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Glad to hear this from David Kim!
I like how in SC2, you have mech style for example if you want lower APM army micro, and if you want a slower paced and more methodical game.
There's definitely elements that can be modernized further. Slowing the pace down even very slightly will be very helpful too since SC2 is very fast paced (and just allow more time for both players to interact/counter each other's moves like in BW, and focusing less on reactions and split second decisions).
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Yeah, a lot of factors come together in BW to make the cadence of a battle feel so plodding and methodical compared to SC2, and some of them are the kind you can't really get away with in a new game, like clumsy real-time pathfinding. But I wonder if you'd get some of that kind of battle pacing if the damage to HP ratio was a bit lower than you see in SC2. So not necessarily making the game slower paced, but making it less damning to a player if they don't immediately react to the start of a battle.
Brood War has this fascinating thing that happens where because it's so hard to make sure all your units are fighting optimally, a supply gap doesn't actually necessarily mean a player is at a disadvantage. I think that's a super cool dynamic because your status in the game doesn't directly correlate to a number in the corner of the screen, but much deeper things like positioning dynamics and tactical micro decisions. There's potential to try and pin something like that down in a new RTS, and I hold out a smidge of hope.
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I think a matchmaking system that allows you to tweak your desired winning probability would be of good use in practice. Not everyone likes a 50% winning outcome. Say you require 80% winning outcome at any one point in a day, your reward would also be adjusted to be small in case you win. If you lose, you take a bigger hit on your MMR. Sure people will farm MMR +1 points at a time, but it also encourages people to grind more which is healthy for the game population.
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On July 14 2021 13:56 NewSunshine wrote: Yeah, a lot of factors come together in BW to make the cadence of a battle feel so plodding and methodical compared to SC2, and some of them are the kind you can't really get away with in a new game, like clumsy real-time pathfinding. But I wonder if you'd get some of that kind of battle pacing if the damage to HP ratio was a bit lower than you see in SC2. So not necessarily making the game slower paced, but making it less damning to a player if they don't immediately react to the start of a battle.
Brood War has this fascinating thing that happens where because it's so hard to make sure all your units are fighting optimally, a supply gap doesn't actually necessarily mean a player is at a disadvantage. I think that's a super cool dynamic because your status in the game doesn't directly correlate to a number in the corner of the screen, but much deeper things like positioning dynamics and tactical micro decisions. There's potential to try and pin something like that down in a new RTS, and I hold out a smidge of hope.
Hello,
I agree with this, it seems the best way to improve things.
But again, it shows Banelings as THE problem unit cause the damage is done in a single shoot.
Imo here the best way to tweak banelings is to increase his supply from 0.5 to 1, increase his hit points and increase a little bit his size.
Then following your idea, you have to increase a little bit the stimpack duration (with maybe decreasing in consequence the 'modified damage') cause lack of micro-ing in terran is punishing and oftenly you get trap and circle,... as Medivacs do against Mutalisks. Similary, the afterburner upgrade is the second most controversial upgrade cause pros doesn t care so much about it while a Bio casual Terran can enjoy it.
I strongly support you and youngest people here to make this kind of mod. This isn t so hard, and the testing tool units is already done. Again, some tweaks are needed but not so many.
Looking to this balance you will be able to smooth the relationship between units and avoid armies to get crushed as you re doing something else. With care, the adjustement of damage regarding the armor value can also be revelant to approach the minimum global modifications without breaking the balance.
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Northern Ireland24389 Posts
On July 14 2021 13:56 NewSunshine wrote: Yeah, a lot of factors come together in BW to make the cadence of a battle feel so plodding and methodical compared to SC2, and some of them are the kind you can't really get away with in a new game, like clumsy real-time pathfinding. But I wonder if you'd get some of that kind of battle pacing if the damage to HP ratio was a bit lower than you see in SC2. So not necessarily making the game slower paced, but making it less damning to a player if they don't immediately react to the start of a battle.
Brood War has this fascinating thing that happens where because it's so hard to make sure all your units are fighting optimally, a supply gap doesn't actually necessarily mean a player is at a disadvantage. I think that's a super cool dynamic because your status in the game doesn't directly correlate to a number in the corner of the screen, but much deeper things like positioning dynamics and tactical micro decisions. There's potential to try and pin something like that down in a new RTS, and I hold out a smidge of hope. I love how SC2 micros up to a point, very responsive and good interactions, but the micro gets less and less enjoyable the bigger armies go. Units respond really nicely and just feel good to control, and honestly that’s something I find rarely in the genre.
