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8748 Posts
On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet.
For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims.
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It probably would have been a better idea to make Scarabs actual units like Interceptors and Spider mines.
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A hypothetical example: SC1 has a base unit class in which all other unit classes derive. Class flyer is one of these that derives from base unit. The wraith, scout, corsair, scourge, mutalisk and all other flying units derive from flyer. Flyer has the basic flying functionality. Every air unit in SC1 is taught how to fly from the same teacher, the flyer class. On the other hand SC2 has a base unit class, but no flyer class. Instead, the flying units take lessons from different teachers. Each flying unit in SC2 has its own flying engine.
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The only thing that can make the game unbalancable is if there are cookie cutter counters. Like say 5 siege tanks can kill an infinite ammount of marines etc. The reason sc1 is balanced (and balancable) is because sheer numbers can win against a stronger unit composition. For an example marines are bad against terran mech. But if you attack a 40 pop terran mech army (including scvs) with 80 pop bionic one you can win with good flanks.
The alternative to the "numbers beat all" situation is that you have a rock paper scissors game where you need to mix in 3-4 types of units in every battle because every unit has a hard counter. This makes the game extremely boring and removes strategy (from an RTS).
As long as "numbers beat all" is true and there is a way to effectively scout your opponent the game will allways be balancable. As it looks now (from the few glimpses we got) I'd say that sc2 has the numbers beat all factor. Maybe not to the point of sc where there were unit matchups like zsergling vs zealot where very small differences in numbers could make a difference. But hopefully it will be like that.
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On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims.
Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better.
Seriously, people are only arguing petty details when they merely serve as example to explain what a gimmick/hack-rule is.
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8748 Posts
On November 02 2009 21:28 timmeh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better. Seriously, people are only arguing petty details when they merely serve as example to explain what a gimmick/hack-rule is. Defining terms and then using them to describe how to make a game never answers the question of why it's a good approach. All of his examples are either irrelevant or bad. Try some other approach at supporting the ideas other than analogy and example.
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What method do you suggest other than analogy and examples? It's a good approach because this is what experience in game design will pretty quickly teach you. The similarity to writing good code is an analogy but hopefully more accessible to more people.
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On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. NonY: you should have used the simpler explanation... if Reavers are imbalanced, why are they not a backbone of the Protoss force or never seen at all? The answer is simple: their cost/performance ratio is near perfect.
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On November 02 2009 22:20 Liquid`NonY wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 21:28 timmeh wrote:On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better. Seriously, people are only arguing petty details when they merely serve as example to explain what a gimmick/hack-rule is. Defining terms and then using them to describe how to make a game never answers the question of why it's a good approach. All of his examples are either irrelevant or bad. Try some other approach at supporting the ideas other than analogy and example.
You don't build a skyscraper without knowing what is necessary to build it and without knowing what the "best-practice" approaches are. Suffice to say, only because one deviates from the best-practice rules does not mean your skyscraper will fall apart, it just means it will make it just that much harder to make it not fall apart.
And asking someone to support ones argument without examples or analogies is like asking a painter to paint you something without giving him paint. Something you have done in stating that a) defining basic terms is not a good approach b) his examples are bad/irrelevant
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
So gimmick in this thread is defined as something ix thinks is a gimmick.
Every game is a set of gimmicks, because every rule is a gimmick. Some of them work and become "core rules", some of them don't and remain gimmicks. You never know which one is which until the game is mature.
Your example of SC1 as a game with a stricter set of core rules than that of SC2 is flawed.
E.g., did you know that zealot does a 2-hit attack (8x2 damage) instead of a single 16 damage? Did you know that firebat can actually do a 3-hit attack under certain circumstances? Did you know that plague deals damage, but cannot kill? That plague affects buildings, while psi storm and dark swarm does not? That a nuke does either 500 or (0.66 * target's HP) damage, whichever is greater? That a zealot is a small unit, but takes up 2 transport slots? That a siege tank has a minimum range in addition to maximum? That SCVs are both organic and mechanical units? That queen's ensnare has a different effect on different units' firing rate? That a dragoon's pre-fire animation is much longer than a marine's which makes it much easier to screw up shooting when microing dragoons? That lurkers, guardians and devourers are morphed from units, and not from larvae? That zerglings and scourges hatch in pairs? That ultralisks cannot burrow even with burrow research, while every other zerg unit can? etc, etc, etc.
