Chris Discussion

Discussion in 'Game Play' started by spellman23, Nov 5, 2009.

  1. recon

    recon SM Support Dev

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    Without it, Empires wouldn't be unique, and would probably have less players then it has now.
     
  2. RoboTek

    RoboTek Member

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    I am going to paint two pictures here. One is the image that I wish for, another is the image of which Chris preaches. Neither is inherently invalid, but I do not like the game he describes.

    Chris has a vision. In this vision the players are all individuals who form a greater whole. Individuals progress over time in this game by acquiring resources. One might equate this to something very similar to 'leveling up' in an RPG, only it begins again each round. As the round progresses individuals gradually obtain better technology as they fight towards a goal. Players are free to choose whatever techniques they prefer to pursue this goal, and when one player does well the team does well, though their benefits for the whole are far less than those for the gifted player. Overall, the team grows together, but unevenly. One might equate it to something similar to the Aliens in natural selection.

    The result is a task force of a few excellent individuals leading the way for a generally disorganized hoard of lesser players seeking individual glory. The strategic advantages that these few individuals can grant are limited, therefore they are not as remarkable as a few good men currently are. A war is fought, and gradually the team pulls together and wins. Strategy is not really applied beyond 'to rush or not to rush' and the predominant factor for victory is the organization of troops. If commanders exist at all in this vision they are the lowest of the low. Menial troops assigned to the dregs of construction. They might receive special abilities if they remain in the game for long, leading their troops with an array of nearly supernatural powers.




    In my vision, gameplay becomes something similar to allegiance, if the only tec base was a ShipYard. Commanders define the very nature of combat for their team with their research choices. People follow the will of the commander, not because they choose to but because they have no choice. Just by being an effective unit they will be playing into his plans and highly restrictive research decisions. Organized attacks that use up large portions of the teams resources are important and required. Gambits to deprive the enemy of funds are risky, but often result in significant long-term advantages.

    The result is terrible scorn for most newbies, but a learning curve far more realistic than in most high-end strategic games. Commanders are respected because their role is difficult, and good commanders can mean the difference between success and failure for the team. Strategic placement of defenses and adjusting research and plans to the map are critical to success. Newer players are assigned to more regulatory jobs until they learn the basics of the game. It is easy and frequent to mutiny against the commander and for a commander to place restrictions on specific players.
     
  3. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    I would have thougth 5% commander 95% team would be infinitely more logical considering that is almost exactly the distribution of players on a large server.

    I would actually expect everyone to just throw themselves at the enemy without much thought, as this is the general FPS approach to problem solving, on occasion you might get a squad working together, on quite a few occasions you should have good squad leaders who drop powers a lot and the occasional building (it's like being a caster in an RPG, cast buffs on your lot, throw fireballs at the enemies) so all players should experience some sort of teamwork at least once, or at least squad leaders nuking players with arty which can look like teamwork if you don't think about it much, but by and large I do not expect it to be used, because I do not expect anything to change the general attitude of the FPS market.

    If 'unique' gets players empires should be swimming in them, TF2 shouldn't have any, CSS should be somewhere in the negative, spore should not have been the utter failure it turned out to be, call of duty should not have made it past united offensive.

    Playability is what makes games popular, not uniqueness.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2009
  4. Ikalx

    Ikalx Member

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    If it's 5% commander and 95% team, then it's the same throughout (1/20th), right? If a commander has the same weighting as everyone else, is there a point in having a leadership role at all?

    I thought the point with having a commander is that it is a heavier burden with a greater responsibility and also greater influence on events. I agree that the commander having the lion's share isn't ideal but there should be a way to preserve the commander still being useful and giving an edge without reducing the role down to the equivalent of "just another class".

    Currently, the commander categorically cannot win herself and is completely reliant on the team. The team on the other hand have only a small chance to win without an adept commander which is the part that fails. To combat that, we need to pimp the role of the infantry and individual a whole lot and add in a heck load of things so that they can carry on without a useful commander, but in a way that doesn't just take everything away from the commanding role. To do this, you need a system in place that rewards skillful play and teamwork (alongside rank points) but instead of just giving personal combat bonuses, it should give specialist elements that are independent of the current level of research and resources.

