EPT
A Treatise on the Economy of SCII - Page 33
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I have received requests on how to try the model out: Search "Double Harvesting (TeamLiquid)" by ZeromuS as an Extension Mod in HotS Custom Games to try it out. Email your replays of your games on DH to: LegacyEconomyTest@gmail.com might have partnership with a replay website soon as well  In Game Group: Double Harvest | ||
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
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Grumbels
Netherlands7031 Posts
On April 26 2015 22:54 Barrin wrote: In finances, the word for this "snowballing" is known as "compound interest", and it has been said to be the most powerful force in the world. It explains why such small differences in income rate seems so pronounced as the game goes on (until peak economy). If you haven't learned about compound interest yet, I highly suggest you go do that now for your own personal sake. Shouldn't take long. different interest rates = different income rates making an investment/deposit = making workers/town halls interest in action = workers mining withdrawing = making production/tech annual return on investment = return on investment by the minute The more the initial difference between mining rates, the greater the difference will grow in the same amount of time, until peak economy. Risk of expanding and threat of attack aside, you can literally make money on your money, and then make money on the money that you made with your money, etc. This is true, but besides the point. I want to apologize if I misused terminology. I use snowballing in the sense of a small advantage naturally growing into a large, even decisive advantage. A snowflock runs down the hill to gather snow, this coalesces into a snowball of massive size compared to its humble beginnings seemingly without any special effort. Relating this to game design you could state that your advantage naturally starts to grow when both players do nothing. The question is how you define advantage, and this depends on the point system of the game. If you play Starcraft and you're 12 to 10 workers ahead, this might be a thirty second or 20% in-game advantage. The economy grows exponentially and some minutes later you do another tally and find you're 60 to 50 workers ahead. Your worker advantage has grown, from 2 to 10, but your overall advantage is still 20% or thirty game seconds. Suppose the economy would grow linearly, your advantage might be 52 to 50 workers. Thirty seconds ahead but your advantage has shrunk from 20% to 4%. Using this as a case example we can state that by itself both an exponentially and a linearly growing economy do not match with my definition of snowballing as your advantage (however defined) stays constant or decreases. As an aside, probably the issue is with my sloppy use of terminology because the snowballing metaphor is easy to associate with the concept of exponential growth. I was thinking of the notion of "slippery slope" as defined by Sirlin, which more accurately reflects the influence of a non-fixed economy on the comeback potential inherent in the game. A quotation: If a game has slippery slope, it means that falling behind causes you to fall even further behind. ... StarCraft also has slippery slope. When you lose a unit, you are penalized doubly. First, you are closer to losing (having no units at all is so crippling as to be virtually the same as the actual loss condition of losing all your buildings). Second, you are less able to attack and defend because the unit you lost was not just part of a score, but also part of the actual gameplay of attacking and defending. StarCraft has even more severe slippery slope when it comes to the game’s economy. Imagine that your opponent rushes you (sends an early attack to your base) and you fend it off. Let’s say you each lost about the same value of units in the exchange, except that you also lost one worker unit. In a different type of game, this might equate to being one “point” behind. But in StarCraft, that can be a crippling loss because gathering minerals is nearly exponential. Your opponent is ahead of you in the resource curve, increasing their earnings faster than you are. You’ve fallen down a very slippery slope here, where an early disadvantage becomes more magnified as the game goes on. In basketball, the score is completely separate from the gameplay. Your ability to score points doesn’t depend at all on what the current score is. You could be ahead by 20 points or behind by 20 points and have the same chances of scoring more points. But in StarCraft (and Chess), the score is bound up with the gameplay. Losing units pushes you closer to loss AND makes it harder to fight back. (source) I think Sirlin fell into the same trap as you did, by the way, since his economy example also did not illustrate how income advantage is growing faster. But it's where I got the definition from, in any case. More to the point, and let's use the same example as earlier, if you have a 20% income advantage in SC2 and you see income as your main tool to affect the outcome of the game, then if you try to gain a more pronounced advantage you'll actually have better odds. If you throw a coin the