What can you do with one faction?

I believe it was more like 'Around 100+ units, but we'll try to cap it at 100'

Don't forget you've got orbital, gas giant, and metal machine planets to deal with too!

And on top of all that don't forget about Uber wanting to provide regular content post release, some of this will be new units as well.

Mike

Another game, Moonbase Commander, with the same "one unit pool" for your consideration:

http://youtu.be/cNabbqI99AQ

The "factions" have all the same units/weapons/buildings, but with aesthetic differences. It puts an emphasis on not just what units you have, but how you use them, since by the numbers each player has no distinct advantage over the other.

Depending on how many factory types there are, and how expensive factories are, we may see a certain amount of factory specialization show up that operates similarly to factions. This happens with Zero-K and, to a lesser extent, Evolution RTS.

This is what I was hoping that Uber would do. I like my units to have a very angular look to them. (Cybrans)

On another note, I hope that when we pick colors, Uber will let us pick a primary and secondary color for our units.

Chess has only one of set of units and they've done alright in terms of depth and longevity.

Look at Starcraft (1&2). The unit variety is absolutely crippled by balancing and the dev team spends an inordinate amount of time on balancing before and after the game is released because unlike real war, games have to ensure that both sides, thought very different, have parity. The new units that were to be introduced in Heart of the Swarm have been tinkered, fiddled and whittled down all in the name of balance. And they'll continue to be whittled and nerfed.

I like asymmetric factions, but they're very difficult to balance. And when all your dev team's effort is focused on balance you don't get team to work on things like the ability to throw moons at one another.

One faction still enables asymmetry but it comes out in play rather than in balance. You decided to build giant lumbering super tanks and I counter with billions of light armed mech marines (or whatever they'll be called). There, now you're protos and I am zerg. When a unit is OP reducing it's capabilities won't force a cascade of balancing on every unit and piece of terrain in the game like it does in SC2 or similar games when they nerf or buff a unit.

I would bet money this will be among the most commonly requested mods, and that they will be the most readily accepted by the core community. This won't be what we see out of the basic game, so make sure to push for solid mod tools!

To clarify, the issue was whether the feature is worth the development time and effort, combined with the fact that commanders will, in actuality, no matter how good the devs are at balancing, never be fully balanced across all maps, so it not only lowers the game's competitiveness but also lowers the value of procedural map generation. It's like Terran having certain exploits that make them OP on some maps, while Protoss are OP on others. Why tarnish the design with such headaches?

The sole rationale for the feature appears to be to give the player a sense of customization. (At least that's what I've been able to piece together - the arguments in the other thread seemed to be based on pooh-poohing my concerns rather than actually listing the advantages, if any, of the feature.) But cosmetic commander skins would do that too, without the downsides. Plus, if you are going to design and implement all these commander abilities, why not make them ingame upgrades? That would sidestep the balance issues, give an even better sense of customization, and improve the game with more strategic depth.

Less crucially, it also contradicts the fluff reason for the single unit set. If units have been refined to the most efficient designs, why not commanders too?

To further clarify, I knew from the start that this feature was never going to be Pay2Win. My opinion of Uber is much higher than that. Seems like a suboptimal design choice, is all.

Because this toolbox has Zerg, Protoss, and Terrans. All the options, all the exploits, all the stuff that is relevant is at the hands of both players. The Commander is certainly a powerful unit but alone will not be significant, and will not be (so far as we've seen) influencing any of their units at all. Anything about them which is special applies only to them, and until you both blow up all the planets and get into a 1v1 match on some tiny moon with only your Commanders, the 1v1 balance is irrelevant.

That's the strength of the "single faction": the weight of success is entirely on how you use the tools at hand, not in both picking the right toolbox and then trying to make it work based on the context of the situation.

This is probably because these arguments have been made over and over and over for the last 5 months, and each new wave of folks coming in disregard the previous arguments thinking they've got some brand new perspective. They don't. So the people who do stick around can turn acrimonious because its easy to tell when someone has actually done their homework and when someone is just spouting off. It's sad because on the off chance we do get someone who has done their homework, and does have something new to contribute, the signal to noise ratio will more than likely drown them out.

Grass is always greener. Perception is not reality.

Upgrades are a horrible solution, because they cannot be represented without adding waste to the game with extra units, extra modeling, or extra game mechanics, all of which then need to be balanced. Upgrades also increase the complexity because you then have to balance for their cost to benefit ratios on top of the actual benefit itself. Time also becomes a complicating factor, in that one can predict how much resources could be gathered and when upgrades would be available to purchase, and so the cost then also needs to be balanced to the time it would take to gather those resources.

Then you don't understand the fluff. An army of units must be balanced against an army of units. If you have different armies on top of that, it increases that complexity to also include the units both on your own army and the other army. Each individual unit must be balanced against all the other individual units for their cost, role, and ability. A Commander must only be balanced against another Commander, and even there they don't need to be balanced by a spreadsheet because player skill can't always be represented as a quantitative value, and how the Commander is used alone is going to be insignificant compared to how it is used in tandem with other units.

There certainly will be at least a "hundred" Commanders total, but if at the end of the day the only difference is how 4~5 attributes are shuffled, then the differences are not significant, and people complaining about them are not worth taking seriously.

