Unstable Equilibrium Aversion topic

The mechanic already exists. It's called the commander. All the limitations, strengths, and vulnerabilities are going to exist regardless of how many extractors or planets any player has.

But that doesn't reduce the slippery slope in terms of economic or army terms.

If you can lose your commander at any time due to a well planned snipe, then yes it is negating the effect of the slippery slope, to some extent.

Killing enemy commander. Checkmate!
Chess is still a game with slippery slope.

Edit:

Bring something new to the table please.

Then stop claiming something is otherwise than it is.

In general, the only effective means of curbing slippery slope is by penalizing the winning player in such a way that if he wants to avoid the penalties, he has to give up what gives him the advantage in the first place. Diminishing returns is the best example of this. I therefore submit mass and energy production should have diminishing returns for producing more (aside from getting into the local vs global economy thing, which messes with this in and of itself). I also submit that armies should somehow have diminishing returns, whether it's implicitly designed as a result of other factors or explicit mechanics are used.

I'm sorry, but I still don't understand why people think diminishing returns is a good thing.

It limits growth and expansion - a bad thing in a galactic domination game, dont you think?

There would be a point where pushing out to acquire a planet is pointless, as the resources gained from it would be negligible to the point that you are actually losing resources to defend it.

If a player is able to push out, take control of a resource, and defend it, why should he be penalised for it? Seriously, please please please stop devaluing player skill.

As I said previously, I should win or lose a game because I was better or worse than my opponent, not because the game kept handing out tools to the weaker side.

Diminishing returns already exist. Large numbers of worlds naturally become more unwieldy to manage. Transferring units between worlds will naturally become more involved and difficult. Interspace combat is a great arena to place major limiters such as with expensive/slow transit, expensive siege units, and a major defending world's advantage. Limiting long distance travel to a single commander will naturally make galaxy sweeping moves more difficult to do.

Any form of local economy will place huge limiters on economic growth and prevent snowballing. At the same time, it can be used to make a local weakness that can be exploited without overwhelming force. Engineers help to an extent, but they'd still grow exponentially without something extra (like energy) to keep it in check.

Lastly, the Commander is always going to be a limited resource. The less that can be done without a comm, the less important it becomes to colonize a billion worlds and drag the game out. While something like this would be contrary to the purpose of a full game, such limiters would make quick games feasible.

He's not being penalized for it any more than the diminishing returns from continuing to add fertilizer to a land is "penalizing" fertilizer usage.

To be honest, probably the best way to go about allowing comebacks without strange mechanics is by generating a huge gap between minimum unit efficiency and maximum unit efficiency.

If a tank, depending on when, where and how you use it, can deal somewhere between 100 and 120 damage to a target in a battle, then the guy with more tanks will win. No matter how you engage his army, you'll get destroyed.

However, if that same tank could do anywhere from 100 to 5000 damage depending on when, where and how you use it, it suddenly is totally up to how you use it. If you make the most of your units and your opponent fails to (because you outsmart him) then you suddenly win.

Something as simple as +100% damage when hitting a target in the rear would make comebacks easier, as it means a clever attack with a smaller army will still result in victory.

Making good use of this simple concept could be everything needed to turn the game from slippery slope to an exciting showdown to the last minute. (And having a Commander which ends the game on death is a perfect example of this concept even. Add a few more, and there you go.)

**** NO.
Don't make the resource system more complex by introducing diminishing returns.

Such a method would need to be very controllable, I can see it drifting to a heavy randomness quickly, which would be pretty bad.

You should look at overdrive in Zero-K. Complex mechanics with powergrids and diminishing returns as metal extractors are overdriven with energy from the powergrid to increase their metal output.
Yet using it is simple as you just needs to build power plants near the mexes and connect the powergrid by building lines of power plants for maximum efficiency.

Now I don't think this mechanic prevents slippery slope until lategame when the map has already been divided.

In Zero-K the stronger units are relatively slow compared to the raiders so that is also a mechanic that reduce slippery slope since by the time the slow units have reached the enemy they will have had time to build counters.
Although on some open maps it can also result in raiders determining the game because slower antiswarm units won't be able to prevent raiders from raiding the expansion because usually you can get 3 raiders for the price of 1 antiswarm unit meaning the antiswarm can't be at all places the raiders are.

Could be interesting to see if slower antiswarm units with similiar weight/cost as raider would reduce the slippery slope drastically.

what game?

this isn't my experience, I play an RTS where situational U-turns are commonplace and orrur many times during the course of one match.

EDIT : Diminishing returns and overdriving metal extrators encourages turtleling ALOT.

Please stop resurrecting very old threads - the last post was 6 months ago.

If one person gains an advantage, and can properly seize upon it, then they're better then the other guy and deserve to win. I don't see why we should handicap someone for being better. Also comebacks and misplays are very, very common on their own, people generally don't full capitalize on advantages or aren't aware of them all the time in any competitive scene.

