A while ago, I was reading this review of one of my favorite games that almost nobody has heard of, Warriors Kings. To save your precious bandwidth, I am going to quote directly from the article (for those with short attention spans, the particularly relevant part is in bold at the end):
Quote:|||tl;dr
(sorry, but I'm on a tight schedule today..)
But I do like wood chopping.. Or rather, I don't object to it so long as it's well integrated and requires very little micro. Rise of Nations did a very good job with complex resource/peasant management imo. They were easy to queue, easy to set to a task, and well automated so even if you forgot about them they'd still find work if it was available.. And the 'commerce caps' in Rise of Nations were an artificial but effective way of ensuring that you didn't need to spend all game queuing up more jobs for more peasants.. (Just like the 1-SCV-per-crystal and 1-SCV-per-gas-mine mechanic saves Starcraft players from being forced to spend excessive amounts of time managing workers after the first few minutes of the game).
The most important part about workers is that they make raiding a valuable and fun game mechanic. This is something that SupCom games struggle with because Mexes are the only resource that has to be spread out.. and they're sometimes too sturdy to be easily raided.. but they need to cost a lot so it's no good making them really fragile either.|||considering a trend in "rts" games to cut out bases competely, i'd have to cautiously agree with that quote.
Just like how sc/fa's exponential economy daunts newcomers, in aoe2 it is crucial to have the least amount of resources in storage because it's just sitting there not being used to research, build, train, etc. stealing stone from your enemies is indeed a devious strategy (i'm guilty...) and supcom1/2 does not have that option.
in TA you could loose much of your economy and still come out victorious under certain situations. in supcom1/2, that is impossible.
Loosing half your villagers in aoe2 also set you back massively, not only in the 50 food per villager cost, but in your income rate.
supcom1/2 also only has two resources with *every* unit requiring both of them in a roughly 2e:1m ratio. It isn't: which resource will i specialize in: it's how many pgens do i need for X mex's and Y factory's building Z units?
having some units that require several ties more mass than energy, or vice versa would be an interesting mix, especially when applied to the more abstract resources that K&C could have.|||I'm a lumber-jack, and I'm okay with wood chopping.|||WoT in reply to the OP,
Well the majority of your post applies to TA and SupCom, but not SupCom 2.
Since mass converters are not based on a build tree in SupCom 2 there isn't a set time when people will get them. Further you usually have to make a sacrifice in order to get them as the research cost is decently high.
As to your comments on infinite resources vs finite resources, the difference in game strategy is not a simple difference in available strategies/tactics but rather focus.
In a finite resource system the relevant long term factors are,
A: Ratio of total map resources gathered between players at games end.
B: Percentage of those resources used for non-economic units.
C: Efficiency of your non-economic units as a ratio of cost to effect.
In an infinite resource system the relevant long term factors are,
A: Total resources gathered between players at games end.
B: Percentage of those resources used for non-economic units.
C: Efficiency of your non-economic units as a ratio of cost to effect.
If the resources are gathered by capping a node like in SupCom or DoW then factor A under the infinite system could also be expressed as,
A: Ratio of resource node control time between players at game end.
So in a finite resource system since you know that you will hit a specific cap you need to decide what you will do with those few resources. Your strategy is focused around the most limited resource and to the extent that you believe the resource will be limited. So if you plan on a rush win there are in effect no limits. Same if you think your opponent will rush and you will be able to win in the mid game. It really only applies to games that go the distance and indeed it defines what that distance is.
In an infinite resource model the whole game is about resource flow. But much to the contrary of your statement that "your choices are limited to just rushing in the early game", games that force you to fight early do so not because of the resource model but because of the available units or other game play dynamics often in relation to resource gathering.
For example, in SupCom it's hard to turtle in tier one. You most definitely have a choice between teching up and expanding your economy fast vs rushing, but the units available do not allow you to defend in an economical way other than using mobile military. Since it is less risky to fight your opponent somewhere other than your base, and since if one person spends mass strictly on eco and another spends some on military units to harass/raid that raider will see a bigger payoff, it is the case that both players build military units and skirmish.
In Dawn of War you have infinite resources but again the fighting is not due to the infinite model but rather the game design.
In all cases your strategic focus is shifted from the percentage of total map resources you control to the ratio of resources being gathered at the moment.
I didn't play AoE online, just with friends so I can't really say that I'm competent in competitive strategy for this game, but my recollection was that you could easily get wood walls up to limit early game raiding of most units. This changed the pace of the game a lot. In games like DoW units can always enter an enemies base, it's more an issue of survivability as the opposing players unit production is right there.
As to Warcraft 3's limit of peons per mine, Warcraft 2 had this same limit, Starcraft has a limit per a crystal and games where you cap a resource node in effect have a max output per node. Further DoW and CoH both have contested resource nodes outside your base. I think the issue with WC3 is the percentage of nodes on the map that are contested not that the nodes are outside your base.
