Something else I was thinking about which I think compounds this slippery slope phenomenon, is what I call "disposable investments". These are essentially "upgrades" which don't function in a typical way and have no applicability past their initial use. They exist to varying degrees in many mechanics, but the most substantial one is shift eggs.
When too many aliens die, you potentially run out of eggs, and then need to supplement the normal rate of egg creation with eggs from a shift. Lets look at that quickly. Too many aliens are dying, that's negative. I suppose you may be inclined to argue that maybe you are trying an all in base rush of some sort, but at the very least if the marines are attempting to counter it, you are breaking even, so overall I would say its negative.
Now you need to spend resources in order to return to the baseline, to return to normality. The new eggs don't mean more powerful aliens, they don't mean more alien players, they don't even mean faster spawning aliens. It simply means that you now reinforce at a normal rate, instead of a decreased rate. On top of that, once used, the eggs cost is completely lost. No lasting benefit.
So at this point, you are in a negative situation, and you begin expending resources in order to return to normal operating efficiency, while your enemy, presumably (but not necessarily) in a positive position, expends resources on more typical upgrades which have a lasting benefit to the team.
In such a situation, assuming that both teams are equally skilled, I'm sure you will agree that purely from an economics perspective, the aliens cannot win. There is simply no way. What this essentially means is that a mechanic like egg spawns does absolutely nothing but prolong an already lost game.
It depends a bit on a viewpoint.
In NS1 I would've often paid quite a bit on the aliens to have a rapid respawn mechanism in smaller games. You'd sometimes get wiped on a res node defense. Losing a node hurt a lot, but losing the map presence hurt equally much. In NS1 you never had a chance to regain the map spread rapidly, which sometimes made games snowball quickly.
What I like about the basic idea of purchasing extra spawning power is that it allows you to decide how you take the fall. You're balancing between decisions on sacrificing res or sacrificng map presense. It's still going to hurt, but you're still allowed to have a strategical approach rather than just hoping that you somehow survive whatever hit you.
The initial issue might be that getting your team wiped in a bad engagement happens too easily or sets you back too far. Meanwhile the egg mechanic itself isn't going to destroy you if it's done right, it more likely allows the losing team to have a recovery plan.
Something else I was thinking about which I think compounds this slippery slope phenomenon, is what I call "disposable investments". These are essentially "upgrades" which don't function in a typical way and have no applicability past their initial use. They exist to varying degrees in many mechanics, but the most substantial one is shift eggs.
When too many aliens die, you potentially run out of eggs, and then need to supplement the normal rate of egg creation with eggs from a shift. Lets look at that quickly. Too many aliens are dying, that's negative. I suppose you may be inclined to argue that maybe you are trying an all in base rush of some sort, but at the very least if the marines are attempting to counter it, you are breaking even, so overall I would say its negative.
Now you need to spend resources in order to return to the baseline, to return to normality. The new eggs don't mean more powerful aliens, they don't mean more alien players, they don't even mean faster spawning aliens. It simply means that you now reinforce at a normal rate, instead of a decreased rate. On top of that, once used, the eggs cost is completely lost. No lasting benefit.
So at this point, you are in a negative situation, and you begin expending resources in order to return to normal operating efficiency, while your enemy, presumably (but not necessarily) in a positive position, expends resources on more typical upgrades which have a lasting benefit to the team.
In such a situation, assuming that both teams are equally skilled, I'm sure you will agree that purely from an economics perspective, the aliens cannot win. There is simply no way. What this essentially means is that a mechanic like egg spawns does absolutely nothing but prolong an already lost game.
It depends a bit on a viewpoint.
In NS1 I would've often paid quite a bit on the aliens to have a rapid respawn mechanism in smaller games. You'd sometimes get wiped on a res node defense. Losing a node hurt a lot, but losing the map presence hurt equally much. In NS1 you never had a chance to regain the map spread rapidly, which sometimes made games snowball quickly.