What 'core rules' are you talking about?
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On November 02 2009 23:44 Random() wrote: So gimmick in this thread is defined as something ix thinks is a gimmick.
Every game is a set of gimmicks, because every rule is a gimmick. Some of them work and become "core rules", some of them don't and remain gimmicks. You never know which one is which until the game is mature.
Your example of SC1 as a game with a stricter set of core rules than that of SC2 is flawed.
E.g., did you know that zealot does a 2-hit attack (8x2 damage) instead of a single 16 damage? Did you know that firebat can actually do a 3-hit attack under certain circumstances? Did you know that plague deals damage, but cannot kill? That plague affects buildings, while psi storm and dark swarm does not? That a nuke does either 500 or (0.66 * target's HP) damage, whichever is greater? That a zealot is a small unit, but takes up 2 transport slots? That a siege tank has a minimum range in addition to maximum? That SCVs are both organic and mechanical units? That queen's ensnare has a different effect on different units' firing rate? That a dragoon's pre-fire animation is much longer than a marine's which makes it much easier to screw up shooting when microing dragoons? That lurkers, guardians and devourers are morphed from units, and not from larvae? That zerglings and scourges hatch in pairs? That ultralisks cannot burrow even with burrow research, while every other zerg unit can? etc, etc, etc.
What 'core rules' are you talking about?
That's brutal ownage.
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On November 02 2009 23:36 timmeh wrote: Asking someone to support ones argument without examples or analogies is like asking a painter to paint you something without giving him paint.
Um, no it isn't. Remember, analogies and examples are stuff that you make up so that people understand your point. They have *nothing* to do with whether your point is right or not. Otherwise I could say stuff like: You are like a rock. Boring, unmoving, and only useful for chucking at things you don't like.
Isn't that obviously wrong?
It's not that analogies and examples don't have a purpose, it's that you and ix have no evidence to support your claims whatsoever and act like you do.
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On November 02 2009 23:36 timmeh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 22:20 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 21:28 timmeh wrote:On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better. Seriously, people are only arguing petty details when they merely serve as example to explain what a gimmick/hack-rule is. Defining terms and then using them to describe how to make a game never answers the question of why it's a good approach. All of his examples are either irrelevant or bad. Try some other approach at supporting the ideas other than analogy and example. You don't build a skyscraper without knowing what is necessary to build it and without knowing what the "best-practice" approaches are. Suffice to say, only because one deviates from the best-practice rules does not mean your skyscraper will fall apart, it just means it will make it just that much harder to make it not fall apart. And asking someone to support ones argument without examples or analogies is like asking a painter to paint you something without giving him paint. Something you have done in stating that a) defining basic terms is not a good approach b) his examples are bad/irrelevant I haven't ever seen any indication that creating a video game is ANTHING like building a skyscraper (ok, it takes some planning, like anything else). Can we please stop with the nonsense analogies?
If you break certain rules while building a skyscraper, people die.On November 02 2009 23:44 Random() wrote: So gimmick in this thread is defined as something ix thinks is a gimmick. Exactly.On November 02 2009 21:28 timmeh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better. How do you know they didn't use a core approach of making no friendly fire from normal attacks, and then added tank friendly fire as a "hack rule" in order to improve the game with the frailty of a tank like?
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How do you know they didn't use a core approach of making no friendly fire from normal attacks, and then added tank friendly fire as a "hack rule" in order to improve the game with the frailty of a tank like? I don't, the point is that by making a rule then creating exceptions you start making hacks to a pure rule. That we can't even tell which was the base rule shows exactly what I'm talking about.
