Unstable Equilibrium Aversion topic

I agree with that. But what mechanics are there that can be used?
If a mechanic feels arbitrary or fits into the game can depend on a lot of things.
In a WW2 setting like "Men of War", where you win by holding the most flags the longest time, you could for example get a full refund or more when you lose your units. That will allow more comebacks while still escalating the battle. In the end you want to have units alive near the flags and if you continously lose the units you won't have units near the flag but will have to send them to the flags all over again.
An additional mechanic could be that you are only allowed to gain in X amounts of units as reenforcement so in the end you can't be wasteful but that would make the advantage more linear rather than exponential.

Yeah but if metal outcome from metal makers was reduced depending on how big army you got then obviously it would reduce the slippery slope. But that feels kinda arbitrary.

Now economy and army size in TA and SupCom gives "exponential advantage" I'd say. That is what gives the slippery slope.
If you look at a fighting game you can only gain "linear advantage". You can always beat the opponent even when you are behind. It is not like you have to perform 4 times better because the enemy got twice the tanks that you got.

That's the question, really. I personally can think of no way to reduce the 'slippery slope' effect, without making expansion pointless.

Indeed it can. TA, FA and PA, however, are all relatively simple concepts. Destroy the enemy to win. The rest of the game is about supporting that, and being awesome while doing it.

It would need reduce all income to 0, or become an active outgoing of resources, to actually be limiting.
At which point, why not just a unit cap?

RTS games are so very different to a fighting game though. They are about constant progression, strategy, choices, sacrifices.


I think we're starting to recycle points now, though.

Really, what people seem to want is for it to be harder to snowball. I've never had that issue personally. If someone got very far ahead of me in resources, it was my fault, not the games.
I should have limited their growth, not the game. Otherwise, who am I fighting against? The game or my opponent?

Now you are not using your imagination. Heres a simple way. When your metal production is higher than your enemy the metal production above his is halved. So if you have metal production of 100 and your enemy only got 50, your production goes down to 75 thus reducing the slippery slope. Having more expansion still gives you an advantage thus expansion is still important.
This feels very arbitrary though.

If the slippery slope caused by expansion is too heavy then map features doesn't become as important since you are more likely to establish a frontline and lose if you get pushed back and lose territory.
One of the best games in that aspect is NOTA on the Spring engine. Strategic manouvers are important and usually it is more important to use the terrain and sometimes a strategic retreat is favorable even if you lose territory.

Oh right. How could I have forgotten. If units drain a considerable amount of energy or metal to keep going then obviously the slippery slope will be reduced.
That feels less arbitrary.
Edit:Having twice the economy still allows you to field twice the army... Not that great slippery slope reduction.

You're forgetting the biggest solution of all:
The Commander.

Everything an empire is built upon depends on its Commander. If the most important options and decisions are centered around using the Comm, then size doesn't matter.

For example, a world may not be manageable without a comm, appearing as an automated base in the fog of war. This makes it much weaker against attack. A world might have limited access to the galactic bank without its commander, creating a HUGE liability for worlds that can not fend themselves alone. Isolation could be huge, with only the barest of ability to reinforce or mobilize between worlds. Upkeep mechanics can punish oversized fortresses while light bases remain easy pickings. There are tons of ways to keep teeth on small players and limit the steamroll ability of overwhelmingly large players.

Keep in mind that everything isn't going to be decided on just one world. The war ends when the enemy commander is dead, and no sooner.

Some of these suggestions are freakin terrible, automated bases and halved metal production etc

Terrible.

Go back to bed. The adults are talking now.

How about you think of the implications for your awful suggestions before posting them?

bobucles, thats supposed to tell us what? zordon might be a bit rush, but I also think that most concepts that are mentioned here to help bad players to win are just not good at all.

People should just understand that in a situation that shows no hope for winning anymore they should write gg and leave and not waste 10 more minutes of their life trying to win a lost game.

I don't think it's good idea either. Come up with something better yourself.

I'm not sure there's a problem. I am yet to see a compelling reason why this change is required. Comebacks were always possible if you were good, or your enemy made a mistake. Which is how it should be.

It's not a about helping bad players win it's about reducing slippery slope.
Better players are still going to be better players.
Slippery slope means that you get exponentially behind for each blow you take.
Taking away all slippery slope is like a fighting game where you can have a comeback even with 1% left, fighting it back blow by blow.

Sirlins' idea about it
I would argue that a game should always be exciting the whole game without you conceding victory. Although I'm not sure what kind of gamemechanics that would fit in PA without feeling contrived and arbitrary.
Offcourse when you are dying you can always look at the fancy explosions, think about why you lost or micro the hell out of your last units.

Comebacks are always possible until some point. The game shouldn't be decided by whom gets the first kill.
Typically, I would like the map/world domination to be important but not critical even late into the game. Just because the enemy hold 60% of the map and you 40% you shouldn't automatically lose because you control less territory than your opponent. In such games you typically fight in 20% of the map and the rest of the terrain doesn't matter.