What I like about the basic idea of purchasing extra spawning power is that it allows you to decide how you take the fall. You're balancing between decisions on sacrificing res or sacrificng map presense. It's still going to hurt, but you're still allowed to have a strategical approach rather than just hoping that you somehow survive whatever hit you.
The initial issue might be that getting your team wiped in a bad engagement happens too easily or sets you back too far. Meanwhile the egg mechanic itself isn't going to destroy you if it's done right, it more likely allows the losing team to have a recovery plan.
Paying for increased spawning would be more acceptable. You put down resources, and you gain some form of buff. That isn't how shift eggs work though (unless I'm mistaken, though I don't think I am). Additional eggs merely let you respawn at the same rate you otherwise would have if you had enough eggs.
Its like taking out a loan in order to pay off your exiting debt. It will keep you alive in the short run, but it is doomed to fail.
Something else I was thinking about which I think compounds this slippery slope phenomenon, is what I call "disposable investments". These are essentially "upgrades" which don't function in a typical way and have no applicability past their initial use. They exist to varying degrees in many mechanics, but the most substantial one is shift eggs.
When too many aliens die, you potentially run out of eggs, and then need to supplement the normal rate of egg creation with eggs from a shift. Lets look at that quickly. Too many aliens are dying, that's negative. I suppose you may be inclined to argue that maybe you are trying an all in base rush of some sort, but at the very least if the marines are attempting to counter it, you are breaking even, so overall I would say its negative.
Now you need to spend resources in order to return to the baseline, to return to normality. The new eggs don't mean more powerful aliens, they don't mean more alien players, they don't even mean faster spawning aliens. It simply means that you now reinforce at a normal rate, instead of a decreased rate. On top of that, once used, the eggs cost is completely lost. No lasting benefit.
So at this point, you are in a negative situation, and you begin expending resources in order to return to normal operating efficiency, while your enemy, presumably (but not necessarily) in a positive position, expends resources on more typical upgrades which have a lasting benefit to the team.
In such a situation, assuming that both teams are equally skilled, I'm sure you will agree that purely from an economics perspective, the aliens cannot win. There is simply no way. What this essentially means is that a mechanic like egg spawns does absolutely nothing but prolong an already lost game.
It depends a bit on a viewpoint.
In NS1 I would've often paid quite a bit on the aliens to have a rapid respawn mechanism in smaller games. You'd sometimes get wiped on a res node defense. Losing a node hurt a lot, but losing the map presence hurt equally much. In NS1 you never had a chance to regain the map spread rapidly, which sometimes made games snowball quickly.
What I like about the basic idea of purchasing extra spawning power is that it allows you to decide how you take the fall. You're balancing between decisions on sacrificing res or sacrificng map presense. It's still going to hurt, but you're still allowed to have a strategical approach rather than just hoping that you somehow survive whatever hit you.
The initial issue might be that getting your team wiped in a bad engagement happens too easily or sets you back too far. Meanwhile the egg mechanic itself isn't going to destroy you if it's done right, it more likely allows the losing team to have a recovery plan.
Paying for increased spawning would be more acceptable. You put down resources, and you gain some form of buff. That isn't how shift eggs work though (unless I'm mistaken, though I don't think I am). Additional eggs merely let you respawn at the same rate you otherwise would have if you had enough eggs.
Its like taking out a loan in order to pay off your exiting debt. It will keep you alive in the short run, but it is doomed to fail.
Yeah, there can be loads of bad implementations of things. In this case I'd say it's the eggs running out and further punishing a team that's probably already losing as it is. Of course it's a pretty complex thing as it is. Teams need weaknesses that can be punished and all that too and quick spawning rate both favours defender and prolongs games.
So yeah, I guess the conclusion is that the basic idea of 'losing team upgrades' is pretty good, but the implementation can be very much bonkers unless you're careful.
ScardyBobScardyBobJoin Date: 2009-11-25Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
For me, the thing that causes NS2's oddly shaped victory curve is the strong correlation between military, economy, and technology. For example, in a RTS like SC1/2, the relationship between producing units, expanding your economy, and teching up is weak enough that a failure in one (e.g. not teching up properly) doesn't necessarily lead to an inevitable loss (i.e. a large enough military supported by a humming res gathering with proper micro can sometimes overcome your tech deficit).
