Globulation 2 has an inherrent lack of "recovery strategy". When one person gains an advantage, their advantage stays, and generally leads them to win. You can't do anything strategically smart to retake the lead. Little map biases, ones that are generally too minute to matter, can gradually pick up over time. And as well, if one player makes a small, rather stupid mistake, like forgetting to build or upgrade his hopsitals, and he attacks, hes as good as dead if the person hes playing against is any good, because they will often retaliate, and he has a pile of damaged warriors lurking about. And even if he does defend well, he's still lost for the whole game, because presumably his opponent has been able to continually build up during the attack, while hes dwindling, trying to rebuild is so difficult and tedious micro-management trying to remake all of his buildings, then upgrade them. And the same time he has to monitor his opponent and his food levels. Recovering is simply very difficult in this game.
One prime example of a little map bias is the way the water is positioned on some maps, and how it affects resource growth. Best resource growth occurs when there is a 15 distance of water in atleast one direction. So resources grow better with this minimum size met. On some maps, though, all the water for one player is sort of like the following: W W W W W W W G G G G G W W W W W W W W W W W W W W G G G G W W W W W W W W This is for some players, and for others its like this: W W W W W W W W W W W W W G G G G G W W W W W W W W W W W W W G G G G G W W W W W W W W W W W W W W G G G G However, I find resources grow much better with the first example than with the second. Yet some maps use a bit of both, just to give it a natural looking feel. So even though for both players the number of resources they start with is the same, and the amount of water to make those resources grow is the same, the way the water is positioned has a big effect. I'm not saying simply change the maps to reduce this bias, nor am I saying simply modify the resource growth algorithm. Maps that look quite balanced can often be quite biased against or for a certain player, and you don't notice it untill late in the game when resources are running low, if infact, you make it that long. So glob2 has a big lack of recovery strategy. Its build up, attack first, you win, essentially. Two well matched players will often be succombed to map bias. Simple mistakes can turn into critical turning points, making the game difficult for new people, who make plenty of mistakes, to become any good at. What we need is recovery strategy, some new gameplay elements which make it easier for someone to recover from a mistake, or a hard battle, or a small map bias. I'm not sure how to do this, however, but if we intend to make the game mainstream, especially internet play (where this is a problem), we need to solve the issue. Making recovery, or very fast build up, less tedious, is a must. Things such as the ability to make a building straight into level 2 or 3, or the ability to repair a group of buildings all at once rather than doing them one by one, or my personall favorite, when it tells you that something is being attacked, but when you try to click the space button and quickly put a flag their, you appear at some random spot, and when you look up, it says something like "inn has been finished" or "explorer under attack", and you have to search for where your being attacked, while the enemy warriors level your once brilliant city. Or perhaps someone gains an early advantage with fruits, they steal a few of your units, you quickly turn on inn view, but for some reason, your units keep dissapearing. You realize that you don't have enough workers to keep your inns in full supply, as the enemy has taken all of them. As you work desperately to make enough workers to get your inns full of fruit so you can recover some units, your opponent only continues to steal your units, making the situation all the worse. You build more swarms (which is now quite a bit harder), put them with 4 or 5 workers and hope you will get enough workers just to survive. But whats this? Your opponent has a ton of workers, and has built a huge, well trained army and defeats you. Another prime example of how little things become big, or even huge, in this game, *very fast*, and theres almost nothing you can do about them. _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel
