Slitherine

Well you know what they say:

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

I kid, I'm not actually trying to baffle with you meaningless bullshit. I guarantee it takes me a lot longer to form these arguments than it takes for you to read and respond to them.
Obviously you have lots to do and not a lot of time for theorycraft, so I'll try and trim down future arguments. Try, no promises.

In this matter, for the time being, I guess we'll agree to disagree. I sort of understand where you are coming from, even with strong variance the entire point of this sort of balancing is to minimize the impact of experience. Having too much will not make you significantly stronger than your enemy. Having too little will not make you significantly weaker than your enemy. I don't believe it's as world equalizing and canceling as you are convinced of, hence the giant argument, especially because of my last example where I used my actual core as a sample. Variance was set to -150 to +150, and the graphs look nothing alike, to me at least. I won't go into how abuse prone it may or may not be just yet because that is a whole new can of worms that reaches into other non-game play orientated fields.

So I'll wrap up:

Rudankort wrote:And let us not mix apples and oranges. Wink More replayability would result from any experience randomization scheme, not just the one you defend here. If I set average exp of enemy units to 2 and variance to 2, you will still get a lot of surprises, but enemy exp will remain disconnected from your own exp, and so my two complains above would not apply. So, this sounds like a good thing to implement.

This is the sort of dangerous situation I've been trying to avoid, but you seem to think it's a good thing. No wonder we disagree, heh. In the future when we move to the scenario/campaign balancing phase, if you choose this path, I'll tell you why it's not as pretty as it seems.

Rudankort wrote:Perhaps the right way, as I said, would be to combine your approach with fixed experience (where by fixed I mean that average is fixed, but specific units can get variable exp), and exact percentage of units to which we apply one of these two approaches will change from scenario to scenario. So in Barbarossa all soviet units have fixed experience, in Berlin their exp is derived from yours, and in between these two scens percentage changes proportionally. So, the war in the east would start easy, but if you fail to finish off the soviets quickly, it will become tougher and tougher all the time.

I agreed with this before, and I'll agree again. The actual balance of fixed VS variable opponents is going to be my only arguing point.

BTW.
"Now with more QQ"
This thread delivers. I got a dev to QQ over my theorycrafting.

Rudankort wrote:I didn't doubt you wouldn't agree, I think it is the very essense of our disagreement. Still, I think that fruit analogies only bring us further from understanding the problem. When I say "you don't have more game to play", I mean this. If you move two tigers in a group and kill two T-34 on the way, it is exactly the same gameplay as if you would move one tiger and kill one T-34. You don't lose anything (except perhaps the epic feeling) if you average this and make the game smaller. (But epic feeling is not an absolute value. Nobody would want 5 million units to move around. )

Now if you need to move your two tigers along different paths and solve different tactical tasks, this would be different.You cannot split one unit, so my simplification approach will not work.

As you rightly point out taken to extremes bigger does not necessarily equal better. Even I would not want a game with 5 million units. However the opposite of that is also true. How exciting would a PG game be with 1 unit a side?

Given then that it's not a question of 1 or millions the real issue is how many units are enough to give enjoyable flexibility and choice without becoming excessively tedious to move. (And again I realize this is a personal preference issue)

Back to your Tigers and T-34s example:

If you have 1 tiger and 1 T-34 on the same path then your **only** move is to use that tiger to kill the T-34. There is no choice - the only variable is the random combat result.

If you have 2 tigers and 2 T-34s on the same path then all of a sudden you have a choice: Do you engage both T-34s simultaneously and risk them both withdrawing to safety to rebuild OR do you focus on 1 T-34 to kill it at the risk of allowing the other freedom of action?

If you have 2 tigers and 2 Paths which must be followed, each with a T-34 on it then again you're stuck on autopilot because your only 'choice' is to send a single tiger against each of the T-34s.

If you have 4 tigers, and 2 paths which must be followed, each with 2 T-34s on it, you again have a choice: you could send 2 tigers along each path OR you could concentrate 3 tigers along one path and accept slower progress along the other one.

But lets face it. "Big" battles in PG meant simply that you need to kill more units with more units of your own. It was not about more battle groups and more complex strategy. In many big scens you could just move across the map with a broad front, consuming all units on your way.

