Fixing the "Slippery slope"

Discussion in 'Game Play' started by Omneh, Aug 25, 2009.

  1. o_O

    o_O Member

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    ^thats the easiest solution, and is easier to figure out then special refs or tank recycling or whatever. Keep in mind though, there needs to be some amount of slippery slope. If the defenders get such an advantage that they can't be defeated then games either stalemate or territory means nothing because the game gets decided by a comm rush (remember back when dual standard arty was the Win Button? One team would be loosing, but get arty first, charge the comm and win because that was all that mattered)
     
  2. Mr. Weedy

    Mr. Weedy I will report bugs on the bug tracker

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    I just read the first post, didn't feel like reading 5 pages.

    I'll say a very simple solution.

    When you get an advantage, you'll also get an disadvantage. And finally if you hog too much something (aka the advantages) the disadvantages will actually become bigger than the advantages.

    Currently I see the Empires like this: If you get an advantage, you won't get any sort of disadvantages at all. And if you get and disadvantage you get only a disadvantage and not any kind of advantage at all.

    Thus this resulting in exponential speed of gaining more advantages for the winning team and gaining more disadvantages for the losing team.

    If a team gets an advantage, it should get an disadvantage too. If they get too many advantages, the disadvantages will actually grow bigger than the advantages thus slowing down the winning team.

    Or as I like to say it: if a team gets an disadvantage and they start to lose, they should get a small advantage too. Thus this braking down the losing team's losing and winning team's winning.

    If you TL;DR then...

    If something goes up, something should go down too to remove the exponential gaining of advantages/disadvantages.

    Fix'd.
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2009
  3. aaaaaa50

    aaaaaa50 Member

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    How do you propose that this advantage/disadvantage works? The only thing that I can think of is if destroying a heavy tank costs 10 tickets. Which is really stupid, but I can't think of anything else. :(

    Edit: Ok, here is a better idea. Have "Tank Tickets". Each team can only build a limited number of tanks. The bigger the type of tank, the more "Tank Tickets" it takes to build, in addition to the normal resources. This way, even if one team controls most of the resources, a defending team can eventually fight off the tank assault. This probably would work better if "Tank Tickets" regenerated slowly over time.
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2009
  4. Vulkanis

    Vulkanis Banned

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    How about a script / plugin that makes barracks and armories have More (like 25% more) health when your teams com vehicle is near it, so not only will it make it harder for bad coms to get ninja'd but then if the com is near the front rax it will enable it to have more health and mabye it will encourage coms to run over enemies every once in a while considering this will only happen near a rax where your troops will spawn!
     
  5. Jephir

    Jephir ALL GLORY TO THE JEPHIR

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    Exactly.

    Mr. Weedy, you could not possibly be more correct.

    A possible solution is vehicle/structure upkeep costs.

    For example, every active vehicle on a team reduces that team's resource income by a certain amount. This way, if the winning team is fielding a large amount of vehicles, the losing team has a chance of retaliating by destroying a large amount of enemy vehicles. Due to the upkeep costs, the winning team will not be able to instantly create reinforcement vehicles and as a result, gives the losing team a chance at a recovery.

    Note: This is income upkeep, not resource upkeep. There is no limitation to the maximum amount of vehicle buildable, other than the pre-existing server limit. There is only a reduction of incoming resources, not current resources. As a result, tank rushes are still possible, however the failure of a tank rush has greater repercussions.
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2009
  6. aaaaaa50

    aaaaaa50 Member

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    Yeah, sure, greater financial repercussions. Even if one team that has most of the refs looses TONS of tanks attacking, that team will be able to field more tanks soon and meanwhile, the other team has to contend with lower tickets, destroyed structures, lost ground, and less resources than their enemies. Unless the ability for everyone, regardless of resources, to create tanks is limited, then whoever has more resources has more tanks and forces the other team into a loss. I say that more resources should allow better tanks, not more tanks more often.
     
  7. BitterJesus

    BitterJesus Member

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    I had a pretty good suggestion long ago, but I think everyone took a giant shit on it.

    To summarize "Each consequently built refinery gives half the resources of the previous one" And if one ref is destroyed, the least profitable ref is taken off the income.

    This would solve the majority of the money problems, as even if the enemy has 80% of the map, they'll only have twice the resource income.
     
  8. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    Heh, as I said pages ago, I like it as long as it's implemented properly.

    I like how the discussion kinda restarted for no apparent reason. Yeah yeah we know every "advantage" should have some kind of cost, that's called fundamental balance. The key is to properly create risk and reward in a balance. Too much reward and you make a steep slippery slope. Too much risk and you end up with walls and turtles everywhere.
     
