EPTStormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 24
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Slydie
1913 Posts
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Manit0u
Poland17237 Posts
On June 06 2023 03:45 Slydie wrote: You can talk about upkeep management as an advanced tactic all you want, but I thought it was really annoying to lose all my income because I made a unit too much. The Blizzard RTS games already have "supply", which in itself can be a frustrating mechanic, and upkeep on top of that is just too much imo. Look at MOBAs, no supply, only income is through fighting. That is what actually works nowdays. Looks to me like you want to play a MOBA rather than RTS... In WC3 if your income drops because you've made one unit too many and you are now suffering because of upkeep it means that: a) you're not paying attention, b) you're bad at strategizing, since you should never break upkeep for one unit but instead bank some resources and then immediately go to the next breakpoint to minimize income loss while maximizing your power, c) you're being outplayed by your opponent since you can't handle his forces with your current forces (unless they too did break upkeep), Any of the above could be true. I really don't get it when people want all the games within the genre to be exactly the same. IMO it's fine to borrow bits and pieces that are proven to work but nothing should prevent some innovation and mixing things up. One of the reasons people play RTS games is that you have a diverse way of playing them (unlike say MOBAs which are pretty much all the same with minor nuances). If you like playing heavy macro games then you have your StarCraft, Supreme Commander, Beyond All Reason, Earth 2140 etc. If you enjoy smaller skirmishes and more micro-oriented games with different abilities on units and such then you can play games like WarCraft, Company of Heroes and others that punish you for losing units for example. It's OK to not like ALL of them and all aspects of the RTS gameplay. There's plenty of good games at different places within the macro/micro spectrum so you can choose whichever one suits your playstyle the most. To me SC gameplay loop of expand -> build -> produce -> big fight -> remake units is actually rather uninspiring and I never really enjoyed the macro-oriented gameplay. WC3 on the other hand landed a sweet spot for me where I did have a bit of economy to think of but could focus on more entertaining aspects of the game, that is micromanaging units during constant skirmishes across the map. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24424 Posts
On June 06 2023 04:17 Manit0u wrote: Looks to me like you want to play a MOBA rather than RTS... In WC3 if your income drops because you've made one unit too many and you are now suffering because of upkeep it means that: a) you're not paying attention, b) you're bad at strategizing, since you should never break upkeep for one unit but instead bank some resources and then immediately go to the next breakpoint to minimize income loss while maximizing your power, c) you're being outplayed by your opponent since you can't handle his forces with your current forces (unless they too did break upkeep), Any of the above could be true. I really don't get it when people want all the games within the genre to be exactly the same. IMO it's fine to borrow bits and pieces that are proven to work but nothing should prevent some innovation and mixing things up. One of the reasons people play RTS games is that you have a diverse way of playing them (unlike say MOBAs which are pretty much all the same with minor nuances). If you like playing heavy macro games then you have your StarCraft, Supreme Commander, Beyond All Reason, Earth 2140 etc. If you enjoy smaller skirmishes and more micro-oriented games with different abilities on units and such then you can play games like WarCraft, Company of Heroes and others that punish you for losing units for example. It's OK to not like ALL of them and all aspects of the RTS gameplay. There's plenty of good games at different places within the macro/micro spectrum so you can choose whichever one suits your playstyle the most. To me SC gameplay loop of expand -> build -> produce -> big fight -> remake units is actually rather uninspiring and I never really enjoyed the macro-oriented gameplay. WC3 on the other hand landed a sweet spot for me where I did have a bit of economy to think of but could focus on more entertaining aspects of the game, that is micromanaging units during constant skirmishes across the map. Of course notable exceptions exist in terms of classic matches, In general I find both StarCrafts more fun to watch than Warcraft 3, but found the latter more fun to play. There’s less macro but there’s more micro, and with hero levels/items/creeping patterns as well as upkeep to kind of compensate. I think possibly