    It's a rough idea only, but this would be the ideal place to shove all the things that don't quite have a main role in the game. If we stick to lights, mediums, arties and heavies available through regular play (APC's too), then we could add things like spawning a sidewinder or mkII (which admittedly eclipse mediums and should not be in the tree) and other vehicle designs, along with outposts, gun turrets and bunkers...all the kinds of things we know should be in the game but aren't yet. As well as boosting the squad power repertoire.

    Calling down one of these features through a personal-squad res/point system would enable infantry to work on their own, regardless of whether or not the commander is slow. It would not solve the bad commander issue, but would mitigate it somewhat. The goal is to solve the problem, not sidestep the issue and say "that's broken...which makes it useless". If we do that, we are fundamentally changing the game and i'm convinced it will not be anything like it was intended. Pimped versions of standard FPS's already exist, Empires is interesting because it takes a step in a relatively new direction..and it's hard to progress precisely for that reason.

    Of course, that's just the way I see it. I don't necessarily have to be right.

    Edit: I guess in the end the question is whether you wanted a regular FPS with customisable tanks, research and spawnable buildings...or if you think Empires is more.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  5. Sandbag

    Sandbag Member

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    empire with no commander just wouldn't be empires. Plus discussing such an idea is not constructive as it would only be in a fully blown conversion that. The dev team wouldn't even consider such a conversion.

    What we seriously can do is take the empires with a commander concept and improve on it, and there is plenty we can do in that department.

    I have this stupid idea that if we discuss good ideas which are very possible over and over again some time the devs will actually implement them
     
  6. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    The commander is one player on a team of twenty or so, therefore he should have the same risk-reward element as the other twenty people, the other twenty players are no less important than the commander, collectively they are twenty times more important because there's twenty of them.

    If you build a game that is anything other than 5% about the commander then the game becomes 'twenty people prance about for the amusement of one player'.

    The commander is useful, it provides the means by which many goals in empires are accomplished, if we didn't have a commander currently we would not have tech progression, or buildings, and empires would not support teamwork any more than any other FPS, it would simply be counterstrike on bad maps.

    However, the commander is not the ideal way to accomplish those goals, because the commander is unreliable, and too much focus is put on the commander because he is, after all, only one player among many. If you can find a way to do reliable building placement without requiring a commander, why would you not? It shifts the weighting back to the other players and is far more reliable, which makes it a categorical improvement for the other 20 players on the server at the possible detriment of the occasional commander who simply likes being the cog upon which the entire game turns, but that is a really tiny group of people compared to all the people who stand to benefit from the change.

    Similarly, if you have a way to do tech progression that not only is more reliable than the commander, but allows for individual choice so players can pick the things they want to use and therefore will enjoy more than the other options, and which allows new possible team strategies where groups of players can perform their own sub-roles for the squad or team, while simultaneously perfectly supporting unthinking pub-fighting, that's also a categorical improvement for the majority of players.

    If you have command roles reassigned somewhat to squad leaders, you not only expand the squad-play teamwork capacity but you give people a doorway into full scale commanding and give perfect scalability to the system, because the more players you have, the more commanders you have to cover them, so each player keeps a good amount of command-attention. It also creates another role to play where people might not want to do global strategy but would love to do micromanagement of a squad, again a categorical improvement.

    CSS has none of these things and I don't know of any other game that does apart from maybe NS which empires has always had some similarity to. It would still retain much of the empires gameplay and competitive players should still have no problem with organisation because most PUGs that I've played do all their organisation over ventrilo anyway, and already divide people up by squads to perform tasks, if anything this should be even better for organised team play while also being far better for general public play which currently simply does not work full stop. There are no downsides to this.
     
