I think these suggestions by Isaac and Gabba are preferable to
introducing a new mechanic to a core aspect of gameplay. One of my
concerns with changing recall costs mechanics is consistency. Right
now recalls are fairly simple to understand across all scenarios: 20
gold. What I worry is that you'll have different money levels or
mechanics in different scenarios. I know that several MP scenarios
have automatic loyal recalls in new scenarios in addition to the
purchase list... it works fairly well.
However altering the recall cost behavior will cause serious
consequences for scenario balancing, requiring quite a bit of work on
the part of content providers. There is some question on how this
would work with some MP scenarios where units are upgraded through WML
events (often with 10X the combat power of an un-upgraded unit).
These alterations would completely alter the game mechanics (and
intent) of these scenarios and basically make them unplayable.
R
On 26-Jan-12, at 4:04 AM, Isaac Clerencia wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Nils Kneuper <crazy-
[email protected]> wrote:
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Am 26.01.2012 08:10, schrieb Gabriel Morin:
Ultimately if you have campaigns you need to have a slippery
slope, the
alternative being that your skill at getting lots of gold and
powerful
units doesn't have much of an influence. I don't think that having
to
restart a few scenarios is to be viewed as The Ultimate Evil(tm):
happened
to me, I was happy to find the way to play them better, and I'm
still alive
today! If you worry so much about poor newbs getting scared, why not
provide automatic loyal reinforcements or gold on easy difficulty,
whenever
you detect that the player is starting a scenario with insufficient
resources/army to win? The rest of us with minimal experience and/
or a
brain will manage.
I think this idea is the most reasonable approach, and it won't ruin
the game for anyone, but ideally it should be brought to the attention
of the player and be opt-in, so players who like the challenge don't
get automatically opted-in into some help didn't ask for.
Something like:
"Your current gold and army strength doesn't seem enough to beat this
scenario. Do you want to start with XX gold and get reinforcements?"
If we go this way, it'd also be good to actually count the times you
asked for help during a campaign, so at the end of the campaign, your
result is 'You have beaten the campaign XXX at difficulty YYY, using
help ZZZ times', and thus there is an extra achievement in not using
the help.
Then in the iPhone version we can instead just sell help tokens at $1
each (just kidding :P).
Hmm, this sounds to me like a better solution to the problem. Lets
face it,
the problem is simple:
You might reach a point where it is not possible anymore to win a
scenario
with the "resources" you have. Those resources include the starting
gold as
well as the recallable units.
Currently to fix this you have to jump back several scenarios and
level more
units and/or play faster with better resource management. So the
question
should be: what can be done to prevent this from happening? For
this I see
several solutions (in no particular order) making balancing of
later scenarios
more easily possible (yes, they are partly drastic and not
reasonable to
implement!):
1) Get rid of gold carry over and just rely on starting gold.
Besides also
remove the recall list. This way every scenario would be self-
contained. This
would suck for many players since they love the leveling up of
their troops
and it would also remove challenges like "manage your finances" in
a larger
scope than just a single scenario.
2) Currently the AI is of a fixed strength per scenario. It tends
to have the
same units available as well as the same amount of gold, no matter
how strong
or weak the enemies army is. An option would be to change this so
that the
enemy AIs amount of gold is based on the players amount of gold (eg
"player
gold + 20%"). Of course the recruit/recall list of the AI could
also be
modified. Currently the AI often hast lvl2 and 3 units on its
recruit list to
make up for a missing recall list with those stronger units.
3) Add some way to check for the current "army strength" of a
player. This
strength does not just depend on the gold (since the starting gold
can be
adjusted by the scenario designer!) but also on the available
recall list.
Though using all units from the recall list is not valid here
either. Maybe
using the difference from 20 gold to the units recruit price (as
long as it is
positive!) as additional component to the "army strength". So a
player with
just lvl1 recalls that each cost <=20 gold would have his starting
gold as
army strength, player with many higher level units would have a
significantly
higher value there. The campaign designer would then try to balance
their
campaign for specific army strength ranges. Eg give the player more
gold or
some free higher level units (possibly especially ones that are
harder to
level like healers). Of course this approach also still has to
differ between
the monetary army strength as well as the recallable strength. So
if you just
have a freaking huge and strong recall list but almost no gold
there would be
a problem as well as with no recall list bug huge amounts of gold.
Possible
solutions in such a case would be a wandering band of mercenaries
that offer
the player their service for a "special fee" (as a way to provide
players with
huge amounts amounts of money with an easier way to get some higher
level
units that might be required to beat a scenario).
The basic change on our side would be giving the campaign designer
better ways
to weight the strength of the player and base the scenario
balancing on the
current army strength by providing "especially useful"
reinforcements,
different enemy troop strength or possibly just a higher starting
gold.
4) Remove the current system of recalling based on a fixed value
and make the
recalling depend on the units recruit price possibly coupled by a
factor. This
way the starting gold of the scenario can be set to a "more sane"
minimum for
what you most likely need to beat the specific scenario.
There are possibly millions of combinations of what I proposed
above possible
and all can probably be done already with some crude WML hacks.
Personally I
prefer to follow some general rules though:
* Try to keep the rules as consistent throughout the game as
possible.
Consistent here eg means "same rule for recalling everywhere" so
that a player
knows what to expect. At least it should be the same ruleset for
one content.
* Make sure that the player at least "feels" rewarded for something
done
really well. Currently this is done by giving "good" players a
(significant!)
advantage in later scenarios and often have "bad" players not fail
in the
scenario they are bad in but later on in the campaign.
All the other things mentioned before in this thread are very player
dependent. Many want to keep their "special" army (and because of
these
save-load when losing a single unit), want to see units level, love
the RPG
like aspects of the game. So yes, for those it would be a shame if
the units
would just be faceless troops and leveling units possibly has a
rather bad
effect on you.
Personally I think it would be good to provide content developers
with better
means to judge the players strength in a current scenario and
adjust the
balancing of the scenario based on the players strength. Since I
personally
really dislike RPGs where the enemy troops level with you in some
really
strange ways making the game significantly more difficult if you
just continue
playing and discovering stuff (anyone ever played "TES: Oblivion"?)
I'd vote
for not taking just the route number "2" as outlined above. I'd
prefer
providing good means to follow route "3" since then the content
designer can
more easily balance stuff based on what is there and what is not.
Of course
this can also mean *slight* adjustments to the enemy troops (better/
worse
troops, free creeps, ...) to better match what the player is likely
able to
beat, but still somehow based on what players actually got
available, not on
what some overachievers managed to get preventing them from a too
easy stroll
through the park.
Cheers,
Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic
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Isaac Clerencia
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