being a worse player as a youngster may have influenced this, the kind of pro-amateur pipeline being less easy to tap into in that even mediocre players are doing recognisable facsimiles of pro builds, but I did find WC3 was a bit more improvisational and reactive in general. Good/bad item drops could lead you to make a judgement call in how to proceed in a match. You/your opponent losing a hero through a sloppy judgement call early on, you’re not dead and can come back but you’ve gotta switch it up. A lot of the impressive stuff that WC3 pros are doing is parsing this stuff and making correct calls, luckily the B2W guys and others communicate this well but it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable to a less knowledgeable audience, whereas SC you have macro monsters doing things all over the map and microing like kings, so it’s a bit more viscerally impressive. What we do actually know about Stormgate is: 1. Macro will be easier mechanically 2. Micro will be easier mechanically 3. Damage/HP ratio will be somewhere between SC2 and WC3 apparently 4. Warcraft 3 style hero mechanics aren’t going to be a thing in 1v1 And a lot of unknowns, which is exciting. We still don’t know how everything is going to work and what the game’s identity is. They’re not going down the Warcraft 3 route anyway, where less emphasis on macro was replaced with all the hero elements. A less mechanically taxing SC2 style game with less focus on macro, more elongated battles giving us more micro akin to WC3 and that’s it? Which I’d personally dig the fuck out of if it was good. Or an SC2 lite, where it plays similarly but is mechanically easier? Which I dig less. I fear that Starcraft is a game where a lot of the depth comes from how difficult it is to execute, so if execution is more trivial you lose depth. Or they’ve got some tricks up their sleeve we haven’t seen yet I’m sure there’s a load of other interesting mechanics other RTSes have tried that could be cool for any new game. Would be interested to hear about them, having only really played the classic Blizz ones/bit of AoE and some Dawn of War games | ||
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Slydie
1913 Posts
No, I am not really a MOBA guy, but I think it is a fact that hero-based RTS-ish games just work better that way. For Stormgate, it will be even harder than for SC2 to load tasks onto the player for the sake of differentiating who can get more done accurately. Blizzard games made a lot of quality-of-life changes too, like unit/building groups and smart cast, so controlling what you want to happen in the game should be made even easier with Stormgate. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17237 Posts
On June 06 2023 05:33 Slydie wrote: Is there even a single other RTS game with a mechanic remotely similar to upkeep? If it is so great, why do you think nobody copied it? There are several games that have some limiting factor on your economy. Even starting as early as Dune 2 you had sand worms that would eat up your harvesters, sandstorms that could shut down your wind traps etc. Then there's games like the Red Alert series, where you have no unit cap (on PC, 50 unit limit on consoles) but also have weird economy slow-downs in the form of energy (without which even your minimap doesn't work, inherited from the Dune series). Total War (even though not strictly RTS) has supply lines where you get heavier and heavier income penalties the more armies you have. Dawn of War 2 had kind of a reverse-upkeep if you can call it that - resource nodes gave you more the longer you held them but once captured by the enemy they reset back to 0, putting heavy emphasis on retaining map control. Then there's SpellForce where you need to capture sectors and your economy revolves around optimal worker placement (since workers are limited) and capturing correct sectors. All in all, it doesn't really matter much. Those are all just different mechanics to make economy more interesting. Come to think of it StarCraft also has somewhat of an upkeep cost because the more you expand the more production buildings and supply depots you need to put down to prevent floating (and those are resources spent not on the units themselves). The biggest difference really is the decision making and understanding the economy part of each game. In WC3 it's sometimes desirable to float resources to then hit power spikes by spending it on a bunch of items or breaking upkeep, in Dawn of War 2 you also wanted to float but at the same time hit specific timings for some units (making sure you have banked enough to get to higher tiers in a timely manner). It's quite similar in AoE I think. If it was all just "get resources, make units" it would lead to a rather dull gameplay with very high potential of snowballing into victory which isn't all that entertaining. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16647 Posts
