Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2019-03-10T15:53:58+02:00

Capt_Bucky_OHare wrote:
A game design team did literally no market research on it's competition because the lead designer had made a similar game in the past

why necro the thread to say this

That said, the idea that power stall is a game mechanic designed to punish players is as ridiculous as thinking that factories / resource gatherers should work with no power...

feel free to give your take while you're here

Statistics: Posted by biass — 10 Mar 2019, 15:53

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2019-03-10T15:12:54+02:00

biass wrote:
I'm not sure where you were in 2007 but every cookie cutter RTS game around that period had a power mechanic. And if you lost power in those games things stopped working. The only difference this game has over it's peers is a hashed conversion to SC's Flow Economy idea. Which was not necessarily a new original design either. My assumption was they looked at CNC in their competition research and decided "hey why don't we make power also like the mass?" and it worked out in testing.

Two words: Total Annihilation. C'mon now, know your shit. Obviously this wasn't a new mechanic because dynamic power (and mass/metal) was one of the core things that was awesome about TA.

That said, the idea that power stall is a game mechanic designed to punish players is as ridiculous as thinking that factories / resource gatherers should work with no power...

Statistics: Posted by Capt_Bucky_OHare — 10 Mar 2019, 15:12

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-12-25T10:37:38+02:00

Blodir wrote:
keyser wrote:
When I cancel a unit I usually do it because I want to immediately start making something I need. Leaving a wreck to reclaim when canceling would be the opposite of a QOL improvement in that case.

Oh i never meant that would like that either. That would be unplayable. But it would make more sense than getting back the resources from the cosmos, like blodir is suggesting.

I must have missed the part in supcom lore where mass disappears to the void when constructing units

The mass of something made is always smaller than the amount of mass needed to make that something. And the mass garnered from salvaging something can sometimes even be worth less or damaged. For example using liquid bases to separate the silicon plates above the connecting nozzle oxidizer in rocketry disassembly.

Statistics: Posted by epic-bennis — 25 Dec 2018, 10:37

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-12-06T18:12:10+02:00

moses_the_red wrote:
So its not clear that this mechanic was added as a means of intentionally screwing over players that can't manage their eco, rather than a natural consequence of a pay as you go economy where power is intended to be a useful target of enemy players.

You overthink design. (and not dev,)

I'm not sure where you were in 2007 but every cookie cutter RTS game around that period had a power mechanic. And if you lost power in those games things stopped working. The only difference this game has over it's peers is a hashed conversion to SC's Flow Economy idea. Which was not necessarily a new original design either. My assumption was they looked at CNC in their competition research and decided "hey why don't we make power also like the mass?" and it worked out in testing.

This is off topic regardless.

For on topic: I am not sure I can see a point where any implementation of this would not be either overly frustrating for either you or the attacker.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 06 Dec 2018, 18:12

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-12-06T17:24:11+02:00

Jagged you listening?

Statistics: Posted by Farmsletje — 06 Dec 2018, 17:24

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-12-06T17:15:00+02:00

FtXCommando wrote:
E stall is literally a gigantic game mechanic that punishes the player for trash play.

I imagine that e stall is the result of a few things.

- Devs wanted power to be a target-able resource by opponents, so not having it had to have a downside.
- Devs wanted to ensure that not having power didn't completely gimp a side, so they wanted it to be possible to keep factories running.
- This means that the cost of a power outage had to be paid in reduced mass acquisition.

So its not clear that this mechanic was added as a means of intentionally screwing over players that can't manage their eco, rather than a natural consequence of a pay as you go economy where power is intended to be a useful target of enemy players.

I'd argue that the fact that it screwed over players was actually seen as a major downside of this system, which is why they changed it for Supcom 2. I think that if pressed I could produce an interview where Chris Taylor says as much.

Game mechanics that punish players are very much against the spirit of this game.

Statistics: Posted by moses_the_red — 06 Dec 2018, 17:15

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-30T03:54:13+02:00

E stall is literally a gigantic game mechanic that punishes the player for trash play.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 30 Nov 2018, 03:54

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-30T03:33:33+02:00

Statistics: Posted by moonbearonmeth — 30 Nov 2018, 03:33

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-30T00:57:04+02:00

AdmiralZeech wrote:
Rather than talking about whether it makes sense or not, what effect does it have on gameplay?