It’s a tricky thing to tweak without going backwards and bringing in archaic UI restrictions, but I’ll be very excited if I ever hear of a game that nails it.
Warcraft 3 is too slow for some tastes, but is a clear example of a game with an HP/damage ratio that’s flipped around. There are still moments you have to be clutch over the course of a fight, but it’s more cumulative.
A max v max engagement in Starcraft can feel like two boxers with insane punching power and the first one to react gets an instant knockout, WC3 it’s like having a boxing match that always goes to 12 rounds, and whoever has boxed the most proficiently usually wins.
Perhaps there’s some happy medium between the two that is yet to be explored!
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United States12235 Posts
On July 14 2021 14:06 keaneu wrote: I think a matchmaking system that allows you to tweak your desired winning probability would be of good use in practice. Not everyone likes a 50% winning outcome. Say you require 80% winning outcome at any one point in a day, your reward would also be adjusted to be small in case you win. If you lose, you take a bigger hit on your MMR. Sure people will farm MMR +1 points at a time, but it also encourages people to grind more which is healthy for the game population.
But that's how a matchmaking system works...
The "tightness" of matchmaking has been tweaked dozens of times on SC2 (as is standard for modern games), based on player population, time of day, average queue time, and other similar meta-factors. One of the more controversial ones is engagement, and one thing that many games do is idealize player engagement in the context of difficulty as a "wave", where players tend to spend the most time per session if their game intensity goes in this type of order: medium, hard, easy, medium, hard, easy, medium, hard ... So, the matchmaker may influence matches to nudge (not enforce) player experience in that direction. What that looks like in practice is that when it comes time to find an "easy" game, maybe instead of the search range being +/-200 it's +100/-300, and for a "hard" game maybe it starts out -100/+300. In both cases you can still find an opponent in the -100/+100 range immediately. This is all invisible to the player but shapes their experience in the interest of improved engagement, improved player perception, and longer play time per session.
Anyway, mathematically speaking, the rating updates occur exactly how you describe. Let's say that your rating is 1000, an "easy" match that you are projected to win 80% of the time would have a rating of 700, and a "hard" match that you are projected to win 20% of the time would have a rating of 1300.
If you (1000) play against the 700 player and win, you would only gain +4 rating, but you would lose -16 if you lost. This means that if you played enough games, your rating would stay the same if you won 8 matches (+32) and lost 2 (-32), literally defining that 80% expectation.
If you play against the 1300 player and win, you would gain +16 rating, but only lose -4 rating if you lost. Just like in the first example, your expectation to win mathematically is 20% because it would only take 2 wins out of 10 games to maintain your current rating definition.
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Mexico2170 Posts
One thing that REALLY annoyed me by the Stormgate devs is that they claim they are "the developer team that made sc2 and wc3".
David Kim is not with them. Dustin Browder is not with them. Rob Pardo is not with them.
In fact David Kim is with it's own studio (the one in this thread) Uncapped games. DustimBrowder is with Mike Morhaime in Dreamhaven, and Rob Pardo has it's own dev team in Bonfire studios.
For what is worth, Dream haven did announce that they have some sort of deal with frost giant studios, but no details were given and no info has come out out of that announcement. So maybe dreamhaven was develiping an RTS but decided to focus on other types of games and just give advice to Frost Giagant who knows.
But the good news about this is that even if Frost Giant doesn't do well (Which I hope they do), we should at least have 1, if not 2, high profile RTS coming in the next few years.
______ Thanks for the update Cicada!
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On June 25 2023 03:36 [Phantom] wrote:
______ Thanks for the update Cicada! Of course! ^_^ Was happy to see they're planning on going free to play and the timeline is making progress. Perhaps it could line up with a StormGate release or shortly thereafter? hmmm. Content creators going to be real busy this coming year XD
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Whoa that's hype!! Time passes. Can't believe my comment at the top of this page is already 2 years old.
Also agree with the misleading advertisement on Stormgate.