In part I assume your Your argument is based on the circumstances of the PG camapign, where advancing on a broad front, consumming everything was possible (because your core was so overpowered), desirable (to maximize prestige/experience), and inevitable (because, particularly in PGF, the AI favoured spamming units in point defense around the objectives forcing you to kill everything just to secure them).

In that context if you're going to wind up with 6 tigers outside of Moscow and the only option to make it's capture 'challenging' (and I use the term loosely) is to spam 20 soviet infantry then yes you could reduce the number of tigers to 3 and the infantry to 10 and have the same challenge with half the work.



However as I suggested a few months ago in another thread rather than going with the same feel and scaling it down to make it PG 'lite', why not take the opportunity to introduce a new paradigm to how scenarios are fought so that they retain their "epicness" while adding more gameplay.



Back to Moscow imagine for a moment you have the PG map and PG sized core and PG size aux with the following differences:

- Soviet force quality *including starting force* has scaled both in experience and base strength. This makes the fight tougher and precludes the possibility of killing everything

- The number of primary objectives are halved but in their place are a number of secondary objectives. Winning conditions include taking 2/2 primary objectives (Tula & Moscow) and 4/8 secondary objectives. Additional secondary objectives add bonus prestige/score.

- Only 4 or 5 more effective infantry would spawn on the objectives themselves. The balance would instead spawn at either a secondary objective or along the map edges.


You do that and suddenly, even without changing the PG rules, Moscow takes on a whole new dynamic. Do you go with a narrow front and capture the minimum number of secondary objectives or do you try and be a hero and capture them all. Which axis of attack is the most important. Which will be the easiest to defend against likely soviet counterattacks? How many Tigers do you push onwards to Moscow vs. how many do you leave to guard the flanks? Is it worth the effort to capture a secondary objective to ensure no counter attack developes from there or can it be more ecconomically screened by defensive forces. Cheap AD and AT units gain value to screen flanks from counter attacks.


Now yes you can do this on a small map with a small core, but if you have 1 objective and 1 flank and a force of 2 tanks how much choice do you really have, compared to a slightly larger map and 4 tanks.

With regards to the whole balance issue the point of the effort in the context of premade scenarios dealing with actual historical events should be to provide a challenge while keeping with historical feel, not necessarily fact.

If my German core has twice as much experience entering Barbarossa as the German army did historically then I've already deviated from historical accuracy. Neither giving the Russians a similar increase in exp. or doubling their numbers would be "historically accurate" in absolute terms.

However in relative terms giving the Russians a similar bonus in experience would at least make Barbarossa feel like it's historical counterpart. Fighting 2 star soldiers with 5 star troops still feels the same as fighting 0 star soldiers with 3 star troops. Fighting 0 star soldiers with 5 star troops on the other will always feel like clubbing baby seals regardless of how many seals you have to club.

Therefore IMO Kerensky has the right approach - better to scale the quality of existing units to where they can provide an interesting challenge instead of increasing quantity of boring cannon fodder you have to fight through before you run out of time.

I would however be happy with a much simpler implentation - just give the players manual quality sliders that they can adjust as they play. WinPG had that and it IMO the most enjoyable version to play because you could adjust the difficulty to keep yourself challenged as your core grew beyond what the scenario designers had foreseen.

The only reason it wasn't effective for the whole campaign was it only affected reinforcements, not the starting forces, a relatively simple fix.

Could return to this thread only now. Which is probably a good thing, because what we have discussed has settled a little bit in my head.

About the balance, I concluded that dynamic experience for enemy units will work best for experienced players, like you guys, so no wonder you both like the idea.

I'm not sure it will have the right feeling if you face 3-star soviets in barbarossa, or 5-star americans in D-Day. If we want the campaign to be more historical, we should instead limit maximum experience you can get in each scen (like many other games do). But I'm afraid that this decision will not be popular among players. Personally, I always hated that "Your hero is limited to level 10" bullshit.

Anyway, let us revisit this topic when we really get to campaign balance.

About scenario size...

boredatwork wrote: Given then that it's not a question of 1 or millions the real issue is how many units are enough to give enjoyable flexibility and choice without becoming excessively tedious to move. (And again I realize this is a personal preference issue)

Exactly.

boredatwork wrote: Back to your Tigers and T-34s example:
...

I should choose the words more carefully, because you seem to take them too literally. I guess, with my example I wanted to show that two units instead of one do not give you more strategy. In some cases they do give you more tactics, as you rightly illustrated. But here I think it becomes the AI issue. Probably you'll agree that in PG and PGF (which PzC's AI is based upon) fighting more enemy units was not more fun.

boredatwork wrote: In part I assume your Your argument is based on the circumstances of the PG camapign, where advancing on a broad front, consumming everything was possible (because your core was so overpowered), desirable (to maximize prestige/experience), and inevitable (because, particularly in PGF, the AI favoured spamming units in point defense around the objectives forcing you to kill everything just to secure them).

Yes, of course I compare with PG campaign. You said that PzC was turning into "PG lite", so I tried to explain why I don't think it is the case... To remove unnecessary micromanagement and at the same time preserve complexity and feel of PG battles is not making it light, it is an improvement.

boredatwork wrote: However as I suggested a few months ago in another thread rather than going with the same feel and scaling it down to make it PG 'lite', why not take the opportunity to introduce a new paradigm to how scenarios are fought so that they retain their "epicness" while adding more gameplay.

...but I agree that we might try to make things even better. Yes, I'm willing to experiment with stuff like the one you described (and I skipped in the quote). But there is no confidence that it will work. In particular, I have no idea how the AI will react to these changes, and how difficult it will be to fix it if needed. So, for now it is a good idea to play safe. We better ship smaller scenarios than big ones which play and feel exactly as in PG. You mentioned that in PG the size was not a problem, and I tend to disagree a bit - in PG micromanagement involved was not justified with enough bonuses in gameplay.

Alas, in PzC we need to do so many things (and ideally do them right), we don't really have enough time to experiment with all ideas we have. But after the initial version is released, such opportunity may arise.

I think, now we better understand each other, and there is not much else we can do in this thread. After PzC is released, and we have experience with how its final campaign plays and feels, we should revisit this topic.

Kerensky wrote: BTW.
"Now with more QQ"
This thread delivers. I got a dev to QQ over my theorycrafting.

About this... In fact I thought about starting my own QQ thread. You know what is my biggest reason to QQ? We've got 100 people here already, but only a couple of folks cared to answer questions I asked here. Is it really THAT difficult?

Rudankort wrote: About this... In fact I thought about starting my own QQ thread. You know what is my biggest reason to QQ? We've got 100 people here already, but only a couple of folks cared to answer questions I asked here. Is it really THAT difficult?

That's precisely why I tried to bump that exact thread when it got 'lost' on page 2:
viewtopic.php?t=23489

Kerensky wrote:This thread got buried, I'll bump it because it has some good content and questions.

You can bring a forum troll to water, but you can't make him drink.

Kerensky wrote:You can bring a forum troll to water, but you can't make him drink.

lol

In my defense, I've typically made new threads to address some of your concerns because I hate singlular 'uber' threads that cover a large range of topics (BUG THREAD FOR BUGS!!!). An unfortunate side effect is that it tends to create a surplus of threads, which can quickly push good threads to non-first page oblivion. Things such as 'Multiplayer' thread, and I weighed in on what I thought about combat prediction visualization here:
viewtopic.php?t=22330

Kerensky wrote:It just doesn't look right, but I can't exactly figure out why. Could be the color, could be the fact the symbol is a lopsided crosshair, could be the negative signs, or maybe it's a combination of all of them. I would feel a lot more comfortable making judgments on this after we see what combat animations actually look like, so we can find something that will compliment that visual.

Kerensky wrote:In my defense, I've typically made new threads to address some of your concerns. Such as 'Multiplayer' thread, and I weighed in on what I thought about combat prediction visualization here:
viewtopic.php?t=22330

I know, you are part of those few who actually did answer something. Who do you think I had in mind when I wrote:

We've got 100 people here already, but only a couple of folks cared to answer questions I asked here.

?

Whatever you are, be a good one.
- Abraham Lincoln.

If I was lucky to be picked as a beta tester, I feel I should do my best to be a good one.
Plus I understand how frustrating it is to create something and want to have discussions and dialogue about it, only to feel ignored. But this is getting way off topic, I'm cold, wet, tired, and hungry, so I'm going to stop here and I'll be back later.