  9. flasche

    flasche Member Staff Member Moderator

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    there are two problems with this:

    .) the battle for refinaries is a essential part of empires.
    .) refinaries that are not close to the base or dont output lots of resources would be ignored.

    while i cant prove the first one, i just consider this common sense. i at least can try to prove the 2nd point.

    lets say a map has 10 refs, all of them give 1 res/sec. a team that holds 5 of them would gain about 2 res (1.940625 to be precise). a team that would hold 2 would still get 1.5. the .5 resource difference wounld really justify an intense battle for them. in the end you would get the closest refinaries that can be defended best and ignore the rest. this will stay almost the same even if you increase the output.

    and to compair this with upkeep.

    a upkeep cost on the other hand wont have this problem. let take the same map. 10 refinaries. lets say a full base + 10 heavies cost you 80% of your income, while a normal base and like 2 lts or apcs cost only 10% income.
    so the team with the 5 refs get ~1 res with tanks and secondary base but would, on the other hand get 4.5 res if they only reach the 10% upkeep limit.
    its similar with 2 refs. but i think you can do the maths on your own.

    also i dont think that halfing, or modifying the output of refinaries by a certain amout, would be very intuitive at all. upkeep on the other hand could be indicated by ONE additional number right next to the income.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2009
  10. Empty

    Empty Member

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    Not to mention your refineries would never pay for themselves.


    It'd actually be mor eintelligent to cap about 2 refs and then sit on them.
     
  11. aaaaaa50

    aaaaaa50 Member

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    Sometimes, it feels like I've never made a point to anyone on these forums, ever. Actually, it feels like that all the time. *Sigh*

    The thing with trying to balance or limit the resources is that the problem isn't how resources are distributed, it's how resources are used. Unless a map has only a few resource nodes, the team that gets the majority of resource nodes will have the constant stream of 10 tanks, while the other team will slowly loose ground until they turtle and die. It's not what always happens, but that's the standard Empires scenario.

    :(
     
  12. Mr. Weedy

    Mr. Weedy I will report bugs on the bug tracker

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    One method which I thought about was money income vs. research points income.

    I'll try to put it short so people actually read it but if you want to hear long story, just ask.

    Research would cost money and research points. The amount of money required to do research would be lowered a bit to compensate better with added research points and to actually help the losing team better which we want to achieve (aka brake down the winning team's winning and losing team's losing.)

    And how this basically works?

    Very basically, the more refineries you have, the less research points you will get. This way it wouldn't be self-evident to rush as far as possible and capture as many refineries as possible and get as much money income as possible.

    This would actually force you to think whether you want all the refs possible or not because if you have less refineries you get more research points and get more research done BUT you will have less vehicles on the field. OR you can choose to rush and get all the possible refineries out there and get shit loads of money and a lot of paper tanks on the field but almost no research because the research point income would be just a tiny fraction of the income which you would have when you had only 0-2 refineries.

    This way the losing team which has only 0-2 refineries left could actually have a chance to come back and maybe even win the game if they just held the ground enough long and were walled in enough well to get some good research done.

    Whereas if the other team didn't think and capped all the refineries, they could actually start to even lag behind in researching and thus they could actually lose the game if they weren't careful with the capping of refineries. They would simply lose because they didn't have enough high research point income because of all those refineries and money they had and thus they couldn't match the, a moment ago, losing team's amount of research.

    Of course the losing team STILL would have less chances at winning because winning requires having much vehicles on the field and they would STILL have LESS money to get vehicles on the field than the winning team but they would have higher chances than in current empires.

    TL;DR version.

    More refs, less research points.
    Less refs, more research points.

    Usually losing team has less refineries, thus they could do a comeback if they held the ground enough long to get more research points and get better research done than the winning team. Thus they would actually have a chance to come back but it still wouldn't be so clear could they do a comeback because winning a game requires having many tanks on the field which the losing team might couldn't affort.

    (However the might couldn't affort part should be written. :P)
     
  13. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    a good solution would be to make the commander generate X resources

    whereas X is 50 % of the total resources on the map

    if there for example are 6 refineries *1 = a total ref output of 6

    each commander would give (6 'the total res possible /2 'half of it) = 3 resources extra for free

    if each team has an even portion of these refineries, each team would gain 3 resources for the refs, and 3 resources for the commander

    if 1 team has all the refineries, it will have 9 resources, while the other team will have 3 (only the commanders)
     
  14. Mr. Weedy

    Mr. Weedy I will report bugs on the bug tracker

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    Blizzerd. I'm failing to see the point in your post where you help the losing team or brake down the winning team's winning.

