[WIP][SERVER][BALANCE]Corang's Tier-less PA Balance

I'd just like to point out that by unlocking everything at the start you're actually making a more complicated game, not a simplified one. Tier-gating off units and structures is one of the most valuable tools for stopping the player from being overwhelmed by initial choices.

If you want a flat-balanced single-tier system then that's fine, but please don't misrepresent it by calling it "simplified", because it's just not.

Using the spring engine, they made a game where everything is buildable by the commander. The commander can build a nuke.

And nano mentions the difficulty curve in that game, being a little higher because a newbie might want to build a nuke immediately, but it's a trap and the enemy can very easily defeat you if you chose it.

It should be obvious in my opinion though. I mean, argue simple or not, but I feel many games are simple yet I watch a lot of newbies fall into newbie traps that even I don't fall into when I am new.

That's an understatement and you know it. It's not a curve, it's a brick wall.

Really the amount of curve depends on experience with similar games. If you're going from SupCom to Zero-K, then you should know that game enders are probably too expensive to go for right off. If you're coming from COD and playing Zero-K because YOLO then you'll be more likely to go for that nuke first. But let's be honest here, no matter what you do a COD player playing an RTS is going to do something stupid. Really the best way to get players to avoid noob traps is to make sure that they play a bunch with the AI before doing MP, and making that AI only moderately difficult at first but scale well as the player becomes more skilful.

So I am told, but I didn't lie, I said the exact truth about the problem and the reason. "Giving people more wrong choice than right". There is no arguement, tiers if implemented correctly do prevent new players from thinking they have wrong choices. T1 should be "all the right choices anyway" and t2 should be "all the filtered out wrong choices from t1". If building it first is a really bad choice that would never win, move it to t2 so all t1 is all correct decisions.

There are other uses of sticking tiers in the game though. One Uber and RCBM uses is for "pacing". Where a unit is in fact strong enough to end a game if simply built off commander, yet is disallowed by a lump sum cost of time and metal across it's prerequisites. Boom bots being t2 would be an example of that, any of Uber's t2 units is an example of that.

I actually think Statera t2 units aren't so flagrantly abusive if allowed to be t1, but the problem then is the ambiguity factor, as in knowing or remembering what any unit does better than any other. If they are so close in power, why not just focus on building the better economy and hurling some blob of mish-mesh at the enemy anyway, odds are whatever the blob is will win the game...

Also, that assumes tweaked balance. I know some Statera t2 that is rather cheap for it's power, but a lot of t1 is really really cheap and really really strong. I wouldn't quote it and apply this disclaimer if I didn't know it was far from perfect, but that is the catch: Why the hell not, everyone go ahead and make cool mods, subtle or huge, orbital or army base, idrc just make ALL teh modz.

RESOLUTION: Just name it "Corang's tier-less PA"?

Because the last thing this game needs is a split player base. It's bad enough with Statera , vanilla, and RCBM all being in play (Although Statera has a monopoly on the server mod player base due to RCBM not being on PAMM, this might change when RCBM releases). If people start making more and more server mods then the player base will split to the point where the only way to get a game reasonably fast is to play vanilla. We want it to be easy to get into a game with the mod you want, and having lots of mods prevents this from being possible. IMO all of the smaller mods should really be used as testing grounds for features to be implemented into larger mods.

I am not too worried about smaller mods. Smaller mods are basically vanilla with some wierd twist. Modded maps for Red Alert 2 didn't split the playerbase, it pretty much just moved units around or started with wierd parameters like prebuilt bases or infinite eco. They pretty much were the game anyway.

PA should probably let people who just want to join whatever someone is pitching just join it. I don't agree that people would avoid every mod just because many small change mods exist.

If I scan list for matches, see one with a single added unit, i won't mind, I might not even use that unit and it might be pretty obvious to use or hardcounter that unit. Or it might be fun to test it out, whatever really.