  7. Ikalx

    Ikalx Member

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    Except that you virtually remove the commander. Chris, what your saying isn't stupid, it's basic, but a main element of the game is the commander role. Now if you could remove those completely critical gameplay elements and give them to infantry but replace them with something else that still means there's a fun commander role waiting, i'd be with you on this. But so far, your suggestion is just "take these things away from the comm, they should never have been with him in the first place", but while that may be true, you're just going to remove the commander role doing it your way...and then it becomes a different game entirely. Not Empires.

    If you can think of useful things that could fill the commander role instead, then that would be ideal. Because at the end of the day, almost everyone else playing the game wants a useful commander role in there - it just would be nice if it wasn't the most crucial in the game.

    Edit: What i'd really like to see is the commander role being akin to a player taking over a sentry turret - the player can make much better decisions like shooting the Engineer just out of range and so on, but the turret can equally function fine without him, although not optimally. That's a bad metaphor...but you get the point.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  8. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    No, buildings research targets and tanks are main elements of the game, the commander is only a main element for one player and as a method of achieving those things.

    Commanders only drop buildings near ref nodes or as siege points, which players can do themselves using this system, as well as dropping them anywhere else if novel strategy is desired, commanders don't give move or attack orders they just give wallhacks, which I can automate, commanders only research the best tree which players can do themselves, except other trees may become useful simply because not everyone has to use them, a single plasma tank in a group of taks is useful, an army of them is pointless, a single arty is useful, and army is pointless, with player research these things become possible. Nothing is being lost here.

    The commander does not command, the commander never has commanded in any way that cannot be done by any player on the server with a microphone, the commander simply operates game mechanics which can be done in other ways, you lose nothing because nothing existed in the first place, except in rare occasions where everyone elects to be commanded. There would be nothing stopping someone getting in the comm view and giving orders or directing the team over VOIP which is more 'commanding' than currently occurs, and squad command is encouraged and widely available.

    Why does everyone want a useful commander role in there? Do they intend to play as commander? If they do then there is a problem because only two people per server can do that, no matter how wonderful you make the commander you only please two people per server, and if you make the commander important at the detriment of the game in general, you make two people happy at the expense of fourty people, and that is a ridiculous idea. Squad commanders are a better idea than that because that means more people can command if they want to have the experience.

    If they desire a commander because they want to be commanded, well my system has far more provision for that, by removing the need for the commander to operate game mechanics you leave more time for actual comanding, as in the they can order people around, squad commanders can do micromanagement and team commanders can do global strategy, if indeed such things matter to most players which I do not believe they do, but still I don't see any reason to remove provision for them if there is no reason to. You can incorporate overlays for command views which show the general control (overlay a blue and red tint which is projected from all allied and enemy units) so commanders can more easily see how the battle is going, I have no objection to the expansion of command tools as long as they do not interfere with the game for other players.

    By taking these required tasks out I improve the game, by adding more important things back in (and to be 'useful' they have to be important) you only reconstruct the original problem and increase the overall game complexity without need.

    As I said, the only people who stand to lose out are the few people who will always command and like being under huge amounts of pressure and always do it right, and if it comes to a toss between them and everyone else, who do you think it's rational to side with?

    There is a commonly held belief that 'the commander is what makes empires' and this is not rational, thinking about it more thoroughly will reveal that the commander currently operates all the visible mechanics that make empires empires, but the commander itself does not make empires. If you took the commander out and kept all the mechanics operational, it would still be empires, you would still have all the buildings being placed and the tech being unlocked and the targets and the fighting over resources and everything else you currently get, except you'd get it more reliably and more freely. The only part that would suffer would be you would no longer have an HSM surrogate whining nasally over the mic at you, but as I kept the interface in and added five more miniature commanders, you not only retain that, but it is likely you will have enough of them to start a barbershop quartet.

    Removing the commander would destroy empires but removing the commander and finding other, better ways to perform its functions would not only keep the things that make empires what it is, it would improve them, and the game.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  9. Ikalx

    Ikalx Member

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    You're not wrong, but i'm unsure of how right you are, and I really won't be able to take you seriously until you have detailed plans on how to do that.