Contrast that with NS2 in which all three (military, economy, and technology) are basically intertwined. To tech up, you need a ton of res (economy). To build up your economy, you basically need to win engagements at your expansions (military). Winning engagements is strongly dependent on the basic FPS skills of your team. As such, if you win your early engagements, it a big buff to your economy, which allows your to tech up faster. Its not hard to see how this can build on itself (as teching up helps win engagements) such that early wins snowball to inevitable victories.
The difficulty is figuring out how to counteract this affect without crippling the FPS portion of NS2. My thoughts of possible solutions are: Military (Goal: Replicate the concept of 'units', i.e. players, costing resources in NS2)
- Get rid of No PRes when dead, but make each spawn cost a small amount of PRes (something in the 0.5-1PRes/spawn may suffice)
- Minimize the amount of no PRes cost upgraded units (e.g. the 'free' unit, e.g. skulk and lmg marine, should be weak and obsoletable. If you wan't something better you need to spend res to get it, e.g. get rid of free leap, xeno, upgrades for base skulks and free w/a upgrades for lmg marines, but allow both to purchase a 'super' skulk or upgrade pack for a small amount of PRes to get access to those tech. All other classes/weapons are fine as they already cost PRes)
Economy (Goal: Institute a tradeoff between more res via expansion vs upgrading existing RTs)
- Allow RTs to be upgraded to produce more res/tick (e.g. Tier 1 = default res flow, 1TRes/8s, Tier 2 = 1TRes/4s, Tier 3 = 1TRes/2s)
- Make RT upgrades to be increased and destroyed in 'tiers' (e.g. allow it to be destroyed in tiers also such that attacking a Tier3 RT drops it to Tier2 than Tier1 than dead rather Tier3 to dead)
- Allow the resilience of the upgraded RT to increase either quadratically or exponentially by tier (e.g. Tier1 RT = easy to kill, Tier2 RT = twice as hard to kill, Tier3 RT = four times as hard to kill)
- Cap RT total res production (e.g. to prevent 1RT turtling, but the cap should be large enough that it would take something like 60min of Tier3 res gathering rate to deplete)
Technology (Goal: Provide flexibility in switching tech paths at the cost of either more res or more time)
- Make the tech tree more broad than deep (e.g. flatten it by reducing the number of prerequisites)
- Repurpose/bring back mist and nanoconstruct as abilities to speed up research by spending TRes (though I would implement it as some sort of autocast feature on tech structures so we don't have to tediously keep casting them)
- Scale the research speed of tech based on number of tech nodes captured (e.g. you can research stomp on one hive, but it will take 15min, whereas with three hives it takes the current time)
@ScardyBob - While I haven't considered each of your suggestions deeply, I think the general concept is sound and worth exploring.
Another way to look at it: think of NS2 as containing multiple types of resources: res, time, lives/spawns, player combat skill, territory, attention (especially the commander's attention), strategic intel, tactical awareness, ai units, weapons, evolutions, upgrades, and more. As it stands now, most of these are strongly linked. NS2 could have greater strategic depth and richness if they were less strongly linked, so that:
a) acquiring/spending/investing in one type of resource necessarily required making sacrifices in the others, so that every choice had trade-offs, and
b) no single type of resource or set of resources was strictly dominant over all others, thus allowing for multiple viable strategies
Reducing the linkage between resource types would also reduce the early-game snowballing effect, as you point out.
Comments
In NS1 I would've often paid quite a bit on the aliens to have a rapid respawn mechanism in smaller games. You'd sometimes get wiped on a res node defense. Losing a node hurt a lot, but losing the map presence hurt equally much. In NS1 you never had a chance to regain the map spread rapidly, which sometimes made games snowball quickly.