    All what I see now is that you give more res to the team which already has higher res income and only small res boost to the team which already has small res income.
     
  15. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    wat, no, the total map income possible from ALL refineries is devided by 2, and this is what each commander generates automatically (without any ref placement needed)

    so each team gets a standard ref income, and refineries margin differences of owning all refineries = 100% of resources, and other team 0% resources is reduced to owning all refineries = 75% of resources, and other team 25% resources


    in short, having slightly less refineries then the other team will be a far smaller handicap then it is currently, and if you own no refineries, you are still disadvantaged big but not to 0 % resources
     
  16. Mr. Weedy

    Mr. Weedy I will report bugs on the bug tracker

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    So are you saying that...

    Let's say if the total map resource income is 10.

    Both teams get half of the refs. That's 5 res income for each team.

    Now the comm will get half of the whole map's possible res income. Which would be 5 too.

    Meaning that both teams would get 10 res income over some time unit.

    Now. If the refinery amount went so that other team got 60% of the refs making their res income 6 res/x time units and other team's res income would go 4 res/x time units. Then we add the comm solid res income there which would make the amounts finally 11 res/x time units for other team and 9 res/x time units.

    Basically... (if I understood right now) where's the disadvantage in this?

    The winning team will still get more res than the losing team and the winning team doesn't gain any disadvantages from having more refineries.
     
  17. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    why would the winning team need disadvantages? it just makes the advantages for having more refs smaller, but still big enough to make you lose the game if you have only 1/3 of refineries, and also it makes it so that you never lose all of your income so last moment recoveries are ALWAYS possible, since as long as the commander lives you can get a little income
     
  18. Icely

    Icely Member

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    As I see it one problem is that an advantage in resource intake will accumulate and eventually even if the losing team took back half the map they'd still be a heavy disadvantage. Rewarding the winning team with a cumulative advantage won't quickly tip the balance, but once it is tipped it is very hard to level. But, the resource nodes can't just be removed or heavily negated because that would remove the territory control aspect of the game.

    So what if resource nodes offered exactly what they represent, territory control, such that a team would not be able to build bases in an area unless they had possession of the resource node? Or for coding simplicity have a building limit that increases with each refinery held.

    The basic idea being to reward territory control with a noncumulative advantage. I'm sure there are any number of implementations and I'm not suggesting one over the other at this point. This is just one I thought of.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2009
  19. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    I believe BitterJesus' 50% reduction is too severe. I personally am more in favor of something like a 10-20% reduction. No map has more than 10 refs (minus money map) so worse case at 20% reduction you would generate ~10% of the usual ref rate. This is also why we said there has to be a minimum generation threshold, either a % or a flat res rate.

    Perhaps a variable set by the mapper and server (on a per-map basis) for this would be useful. Of course, we need a way to easily show what the current value is.


    Then again, upkeep, as already mentioned, is a much more widespread system, easily trackable, and scales very nicely. A WarCraft3 upkeep system with different tiers would work beautifully, especially since we have a hardcoded cap on stuff like vehicles. A linear adding system could have issues since too many high-upkeeps would max out at 100% and then the rest are effectively upkeep-free, but they just have no income.

    Interesting for a huge suicidal push that better work or die.
     
  20. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    I don't see how that's going to help.

    If the winning team has more resource income they are going to be able to afford more upkeep and therefore field more tanks than the losing team, which is exactly the situation we have now.

    The obvious solution is to design the maps so that the further towards the enemy base a team pushes, the harder it is for them to continue, which means removing all the advantageous things along the route, like refs, and only including things like base locations, which allow the team to solidify their hold on the area but which, if the team doesn't actually manage to make the final push, won't bring them progressively closer to victory like a res node does.

    Holding a res node over the enemy makes it easier and easier to win as the resource gap widens, which occurs constantly over time, so stalling an assault only means the next one will be easier.

    Removing resources from the middle of the field would stop that, and map design which favours the defenders would mean that in addition to that lack of advantage, the attackers grow steadily more disadvantaged the closer they come to the enemy base.

    The natrual progression of technology should serve as the destabiliser, as people get heavies with nukes and rails and arties the terrain advantage becomes less and less of a benefit, because the power of the fighting has escalated so that only other tanks will stop the enemy, that stops stalemates.

    The overall result should be that the initial game pushes the teams to the middle, because to push far past it would require an enormous skill advantage on one team, but as the game progresses that push becomes weaker and the teams even out more. It could then progress to a very unstable stage where the element of chance comes in more strongly (sudden death), or it could end in a by points (tickets) or even a draw, depending on what you think would be least annoying.
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2009

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