    It might not be worth your time to do it, and we might not have the devs to code it, and you'd only be winning support from a few people on the forums, but if you really believe it would be much better, then it's worth taking a little while and just outlining exactly what would be in this Empires MkII. For instance, would squad leaders conflict with other would-be commanders? What would people need to have to spawn buildings? Would there be a team resource pool that could be easily pwned by a nub?

    If you only look at your idea from a fixing Empires viewpoint, then you risk getting problems that you haven't thought about - you might end up fixing what was wrong with Empires and making everything else faulty. At the moment you've just fixed a lightbulb above our heads and are asking us to give up the fire. Sure the fire burns, but can the lightbulb cook food?

    I would like to see just how well your system works, but I can't take up a cause like that if I really don't know how it'll work...so unless you want to spell it out... That's why I usually say work on pimping everything else, and then when we've done that, we can phase back faulty game mechanics like reliance on 1 person.
     
  10. ScardyBob

    ScardyBob Member

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  11. recon

    recon SM Support Dev

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    You're confusing "games" and "mods". Games have lower standards to meet to become popular, simply because there are companies (read paid developers, testers, marketers) behind them.

    Most popular commercial games are polished (Empires is not), balanced (most are better than Empires 2.2+), and marketed aggressively (something Empires has never had).
     
  12. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    ive see things, ive seen them with my eyes

    and they told me that this is not inherently true, mods shine in the fact that they have way more time to get polished "on the go"

    commercial games are made with a vision, if the vision is off, the game isnt fun and will rarely be changed and more likely be abandoned

    mods are made with a vision too, but if things seem not fun, they get altered and changed and tuned and tested until perfection, agreed with a far lower budget in money and workhours, but with far closer feedback and less demand for contract upholding and other bureaucracy restrictions (release dates?)

    does anyone remember how natural selection looked at release?

    on topic, if only we could get the devs to do what chris said just this once... i would really like to see how it goes
     
  13. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Games have higher standards, which is why they have all the money put into them.

    Mods have lower standards because they're free, you don't have to pay for them.

    Of course using that as an excuse is an unspeakably pathetic attitude, everything should be made as good as possible at all times.

    Also 'games' and 'mods' are not entirely different entities, they're the same thing, mods just tend to be like their parent games, but they are still games.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  14. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    Frankly, I rarely play a mod unless it's 1) fun, 2) unique and 3) polished. Also, I'm a scrooge and try to squeeze the most out of the games that I buy.

    So, as it turns out, I have the same standards for mods as AAA titles. I just don't care about some of the lame shiny in AAA titles.

    EDIT: I define "polish" as completeness and coherence and that extra flair of style. Not zomg we haz particle effects. NS is very polished. So is Dystopia. Empire: Total War on release was not polished.
     
  15. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Well if truth be told a mod should always aim to be of the highest possible quality as should a game, a mod is merely more excusable if it isn't perfect because you don't have to pay for it, there is no 'money's worth' as such.
     
  16. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    Maybe to you. Not to me. =]
     
  17. Sandbag

    Sandbag Member

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    most popular mods are as polished as full games, but smaller in scale. They don't have lower standards.
     
  18. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Smaller in scale is lower standards, if they had equal standards they would have to be indistinguishable from AAA titles.
     
  19. flasche

    flasche Member Staff Member Moderator

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    like CS? DoD?

    next one Ins? no its too much realism for a AAA title - AAA titles need to be dumb as hell so they can be sold even to the most retarded 5year old kids ...

    <.<
     
  20. Empty

    Empty Member

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    I know the type.

    The way they talk about games, as if realism and graphics are the most important things makes me gag. Oh look, it's WWII game 3021230121:The Pacific, gunna buy that for 200 fucking bucks on it's release day. Oh look it's specops game 220, I heard that game has a p90, you know deagles? Best gun in the world. AK47s can work underwater on fire. Katanas are fucking awesome. This one time I shot a hooker in GTA. Dat bitch got ownt.
     

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