It is fully possible for everyone to seemingly have an advantage early, and lose it and the game, no reason to give anyone an advantage ever through handicaps. It would just create situations where players would take losses on purpose or could be more careless because a system would pick up the slack, which really isn't a viable option in a strategy game.

sorry

Mike said to use search so I did.
In any case I haven't seen you here yet and this is a brand new one.

We shouldn't come down too hard on people necroing threads. In this forum, the desired policy is that users should search about a topic before creating a redundant one. If that's the case, then people who want to take part in a discussion that has petered out are going to end up having to necro a thread if they have something to say. I've been in other forums where the opposite policy was in place. Necroing a thread was seen as worse than creating a redundant one, thus there was a lot of repeated discussion, but no digging up of old topics.

However, tatsujb, if you're going to bring back an old thread, then you should really ask yourself if you have anything new to contribute to the discussion. The reason why these threads died out is because the key points have already been made, the lines of for and against had been established, and not enough new thoughts were being added to the discussion to maintain interest.

If you have read one of these older discussions in full, have noticed that there is an interesting point that nobody had brought up, and you are ready with a well thought out and presented post on the matter, then by all means, re-open the discussion. If not, then you should properly let them lie.

I actually do have an interesting point that nobody has brought up yet.

First off, I am of the belief that a slippery slope should be minimized. Reclaiming wreckages is a nice addition which seems to give the loser a slight "advantage", but it's still not enough.

The way I see it, the best way is with the aforementioned concept of high-risk, high-reward. Games like Starcraft 2 tend to have rather linear gameplay progressions with a few major, known strategies. The number of factories, mineral gatherers per factory, etc. is all calculated down to the mathematical constant, and most skilled players basically do the same "build, rush, harass, expand, etc." strategy, with small changes.

Ultimately, in games like this, one small mistake costs the game. We don't want this in PA. Or at least, I don't like the sound of that kind of game.

Which brings me to the solution. Bring more flexibility to the game. More toys to play with.

Let me give some examples. The idea of smashing asteroids into planets is wholey a high-risk high-reward tactic -- do it right and your enemy's key economy is crippled. But it takes a lot of economy, time, etc. to do this, so it's high-risk. And there are counters: enough nukes could blow the asteroid to small enough pieces that they just fizzle in the atmospohere.

A great example I can think of is this. Suppose one team is winning. A fight is raging where a planet is up for dispute. As team A begins to be beaten by team B, they run the risk of losing the planet. So, they launch their CO and some key units into the asteroid belt, where they try to rebuild their economy. Then, they order their remaining builders on the planet to build a fuckton of engines on the planet such that it sends it on a trajectory into the sun.

Now, the skilled player can recover. They can take out the engines soon enough. They can counteract the force with more engines. They can take out the enemy quick. They can go to the asteroid belt and track the enemy CO down, or use their short-lived economy on the planet to repopulate somewhere else. But it remains that the loser can always pull some crazy stunt.

Crazy stunts are what will make the game awesome. Overpowering the enemy with 1,000,000 bots will make the game only kind of awesome. But building 50 lobbers on the dark side of the moon and then using thrusters to spin it around to the other side turning it into a virtual orbital death star raining fire upon the planet... that will make it awesome. All Uber needs to do to make the theoretical slope less slippery is put some metaphorical precarious ledges and ladders on the slope, with metaphorical thruster jets to climb over the metaphorical hill to make an awesome comeback. To do this, just make the game mechanics as flexible as possible, and let the players' creativity be the limit!

I agree with OP insomuch as early success should not necessarily translate into future success. Snowballing victory and spiralling defeat are pratfalls to be avoided. From a competitive perspective it's not fun when the game is decided in the first few minutes, it puts a heavy emphasis on an otherwise trivial part of the game and undermines later gameplay. This problem is difficult to avoid for RTS in particular, when map struggle is the game and map control has intrinsic benefits. In genres like FPS this is less an issue because death is essentially a reset and the advantages afforded to you from not dying are not that great. I suspect that's a big reason why FPS has come to dominate the eSports scene. RTS probably can't emulate the FPS respawn mechanic but there are other approaches. For example, the game could be designed in such a way that the advantages afforded from success are not always directly impactful to the rest of the game.

I don't mean giving disadvantaged players some kind of handicap. Rather, I mean designing the game in such a way that success doesn't always directly translate to future success. How would could that be done? Well, if players are afforded a breadth of tactical and strategic options then a loss on the land may not necessarily translate to loss overall. If the player who lost land shifts focus to air then the paradigm of the game is shifted, tanks aren't too good aganst bombers. People like to harp on hard counters but the reality is they allow the paradigm of the game to change and afford a much greater variety of valid strategy and tactics. So in a word: options.