MichaelCook MichaelCook

Lose to win?

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Lose to win?

from Elemental Forums

I had a waking thought about Elemental this morning. I don't know if that is good or not.

 

Talk of the end game being cool because the possibility for any player (Human or AI) to make a comeback will be included. I'm thinking then will I be able to take on the hardest AI, make no headway in the early-mid game and then WHAM!, kick ass for an endgame victory? (yes, I know that a victory will always occur at the end of the game :) )

 

If the endgame will still be interesting, then what is the point of the early and mid game? To set up the board for the important endgame, but the board setup doesn't really matter?

 

Its an interesting game design, I think it has alot of merit and I'd love to hear more about it.

 

*edit* Thinking about it, Settlers of Catan is a game where everything can change and the potential winner can stumble and be overtaken by others, but that has random elements in it to facilitate it. Any standard 4X game I've played is less like SoC and more like chess, and so a strong early-mid game makes the end game all but over. Maybe the lower your score the more likely your character could find an item, discover lost spells of destruction ect., I think i read that techs will not be fixed but random each game, perhaps a lower score increases the chance of getting the good stuff (spells or tech or items)? In this way you still want to be no. 1 because statistically its the position that the win will most likely come from, but if your not no. 1 then you have a greater chance of getting the ultimate spell, but its not at all definite.

 

The other route to take is the random bad thing that happens to the no.1 empire, but nobody likes losing a game because of a random bad event.

elemental
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Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Cerevox, reply 18
Any kind of endgame saves should be player based. Things like convincing another player to come save you. Random events or getting bonuses will be either too weak to matter at which point they are not a reversal at all OR too strong which would make building up your forces pointless. Having a game where everyone races to get beat up the most for the bounceback bounses would be absurd.

Pulling a metor shower spell out of your pocket that you have been saving all game would be great. Having a metor shower spell given to you would be horrible.

The problem with having some other civ come in and save you though, is whats to stop them from beating your attackers off, then taking your civ themselves? They have to get more from helping you then killing you themselves. And having fixed teams dosen't really work. With fixed teams it wasn't really a turn around since anyone could of seen that your teammate was going to save you anyway.

TBH, power in 4x games tends to be visible and isn't really suprising. Why hide a troop of elite knights in the back lines when they could of been upfront keeping you from getting into a losing postion in the first place?

The only examples i can really think of are master of magic and civilzation, if another civ is ripping into you, and you finish a major summons early on. A fire gaint can smash a LOT of spearmen. But later on a couple summons just won't cut it. And pulling off the mastery spell isn't that much a suprise for anyone. You were probably being attacked because you started teching it. In civilzation going straight to modern armor or nukes could let you turn a losing situation around pretty fast if the other team is still using muskets. In both those situations though, you had to be preparing for the turn around pretty much from the start. You sacrificed your early/middle game to be able to dominate late game.

This sort of thing happens a lot in RTS games. EX. your 2 teammates act very aggresive and hold the other team off for the early game, but lose a ton of troops doing it. The other team pushes in, but before they can kill your teammates, you finish making a tank thanks to your teammates covering for you. Your tank rolls out and smashes the other team because you got it so easrly. That kind of thing would be the kind of comeback that works well.

Don't want come-backs artifically inflicted on games.

 

 

 

The voice of reason.

Italics are key things I would have said myself.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Awesome, i alternate between being the voice of reason or the voice of need-more-elven-babes-in-platemail-bikinis.

The whole point though, it that in a 4x game, unless the civs are pretty even, reversals are almost impossible without outside intervention. Once one civ gets an advantage you end up in a snowball postion where one side gets crushed. Trying to jump in and save a civ that has lost 90% of its territory is either pointless or gamebreaking. The only time you could really alter the outcome is when the sides are well balanced, but thats when you don't want to be interferring.

Although i have vast respect for SD, i just don't see how they can maange to make a losing civ stay a viable threat without giving the losing civ an i-win button. And that would be pretty unpleasent for the player with the winning civ who outplayed the other guy too.

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Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Since I'm a competetive gamer (of both TBS & RTS) I'm not fond of major random happenings. In Heroes V for example, if I take the other players mines (no matter if the opponent is a human or A.I) then I expect him to NOT get any free resources unless the difficulty gives it to him but that's a flawed difficulty design as it should be done like Heroes II where it gives a % bonus and not stuff from thin air.

 

 

Absolutely nothing wrong with elven babes in platemail bikinis :grin:

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

For example would a player seeking military dominance, once they truely have dominance and are just going through the motions to end the game feel extra pressure and determination because they simply don't know exactly what stage the other players are at? Or would it still be a chore to finish up?

Re the mop-up chores question, it really depends on how good the UI will be at minimizing repetitive tasks. As a non-competitive singleplayer type, I very much like the general idea of being a bit fuzzy on how close a rival is to ending the game. Especially if a good intelligence network can help reduce that fuzz more or less in proportion to the intel-counterintel resource totals for you & the faction you want to know about.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Once you have military dominance and have started chopping up thier empire to divide between your 8 eyed grandchildren, the empire should not have many suprises left. As i already said, keeping reserves hidden while your are getting stomped makes no sence. And by the time you are crushing them, thier borders should be weak and your spies should be keeping an eye on everything. The only source of suprises should be spells and unless he summons something strong enough to counter your army or some kind of mass super metor shower that just wipes your army out he really can't do anything.

