Starbow - Page 163

On February 07 2014 06:14 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit unfair to single out unit selection. Starcraft has a lot of different mechanics that limit the player, each with advantages its own advantages to being in the game.

For example, managing supply is mechanically taxing and sometimes limits your ability to produce from your production facility. It's a resource that's not very fun. However, if you are replenishing units after losing them it's less expensive than creating new units because of the supply tax. This promotes comebacks. The supply limit puts a cap on army sizes, but it's obviously necessary to have in the game not only to protect your graphics card, but also to prevent situations where you have a thousand supply of ravens.

You can have a similar analysis for other mechanics, I gave one for the unit selection limit before. There are less obvious ones such as map size and unit mobility. The key point is that you can evaluate how much a certain limitation can contribute to the game and weigh this with the fact that it is a limitation on the game, which in a sense is not desirable. It's about finding the right balance which is the most fun to play. I mean, chess is a game with a restricted board size, restricted mobility, restricted moves per turn, restricted time controls, yet nobody complains that these are artificial limitations on the game, it's simply part of the design. If you start to single out limited unit selection and problematize it as an artificial limitation then I would question your perspective. The only test is whether the mechanic ends up being fun to play, and I have my suspicions that all those prophecizing doom might end up reconsidering if they would give it an honest chance. Or not, but we could at least test it.
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Mind you that many of these mechanics are intentionally in the game, they are not there by chance but because Blizzard (in designing Brood War) felt that they improved the game. Do you think that they had technical limitations that prevented them from implementing automine, mbs, smartcast and unlimited selection? I can understand the argument for the pathfinding, but the other things I mentioned are trivial to implement, (and in fact would often already exist in other games that had come out at the time), yet Blizzard still neglected to add them. It is on record that the unit selection limit was added in Warcraft 2 to make army movement more strategical.
And for other mechanics, even ones such as supply, they might exist in other games before and maybe Blizzard didn't specifically predict the effects they would have, but it doesn't matter. We can still imitate aspects of games that worked out well, even if they weren't designed for the purpose they ended up serving.

Also, I want Starbow to obey the rules of time&space, which is to say that everything that exists in the game should take up space and every action you take in the game should require some amount of your attention, but it should be relative to space. I don't want manual-rally in the game, but for argument's sake: if you have more bases you need to spend more attention to further increasing your income. For limited selection there is a similar argument: more units equals more attention to controlling them.

I think this is a neat theory and creates a natural balance for the game where the person that is behind is always boosted a little bit by virtue of having less "space" and therefore the ability to be more luxurious with "time", furthermore it also adds natural limitations to everything that keep the game in proper scale. Just like how chess functions best on a specific board size, Starcraft functions best within certain supply limits, map sizes and game lengths.