I haven't ever seen any indication that creating a video game is ANTHING like building a skyscraper (ok, it takes some planning, like anything else). I'd imagine that's because you've never been involved with creating one.
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8748 Posts
On November 02 2009 22:30 ix wrote: What method do you suggest other than analogy and examples? It's a good approach because this is what experience in game design will pretty quickly teach you. The similarity to writing good code is an analogy but hopefully more accessible to more people. How have you established that games based on this game design are good and games that aren't based on this game design are bad? And how have you related that to the experience of the game designers? Were the creators of Chess and Go experienced game designers who learned the distinctions between different kinds of rules and in what proportions and instances these rules ought to be used, so that they were able to create good games? That seems impossible to me and it's infinitely more likely that you are just doing some retrospective analysis. They happened to make games that way and those games happened to be successful and now you're attempting to explain their structure, but you go far beyond just explaining their structure and that's where I see fault. It seems to me that you ought to be simply pointing out a pattern that you've observed and that you ought not make claims about Blizzard's inexperience or SC2 being unbalanceable.
When you are making an analogy, you need to do three things: (1) list similarities (2) provide reason why similarities are relevant (3) consider countervailing reasons. You do a decent job at (1), (2) seems quite lacking, as if it's unnecessary or completely obvious, and you ignore (3). No matter how big the similarities are and how nicely they seem to fit together, they're only as strong as your reasons that they're relevant and the certainty that there are no countervailing reasons.
For WC3 there is a huge countervailing reason: the conventional wisdom is that it's "unbalanceable" because it has 4 factions instead of 3. This is such a big issue that I don't know why someone would bother to entertain other ideas about the trouble with balancing it. No matter how much you speculate and hypothesize, it will always be useful for someone to say "Yeah but WC3 might've been just fine with the game design it was given if there was just one less faction." For Chess/Go, a dissimilarity like turn-based vs real-time seems enough to cause sufficient doubt about analogies. For anything involving SC2, there is that whole problem that nobody participating in the discussion has enough familiarity with the game to conclude anything about its balance issues.
So while you proclaim a nice idea about the way a simple strategy game should be constructed, you fail to convince me that it's relevant to complex strategy games, and even if it is relevant you fail to convince me that it's relevant to SC2, and even if it is relevant to SC2 and SC2 has extraordinary balance issues, you fail to convince me that there's no other explanation, and then you completely blow my mind when you say that you can conclude SC2's design team's inexperience.
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On November 03 2009 04:27 ix wrote: I don't, the point is that by making a rule then creating exceptions you start making hacks to a pure rule. A rule with exceptions is still a rule. It's just as valid as any other rule. There's absolutely no reason to suppose that emergent gameplay resulting from a base set of rules and gameplay which results from very specific rules are any different in terms of quality. And the latter is the easier one to balance, not the former.
Your entire argument boils down to the fact that you feel a certain style of game design is nicer. There's no rational basis here, you've just built up some silly sense of aesthetics about game design.
