Attack vs defense in team games

[FunkOff]

There's a concept that people seem to not understand that is nonetheless important for balance, so I will elaborate on it slightly here.

Essentially, an attack by one player can threaten many.

The best example of this is nukes. Every player generally has their own base, and nukes threaten bases. For a team of, say, five people to successfully defend against a nuke, all five need a an anti-nuke. Anti-nukes are half the cost, but because so many of them are needed to defend against a single attacker, it's actually not very cost efficient to defend via nukes, as you would need 250% of the attacker's inputted resources to successfully prevent a strike by the attacker's nuke.

The same applies to other strategic weapons, such as Tech 3 and Experimental Artillery. Although a single base can be protected from a mavor by less than a mavor's mass in shields, five bases cannot.

Although one ACU can be mass-efficiently defended from mercies by UEF Tech 2 shields (600 mass in shields stops 1200 mass in mercies), five ACUs would require 3000 mass in shields to defend against 1200 mass in mercies.

This is an essential point to consider in making balance determinations.

[Raging_Squirrel]

or you could just build an exp/start bombers on the same resources and rape him and/or his nuke

noobyfunk

[Armmagedon]

funk you can apply the same logic with gunships and all air units, for this i dont want gunships with that amount of hp/mass proper of a land unit

[FunkOff]

funk you can apply the same logic with gunships and all air units, for this i dont want gunships with that amount of hp/mass proper of a land unit

This is true. The counter-balance to most air units, however, is that they do not scale well: All air units are short-ranged (no siege air units) and they clump together, making them vulnerable to flak.

[ToejamS]

If I fart in an enclosed space with 5 other people, does that make my fart 5x worse? Interesting idea and correct on some level, but it cannot be applied to this scenario. Everyone is making an offesive unit ( hopefully ) so everyone is making a counter ( hopefully ) so I think the offensive/defensive costs balance. Pooling resources to rush a monkey is working on the same level. I just dont think it can be applied.

[uberge3k]

I wish we had more high level teams that regularly played together. Only then could we adequately test balance for teamgames - using TrueSkill as an example, imagine a 4v4, all with 1800+ players playing their best, with < ~25 difference between each player and their enemy.

As it stands, teamgames are *always* unbalanced. There are simply too few players with too widely varying skill levels. And we're not even taking into account such factors as how well that player is playing that day, how good they are at that position on that map, what prior experience they have on said map, so on, so forth...

Using a nuke as an example - there are so many cost-effective ways to counter a nuke that it would necessarily require that the person building said nuke has a nontrivial advantage to start with. Assuming all players were playing at an extremely high level and making few mistakes, nukes would likely see little to no use as they are so easily scouted/countered/killed before they are finished, aside from extreme eco/turtle maps such as thermo.

[FunkOff]

This is an essential point to consider in making balance determinations.

Is it?

By applying this logic reductio ad absurdum one could thus argue that a Striker poses say three times it's threat given that it can attack 3 players rather than one and thus it's cost should be increased thricefold. Trying to balance for team games impossible.

Not true. The striker is not a strategic weapon: It is very slow and limited by terrain in where it can attack. Further, even a large group of strikers don't pose a significant threat to ACUs or bases. The rules I stated only apply to strategic weapons.

This is misleading, whilst say 3k M may be required to defend against 1.2K M in Mercies, this cost would divided by 5. Also this disregarding that the opposing players could retaliate symmetrically.

I must I disgaree because this logic could negatively impact 1v1 games, where equilibrium is the most important.

Again, it requires a balance between team games and 1v1s.

[noobymcnoobcake]

Yep it can get very expensive to defend against an early game tac missile launcher. I use this quite a bit.

[perkl]

This is currently only a problem with air units. T3 arty is nigh useless, T4 a little less but it's very expensive and vulnerable. Everyone masses shields. Everyone builds antinukes in long games anyway, just in case the enemy had two launchers. A fleet of gunships isn't that expensive, it's very hard to neutralize the threat unless it commits and it's murderous against ground units which by and large can't shoot back. In theory if strat bombers ever become viable they're prone to the same problem. A fleet of those threaten comm snipe, forcing your comm to hang back.

It's not just in team games, either. If you spot your opp using gunships you have to build defenses and keep it up until those gunships are down. Sometimes it'd be more effective not to use them but simply keep them in reserve, to force opp to build counters against a threat you're not sending.

[Gowerly]

I think the question that needs asking is:
Is this a team v team game or a 1v1 game? Chances are you can't balance for both without having scaling unit costs.
Even the most finely balance games (e.g. Starcraft) are balanced for 1v1. Playing them at even 2v2 has wickedly overpowered strategies.