outcome of which would increase or decrease your advantage, it would be 55:45 in your favor. Growing your economy is a neutral action if you're growing it at the same relative speed as your opponent, regardless of whether it's exponential growth or not. But the income disparity actually allows you to speed up your build and this does allow you to make gains. This would happen with both exponential growth and in some cases with linear growth, it's just that in the latter there is a competing effect that reduces your advantage and therefore you can no longer categorically state there is a slippery slope effect. With a fixed economy none of these effects exist. A concrete example of this: you're 2 workers ahead and eventually some extra army units. You decide to take faster third base and start your upgrades earlier, while your opponent has to play safe due to lower army supply and starts tech and economy later. His build, which used to be thirty seconds behind is now a minute behind and victory is assured. | ||
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BlackLilium
Poland426 Posts
On April 26 2015 23:06 Barrin wrote: Almost exactly 20%. Just 20%. You are actually right, it is 20% with very small error Didn't check the actual number when I was writing that, just picked it from memory... ----- Grumbels, I think I have to agree with you. If I am at 11 workers and my opponent has 12, then I am 17 seconds behind (the time to build 12th worker). If we both play ideally from that point, macroing, I will remain 17 seconds behind. In the long turn it will mean I am about 850 resources behind (assuming income of 3000 minerals & gas per minute in the mid-late game). But that disparity is not going to grow further due to supply cap and realistic limit on the amount of workers that you want to have. | ||
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Randomaccount#77123
United States5003 Posts
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MrMatt
Canada225 Posts
I really feel now we are just rushing to 200/200 armies so fast. It's not that I want 15 minutes of sim city before a battle. But I really would love to see a way of slowing the speed at which the army just becomes a big hard to control ball. | ||
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BlackLilium
Poland426 Posts
On April 27 2015 02:27 MrMatt wrote: I still like smaller skirmishes. I love seeing a small force fight a small force with micro on both sides. Hellions and reapers vs queens lings where you can see micro, kiting, positioning, zoning and all these decisions where the difference getting a unit kill vs keeping it alive can make a big difference. I really feel now we are just rushing to 200/200 armies so fast. It's not that I want 15 minutes of sim city before a battle. But I really would love to see a way of slowing the speed at which the army just becomes a big hard to control ball. Oh, I agree with you on that as well! But that is not what DH tries to address; at least not directly. I would welcome much lower overall income rate.... But I am sure there are many who would disagree with me as well. | ||
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SetGuitarsToKill
Canada28396 Posts
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
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SetGuitarsToKill
Canada28396 Posts
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StalkerFang
Australia68 Posts
On April 27 2015 12:57 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: So after watching the Scarlett vs Parting showmatch, I can't say I'm super impressed with the new model. Maybe it's just rooted in the fact that there's a significant skill difference between those two players, but it seems like there was just no reason to take the extra risk and go up to more bases than you needed (3-4). The extra income you got just didn't justify the extra risk of taking more bases, and it was too easy to spread the other player thin trying to defend all their bases while sitting back on your standard 3. Parting played perfectly standard 3 base, full saturated macro play and had more than enough resources to deal with Scarlett's 4-5 base economy. Again, this could just be the players, but from the looks of things there was very little difference between what would have happened under the old economy and what happened in the proposed one. A big part of this could be the maps too. It seems you'd need to complete redesign maps to make them easier to take past 3 bases, or else a 4th is just almost never worth it even if you get more money per worker. Definitely felt the same. It just didn't seem to make a big difference at all. Zerg already goes up to a 4th base against a 3 base protoss and scarlett had serious trouble taking a 5th. I think defenders advantage is just too weak in SC2 for anybody to take proper advantage of this model, particularly with Parting's style in PvZ. I'd still be in favour of blizzard trying this out in LotV for a couple of weeks at some point to get a larger data set. But I honestly don't see it affecting very much without a lot of other large changes. | ||
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BlackLilium
Poland426 Posts
