supposed to handle by themselves.

For the speed, I am not sure how to balance that. I agree with it not being instantaneous, but I also don't think that we have enough information to tell what is a "long" time or not. If the player doesn't have a lot else to monitor, then 30~40 seconds can feel like an eternity. If the player is overseeing a strike force, it may be 2~3 minutes before they come up for air.

As for escalation, with only two tiers, the goal as far as I understand is that there won't be a point when units become outclassed. It would just be that for a lower tier you'd need more units to account for the cheaper cost.

This would go back to picking a map size that reflected the assumptions in the game. We can't have big systems balanced for quicker 1v1 play, because then when you get the appropriate number of folks on it the game doesn't play right anymore and the balance is upset again.

Pro-Tip: Wait until at the very least the alpha is released before starting the everlasting **** storm of balance discussion.

Being able to make ships early does not mean you would do so if somebody else is on your planet. In a 1v1 on a single planet you are focused on not dying and are likely to have expansion hampered by raiders. If you are alone on a planet you can just naked expand and put a lot of resources in to economy.

Space travel can still be reasonably cheap as well as be a poor way to send units around a single planet. Trips could be one way, require resources and be slower than air transports. There could be anti-orbital weaponry that is more effective than AA.

What is wrong with these balance discussions? Of course we can't say much but these are on broad topics with new mechanics. I'm sure many people can see these basic implications of the mechanics so their worth can be discussed.

If we do same planet orbital, it should IMO be faster, but very vulnerable. RL example, sub orbital transportation is a <10 tech at this point, New York to anywhere in less than an hour, but there is exactly one simple path to do it and anyone with a calculator can figure it out. As opposed to 20 hour plane rides that can take almost any route.

What if a teleport structure can send through an army? You send a squad to escort an engi, and it builds the beachhead whereever on planet that you feel safe or convenient?

This is a very valid point for balance. I think that getting to space would have to be an early game capability. You can prevent quickly getting a game ending weapon though economy, making it prohibitive expensive early game. I also think that starting on different planets is a viable 1v1 game mode and should be at least somewhat common. It will lengthen the game a bit but every good RTS I can think of had larger slower playing maps. I disagree that you should make long flight times. It would make reinforcing an area difficult, and that's one of the main points of this sort of game. Instead I suggest that landing take a while. Doing so would leave the transport venerable. It also makes sense to allow AA to be able to hit landing transports. So long as they can't drop right into your base (and any decent player will have AA) there is no reason they shouldn't be able to land in an arbitrary location on the planet quickly. Now if the player who owns the assaulted planet wants to put a mobile AA unit with overlapping fire covering the entire surface so be it. It will take him resources and becomes a strategic decision, and isn't that the whole point of the game?

I don't think that we should regard a typical 1v1 game as being two players starting on different planets. What would seem to be more appropriate is to consider what is displayed in the teaser as a typical 1v1 match. if you have a 10 player game in a system with seven planets, three of which are gas giants, you can expect the 10 players to be scattered around the rocky planets, where they fight those that started on those worlds for resources, and eventually expand into space to fight the players that have won the wars for their starting worlds.

The OP's goal was not so much to debate how common the multi-planet 1v1 start would/should be, but to discuss the implications of it. Typical or not, someone at some point will want it, and the question is, what issues could/should there be?

Yeah, but shouldn't you know what you're getting into if you start a 1v1 on different planets? No matter how hard you try having an "early game" will be difficult if not impossible.

What IS a valid topic of discussion of how viable early space expansion is. I feel that as long as MASS orbital transportation isn't cheap, there shouldn't be a problem. IE, moving your commander or a couple of engineers early on should be easily doable. Moving an army, not so much.

Also as a side note, aircraft already invalidate terrain. The only thing sub orbital hops would change is the potential immunity to anti-aircraft fire.

I agree with all your points, cept the last one. I feel compared to aircraft suborbital should be: faster, expensive, vulnerable (to orbital defenses at least, maybe sams(high end ones?)), and difficult to just move around the map that way. It's a point to point system, not an exploration or maneuver system if that makes sense.

I agree that suborbital is different and should be used differently. My point was to one of the OPs major statements that suborbital invalidates terrain (which is true) and should be well thought out. But I wanted to point out that aircraft also invalidates terrain (and, IMO, isn't well thought out).