Seems like you don't know what you're talking about.

It's sad commentary when the persistence of ignorance has done more to discourage Uber from their design choices than any valid positions or points.

Okay. This is a really important point, so let's just get it squared away. Balance is numbers and math. Nothing more. Balance happens after the core mechanics and unit interactions are established. Each new mechanic creates a new way to modify a unit, thus creating more unique ways for units to interact.

Numbers can not create balance, but they can reveal where it is impossible. That's why the most import part is having a wide kit of tools to tweak odd attributes. More specific stats allow more specific balance issues to be addressed.

For example, the Starcraft2 Hellbat is under fire for it's overbearing strength in drops. Changing its health or damage would screw it up elsewhere, ruining the point of the unit. Instead, the cargo size is getting increased, so that they're more difficult to drop. Balance.

I always see people bashing Starcraft 2 for it's balance.

Why can't they just enjoy the game in spite of such a problem that is frankly rather minor to the whole experience?

I do believe i respect Bobucles to be one of those with the biggest rational opinions on this forum so far. In the end, all commanders will have different weapon,armor and ability aesthetics but pretty much the same numbers. In that way its that easy to get everything balanced.

Because when you are in a competitive scenario, especially in a professional context, it is important to make sure the playing field is as level as possible before player skill is taken into account. Otherwise it's greatly discouraging to those who play competitively or who aspire to play competitively to practice, since their skill and practice no longer correlates with reward.

And before anyone goes off about competitive games being bad, bear in mind that video games still aren't seen as legitimate in general, and legitimizing them as sport will go a long way to helping that.

I played SC2 and about 80% of the updates were about balance.


As to what you can do with one faction? A lot.


People who are sceptics of the idea seem to think that all you get is a small amount of units and that's it, as if every PA battle is a Terran VS Terran.

It's not: we'll get a more expanded unit palette, and i sincerely doubt you'll be able to make all ingame units effective in 1 game and win. It's likely that choices have to be made, and where one guy chooses, say, Light tanks, the other can choose Heavy tanks. Or walkers. I imagine such systems to be present throughout PA: you -in a practical scenario- can not build all units and make use of all units, and your enemy is not a clone. So the battle will be different from the get-go.

That would be the case if all commanders had the same abilities, yes.

That's interesting. So the commander will exist in a dimension separate from all the other units, with no way to interact? That's what it would take to "not be influencing any of their units at all". What's your source on this?

Exactly. The problem is, the feature under discussion means there's no longer a single faction, so this is not a strength of the current design.

I can't help but notice that you failed to list the advantages of the feature...

And your point is...?

So balancing the commander abilities as pre-game selections is "irrelevant", but balancing the exact same abilities as in-game upgrades is "horrible"? Are you even trying to make sense? Most of your concerns are equally true or moreso for pre-game selections. In fact, balancing is much more "horrible" for pre-game selections since inter-faction difference brings with it a whole new dimension of imbalance. It's like trying to keep a sphere balanced on the center of a flat surface, instead of the center of a half-pipe.

Am I to understand this irrelevant ramble as a concession to my point?

As for your thesis, it's completely false (the commander exists in the same game with all the other units - why is he somehow exempt from balancing against them?) and compared with your other points, self-contradictory to the point of dishonesty. In your previous paragraph you said balancing commander abilities would be 'horrible', but now you're back to saying commander abilities don't have to be balanced at all.

The difference? One implementation of commander abilities, pre-game selection, is currently supported by Uber, whereas the other, in-game upgrades, is not. Your argument appears to be based not on any sort of rational thinking but on blind support for Uber's momentary design preference. I suspect that if Uber were to change their minds, it would suddenly be the other way around with you.

And thus concludes a string of self-contradictions, evasions and ad homs. What is it about this feature that makes people rush to its defense with such flimsy justification?

Frankly, I think this is the first case of fanboyism on the forum. Everyone is jumping to excuse the feature - yes, excuse, not advocate, nobody has listed its benefits yet - not because it's good (it's not), but because it's what Uber happened to go with, for now. Not really the most constructive attitude towards Uber, the game, or the board.

Neutrino has stated that all commander abilities (for the time being, anyway) will affect only the commander. Which means that any difference between commanders is only relevant to the commander, not to your units.

It'll only matter for the first few minutes of a game, tops, where the commander is one of your primary units.

Then again, it has also been mentioned before that they've been thinking about scrapping the feature to swap out commander modules entirely, but for now they want to keep it. It's mostly cool and a minor impact on the game, which is a worthwhile feature.

But it is not (and never will be) the case that the commander you pick decides the winner, so in that regard it's barely an issue. It's quite a big step from having one different unit to having entirely different available units.

You already gave the advantage yourself... giving people the ability to customize their commander. It's a powerful thing (otherwise people wouldn't be willing to pay $1000 for it) that barely impacts the game balance, which means it isn't a very expensive option.

Well I think we can discard the whole 'upgrades' issue as irrelevant considering that this is a successor to TA and SupCom, which didn't have upgrades.

Seriously, if you haven't played either of these you probably should, just to get an idea about what the developers are building off of.

Uhh......SupCom had you upgrading your mass deposits and factorys...and your commander.

I was talking about starcraft-style upgrades.