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Small update on the games progress and stage of production via LinkedIn.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
On June 25 2023 03:36 [Phantom] wrote: One thing that REALLY annoyed me by the Stormgate devs is that they claim they are "the developer team that made sc2 and wc3".
David Kim is not with them. Dustin Browder is not with them. Rob Pardo is not with them.
In fact David Kim is with it's own studio (the one in this thread) Uncapped games. DustimBrowder is with Mike Morhaime in Dreamhaven, and Rob Pardo has it's own dev team in Bonfire studios.
For what is worth, Dream haven did announce that they have some sort of deal with frost giant studios, but no details were given and no info has come out out of that announcement. So maybe dreamhaven was develiping an RTS but decided to focus on other types of games and just give advice to Frost Giagant who knows.
But the good news about this is that even if Frost Giant doesn't do well (Which I hope they do), we should at least have 1, if not 2, high profile RTS coming in the next few years.
______ Thanks for the update Cicada!
Dreamhaven is publishing and collaberating on Stormgate AFAIK
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I hope this doesn't become the 100th RTS after Sc2 to design the game around smaller army sizes, fewer bases and slower units.
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Really good news for RTS lovers, lets hope he stays away from game balance ;P
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Large army sizes are fun, that's why people play BGH maps...nothing like sending waves and waves of carriers.
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Did a quick search and found nothing really on that game yet they advertise playtesting already in that job posting... pretty odd
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On September 25 2023 13:08 gobbledydook wrote: Large army sizes are fun, that's why people play BGH maps...nothing like sending waves and waves of carriers.
I don't think you can get "proper" multitasking if total army sizes are limited to like 20-25 units max. The best part of RTS games are when you can split your army into different parts around the map. If anything I go above what we have in Sc2/Sc1.
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I think a lot of these debates will be settled or at least focused when these new RTS titles come out. I personally am unsure about where I come out on this stuff, but as a gamer in my 40s that’s been playing RTS and pretty much every other genre of game in both digital and tabletop formats for over 30 years there are a few things that feel like intuitive truths:
1. There is something about the ways the units move in SC2 that feels smoother and more responsive than any other RTS, and I do think speed has something to do with it but would just note that there’s nuance here (e.g. accel/decel rate versus movement speed, take a look at the proposed changes to the Tempest to make it more responsive). Byun winning the world championships was maybe partly a unit exploit with his unrivaled speed and dexterity, but it didn’t feel unfair because he was doing things no one else could do (Maru ironically attempting the “just play like Byun” reaper micro in 2016 was pretty hilarious),
2. As a general rule in strategy games, mechanisms that simply tax your memory or executive functions without require meaningful tactical or strategic decisions are simply bad game design. It’s just not fun or interesting to see someone lose a game because they forgot to make an upgrade or got supply blocked at a critical moment. Again, there is nuance here. The point isn’t that high-APM games are bad game design. FPS games, if you count the constant movements and actions, to me feel even more high-paced and stressful than SC2, but thank god the devs don’t make me click away from my screen and press buttons every 15 seconds. So even though it sucks to lose with a single headshot, it doesn’t feel dumb to lose that way.
3. I’ve seen some “modernization” of strategy game design in the last 10 years that I think hasn’t quite hit the RTS genre yet. The basic understanding from devs and designers is to “find the fun” and then lean into those mechanisms and minimize unnecessary admin or other tasks that either don’t enable the fun or may undermine it. So what are those mechanisms in an RTS? Honestly it’s not that different than many other strategy games. Mechanisms that allow you to hide and pay a significant price to secure critical intel are fun. Mechanisms that allow for different, creative builds and evolving metas are fun. Mechanisms that reward speed and dexterity skill in fights are fun. Mechanisms that reward keen observation and adaptation to evolving game states are fun. Mechanisms that prevent turtling or grinding to victory, and allow for comebacks with extremely skillful play, are fun. All the best, most memorable moments in SC2 include this kind of stuff. Mechanisms that reward the player who memorizes and accurately executes on a preferred build order are not fun.
4. These things are hard to get right. If you get rid of these annoying macro/admin mechanisms, people will complain. Some people do find that stuff to be fun. There are not objectively correct answers to these things.
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I suck at these games but doesn't reducing the demands of attention and management affect the strategy?
Can we actually get that cream out of the coffee?
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