"Wages"
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Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">Coupling team and personal res while still retaining some autonomy</div>Decoupling personal and team res breaks RFK(see Flayra's musings on the pros and cons of RFK in his design decision google doc) and removes a degree of freedom from tactical considerations.
In NS1 you have to choose between a hive or a fade, a res tower or a lerk, shotgun rush or a proto lab. Splitting resources into personal and team resources removes that dimension; you get both kinds of res simultaneously, at a set rate.
To couple them again without having to micromanage players too much you can give the commander a slider button. Slide it all the way to the right and players gets the entire resource income in the form of personal res and the commander gets nothing; slide it all the way to the left and players get nothing, commander gets the whole pie.
RFK now works again; if you get more kills, you get more personal res and the commander can allocate less resource flow to players and more to expanding and teching up.
It is slightly more round-about than before, but marine comm doesn't have to directly provision his marines. It solves something that was mentioned as a problem in the design decision log; if RFK awards team res, it may boosts the rate at which the team can tech up in big games and that can be really awkward to balance. But with personal RFK and a wage system the worst that can happen is that the commander spends less resources on his marines; he cannot suck res back out of marines so the maximum rate of teching up is still bounded by the number of res nodes.
This coupling also has potential cons, that may be possible to mitigate. For instance, if personal res is derived from team resources, a larger team means that more of the res node output has to be dedicated to producing personal resources. One way to fix this is to scale the amount of team res awarded by the number of players on the opposite team(being more populous should be punished, not rewarded). E.g. 1 "mother resource" earned by a res node becomes 0.8 team res and 0.2 personal resources for every player (scale factors may be necessary for balance); if there are a few more players on aliens the more populous team may be rewarded only 0.18 res per player, per RT, per tick at the same slider setting.
In NS1 you have to choose between a hive or a fade, a res tower or a lerk, shotgun rush or a proto lab. Splitting resources into personal and team resources removes that dimension; you get both kinds of res simultaneously, at a set rate.
To couple them again without having to micromanage players too much you can give the commander a slider button. Slide it all the way to the right and players gets the entire resource income in the form of personal res and the commander gets nothing; slide it all the way to the left and players get nothing, commander gets the whole pie.
RFK now works again; if you get more kills, you get more personal res and the commander can allocate less resource flow to players and more to expanding and teching up.
It is slightly more round-about than before, but marine comm doesn't have to directly provision his marines. It solves something that was mentioned as a problem in the design decision log; if RFK awards team res, it may boosts the rate at which the team can tech up in big games and that can be really awkward to balance. But with personal RFK and a wage system the worst that can happen is that the commander spends less resources on his marines; he cannot suck res back out of marines so the maximum rate of teching up is still bounded by the number of res nodes.
This coupling also has potential cons, that may be possible to mitigate. For instance, if personal res is derived from team resources, a larger team means that more of the res node output has to be dedicated to producing personal resources. One way to fix this is to scale the amount of team res awarded by the number of players on the opposite team(being more populous should be punished, not rewarded). E.g. 1 "mother resource" earned by a res node becomes 0.8 team res and 0.2 personal resources for every player (scale factors may be necessary for balance); if there are a few more players on aliens the more populous team may be rewarded only 0.18 res per player, per RT, per tick at the same slider setting.
Comments
As for handling larger teams, can't it just give every player the same amount regardless of how many players there are? Since both sides get it. Or... perhaps aliens keep the resource system we already have, while marines get this new method?
Your mechanic puts a connection back between them- which I like.
But introducing more patch solutions and complexity probably won't help overall. A single resource model would work better. Better than a ######ized multilevel patched resource model- and all so new players can get their guns faster. Boo.
There are still consequences. You lose P.Res for med spamming, dropping guns (as a Comm). When you're out of P.Res you can't continue to med/weapon spam.
You can still have a game with strategic choice with the res model; there just needs to be enough to do with both resources. Once the MACs abilities (Mines, EM Blast), ARC, Nano-Grid Defense, Cat Packs, and Weapon Dropping are implemented there will be plenty to spend P.Res on and therefore plenty for opponents to deny.
I think they want to avoid such artificial scaling methods. Basically you could have tried some similar trickery to NS1 res model to balance it's scaling, but they decided not to.
The two things I don't like about this one are:
1.) Spreading resoucres to individiuals is inefficient, you want to be doing that as little time as possible. In NS1 alien with 48 res is as strong as an alien with 0 res. At least I would be constantly using the extreme ends of the slider to minimize the time marines sit with resoucres they can't use to afford anything.
2.) The further we go this way, the more it feels "Like NS1, but in less interesting way." In NS1 as commander you had full control of what goes where. It doesn't feel right if NS2 gives you some rough control, but nothing exact or nothing particularly new and exciting. There's no easy solution for this though - At the same time I'm worried about moving too far away from the NS1 model too.