What I like about the basic idea of purchasing extra spawning power is that it allows you to decide how you take the fall. You're balancing between decisions on sacrificing res or sacrificng map presense. It's still going to hurt, but you're still allowed to have a strategical approach rather than just hoping that you somehow survive whatever hit you.
The initial issue might be that getting your team wiped in a bad engagement happens too easily or sets you back too far. Meanwhile the egg mechanic itself isn't going to destroy you if it's done right, it more likely allows the losing team to have a recovery plan.
Paying for increased spawning would be more acceptable. You put down resources, and you gain some form of buff. That isn't how shift eggs work though (unless I'm mistaken, though I don't think I am). Additional eggs merely let you respawn at the same rate you otherwise would have if you had enough eggs.
Its like taking out a loan in order to pay off your exiting debt. It will keep you alive in the short run, but it is doomed to fail.
So yeah, I guess the conclusion is that the basic idea of 'losing team upgrades' is pretty good, but the implementation can be very much bonkers unless you're careful.
Contrast that with NS2 in which all three (military, economy, and technology) are basically intertwined. To tech up, you need a ton of res (economy). To build up your economy, you basically need to win engagements at your expansions (military). Winning engagements is strongly dependent on the basic FPS skills of your team. As such, if you win your early engagements, it a big buff to your economy, which allows your to tech up faster. Its not hard to see how this can build on itself (as teching up helps win engagements) such that early wins snowball to inevitable victories.
The difficulty is figuring out how to counteract this affect without crippling the FPS portion of NS2. My thoughts of possible solutions are:
Military (Goal: Replicate the concept of 'units', i.e. players, costing resources in NS2)
- Get rid of No PRes when dead, but make each spawn cost a small amount of PRes (something in the 0.5-1PRes/spawn may suffice)
- Minimize the amount of no PRes cost upgraded units (e.g. the 'free' unit, e.g. skulk and lmg marine, should be weak and obsoletable. If you wan't something better you need to spend res to get it, e.g. get rid of free leap, xeno, upgrades for base skulks and free w/a upgrades for lmg marines, but allow both to purchase a 'super' skulk or upgrade pack for a small amount of PRes to get access to those tech. All other classes/weapons are fine as they already cost PRes)
Economy (Goal: Institute a tradeoff between more res via expansion vs upgrading existing RTs)
- Allow RTs to be upgraded to produce more res/tick (e.g. Tier 1 = default res flow, 1TRes/8s, Tier 2 = 1TRes/4s, Tier 3 = 1TRes/2s)
- Make RT upgrades to be increased and destroyed in 'tiers' (e.g. allow it to be destroyed in tiers also such that attacking a Tier3 RT drops it to Tier2 than Tier1 than dead rather Tier3 to dead)
- Allow the resilience of the upgraded RT to increase either quadratically or exponentially by tier (e.g. Tier1 RT = easy to kill, Tier2 RT = twice as hard to kill, Tier3 RT = four times as hard to kill)
- Cap RT total res production (e.g. to prevent 1RT turtling, but the cap should be large enough that it would take something like 60min of Tier3 res gathering rate to deplete)
Technology (Goal: Provide flexibility in switching tech paths at the cost of either more res or more time)
- Make the tech tree more broad than deep (e.g. flatten it by reducing the number of prerequisites)
- Repurpose/bring back mist and nanoconstruct as abilities to speed up research by spending TRes (though I would implement it as some sort of autocast feature on tech structures so we don't have to tediously keep casting them)
- Scale the research speed of tech based on number of tech nodes captured (e.g. you can research stomp on one hive, but it will take 15min, whereas with three hives it takes the current time)
Another way to look at it: think of NS2 as containing multiple types of resources: res, time, lives/spawns, player combat skill, territory, attention (especially the commander's attention), strategic intel, tactical awareness, ai units, weapons, evolutions, upgrades, and more. As it stands now, most of these are strongly linked. NS2 could have greater strategic depth and richness if they were less strongly linked, so that:
Reducing the linkage between resource types would also reduce the early-game snowballing effect, as you point out.
More food for thought.