My resource system and confidence feedback

[Saliva]

Unvanquished has a lot of potential and I'm glad people are working on it. However, in my opinion the development has taken a wrong turn. Practically abandoning resource gathering in favor of the confidence system is problematic and below I'll explain why.

Problems with the Resource system in the current version:

The original intent of the resource system was to encourage active play. Campers would lose because the other team gets more resources and overpowers their defenses. Currently resource gathering only gives build points. You can build like 20 eggs/teles near the camping team's base and it definitely helps but that isn't enough of an advantage to reliably defeat a camping team. Also it's tedious to have to build so many structures. The attackers need more power like evos/credits or stages.

Problems with the confidence system:

Everything about the confidence system feels arbitrary. It reminds me a lot of sudden death in that regard. It feels like when the resource system didn't work as intended confidence system was put in place to seemingly fix the problems, just like sudden death was a supposed fix to camping. In my opinion a game should have clear and strong mechanics to support it. The rules how confidence is gained are unintuitive and often completely unclear. Also there are problems with abusing the system. For example building useless structures to gather confidence is silly. I don't like this system at all and instead would like you to try something else.

A possible solution:

Try getting the resource system to work again. The problems with unstable gameplay because of no chance of comeback can be fixed. This is what I propose: Resource gathering buildings should be costly to build. It can cost a lot of resources/time or both. Then you can't just spam them everywhere and the one who gets early advantage gets the whole map and is swimming in resources. Because the cost to get more resources is high the games are a lot more stable. Small victories give an advantage and time to build more resource gatherers but not enough of an advantage that there is no chance of comeback. The low hp of the gatherers also makes it possible to make sneak attacks against them that ensures that they must be properly defended. Resource advantage can easily be lost by attackers. Less gatherers also increase the strategy element of the game when you really need to consider when to build them and where to build them. The radius that decreases resource gain should be way larger than currently and have a greater penalty. Gatherers should provide stage lvls and evos/credits. There should be a balance between personal evo/credit gain and the amount you get from gatherers. It should never feel like skill doesn't matter because you get free evos/credits anyway and not the other way around either.

I would like to know what you think about this. There are some things I left out but I hope what I'm trying to say is clear enough.

[Viech]

First of all, thank you for your feedback Saliva!

I agree with some of the issues you lined out with the current approach but I'm not yet convinced of the proposed solution.

On problems with the resource system

Campers would lose because the other team gets more resources and overpowers their defenses.

What this really does is that campers cannot win anymore, while the attacking team won't necessarily be able to win either. Such a stalemate would be really annoying for both teams: The campers will realize that they have no chance to turn the game in their favor even if they try to push the enemy back, so they will rather continue to camp in order not to lose the game. The attacking team would constantly push against a turtle base and lose their personal resources, since they don't get any kills. Now we have a game with very little progress and the really artificial timelimit will kick in. For that reason, I agree with the rest of your statement:

Currently resource gathering only gives build points. You can build like 20 eggs/teles near the camping team's base and it definitely helps but that isn't enough of an advantage to reliably defeat a camping team. Also it's tedious to have to build so many structures. The attackers need more power like evos/credits or stages.

When I tried to couple stages to mining efficiency I had a similar thing in mind. Being able to build as many structures as you wish isn't always enough to defeat your enemy hwo does not have this ability. However, when we did this, the team that managed to strike first could stage down their enemy, making it close to impossible for them to recover, because they needed to push back an enemy on a higher stage and re-expand at the same time. So the lucky attacker (they might just have placed a few good nades in suicide runs) did not only have the bigger guns but also one or two combatants more than the team that was now forced to designate builders. If the attacking team didn't finish the game at that point but instead took over the cleared map regions, they could win a game minutes before it ended, not unnoticed by the team being defeated. While I personally had no issue with this RTS-like slippery slope a lot of people noted that it wasn't fun to foresee being defeated, especially since they enjoyed matches in Tremulous where a team recovered from a setback and won. Another issue was that building was really important and you would constantly have two or three builders on your team, so this game mode didn't work well with a low number of players.
So yes, I do agree that the expanding and attacking team needs more power against a camping team. It's good if the attackers keep a high stage but confidence is better than plain resources because it doesn't instantly stage down a team that is just temporarily being pushed inside its base. We still have an issue with the attacking team running out of personal resources, so if anything I'd let RGS generate some personal resources in addition to build points.

On problems with the confidence system

Everything about the confidence system feels arbitrary. It reminds me a lot of sudden death in that regard. It feels like when the resource system didn't work as intended confidence system was put in place to seemingly fix the problems, just like sudden death was a supposed fix to camping. […] The rules how confidence is gained are unintuitive and often completely unclear.