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8748 Posts
On November 02 2009 23:36 timmeh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2009 22:20 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 21:28 timmeh wrote:On November 02 2009 12:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:On November 02 2009 07:45 ix wrote: So there you have an example of how I'd apply what I'm talking about to SC: I'd have balanced Reavers by making the AOE damage everything and left the Scarab pathing AI alone. I know SC is now beyond changing but it would have been the superior approach to balance through clean, simple rules than the messy method Blizzard used. Reavers were imbalanced when their only friendly unit was a Shuttle. They fired too quickly and too accurately. When they had support beyond a Shuttle, it was usually Dragoons and/or Scouts. Keeping Scarabs as they were and changing the splash damage to cause friendly fire is complete nonsense. This from a game that's been released 10+ years and has maintained an incredibly large following and yet you have confidence in your claims about a game that hasn't reached beta yet. For those of us who know a lot about SC:BW, we can see how little we know about SC2. But I think for those who don't know much about anything, the information about SC2 may seem sufficient for bold claims. Sigh. Of course he knows this. And I am sure he doesn't disagree with the non-friendly fire scarab as it is. But he is saying, from the get-go, from a design point of view, an approach with the core-rules would have been better. Seriously, people are only arguing petty details when they merely serve as example to explain what a gimmick/hack-rule is. Defining terms and then using them to describe how to make a game never answers the question of why it's a good approach. All of his examples are either irrelevant or bad. Try some other approach at supporting the ideas other than analogy and example. You don't build a skyscraper without knowing what is necessary to build it and without knowing what the "best-practice" approaches are. Suffice to say, only because one deviates from the best-practice rules does not mean your skyscraper will fall apart, it just means it will make it just that much harder to make it not fall apart. And asking someone to support ones argument without examples or analogies is like asking a painter to paint you something without giving him paint. Something you have done in stating that a) defining basic terms is not a good approach b) his examples are bad/irrelevant A builder familiar with the scientific and mathematic knowledge relevant to building skyscrapers doesn't need to use examples of skyscrapers to build a skyscraper. But the knowledge in that case is known because the field is well developed. The formula is known and when there is a failure, a departure from the formula can be found. But ix's notion that he has the formula for successful game design is not established as true. His examples and analogies are for explaining and not for justifying. Using examples and analogies for justifying an idea requires much more rigor.
Examples and analogies can be used when trying to establish the truth of an idea or they can be used when trying to explain an idea that is already established as true. It seems to me that mostly they've been used in the latter case so far, when what is needed is the former case. But since there is limited evidence and history in the field we're engaged in, I doubt that anything useful can be done. So for now, all that we can do is continue to gain experience and keep a watchful eye for patterns of success that might reveal themselves. But it'd be nice to have some restraint and not get carried away.
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This is about change. Why do you use word quagmire when you give so few examples and write about your designer's instinct instead? You gave fewer examples than amount of not really used in BW units - this means even according to you SC2 units have less problems then BW ones.
Splitting SC2 into 3 parts is admitting by Blizzard that they do not want to finish development of SC2 - why wouldn't they want for SC2 to live as long as BW? They do not hide the fact that most of them is from W3 design team, they were saying that in interviews. Do you really follow SC2 development much enough? I am 100% certain I saw either Karune's or Cavez's post in old SC2 gameplay forums that they did realize Thor's role problem, it probably is on sc2pod but for now I can quote another one:
We are just testing this idea for the Thor. In general I prefer to shield you guys from whacky ideas like this because I know that some of our ideas will be bad, and then you guys will get very grumpy with us for pitching you bad ideas. =(
^ this came from Dustin Browder, head of devs almost 2 years ago ( go to 607 ) and you are trying to prove that they are clueless and don't realize that their ideas may end bad.
It's a little hard to express beyond a game designer's instinct. Something about the SC2 abilities- slow on Marauders, a standard unit, blink on Stalkers and the mess of designs such as the Thor they want but has no role makes me think Blizzard are stuck in something of a gameplay quagmire with SC2. Do you really think that just giving them more HP, making deal more damage or do it faster is better than making them different by giving them slow, adding more micro possibilities to them? With what gimmick exactly would you like to balance this example?
On November 01 2009 08:32 ix wrote: Klockan3: Yes but flying units had to be heavily balanced on that basis, the difference with Stalkers is that they're also an army backbone unit so you're caught between the balancing needs of super mobility and of a main army unit. They're also not self-limiting with slow speed and low massability as the Colossus is.
I'll response to the rest tomorrow. Happy Halloween.
How do you know that? You are just used to Dragoons being backbone of Protoss army.
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A builder familiar with the scientific and mathematic knowledge relevant to building skyscrapers doesn't need to use examples of skyscrapers to build a skyscraper. You should look at the history of bridge design. Advances in bridge design have leapt forward by analysing the strengths and weaknesses of prior bridges. Box construction, for instance, was a response to a specific disaster.
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On November 03 2009 05:48 Liquid`NonY wrote: (huge wall of text) Wow. This was a pretty good read- I'm surprised you went to such lengths to dismantle the OP's arguments.
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