Hey, I'd like this thread to be a place for reviews of our resource game mode implementation as it currently runs on the [url=unv://74.91.17.250:27975]Development & Testing Server[/url]. This thread should differ from Resources Feedback in that we try to not get into quick one-liner discussions but elaborate on our points of view as we did in the Vision Statement Subforum when we were planning what we are now testing.
Before you post, please read my Testing a new resource system news post where I explained the technical details of resource generating structures and also try to attend one of our development games to get an ingame impression with a handful of players and no bots.
In the title of your review, copy the latest commit description from here so the programmers know roughly what version you were playing. It would also be wise to name the date of a devgame you are talking about.
I hope this will give us some direction and inspiration to take this game mode further and to avoid dead ends in development. See you on the Dev-Server!
So, today (Sat 17.03.13) we had our first development games with both resource generation and team stages that are based on the total mining efficiency of a team. Consequently, stages could be lost if your efficiency dropped 50 percentage points below the stageup-threshold.
I found the games to be a lot of fun, but I'm biased by the fact that I won every match :D (I switched to the human team while it was being defeated to get a quick impression of the other side). I usually started as a builder and started an expansion campaign. Often there was another builder forwarding in another direction. When I had trouble I asked an armed player to support me but most of the time people on my team tried to push the enemy back, as opposed to just babysitting a builder. My strategy worked. Since my teamates managed to keep the enemy at a distance I didn't see a point in fortifying the main base but tried to build the enemy in instead. On atcshd and parpax (d1a) I manged to build both aggressive structures and RGS close to the enemy base, which lead to a S2- and S1-stagelock of the opposing team respectively. In a match on plat23-b9 the strategy failed due to the enemy pushing us back. Since we were on S3 at that time I decided to drop the construction kit in favor of a lucifer cannon and destroyed what I couldn't disrupt. When playing human the ability to quickly switch between gun and ckit was a lot of fun. I think as aliens we could somehow counter this through our agility.
I'd like to split my actual review into pros and cons:
Pros
The games appeared balanced to me. Both aliens and humans had the ability to push the enemy back and build them in.
The number of generated build points seemed appropriate. The rate was high enough so you didn't need to pause in the expansion phase at the beginning of a game but if you didn't manage to hold the line, there weren't enough BP available for a game-protracting turtle base. [Settings: BP0 = 50, R0 = 10, T = 15, r = 750, S2T = 400, S3T = 550, HN = 50]
The games were played on all three stages. Most of the time, one team managed to get a stagewise-advantage but because of the weak nature of the expansion forwards, stages were often lost again if the advantageous team didn't attack the enemy from both sides. At the end of a match the winner was either on S2 or S3, depending on their strategy (getting aggressive on S2 vs. trying to stagelock the enemy).
Teams tried to coordinate. In addition to the usual call for a rush and cry for a booster, builders asked for forwarding defense and attackers shared positions of spotted RGS. For me this is a pro, but the downside is that we will need to give teams more tools to coordinate!
Destroying enemy RGS felt great! There's not that much fun behind destroying the armory/booster anymore, since they will have more than one. But killing buildings knowing that this will have a significant impact on the game (stagedown) is a lot more fun than just fighting through countless defense buildings until you finally can harm the RC/OM.
There was no camping that I'd be aware of. Even when the human team got built in in their main base on parpax, they tried to break out and managed to destroy one of the two forwards that locked them down. I'm not sure if a comeback would've been possible, though. This takes me directly to the cons…
Cons
When the human team was stagelocked to S1 on parpax, they tried to break out again (which seemed very odd if you were expecting the usual camping in order to gather credits!) but not being able to purchase a helmet was their death sentence. While the alien team can build boosters that will still function when they fall back to S1 the humans are lacking something that will help them to repel if they were previously on a higher stage. I think humans will need a S2 building that increases their chance to break a siege. It's hard to return from a deficit with defensive structures only.
Unlike in Tremulous where public games often ended in alternating rushes with no winner apparent until one team managed to strike hard enough, now you will often know when you are about to loose before you are obviously defeated. I'm not sure how long this timeframe can be but we will want to keep it as short as possible, as this is possibly one of the most frustrating element of RTS(-hybrid) games. As mentioned in the previous point, I think the ability to return from a setback is what we should put our focus on with our future development.
The dev server is presently running daemonded built from bots+resources (ff80dc1) with origin/master (8434508) and origin/resources (0b4c1f4) merged into it. This build was compiled at 20:06 GMT today and has been in use since about 20:15.
I'll detail the experience of playing as a stage-locked human on parpax this morning.