Even if you have limited resources the net effect of a node running out only applies to strategy if it will run out in that game. So to give an example, in Starcraft resource nodes are limited but they can last the entire game. People have plans in mind for expansion but the priority of these plans is weighted by how fast the resources will run out.
Economic strategy is tied heavily to non-economic aspects of game play. For example, in SupCom2 the payoff time for capping a new resource node is about 2 minutes and 45 seconds. In a 1v1 game the match could turn and you could lose in that time period making the economic expenditure very risky in a close game. If your Mex doesn't last for 2:45 you have lost mass overall. As a result people stop capping resource nodes past a certain point. Though you can in effect steal mass (reclaiming) the constant radar means your engineer will definitely be attacked.
The DoW resource model had combat units claiming contested points over the map. It was much faster to de-cap a node than to cap it which made it more important to attack an enemies node than to cap an un-capped node. This made your combat units integral to your economy.
Though I do agree on some of your points I do not think that infinite resources has anything to do with the game play effects that you describe. The game play of SupCom would be similar if there was a max mass with the only differences being how you weigh the value of units. You would consider the implications of the unit in terms of percentage of max mass rather than percentage of mass income. In this way a limited resource model moves the RTS genre closer to the RTT genre.|||And it is your last line which is my reason why i vastly prefer infinite, or near-infinite resource models to finite ones.
However, something that the supcom series has lost from TA, was being able to build up a base by reclaiming the things around you. reclaiming trees/vegetation for energy, rocks for mass: Staple of TA, but got somewhat lost in the spiritual successor. also ta:k failed in that regard.
|||@ re1wind
Supcom does have that, in an effect and not to the same level as TA though, and supcom 2 more or less loss that completely.
If you think of the limits of a finite resource system you have to think of what sort of battles you want to be seeing happen in a game, GPG are known for over the top games with huge unit caps and stunning graphics, as far as stunning graphics goes, it has nothing to do with it, but large armies rely on large pools of resources, Games such as age of empires largely capped the amount of units that could effectively be fielded by limiting the amount of gold or food in the imediate vicinity. This destroys a core Mechanic of Most GPG games in that have finite resources caps army size, but not army growth.
Don't get me wrong, i loved the 'good old' days of resource gathereing, where there was always a risk of those resource gatheres being murdered and your economy go down the preverbial **** hole, Though the same can happen in an infinite resource game, great example is DOW2 where ifa player leaves mid game he/she is replaced by a computer who decides to ninja around the map capping resource points, this destoys large armies as you must assign your army to capture the point back rather than fighting, this effectively lessens the numberof effective units in a skirmish. The same happens in a finite resource game, if the economy producing characters/ points are destroyed then it effectively lessens the amount of resources to be spent, which effectively lessens the number of units in a given skirmish.
That said infinite resource systems remain the main staple of 'large army' games as they create the greatest number of combat units in a given skirmish, as little resources have to be spent on economy.
One thing that this game could do to implement both the finite resource syste and infinite resource system is to 'reseed' resources throught the length of a game. Lets face it when man cuts down a forest and leaves it the forest comes back, when we kill large amounts of animals leaving a few the numbers rise again, in this reseeding world vital resources would remain infinite, and other resources, like say a mine, would simply expand, gold mine runs out, they search for a new vein of gold, coal runs out, search for a new vein. In this way the resources would be infinite and would require the finite resource gathereing system, but there would be inherent benefits in expanding an economy early game as capitulation late game would see you take advantage of reseeded resources. As far as finite resources, such as gold or stone for example, they could be considered infinite for the purposes of the game. To draw a real life comparison man has yet to run out of any natural resources despite hundreds of years of coal, gold, silver, and iron mining etc. so why would in a battle lasting , maybe years, should the player run out of seemingly finite resources when people on the planet we live on have not. More so in a fantasy world it could be ethereal powers, magic or maybe a mechanisation of man, which you build or research to reseed resources close to your base, maintaining the finite resource collection model with infinite resource dynamics.|||I do like the idea of infinitely re-seeded finite resource nodes.
Though I think it would take a large map size to player ratio on the maps to truly make this shine.
This could also lead to more options for defining factions. A faction that gains more resources back when reclaiming structures would have more of an advantage in mid-late game where node hopping is becoming important. Really any faction that has a unique aspect to their building or reclaiming process would show that distinction even more if node hopping was necessary.
It also gives a possibility of adding another element to the intelligence war which would be prospecting. Of course this would require resources outside of the default map nodes to be randomly placed.|||supcom1 did have that to a limited degree, but it always felt like a chore and was almost always wasted because of the storage limit. supcom2 removed the storage cap but threw away anything reclaimable in skirmish, and in campaign for the most part, except for reclaiming mass from wreckage.
And that you couldn't easily tell an engineer to "reclaim energy", just to patrol a route in which it would reclaim/repair everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment