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| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0001706 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - New Unit Ideas - AI-Specific Units | Dec 2, 2010 2:31 pm | Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | |
| Reporter | Vinraith | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 4.042 | ||||
| Summary | 0001706: Possible alternative (or additional) incentives for ARS, Advanced factory, and other extras capture | ||||
| Description | So the new changes for 4.043 force capture of ARS's, advanced factories and the like by placing units that must be destroyed on those worlds. I certainly understand the desire to avoid late game grind, but perhaps there is another way to incentivize acquisition of mark IV ships, bonus ships, fabs and the like. A series of new core guard posts with specific immunities might be implemented. A couple of (undoubtedly flawed) potential examples: Core Experimental Guard Post - Is immune to fire from triangle ships, or hard counters all three of them, thus requiring that it be taken down with bonus ships. Core Ion Post - Rapid fire, short range ion cannon-like shots that destroy ships of mark III and below, making it all but impossible to kill without mark IV vessels. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Well, the main problem is that we don't want to make the players HAVE to have the higher-mark ships. If all the advanced factories are destroyed, for instance, the players should still be able to win. And, it should be a valid strategy to unlock widely-but-shallowly, too. For most players, the changes in 4.043 should have almost no effect on their playing habits, I'd expect. The natural thing is to go after the goodies and see what you can accomplish -- and the AI Progress progression is designed around players actually trying to take some territory. That's the more fun way to play, usually (you get to actually do stuff and make decisions -- things happen), and it's easier to balance. The trick comes in when players want to just have a few planets and then deep-strike like crazy. That's all well and good, but the endgame shouldn't be reachable by such a strategy alone. It's kind of the warp pipe problem in mario bros. 1: I could play levels 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, and then world 8 repeatedly by just using the warp zones, and so there was little incentive to do the rest. Mario 2 and 3 had similar ways to jump straight to the end of the game. As much as I love those games, I think that was a flawed design (largely brought on by the lack of a battery in those games). Zelda 1, by contrast, had a big open world and you could do a lot of the dungeons out of order. You could even do part of the dungeons at a time, switching between them. Though there were a few that you had to do in sequence, at least getting the item from one before going to certain others. But the bottom line was that there was no way to just walk into death mountain and win after the first dungeon if you happened to be really good at dodging. The later mario games (even super mario world, but especially the later 3D marios) also embraced this sort of strategy where players didn't have to play the entire game, and certainly not in sequence, but they had to play a lot of it to get to the end. I'm attempting to move AI War in that direction. By contrast, I think a lot of JRPGs are really poorly design in terms of their final boss encountered. In a typical Final Fantasy game, I might be level 30-something at the end of the main story arc, if I've done a few side quests. Then I try to go up against the final boss and get utterly murdered (unless, I guess, I know all the tricks and have some preternatural skill). So then commences the "wandering around doing side quests" phase where I grind my levels up, find rare "ultimate items" and the like. Depending on how far I push that, sometimes the final boss is beatable in something like 12 hits, or sometimes it's still difficult but not impossible. AI War used to be sort of like that, but in taking away the grind (in 4.0), I accidentally introduced the exploit along the lines of warp pipes in mario 1. Whoops. Totally not intended, though I'm glad the ending isn't like a JRPG boss fight anymore. And the only way I know to solve this without being ridiculous is to make the players actually play the game. You have to get 70 stars before you can reach bowser in mario 64: there are 120, so you don't have to get them all and you have your choice as to which ones you will capture. I think that's a pretty fair model. In terms of AI War, the game really expects you to capture a certain number of planets -- which ones, it doesn't care -- if you want to win the game. I tried the high-stats-end-boss thing and that doesn't really work most of of the time any more than it works for JRPGs. So now I'm going with a less-flexible but less-exploitable and less-annoying approach. Hopefully that makes sense, and I'm sure this will evolve over time, but that's my thought process for now. It's been a really tricky design question. |
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@x4000 Thanks for the detailed explanation. To be clear, this suggestion wasn't intended as a criticism of the new model (that'd be silly, I haven't even played it yet!), just another thought that might be of interest. As mentioned the implementation here is fairly crude, and I can see why it presents problems, I suppose my thought was just that it would be more interesting to require the "effect" of capturing the "correct" number of worlds, rather than directly requiring the "cause." In practice the new system will have absolutely no effect on how i play the game, as I always captured all the ARS's and an Advanced Factory or two anyway, in fact you could argue that my thought here was "how can I make this change more interesting for me?" :) Anyway, I understand your reasoning and appreciate your consideration. |
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I completely understand. I just don't have any particularly-better ideas for how to make the end harder-but-not-grindier while requiring that players get the higher-mark stuff while still making sure that the lower-mark stuff is useful, while making sure some clever souls can't skip too quickly to the end, and so forth. I'm not saying that such an idea doesn't exist: I just haven't thought of it or seen it presented yet. The experiemental post is interesting, but would be pretty unclear on the interface -- how to really express what it can do concisely to the player? Because it wouldn't be enough to stop at the core triangle: all those starships the player has access to from the start would have to be ignored, too. And what if your bonus unlocks were eyebot, space plane, shield bearer, munitions booster, and electric shuttle? Good luck taking out some large structure with just those alone. ;) And even more to the point, something like this has to be future-proof as much as it can be, working with not-yet-designed ships as well as those that have been designed. I think the idea is immensely interesting, don't get me wrong: the idea of making the higher-mark ships more uniquely useful at the end of the game. I just haven't figured out a way to do it yet. Thoughts are, as always, welcome. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2, 2010 2:31 pm | Vinraith | New Issue | |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:18 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0004909 | |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:18 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => resolved |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:18 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:18 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:29 pm | Vinraith | Note Added: 0004911 | |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:34 pm | Vinraith | Note Edited: 0004911 | |
| Dec 2, 2010 4:45 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0004912 | |
| Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | resolved => closed |