The match began with building out expansions into the long hall and O-stairs area. And that's about as far as expansions got. The aliens were quick at shutting us down from there on. Fights took place primarily on the O-stairs side of the map. I was building at this time. Trying to push ford but it wasn't enough. The aliens had expanded through to the top of the O-stairs and were stage 2. We would not make it to stage 2 at any time this entire game. This means we had no helmets what so ever. The advantage was obvious but this did not make the game less fun. I did once manage to sneak into alien territory and take out two RGS. Not sure if this halted their progress but it felt good. At the time the drill in long hall was taken out our team starting co-operating/communicating to try and do better. Velo and I began rushing the alien forward in lower storage. We managed to destroy this eventually which was nice but still didn't defeat the fact we were still on the wrong end of the slope. Another player was defending and asked for assistance when needed. I don't think our team was losing by much if we compared the kills on each team, it was the pushing that counted. Thus why when we tried to push we had more success than trying to camp (hint hint this is good). Shortly after more defence and more loss of structures we knew we were going to lose, still didn't make it feel bad to play.
Once the base was destroyed I ran to the missing tank room. Surprisingly found it empty. At this point I realised that such a place could have been built in as a sneaky RGS place or backup base. This made me feel that there are different ways you can go about situations. Perhaps the humans could have stood a chance say they expanded sneakily and staged up for a good rush on an alien forward.
Anyway to sum up the experience you definitely feel the disadvantage of being at a lower stage (no helmets). But there is still room for comeback, but perhaps comeback should be slightly easier to attain. At this point we cannot know if it's to do with how we built and positioned ourselves or if its a general thing. Game was fun and frustration was lacking. No camping too!
I played a single game, so I shall give my opinion on that game. As someone who enjoys running around and killing stuff, I can confirm that you can still do this pretty well and it is still fun. It was a little awkward in that killing things didn't actually help advance stages. Bad building will sink your team and recovery is neigh impossible if the enemy is any good at all (as in spreading attack structures everywhere, coupled with the fact that no adv grangers can be spawned if OM is down.) Furthermore, I also learned that if you are quick, you can be stage 2 within a minute and stage 3 within two (the stage jump from stage 2 to stage 3 is tiny)... This is somewhat odd. As we develop Unvanquished further, I feel stage 3 should be a stage that ultimately allows one team to destroy the other and that it should be difficult to achieve and should provide a significant advantage over a stage 2 team.
Played for two and half hours today. I realize that first impressions of gameplay are usually close to worthless, but I formed a few strong opinions that may or may not be valid. Some of these might be improvable by simply having better UI feedback, but generally I think the game would benefit from stripping away some unnecessary complications until we see an actual need for them. Simpler is usually better.
I really disliked repairs costing build points. It felt confusing and punitive, and I don't see any benefit to it.
Power/creep restrictions felt really pointless: everywhere people just built an egg/leech or repeater/drill pair -- it felt like I had to build two things for one purpose. My guess is that everyone would be surprised by how much more fun it'd be to not have power/creep at all, but if it has to stay then the build point extractors should be the structures to generate it.
The diminishing rate of build point extraction was basically unnoticeable, and didn't seem relevant to any of the games I played -- maybe it had a subtle effect, but it seemed like every game ended more because one team got a stage advantage and used it effectively. It's probably too early to say for certain, but I suspect our fears about stalemates and sudden death were overblown. I'd like to see the game given a chance without any endgame-forcing: no sudden death, no timelimit (other than vote draw), no build point depletion.
Overall, it felt like building was overly complicated because build points were actually rather unimportant. Every game I played was dominated not by build point accumulation but by trying to get and maintain a stage advantage over the other team -- and really, that's not a bad dynamic for the game to have, but my (early, possibly wrong) opinion is that if it's going to be the focus then building should be much less complicated.
Power/creep restrictions felt really pointless: everywhere people just built an egg/leech or repeater/drill pair -- it felt like I had to build two things for one purpose. My guess is that everyone would be surprised by how much more fun it'd be to not have power/creep at all, but if it has to stay then the build point extractors should be the structures to generate it.
I think this idea could work, or could at least be an option to server administrators. This is the model employed by Warzone2100 and Age of Empires: while you need resource-gathering structures in order to be able to make and do things, your buildings do not have to be within some arbitrary range of them. Rather than build near their resources because they have to, players just tend to build near their resources so that they can defend them more easily: a lone resource-gathering structure in WZ2100 far away from your base, for example, will not last long without any sort of defenses, but only if the other team knows that it is there.