On June 05 2023 23:54 ProMeTheus112 wrote: Mobas had become more successful than RTS as a whole, as they pulled in a lot of players in an era where gaming became much more popular years after years and a large proportion of players like to play team games, and games that aren't heavily demanding on mechanics like RTS are. I thought I read somewhere the plan for Stormgate is to have heroes only in team games. To add to your point about MOBAs versus RTSs. in 1995 a MOBA with 5v5 of 10 people connected in low latency was not technically feasible. What was reasonably possible was finding 1,2, or 3 people who could play against you in a 1v1 or 2v2. Competitive MOBAs were not technically feasible... RTS games were technically feasible. As soon as the 5v5 MOBA became feasible the competitive 1v1 RTS waned in popularity. | ||
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SHODAN
United Kingdom1060 Posts
On June 06 2023 05:33 Slydie wrote: Is there even a single other RTS game with a mechanic remotely similar to upkeep? If it is so great, why do you think nobody copied it? WC3 copied it from older RTS games. Company of Heroes has a similar upkeep system. the Cossacks games have tons of maintenance costs. Supreme Commander has energy maintenance. also, a lot of turn-based strategy games like Crusader Kings and Civilization have upkeep / army maintenance mechanics. resource penalties for large armies is a very common mechanic in RTS. WC3's upkeep system is just one take on the army maintenance. | ||
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Hildegard
Germany306 Posts
Room for improvement from the Starcraft games could be to make macro more visible. A Zerg player that can unload huge zergling/baneling attacks and re-max immediately, multiple times does incredibly well in macro, but for most viewers that process isn't really visible. Creep spread however is. I realize creep isn't seen as a great mechanic, but for a viewer it's easy to follow. tldr: Easing players in is fine and team/coop as well, but what the game is (hopefully) about is competitive 1v1 RTS and I hope they find a way to bring in players that enjoy such games and kickstart a competitive scene. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17237 Posts
On June 06 2023 15:47 Hildegard wrote: One difference is that more people playing games in 2023 than probably ever before. The team game market is saturated, but there are very few 1v1 games. But I'm fairly certain there is a market for 1v1. Especially that you have several communities starved for a new RTS. Dawn of War 3 failed, Company of Heroes 3 failed, Red Alert went mobile, WC3R failed, Spellforce 3 and Total War Warhammer 3 kinda niche... | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16647 Posts
So that, in 1993 the action/strategy players attached themselves to MULE and Super Tecmo Bowl and these players never moved on. They played the games until they had kids and then stopped playing games altogether. I know COH players who like 1 certain type of COH1 game or COH2 game and they are not moving off those games. This makes it very hard for COH3 to succeed. Today, there are dozens of these communities. In the early 90s this was not the case. It was MULE and Tecmo Bowl and that's it. This made it way easier for upcoming Action/Strategy games to succeed. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16647 Posts
On June 06 2023 17:09 Manit0u wrote: Especially that you have several communities starved for a new RTS I think it is the opposite. The consumer today has a bountiful crop great games from which to choose. What we have is a growing number of consumers with a bizarre self absorbed mindset expecting a video game to make their life great. They get very loud when they feel bored. When I was a kid and we got bored of Mario64 or StarCraft64 or Zelda we just ripped the cartridge out of the N64 and did something else. We did not 'blame the game'. We just accepted the fact that all games eventually get boring. Grubby discussed this exact issue a few years ago. "Play until you get bored and when you get bored do something else.' These giant marketing companies tell players the next game will make the players' lives complete by making it into an all encompassing lifelong + Show Spoiler + money spending | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6815 Posts
On June 06 2023 15:47 Hildegard wrote: One difference is that more people playing games in 2023 than probably ever before. The team game market is saturated, but there are very few 1v1 games. But I'm fairly certain there is a market for 1v1. Chess got a lot more popular in the last ten years for example. I'm all for easing in newer players with automation features, coop, campaigns, but competitive 1v1 with enough complexity to develop player styles and balancing good enough to allow many different approaches/tactics/strategies to work. Room for improvement from the Starcraft games could be to make macro more visible. A Zerg player that can unload huge zergling/baneling attacks and re-max immediately, multiple times does incredibly well in macro, but for most viewers that process isn't really visible. Creep spread however is. I realize creep isn't seen as a great mechanic, but for a viewer it's easy to follow. tldr: Easing players in is fine and team/coop as well, but what the game is (hopefully) about is competitive 1v1 RTS and I hope they find a way to bring in players that enjoy such games and kickstart a competitive scene. I'm pretty sure Stormgate's main ladder and balance is not 1v1 but 3v3. They have said so. Will add source as soon as I find it again EDIT: There is a lot about 3v3 out there but can't find the source I originally meant. Anyway in 5 days we'll know more  | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey394 Posts
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NonY
8748 Posts
It’s rewarding idleness — the optimal play is to stop doing anything. You can call it strategy or awareness to know when the best thing to do is nothing, and there’s truth to that!, but it is fundamentally a flawed mechanic. I don’t know why someone building an RTS from the ground up would plan to have it. And with respect to how it “adds” strategy: I’m not so sure. It’s an artificial mechanic that gives a massive hint on when to stop producing units, how big of an economy to build, etc. Similar to how 99% of people put 16 probes on minerals in SC2… compare to BW where people have to have a feel for how many workers to produce, when to start and stop, etc. it’s so much more fluid and therefore more complex than worker management in SC2. Every possible place to focus your attention in the game should ideally have some benefit to it at every stage of the game. That way the skill of “where to put my attention” is constantly in play. This is also good for having a variety of play styles. Also note that plenty of people produce without thinking in BW and SC2 and overproduce certain things and it’s really bad for them. You don’t need upkeep for the game to punish someone for carelessly building too many of something at a certain time. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24424 Posts
On June 06 2023 17:09 Manit0u wrote: Especially that you have several communities starved for a new RTS. Dawn of War 3 failed, Company of Heroes 3 failed, Red Alert went mobile, WC3R failed, Spellforce 3 and Total War Warhammer 3 kinda niche... I’m not sure how much these games failed. They just weren’t the new BW/SC2 or what have you. Such is modern gaming and expectations though. Making a decent AAA game and making your money back is relative failure if it’s not the new League or Fortnite level game I mean AoE4 is a case in point. Its success or failure really depends on what your gauge is. A ton of people gave it a shot, enjoyed it and went back to playing other things. It would be a success on many metrics, a failure on others. | ||
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
On June 07 2023 00:14 NonY wrote: Every possible place to focus your attention in the game should ideally have some benefit to it at every stage of the game. That way the skill of “where to put my attention” is constantly in play. This is also good for having a variety of play styles. Ngl a lack of variety in play styles was always my main point of criticism with war3. Idk if I would attribute it to upkeep as I usually placed it rather on unit balance / match up balance / tech paths balance. But it's true that expansion styles or economic styles in war3 also tend to repeat and limit match ups probably more than other games. Although to be extra fair that's also where I always end up criticizing almost any strategy game where you seem to have so many options but only a select few end up being playable ; to which extent, that still varies quite a bit per game or match up. In conclusion my ideal strategy game would allow as many of the possible paths that it proposes to the players playable with as many variations and follow ups as possible (similar to Go), for example if it's possible to build 5 different buildings at start, almost any of these could come first and sometimes in varying amounts etc, allowing you to pick your favorite sequences and switch them around per game. If you have to follow a damn unique or 2 build orders at the start or you lose, follow this or that mid/endgame paths or you lose, bummer for me. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24424 Posts