On April 27 2015 13:18 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: Matches will be uploaded here eventually, also on Bacon_Infinity's twitch page probably https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5RrInxbPBbX9zfTscLvcw Looking forward to matches. Can't say much about Scarlett vs Parting if I didn't see it  I would like to point out however, that DH9 - or any other DH for that matter - tries to be a small change just to encourage expanding. It is not a "must have" to force expanding-style gameplay. It is not meant to be a mod that would throw everything upside down. 3-base play should remain viable. Is DH9 a too small change? That is hard to judge; we need more games. Much more. Plus also the fact, that players will need time to adapt to the new economy. As with any other balance change, effects are not always immediately visible. | ||
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Krobolt
Canada42 Posts
Same mining time as DH9, but return 8 minerals instead. (Lower income = slower time to max out since I think it's still too fast right now. Adjust gas mining rates to compensate.) 10-12 worker start. (I think the game would start a bit too slowly with 6 workers and DH8. Also would be more in line with Blizzards goals.) High ground advantage mechanic. (Doesn't have to be RNG 1/2 miss chance, but some form of this would allow for 4+ bases to be taken more safely.) | ||
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ZenithM
France15952 Posts
If you think about it, Blizzard IS actually shaking things up way more than the DH thing with the LotV model: adding a sense of urgency in expanding, constant aggression moving at different locations on the map, battling for expands with way less resources... It doesn't really create strategy per se, but I'm not sure anything will at that point in SC2, but it's a change from HotS at least (in a good way as far as I'm concerned). What DH does is address a hypothetical case of one player being able to easily expand against a turtling opponent and being rewarded for doing so: it actually doesn't create either conflict or strategy, I'm guessing that in a stable metagame, there will always be some fixed way a matchup is economically played out and one race has to expand a fixed number of times (possibly more than the other). The game will be balanced around that and that's it, nothing indicates that this will create more interesting situations. LotV's economy has its obvious flaws: tech timings and costs are outdated in the new 12-starting-worker game (this can obviously be fine-tuned), and the difference between full base and half mined out base is too steep. I would actually like to see bases where mineral patches have something like 100%, 100%, 100%, 90%, 80, 70, 60, 50% of their original load, for a smoother transition. But overall I think it's worth testing imo, about as much as DH is, and the community didn't give it even a chance because it hurt their feelings, essentially ("boohoo, I feel like I'm being punished instead of rewarded", bleh, what a drag). I'm glad they didn't give in immediately to a misguided elite's demand, and that more people get to test it out soon as beta invites are sent. | ||
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BlackLilium
Poland426 Posts
On April 27 2015 15:38 ZenithM wrote: But overall I think it's worth testing imo, about as much as DH is, and the community didn't give it even a chance because it hurt their feelings, essentially ("boohoo, I feel like I'm being punished instead of rewarded", bleh, what a drag). I'm glad they didn't give in immediately to a misguided elite's demand, and that more people get to test it out soon as beta invites are sent. As the author of the original DH model, the only thing that "hurts my feelings" is that the DH idea was dismissed so quickly and based on false reasons. While the David Kim's statement was somewhat ambiguous, it boiled down to his observation that DH rewards expanding player too much. He claims that LotV is somewhere between DH and HotS. But is it? The recent posts in this thread show that DH may actually be too weak, invalidating his statement even further! | ||
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EatThePath
United States3943 Posts
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Teoita
Italy12246 Posts
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EatThePath
United States3943 Posts
On April 28 2015 01:54 Teoita wrote: Mine 3 times, 3 minerals each Is the total mining time the same? Also: On April 17 2015 23:09 rhythmrenegade wrote: Go download the best RTT (real-time tactics) games ever, in my opinion, Myth/Myth II: Soulblighter: http://gateofstorms.net/ Myth! :D | ||
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Teoita
Italy12246 Posts
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EatThePath
United States3943 Posts
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Pontius Pirate
United States1557 Posts
For the sake of demonstrating your model's efficacy, a more aggressive efficiency decrease between 8 and 16 workers is needed. It will almost certainly not make the final game, but it's the only way to showcase an element of the game that usually remains behind the scenes. | ||
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