On 01/27/2012 12:31 PM, Nils Kneuper wrote:
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Am 27.01.2012 11:57, schrieb Noy:
If there is a problem with the game dynamics for beginners, then I suggest
there needs to be better scenario design, and maybe implementing some of
the suggestions made by other developers for beginner players (ie end of
scenario reinforcements.) However if you'er on an advanced difficulty level
and you can't beat it at that level, tough luck. My suggestion is try again
or decrease the difficulty level.
Okay, so we come down to basically two problems listed by you one the third
one omitted:
1) The game might be too difficult in some selected setting for a specific
player. A solution here can be "restart this mission in 'insert_easier_mode'"
as was proposed before (though it has problems if the campaign forks to
completely different scenarios only available in higher difficulties; this is
technically possible but IIRC noone has done so (yet)).
No, I have never talked about campaigns or the game being too difficult.
Restarting the campaign at a lower level is not a solution, as discussed
in the
answer to Noy.
But I think implementing the difficult change during an ongoing campaign
is worth
thinking about. Again, that is not a solution to the problem.
2) For a really new player the game might be too difficult on the easiest
level proposed. Here some "better" tools for scenario developers might help
making it easier for them to see if the player is "too weak" and possibly
*allow* (not enforce!) some help.
Please, let's stop talking about weak or new players.
That is totally off topic.
3) Due to gold carry over and the recall list balancing of (longer) campaigns
is *really* difficult.
Now lets look at what we can/should possibly look at for each of the problems:
For '1' we got a proposed solution though there are problematic corner cases.
We might have to enforce that every scenario of a campaign has the same number
of difficulty levels so even if you branch into some "hard only" scenario it
still has to be possible to switch to some "easier" version of it.
Yes, the proposal with changing the difficult levels is a nice feature
to have.
But it's not related to my proposal and should be discussed in another
thread.
For '2' we can already provide reinforcements and stuff like this, but
currently there would be no reward in not accepting help. And there is also no
good mechanism to determine if help should be offered.
Again, let's discuss new player specific problems in another thread, please.
Although I do not see the need to do anything on this field.
The lowest difficult level of beginner campaigns should be fit for new
players and
they already are in my opinion.
No need to do much in that direction.
For '3' we really have a tough spot. A real problem here is that you basically
have to play the complete campaign in a selected difficulty level to see if it
is feasible or not. The main problem here is also that a campaign designer
might not be the best player of the world but still wants to offer a "really
challenging" setting. There is no decent way for the content designer alone to
determine if the later scenarios are not "too easy". I think the idea fendrin
mainly has is to ease life of scenario designers by making the maps more self
contained.
Yes, one of the goals is to make balancing more easy.
But I don't like to emphasise the self contained character of my proposal.
A campaign that uses it,
will offer the possibility to test a scenario on it's own,
just with the minimum gold that is granted to the player and by enabling
the recalling of higher level units if wanted. (this can be done guarded
by an
#ifdef DEBUG)
If an expert is able to still beat at HARD the balancing should be fine
for the
usual player. And all campaign maintainers are experts, at least when it
comes
to their own campaigns.
The self containing sounds like campaigns are transformed to scenarios
that are roughly
connected with each other.
I don't think they are. The recall list is still a valuable resource for
the player.
The "you kill all the RPG style" is neither my intention nor do I think
it will happen.
For this problem I personally think we somehow have to switch how
difficulty levels are handled and done and which influence they have on the
game.
Currently difficulty levels mainly define how much gold the player gets, how
strong the AI is (recruit and gold wise) and how much time is available to
complete the scenario. Here it might make sense to switch to some kind of
"ranges" for available units and gold for a player in a selected difficulty
level. And the range plus the difficulty level determine what the player and
the AI get (plus possibly offered reinforcements). With something in this
direction it might be possible to have a single scenario more self contained
and reduce (not remove) the effect previous scenarios can have. This way it
might be more easily possible to balance a "freaking long" campaign in a way
which leaves the later scenarios still challenging for extremely good players
while not making it basically unbeatable for everyone else. I fear that the
extremely good players might experience a drop close to the end of a campaign
at the moment since their troops and amounts of gold just make them too
powerful.
Yes, this is a *really* hard to judge area of the game. I think there is no
"perfect" solution at all. Every solution we find will have some flaws in some
area. So the question is what are the important parts and how to achieve at
least decent solutions for all the areas, even if some of them are not as
great as we'd love to have them?
Okay, you do have many good ideas and arguments worth thinking about.
Still they miss the main point of my proposal for the reasons mentioned
above
or in the answers to Noy and Dave.
So again, let's discuss them in an extra thread.
They are all not fit to get rid of the core problem.
Cheers,
Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic
Cheers,
Fabian
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