<!--quoteo(post=1849991:date=Jun 5 2011, 08:27 AM:name=KuBaN)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (KuBaN @ Jun 5 2011, 08:27 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1849991"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You can still have a game with strategic choice with the res model; there just needs to be enough to do with both resources. Once the MACs abilities (Mines, EM Blast), ARC, Nano-Grid Defense, Cat Packs, and Weapon Dropping are implemented there will be plenty to spend P.Res on and therefore plenty for opponents to deny.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think it still ends up limiting the strategy quite a lot. Basically you're always directing some certain value of res into brute field strength and certain amount in buildings and tech. That way there would be a lot less back and forth because both teams are constantly teching a bit and pushing their army advantage a bit.
Just a little slider. Don't make it too prominent; say top-right corner of the screen or on the score board. Everyone gets to see it but only a comm can move it.
<!--quoteo(post=1849925:date=Jun 4 2011, 05:30 PM:name=Align)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Align @ Jun 4 2011, 05:30 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1849925"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->As for handling larger teams, can't it just give every player the same amount regardless of how many players there are? Since both sides get it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If every player recieves the same amount of personal res per team res converted you will get more resources if your team is larger simple because there are more players able to recieve team resources on your team. This is bad. At the very least you should even it out(e.g. if the smaller team has N players and the larger team has M players, the larger team should have a scale factor of N/M applied to team res income).
The single resource model had serious problems to.
You don't start with a set number of players and train more units as you go along, as in a normal RTS. Right off the bat you start with as many units as you're ever going to have and the number is constant throughout the game(with minor fluctuations due to AFKers, lame-quitters, late joiners...).
There are fixed costs, such as upgrades and tech requirements, and there are costs that scale with team size such as equipment and lifeforms. This is inherently problematic with a unified resource model because if res scales with team size so that the fraction of players that can be outfitted with lifeforms or equipment stays the same, the cost of upgrades will become <b>trivial</b> in large games. If the res income doesn't scale at all with team size you won't be able to afford more equipment and lifeforms in larger games and a much smaller fraction of players will be anything but skulks and vanilla marines.
If you keep team and personal res separate, you can't use team and personal res interchangably; so that means you can apply different scale factors to team and personal res and make large games play similarly to small games.
See my reply to _tresh_ on the unified resource model. Since you can't actually build RTs faster and there is no RFK the implication of a fixed personal res income is that in small games everyone has more personal res than they can even spend and in a large game almost everyone is playing vanilla skulks and marines. A similar <i>fraction</i> of players should be able to afford upgrades in both small and large games.
If you allow more than one comm concurrently there will always be ######s. The benefit from moving the slider is diffused across the entire team so the incentive is not as strong as in NS1, were ######s would occasionally go into the comm chair and drop themselves equipment when the comm left temporarily, or NS 1.0x where ######s would occassionally go gorge to soak up more resources so they could evolve quicker.
I don't think they have a choice in the matter.
See my reply to _tresh_ on the problem with the unified resource model as I see it; large and small games play differently because there are fixed costs and costs that scale with team size. Separating res into personal and team res allows you do solve that problem by _scaling_ personal res with team size.
I'll look at the other problems you've identified later.
Umm, if everyone receives the same amount of personal res regardless of how many teammates they have then the fraction would surely stay exactly the same?
The trouble with this is that in smaller games, you can't buy as many units (because your equivalent of population cap, player cap, is very low) but you still get the same amount of money, meaning there is little limit on your tech progression. So a smaller game would progress rather quickly. On the other hand, large games tend to suffer from supply issues due to lots of players needing stuff bought for them.
The same problem occurs for aliens, although with aliens you also have the problem of most of their stuff coming from class choices, which means they need to basically save up for a huge investment, they go from being very rich to very powerful in one evolution, and this kind of messes up alien gameplay whereby their power is very weird and jumps up and down as aliens evolve and die. Puts almost all the emphasis on a few players who play the high level lifeforms.
Conversely, NS2 fixes this, tech and unit production use different resources, and unit resources scale up with the number of players. This means that tech progression is the same with any game size, while unit production is also the same, as each player gets a certain amount of cash. This is also quite easy to understand as each player just gets a resource pool, they don't have to worry about taking from the team supply and the commander doesn't have to juggle unit deployment against tech development, it's actually much more straightforward than NS1, and works better, it's a universal improvement and I don't think it needs changing.
This is what I thought you meant at first; but your reply confused me:
<!--QuoteBegin-'align'+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE ('align')</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin--><b>No I meant like you always get the same amount of team resources</b>, they're just split into more (total) personal resources if you have more players (but it's the same amount for each individual player regardless of how many teammates they have).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes if every player recieves the same team res per RT per tick regardless of team size you should get a similar fraction of players with equipment regardless of team size; <i>but you can't do this without adjusting for relative team size because it's deeply unfair</i>.
If I have 12 players on my team and you have 10 on yours; my team will recieve 12 personal res from one RT in the time it takes your team to recieve 10 personal res from an RT, because there are simply more players able to recieve personal res on my team. That's 20% more personal res; my team can by 20% more equipment/evolutions than your team.
At the very least you should adjust the personal res income per RT down so that both teams recieve as much personal res per RT.
Having more players is unfair to begin with; without having a res model that compounds it.
What's this about individual players receiving team resources though? Shouldn't tres income be exclusively determined by number of RTs?