Personally I think it's so infrequently used that it will have very little effect on real gameplay, and if it was implemented it could probably open up several potential exploits to be be abused.

I don't think it's really worth the effort?

I tend to agree here. Is the change worth the risk? I think the change itself would be beneficial to the game, but if it involves significant risk of exploits or functions as a time sink for devs then its probably not worth it. If its generally agreed to be beneficial and the devs feel its a low effort low risk kind of change then it should go in. Otherwise there are more important matters that should be addressed.

Statistics: Posted by moses_the_red — 30 Nov 2018, 00:57

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-30T00:49:16+02:00

Mountain wrote:
Anihilnine wrote:if it was instantly put in storage it would be weird

if it was a slow reclaim, that might be annoying cos player might need something urgent, eg AA vs mercies

middle ground is to have have huge reclaim speed?

Any reclaim mechanic would just break everything cause now we cant cancel instantly which is pretty important to be able to do.

Even with insta cancel returning resources, I'm opposed to this personally because it makes it less punishing to make poor decisions. But I guess if the numbers were small enough I could see it reducing some pain without being too soft on poor play

Its not the job of the game's mechanics to punish player's for poor play. That's the player's opponents job. Players should be punished by other players for having units out of position or not enough units or bad map control or bad micro. They shouldn't be punished by the game's mechanics for their actions.

I think that this kind of attitude goes against the spirit of SupCom in a fundamental way. The high APM games like Starcraft, they might punish a player for having bad game mechanics. Supreme Commander is supposed to be different. With supcom the game itself tries to be as helpful as possible, its your opponents that are supposed to punish you.

Statistics: Posted by moses_the_red — 30 Nov 2018, 00:49

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-25T18:39:45+02:00

Yea lets take out even more decisions from the game and make it even dumber

Statistics: Posted by TheKoopa — 25 Nov 2018, 18:39

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-25T16:57:45+02:00

i think 50% of its current progress being refunded is fair

Statistics: Posted by Dro — 25 Nov 2018, 16:57

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-11-25T04:41:41+02:00

keyser wrote:
When I cancel a unit I usually do it because I want to immediately start making something I need. Leaving a wreck to reclaim when canceling would be the opposite of a QOL improvement in that case.

Oh i never meant that would like that either. That would be unplayable. But it would make more sense than getting back the resources from the cosmos, like blodir is suggesting.

It would make sense to me if the factory can just reclaim the mass invested so far, with no wreck left. It would reclaim at the same rate as standard buildpower, so a t1 factory reclaims as fast as 4 t1 engineers. For t1 units this almost instantly reclaims the unit and you wouldn't waste mass but have hardly any delay, so it would be more convenient. But maybe you would have an issue with higher tier units still taking some time to reclaim, especially naval units. I don't know exactly the mass reclaim rate per bp. Assisting engies ought to be able to assist with reclaiming to help ease that possible problem as well though, so it could still be preferable for t2 and t3 factories.

I do hate just losing the mass, but it just doesn't seem like it should be instantly refunded either. This type of factory reclaiming mechanic would seem to be a fair compromise to me. I have no idea if it is feasible to code. Also, maybe you would want to have a separate option to reclaim vs immediately stop and forfeit the mass, so that you can still choose to immediately cancel a unit too if you want to.

Statistics: Posted by Steel_Panther — 25 Nov 2018, 04:41

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-09-24T13:25:27+02:00

I just lost a game few days ago because my air player didn’t want to cancel his strat xD

Also misclicked and made a t1 bomber a few days before that I didn’t want to cancel^^

So as to does it happen? Yes, yes it does.

Statistics: Posted by JoonasTo — 24 Sep 2018, 13:25

Re: Return some percentage of resources on factory cancel or

2018-09-23T13:06:15+02:00

Rather than talking about whether it makes sense or not, what effect does it have on gameplay?

Personally I think it's so infrequently used that it will have very little effect on real gameplay, and if it was implemented it could probably open up several potential exploits to be be abused.

I don't think it's really worth the effort?

Statistics: Posted by AdmiralZeech — 23 Sep 2018, 13:06