On June 07 2023 00:14 NonY wrote: The micro equivalent to upkeep is having the default uncontrolled behavior of units be better than anything a player can manually micro. It’s rewarding idleness — the optimal play is to stop doing anything. You can call it strategy or awareness to know when the best thing to do is nothing, and there’s truth to that!, but it is fundamentally a flawed mechanic. I don’t know why someone building an RTS from the ground up would plan to have it. And with respect to how it “adds” strategy: I’m not so sure. It’s an artificial mechanic that gives a massive hint on when to stop producing units, how big of an economy to build, etc. Similar to how 99% of people put 16 probes on minerals in SC2… compare to BW where people have to have a feel for how many workers to produce, when to start and stop, etc. it’s so much more fluid and therefore more complex than worker management in SC2. Every possible place to focus your attention in the game should ideally have some benefit to it at every stage of the game. That way the skill of “where to put my attention” is constantly in play. This is also good for having a variety of play styles. Also note that plenty of people produce without thinking in BW and SC2 and overproduce certain things and it’s really bad for them. You don’t need upkeep for the game to punish someone for carelessly building too many of something at a certain time. I guess one would need to see how the overall economy works. In SC2 with its faster ramping up of things, unless something weird goes down it’s basically always optimal to take that second and third base at standard timings. And as long as you can hold them, further expansions. BW doesn’t really work like that, so there’s some additional depth and strategic thinking injected there Most SC2 games where some funky cheese isn’t involved invariably end up with the same expansion patterns and timings. | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On June 06 2023 15:47 Hildegard wrote: Room for improvement from the Starcraft games could be to make macro more visible. A Zerg player that can unload huge zergling/baneling attacks and re-max immediately, multiple times does incredibly well in macro, but for most viewers that process isn't really visible. Creep spread however is. I realize creep isn't seen as a great mechanic, but for a viewer it's easy to follow. I think fundamentally 'macro' is just not fun and really just a means to get to the fun part. Unit interactions, player interactions. I am saying that as someone who enjoys pressing the buttons, to get into a certain flow, but ultimately this is all just a certain mechanics test, there is nothing interesting to it. Whereas controlling the units vs another player is dynamic, it allows the player to have different experiences depending on the other player's inputs. It's no surprise that this is what mobas generally focus on, player vs player interactions, unit dynamics. That is what is fun, to most people. A good test for it is imo also what newer players generally do in starcraft, they pay way too much attention to their units, they want to control them, which means bad macro. But this inclination in itself tells us something. | ||
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Hildegard
Germany306 Posts
On June 07 2023 02:42 The_Red_Viper wrote: I think fundamentally 'macro' is just not fun and really just a means to get to the fun part. Unit interactions, player interactions. I am saying that as someone who enjoys pressing the buttons, to get into a certain flow, but ultimately this is all just a certain mechanics test, there is nothing interesting to it. Whereas controlling the units vs another player is dynamic, it allows the player to have different experiences depending on the other player's inputs. It's no surprise that this is what mobas generally focus on, player vs player interactions, unit dynamics. That is what is fun, to most people. A good test for it is imo also what newer players generally do in starcraft, they pay way too much attention to their units, they want to control them, which means bad macro. But this inclination in itself tells us something. I don't agree. Macro is what RTS games are really about. Without it, micro and decision-making would be a lot less impressive. I just think that macro needs better visualization. That makes it more rewarding. To what, I agree is that many macro mechanics aren't all that exciting, but I think there is room for something as "simple" as remembering to do something every 18 seconds. Hopefully, the Stormgate developers can come up with something exciting. Maybe one faction needs to recalibrate instruments for the mini-map or other interface features to work. That could be a simple mini-game that takes 1–2 seconds to complete, but, if failed, can only be tried 30 seconds later. Ok, I'm certainly no developer for a reason, but I hope we get excellent macro mechanics for Stormgate because I don't think new micro mechanics or decisions could be innovative in the same way, simply because most things in these areas have been done already. | ||
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
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