Faction Diversity

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

Balance should never be handled by playerbase liking or not some changes. Nothing good will ever come out of this.

Regardless of whether the playerbase likes these changes or not. You don't think making changes that upset the player base of a shrinking community is important..?

I don't think that balance changes will ever be a reason for this community to be shrinking.

In my experience, stagnation is the far worse enemy. It is already taking hold as you can see in some posts. If you spent a lot of time having learned what works, some people get upset. Some just don't like change (this is not addressed at Blodir's post).

I wouldn't worry too much about learning how many missiles are required to kill which building. Cybran being fragile is quite intuitive imho, and it is consistent. Faction diversity will always require some additional learning and I think that's a good thing.

In terms of accessibility there are just much bigger fish to fry: Factory setup and upgrading multiple factories is just awfully non intuitive, the lack of area commands which were already in games like Homeworld (1999), the resulting necessary factory attack move which you can drag and drop for convenience but gets screwed if you overflow are some things that come to mind.

[Exotic_Retard]

oh yes we love a bit of balance discussion/fruitless arguments

first, i agree with blodimir here because hes in the corr[e]ct clan <3

so about these structure hp changes:

Spoiler: show

well hp is strange because it doesnt always matter, especially when structures are concerned.

it behaves much smoother with units because there are more of them, and every extra shot needed to kill some tank makes an army better/worse, and affects the strategies you can pull off with that faction. (imagine if strikers had 301hp)

buildings dont really do that, especially when most of them dont fight back. it not like you will stop building t3 pgens if you are cybran, but you do know that theres a difference between cyb and aeon mml. likewise you probably won't say that t2 tanks are the same without tradeoffs. (although they do have the same role)
for buildings the most prominent difference in hp comes when snipes are concerned, which are also strange cos they are a pain in the ass.

its kinda strange that with the pgen hp changes you need 1 more cyb strat to kill a uef t3 pgen next to 16 t2 mass fabs.
sounds very specific? but this is precisely the kind of situation which will cause someone to say this is bullshit; because you require only 1 strat in any other combination of factions. not very intuitive.

same with walls - with 2000hp you can use strats to clear walls pretty well, but not uef vs cybran.
why are cybran weaker vs uef walls? what sort of op wall strat does this prevent?

in short there's a bunch of exceptions added with these changes, which don't really make sense to me.

so yeah i think these changes are quite silly.

especially when you consider that you can assist your cybran facs to save them from the correct number of tmls 70% of the time, and if you're me and know how to abuse tmls so they land in the same tick that expectation is also betrayed.

the question im asking is:
what gameplay benefits does this bring? how do these changes make the game more fun?
and dont say "more faction diversity" because that doesn't actually equate to fun (90% of ladder is 1 faction anyway)

tldr: inconsistency/bullshit happens without any clear gameplay benefit.

hope this helps, have a nice day.

[Turinturambar]

it isnt allways about snipes, dont forget the drops (also some nice runby)!
I think the idea of rewarding non stealth drops vs cybran (and lategamedrops in general) sounds very fair to me.

[Morax]

It seems to be centered around making it necessary for Cybran to keep units at home to defend so their raids are not as strong. I guess this helps their "opness" but I don't like the path...

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

It seems to be centered around making it necessary for Cybran to keep units at home to defend so their raids are not as strong. I guess this helps their "opness" but I don't like the path...

That's an easy thing to say. How would you do it then?

One alternative that comes to mind is taking away the toys. I bet there would be many more rants about how nerfing unit x destroys the spirit of the Cybran faction or how it destroys faction diversity. You could try to wrap it into buffing everything else but that involves much more work and people will probably see through it. The argument then will be: "Why change everything, the game was fine!"

[Blodir]

Hey. I put off replying for quite a long time, apologies for that. It takes quite a lot of effort to write these posts.

Hi,

It's been a while but here is the promised response. Also nice to see some of the pretty good articles linked that i've been reading too. Yet, i draw different conclusions:

If a unit costs the same amount of resources and fills the same purpose its stats should also be the same.

When diversifying the rather homogeneous unit base of SupCom it's a good rule of thumb to make each unit a tradeoff: a unit that is better than it's counterpart in one respect, should be weaker in another.