Ok, say we have all these buffs to the losing team that people are proposing. As far as I can tell this will do one of 2 things. It will either not be useful enough and not affect strategy or it will encourage players to turtle in their base until they have sufficient power to wipe the other guy off the map in a single attack.

How is that balanced or fun?

Like sending units that just die to the enemy defence and being reclaimed?
The better player will obviously know how to win because he is a better player and avoid making mistakes that makes his opponent stronger.

Send them in waves large enough to do damage before they are destroyed.
Vary the unit types to find a weakness.
Uber have said no bubble shields, so that makes that easier.
Use mobile arty to deal damage out of range.
Target engineers to prevent them rebuilding
Flank them
Suicide air units to target specific defences to punch a hole.
There is always something to do.

I don't see a fair way of making the game dynamically adjust "balance", let alone a way of making the game identify the difference between a poorer player and a player whose equally skilled enemy just found a hole in his defences.
The only thing i would trust for balanced is a user-defined handicap chosen at the start of the game.

Thus the skilled player wins by not letting the enemy get time to recover from your attacks. Even though the wrecks could potentially turn the tide of the battle a skilled player will not fall into that trap.

Did I say dynamically adjust balance? Did I say handicap from start of the game?
No.
I said reducing slippery slope which means that a player has chance to have a comeback even when he is behind. How big should the opportunity to have a comeback be?
It can be discussed.
With the game ending when the commander is killed the weaker player can win the game even when he is far behind although a failed comsnipe might put him even further. It's an interesting mechanic that keeps the game exciting even when 1 player is having a huge advantage so long as the weaker player has some assets to perform a comsnipe.

And how can you do that without dynamically adjusting the balance?

You tell me.
If you call most of the proposals in this thread "dynamically adjusting the balance" I don't know. Otherwise read the proposals in the thread.
You would have to define what "dynamically adjusting the balance" means before I can answer that.

Nerfing income based on either your pop cap may be doable, except that in terms of pop cap an experimental is worth as much as a T1 scout.
Nerfing income based on other player's income.

You make the argument that you want it to be harder to snowball. Don't you want it to be easier to snowball? Once the winner is obvious why prolong it?


The above was the start of my reply. Then I got into reading the thread, took my own advice if you will.

Everything I have said, was about to say has been said about half a dozen times in the last 3 pages alone. It basically boils down to:
A - We can do this
B - But that isn't useful because the winning team gets that too.
A - We could do this
B - How do you justify doing something arbitrary based on a single stat (income, unit pop etc)
A - We can do this
B - Well actually that has been done in every single TA style game since ever, don't really see the point of bringing it up here.
A - Well....
B - Look, why do you want to do this anyway?
A - BECAUSE IT WILL MAKE THINGS BETTER
A - We could .. (and so it goes on)



Dynamically adjusting balance, phrase {adj, verb, noun} - To alter a players attributes/capabilities based on situational and arbitrary attributes on a frequent basis so as to obtain and maintain an equal probability of success for all participating parties.

The problem is that it is really hard (impossible) for a computer to tell which player has a higher chance of winning. Any simple mechanic to alleviate this, such as scaled resource income, will result in strategies based around exploiting these mechanics.

If you are playing against someone you know is of a different skill level than you, then you compensate by handicaps or by careful choice of who is fighting who. If you are winning by force then there are still other options available to your opponents, even so you shouldn't need to increase the power of your army as the enemy becomes weaker. All this would do is make factory take longer, which is the opposite of what anyone in this thread wants.

Like Warcraft3 you would need units to have different drain on the pop cap.

If resources scale and you for example get less output from each metel extractor the more mexes you have it would reduce the slippery slope.
10 mexes:+20
20 mexes:+35
40 mexes:+60
80 mexes +100
and so on with diminishing returns. No mex upgrades to keep it simple.
Now in a situation where 1 player is losing the front he might consider making a strategical retreat to an easier defendable position. Maybe he his Monkeylord is halfway built. Now if the punishment for losing a few mexes is less and the advantage of getting additional for the enemy is smaller than the player might make the strategical retreat and push out again once his Monkeylord is finished. Would you call this exploiting the mechanics?
I say it makes the battle more interesting as it gives the player more economic room to make retreats and waiting for some tech, or asset to finish without being punished as much because he lost some territory.

The point at which 1 player "obviously" has won is shifted away more from territory control and more onto the units in play and the worth of their strategical positions on the map.

Typically, the 2 biggest slippery slope factor in an RTS is how big your army is and how good your income is.
What about incentivizing map position over thoose 2? I guess you end up with World in Conflict, A bridge too far or something.

Anyway. There is no point in discussing this further unless we can think of some mechanics that fits PA.