End game is called end game for a reason.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Campaigner, reply 28
Randomness is the spice that make something good exceptional. The random chance of which primary and secondary stat you get in Heroes V can put a pole in your spokes but that just means that you can't hope for things to go a certain path but have to be prepared to adjust. The A.I is useless at choosing secondary skills so you got an advantage either way.

 

Actually the quote is from another thread.

 

Randomness is good, randomly being given a one or two use meteor spell when your or the AI losing is bad?

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Limited randomness is okay. Giving a losing side a super power to compensate is not random, its just crappy. By limited randomness, i mean in combat the possiblity of a unit perfroming better/worse then its standard level. Or some other way to mix combat up a bit. I don't want to be able to look at one force compared to another and say "Oh, they have a 1.4% superiority, they will always win". 1% difference should be pretty much even in combat with the RNG leveling it out. On the other hand, peasents should get totaly munched by dragons, RNG being powerless here.

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

As a non-competitive singleplayer type, I very much like the general idea of being a bit fuzzy on how close a rival is to ending the game. Especially if a good intelligence network can help reduce that fuzz more or less in proportion to the intel-counterintel resource totals for you & the faction you want to know about.

Aye, I agree with your espionage focus, although I love poring over my game graphs at cup of tea time, I think covering them with research-dispeling fog would be a very satisfying game dynamic. I guess the question in this however, is would the A.I. be able to infer the meaning that a human player would once "Flanders is pushing hard on quest" was revealled. Coming from a total n00b space...I suspect that programming an A.I. to assess "what it doesn't know yet" and act adroitly would be exceedingly difficult.

Um...hope that's clear...try this: If unveiling victory data will effect a priority shift in the AI, then I think it could only be an all or nothing scenario, because if you only got info on one team, then the A.I. could only respond to it as "biggest" threat because it doesn't have any comparables.

randomly being given a one or two use meteor spell when your or the AI losing is bad?

Lol, I think the biggest fear there is that "randomly" doesn't sit well amongst the conceptual pattern you have provided. :) But aside from that yes, getting an "out" card like that, especially to the point of learning to rely on it, would be annoying. I think this is a question that crops up often in games with multiplayer : Random versus balance. THe idea that these two titans are locked in unresolvable struggle has always bugged me, I don't see why we can't have both.Sure it turns out unfair for some players sometimes...so what?...diversity is interesting.

Perfect balance on the other hand, is to me the precondition of the golden path...that is, one strategy to rule them all. Er...okay rambling off-topic now...will give this more thought in effort to add context.

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

You guys speak of the underdog getting a fighting chance end-game through random means, but you miss the potential for the topdog to get destabilised through random means. Here me out here...

 

Large empires will always have rivals and enemies. Even the most valiant and noble kingdom will have a rival empire, or exiled champion who will always hate them for whatever reason. Why not simulate that in-game? Deosn't have to be big, but a "neutral" hero popping up on the outskirts of one of you major cities wiith an army of bandits won't ruin your game but it may provide just the right amount of pressure to make things interesting. The same would have to apply to AI kingdoms of course, and be on a scale depending on the relative size of the various empires.

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

I like this idea. Since my empire of nightmares and horror would be immune. Failing to reach your quota of fish mined per day would lead to being added to the que for execution and transformation into a zombie for my ever increasing armys of the dead. A bunch of bandits who can't even reach an acceptable FM/D won't even faze the gears of my empire of pure evil. Perhaps one of my mutant custom bred super children who craves only blood and destruction can take a few ghouls and rip up the bandits for my amusment.

Actually, if i went hardcore evil empire, it would be kind of cool if every now and then a "Chosen One" would pop up and try and bring balance to the force or whatever by going on a quest to kill me. And i could laugh as my minions rip him apart.

But yes, it would be kinda cool and actually make a bit of sence if larg empires tended to attract more problems then small nations. Look at china for example, they have ethnic tensions along pretty much thier whole western border, the gobi desert is expanding southward into thier farmlands, they have trade arguments with damn near every other country, internal problems, global warming is going to sink thier eastern coastline where something like 20% of thier population lives. Being big lets you have big armys and big econemies, but it brings big problems.

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Reply #36 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ubernaught, reply 33

Perfect balance on the other hand, is to me the precondition of the golden path...that is, one strategy to rule them all.

Nah, perfect balance in strategy games is when there is no such thing as one winning strategy. If there is only one winning strategy then there is no strategy in the game at all, you're just playing according to a predefined script.

Reply #37 from Elemental Forums Top

Too true. If there is one strategy to win all the time, it simply becomes a matter of who can machine through the motions the fastest, which is great for high level competitive play, and horrible beyond words for things like fun.