First this two essential assumptions, if this concept were to be enforced, a large amount of units in the game would need to be reworked. There is no real reason units with the same stats and purpose can't be more or less good at this purpose in line with the desired weakness or strenght for the faction. It is true that more differences between the factions increases the "Burden of Knowledge", but that applies just as much or even more if units would have different cost or other kind of tradeoffs, it applies to many changes that were done in the past, and is a natural part of the game. A part that needs to be considered carefully with any change, but not a reason against change by itself. There is no way to increase faction diversity without requiring people to learn about the differences. Here is where intuitiveness plays a major role to make the required information easy to learn.

But a few examples of units with the same cost and role, but different power, without tradeoff:

-the already existing hp differences on structures (that are useless, but if you are learning the game you dont actually know that)
-t1 bombers
-hover flak
-sera transports
-percy/brick (even though percy has a tradeoff to be worse against t1, but it is purely theoretical)
-hoplite/mongoose
-TMD (Aeon is a tradeoff, but uef is plain worse)
-Stealth (cheaper AND better, no tradeoff at all)

Are all this things bad for the game? I don't agree.

Notice how most of the examples you list here are things that have been a source of a lot of complaints from the community. Also keep in mind that these are things that we as a community have gotten used to and so they have started to feel more natural to us, even if they aren't intuitive to a newer player - new changes don't have this advantage, but instead feel wrong for all players, at least initially. I'm not saying that we have to change all these units at this point of the games development, but we can at least avoid causing similar problems.

I don't want to say that i would't agree to tradeoffs being often nicer, more diverse and more interesting than plane advantages or disadvantages. However just because they are often nicer, it does not mean any other way for faction diversity is bad.
Giving factions unique strengths across several units in fact follows the same idea: The faction gets some advantage in one area, but a disadvantage in another. The concept is not limited to single units, but can be applied across several units, tech levels or more.

For example cybran has weaker defences, but more offensive capability, they have the worst shields but get better stealth in return.

The point is: Having some limited diversity is better than none, if the disadvantages of the change don't outweight it of course. The difference in gameplay is not extreme, but it will matter in several of situations and can give UEF the edge or give cybran trouble where they were equal before, making the factions better in specific situations also changes how they play because it makes them more inclined to create or avoid this situations.

It is of course arguable how big the problems caused by 3655 are, however I do not see why we can't introduce faction diversity in more healthy ways. It's not like there's a particular need for these changes specifically and they are causing a lot of dismay, why not choose a safer route?

Now are the disadvantages, as you named named intuitiveness, fairness and burden of knowledge (though there are more) so large?

All this points are very arguable. UEF Is supposed to be the "durable turtle faction". Is it so unintuitive that their buildings have more HP? Cybran is the offensive, sneaky and tricky faction, is it so unintuitive that their buildings have less when they are based on offense rather than defence? It fits very well to the design of the faction, and thus i believe it is very intuitive to learn together with the "style" of the faction.

Yes it is. If you are spending the same amount of resources on something that does exactly the same thing, it will feel very unintuitive (and as a result unfair) no matter the faction theme. It's hard to convince someone otherwise, however I think the amount of criticism 3655 got in this sector should be a big indicator that a lot of players feel like the change is unfair.

And in contrast to differences between most units, HP changes are something that is very easy to see, as it is directly displayed in the game. If this hp differences are unintuitive, so would be e.g. the differences in Shields, point defences, and about every type of faction diversity we have currently.

I agree that HP difference is more transparent than say a buildtime change, but I don't think it really addresses the issue. HP difference isn't unintuitive by itself, it's the fact that there exist units that are exactly the same in every other way except for the HP difference.

Fairness is a very related area. What is fair, and what not is a feeling that is different for everyone and thus hard to argue about. If this is bad or not, supcom is designed around unfairness between factions in different areas, stages of the game or situations. Best example is the cybran TML, is it just unfair cybran got such a nice tool or is it ok, because its increasing the deversity between the factions?

I acknowledge that there are existing problems of this kind in the game. However none of them are this large in magnitude, and I'm definitely not against changing them as long as it's well thought out (what and how can be discussed further in the future if you are interested in my input).

About the burden of knowledge i always tried in all changes to not increase it unreasonable, or to reduce it (which is quite hard). Similar with this changes, as mentioned, once a change is intuitive enough, it is rather easy to learn. So what is required to learn about this changes for a new, or medium, or a good player?

a) UEF buildings have more HP
b) Cybran buildings have less

This two facts should be enough for every new player to be perfectly fine. There is no need to know the details about how many tmls, bombers or other units you need to kill buildings in one pass. This are optional knowledges, that can be optioned to become a good player, but not even necessary. I have no idea how many strat bombers you need to kill a t3 pg currently, and i'm perfectly fine without knowing this. It is possible to gain advantages with such knowledge however, but since it is not required to play, this is not making the game harder to get into, it is just increasing its skillcap for the top percent.

However even for this kind of knowledge i finetuned the values to not require to learn how many strat a mex needs, even the optional knowledge is following some easy rules rather then requiring to learn arbitary values:

-UEF eco buildings need 1 more strat to die
-Cybran eco buildings need 1 less strat to die
-UEF needs one less strat to kill eco
-Cybran needs one more strat to kill eco (which is not even a new thing to learn, because its already the case for t2 mex and you just need to expand this knowledge to other buildings)

I like how you took this into consideration and it seems quite nice at first glance.

While it would be nice to have more diversity, with tradeoffs and more impactful changes, this is nothing i believe we want to do, as it would change the game too much from the original, and would be very hard to balance on top. This does not mean that some limited diversity is a bad idea, and its always possible to expand this changes a bit more in the future, if they work well and are liked.

There is no advantage (that I'm aware of) that 3655 approach has over tradeoffs in this regard.

The proposed idea in this thread of giving cybran some regen, stealth on mex or something else in return to the weakness is not bad though.

This is the correct direction, however I would leave eco untouched because of the massive impact it may have on the game.

I would like to bring up another argument that I previously found hard to put into words. 3655 approach is a very passive way to increase faction diversity, it does not alter the gameplay for the player who gains the advantage, but punishes the opposing aggressor sometimes very significantly. There is no choice that the UEF player is given by the change, mexes will be built just the same. The result of this is that the UEF player does not feel rewarded in any way, where the opponent may feel punished or even cheated.

[Mephi]

In this case Blodir, myself, and many others who understand the game fairly well are heavily opposed so I'd say it's not a good idea to push this one.

I dont really like this kind of posts, they dont contain any proof or specification, neither your "clear arguments".


But back to the topic:

i support most of the changes, simply because they are done with the supcom spirit. It was never the case in supcom, that buildings or units, which cost the same, are also equal in stats. It was clearly not intended, that this logic is a part of supcom.

I would also argue, that the building hp changes wont affect the gameplay too much, or maybe in a different way than we all expect. Some changes go far further, like the bomberchanges, which arent discussed so intense.

[Lieutenant Lich]

Bomber changes were discussed intensely enough. A bomber without radar = useless bomber/blind bomber. Building a scout to aid your already expensive bomber is bullshit.

Back on the topic, however. You know my position on buildings' HP and I will not change it. Those buildings do EXACTLY the same thing so they should have equal HP. Changing it will make some factions OP, others UP (underpowered).

[biass]

Bomber changes were discussed intensely enough. A bomber without radar = useless bomber/blind bomber. Building a scout to aid your already expensive bomber is bullshit.

Not really, you just cried about it
Making a scout to assist first bomber is not only not "bullshit" but already used and the far more preferable option to using bomber radar

You probably already make scouts with your 1st bomber without even realising it, and if you dont, why not?

[Gorton]

To be perfectly honest here, I don't think the removal of the radar will fix any issues at all (i.e making first bomber less strong)
If anything, it will increase the want for hoverbombing with sera/aeon as they'll need to micro to get a first pass that hits something, which cybran and uef cannot do
Seems a bit pointless to me

Mephi wrote:

I would also argue, that the building hp changes wont affect the gameplay too much, or maybe in a different way than we all expect. Some changes go far further, like the bomberchanges, which arent discussed so intense.

I agree, and I also think it's odd that people are calling this a uef buff when as of now that amount of hp doesn't help at all, especially late game where if someone is attacking you in your base, you probably lost it all and 2k hp either way won't really make a difference