Forged Alliance Forever

Re: To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-16T13:45:27+02:00

I remember that quote, SeraphimLeftNut. I think it is important to allow for creativity in your teammates as long as they communicate what they are doing to some degree. Out of respect for your team, an unusual and creative endeavor should probably be agreed upon instead of silently being implemented. I can understand players getting angry at a back player on Seton's moving his build power to the distant shore and spamming only naval units with not much econ. This is such an unusual strategy that your team should probably be warned at the very least. Perhaps the extreme naval dominance may even be the mvp in your possible victory. Lack of air support form you definitely should not come as a suprise to them. Everyone will be placed at much higher risk from the things you are usually going to counter with your ASF(I tend to use the ASF back seton's reference a lot due to the usual lack of flexibility in a team's expectations of that position).

Voice communication is a great asset in allowing unusual gameplay. With it, you have the ability to notify your team not only of your initial gameplan, but also of your improvisations. Ubergeek mentioned how innovative gameplay becomes harder to test and implement without organized teams and competitive goals. Many players simply want to have a relatively relaxed game with not too much out of the ordinary. Others may want a different experience in which they playtest and practice with the same group to become a well oiled and flexible war machine.

There is certainly a difference in a long term competitive community and a single competitive game. For an individual game, you will use the strategy you know best and which works best for your team in the given situation. This is not really the time to test something new and possibly be the main contributing factor in losing the game. Games explicitly for testing and not for goofing around or playing for a reliable victory allow for the most innovation with the least negative effects on the individual game. Goofing around is for a certain game, testing is for another and hardcore competition is for another. A great community allows for all to take place, and even the blending of some aspects into a single game. I think most players want to do all three at one time or another to some extent. This game afterall is strategic, competitive and hilariously funny at times.

Statistics: Posted by Myrdral — 16 Jul 2012, 13:45

Re: To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-13T19:20:24+02:00

I remember CTs "vision" of a real strategy game.

I wonder when he realised that it wasn't going to work and started to improvise.

Some ideas behind SupCom have potential and we can get a glance of it in FA. But i don't think GPG will ever be remembered as geniuses in game design.

Statistics: Posted by Pavese — 13 Jul 2012, 19:20

Re: To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-13T19:09:37+02:00

The game snowballs to an incredible amount. A very wise player, who is responsible for most of my improvement at the game, once said that "if both players are playing perfectly, losing a LAB at minute 2 is equivalent to losing an ML at minute 20".

I concur. This is one of the reasons wreckage is necessary, because it helps players come back if they survived a huge attack.

I think this is also a good argument for lowering how much mass T3 extractors produce, from the excessive 18 (buffed to 27 with storage) to something more reasonable like 8, so it's only worth 2 T2 mex rather than 3, and perhaps even lowering the energy cost of power generators. (Both of these things would reduce the capacity for "snowballing" by allowing behind players to more quickly catch up.)

Statistics: Posted by FunkOff — 13 Jul 2012, 19:09

Re: To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-13T18:50:13+02:00

Yes. If there is one thing to get a new player do understand in supcom fa, it is that last quote.

Statistics: Posted by SeraphimLeftNut — 13 Jul 2012, 18:50

Re: To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-13T18:26:16+02:00

We're playing at a tiny fraction of what the game is capable of. That's a fact.

I've been at the top of the 1v1 ladder for some time, and yet I make hundreds of mistakes each game. I still make dumb moves, make the wrong counter, and lose the game because I wasn't paying attention to my ACU and it got sniped. Every game of FA, at the highest levels, comes down to who makes the fewest mistakes. Not balance, not "skill" - only who slightly edges out the other by making a few less mistakes, or making not as severe mistakes. This is why I do not believe that anyone truly understands the game yet. And no, not even myself - I know that I am, objectively, a terrible player who makes far too many mistakes.

I define a "perfect" game of FA as maximizing the use of your limited resources to create the best possible outcome. In any specific situation, there is always an optimal set of moves to make that could not be improved upon by substituting alternate moves.

This is certainly doable for the first few minutes. But as the game goes on, with exponentially larger quantities of units to take care of and responsibilities to attend to (scouting, defending, managing eco, micro'ing skirmishes, etc), it becomes increasingly difficult.

I doubt it would be possible to play a "perfect game" in the sense that you dodge every single shot by micro'ing every single tank individually. I suspect that engine limitations, and then human limitations such as how quickly you can physically move a mouse or the visual cortex can process sensory input, will eventually be the upper limit. But up until then, I believe there is an extremely large amount of undiscovered territory from where the current "high end" of FA gameplay is.

Sadly, due to the lack of competition, there is very little to drive the innovation that would eventually push the game to be played at this level. I don't think that we'll ever see it. But I think that we should keep this in mind when discussing things such as lategame balance, as we are balancing not for true "balance" (as it is exceeding difficult to test a unit that comes into play at minute 20 when both players have already make hundreds of compounding mistakes before then), but for the ease of use for casual players.

Experimental balance is a great example of this; many believe T3 land to be underpowered and T4s to be overpowered, because "everyone always makes experimentals to end games!". This is true, but I believe the real reason is that an exp is simply much easier and much safer to use than the equivalent value in T3 units, as they would require a great deal more of unit control. Additionally, by the time that T3/T4 is in play, the game has already been decided by a series of compounding mistakes of every player involved.

The game snowballs to an incredible amount. A very wise player, who is responsible for most of my improvement at the game, once said that "if both players are playing perfectly, losing a LAB at minute 2 is equivalent to losing an ML at minute 20".

This is perhaps the truest sentence I've ever heard on the subject.

Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 13 Jul 2012, 18:26

To be great is to be misunderstood

2012-07-13T17:50:47+02:00

I'd like to make a plea to all the people in Supcom FA land to not assume they understand this game. I have been playing for five years and I have had surprises along the way every few months.

Just because it looks weird and unintuitive to you don't cast it aside as something wrong. Embrace the genius of supcom FA. Learn to see the difference between strange and game breaking.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Self Reliance:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

Statistics: Posted by SeraphimLeftNut — 13 Jul 2012, 17:50