You are right, confidence was invented to fix staging without reverting it to the (flawed) state of Tremulous. I dislike game elements that feel artificial, especially if the kick in abruptly such as sudden death or timelimit. On the other hand many key gameplay elements in computer games are highly artificial
(experience points, mana, health points, capturing flags, combo multipliers, tickets, respawn timers, maximum frags, …) but we usually accept them if we understand their importance and they are displayed and not just calculated in the background (even though this stresses the artificialness). For the display of confidence and stage thresholds, I imagine a (charge/progress) bar with a little line for each threshold on it. I do agree with the confidence ruleset being unclear and potentially unintuitive. Not sure what to do about it without exposing the players to the underlying math. The same problem exists for credits/evos for killing enemys (before I read the code I didn't know Tremulous evo reward for killing a human was (400 + equipment_value) / 400).

Also there are problems with abusing the system. For example building useless structures to gather confidence is silly.

Some forms of abuse related to deconstructing and replacing buildables will be fixed. But I don't consider building useless structures an abuse. First of all, you waste build points that you could spend on building useful structures (which also generate confidence). Building structures will give you 80% of the value of a buildable at most and less if you cluster them. So if you really wanted to convert build points to confidence at the best possible rate, you would need to spam buildables all over the map. I do think this is potentially a good early game startegy for aliens, for example by building a line of eggs and leeches in the hall on plat23/atcs, but it is also a risky one. I've seen a player doing this and while it did manage to give aliens a quick stage two, there was a followup situation where humans manged to push back and clear the hall in two rushes, elevating them on stage three while the aliens lost a lot of build points. The main and only idea behind giving confidence for building was that we wanted to encourage (risky) forwarding, so that both teams had two ways to generate confidence: By expanding and by killing the enemy forwards. Both can be considered progress which is what we wanted to reward in the first place. Furthermore, if one team turtles it can't prevent the enemy from staging up because they can expand. If mindless eggspam becomes a problem we can add a sepcial rule to make it less efficient but until this happens I would consider it a valid, risky strategy.

On your proposed solution

Resource gathering buildings should be costly to build. It can cost a lot of resources/time or both. Then you can't just spam them everywhere and the one who gets early advantage gets the whole map and is swimming in resources.

If RGS cost a lot of build points that would make recovery hard (it woudld be like giving OM/RC a cost). I find that the interference should be the main limit in placing them – the BP cost was really meant to prevent them from being abused as a barricade or always built in pairs for redundancy. If we are going to have spam issues in the future I would consider raising the build time but if we stick to confidence and maintain a high interference range I don't see this coming.

Because the cost to get more resources is high the games are a lot more stable. Small victories give an advantage and time to build more resource gatherers but not enough of an advantage that there is no chance of comeback. […] The low hp of the gatherers also makes it possible to make sneak attacks against them that ensures that they must be properly defended.

The main problem wasn't the stageup you gained when you got temporary map control but the instant and often permanent stagedown when you lost control once. Stability would require making them much harder to destroy, too.

Less gatherers also increase the strategy element of the game when you really need to consider when to build them and where to build them. […] The radius that decreases resource gain should be way larger than currently and have a greater penalty.

I agree in theory. I fear that in practice a leech hidden in some dark corner could be too powerful and add an annoying search-and-destroy aspect to the game. With cheap RGS you have a smooth approximation of the area under your control. I do like both approaches and if we will try to significantly boost the importance of mining once more I'd be open to trying this.

Gatherers should provide stage lvls and evos/credits. There should be a balance between personal evo/credit gain and the amount you get from gatherers. It should never feel like skill doesn't matter because you get free evos/credits anyway and not the other way around either.

For now I'd say no to stages. It sounded good in theory but the game really felt wierd that way. (And to be honest, I liked it a lot more than everyone else on the team.) I agree with what you say about evos/credits and the necessary balance. Since we currently do see an issue with attackers running out of personal credits when they fight against a turtle base, I now consider removing the (super articifial) free kill period and adding some income from RGSs instead. I will need to discuss this with Ishq and Tim first. (The latter was a strong opponent of coupling stages and resources and proposed the move to something like confidence so you might want to talk to him if I couldn't already convince you. )

[Ishq]

First I'd like differentiate the measures of both methods of stage advancement. Resources measures how well a team is doing overall. This is where the instability comes in. If a team fails a rush, it is still ahead overall and there is hardly any penalty since they don't lose anything and the team that prevented the rush will just camp harder waiting for the next rush. Confidence on the other hand is (or at least aims to be) a measurement of a team's momentum. If a team rushes and fails, even if they're ahead overall, they just lost a lot of momentum, and the team that stopped the rush picked up a lot of momentum. Now they have a chance of building on that momentum and fighting back. The momentum approach seems to be much more fun because it allows teams chances at comebacks while providing a holistic view of how a team is doing, rather than focusing on one aspect.

Quite frankly, I don't think making making resources hard to keep will make the game more aggressive. Quite the contrary rather, it will cause teams to camp. Now, resources are far more valuable and the structures are weak and vulnerable to random sneak attacks, thus in order to defend them, the teams will play far more cautiously, camping, or turtling the base outwards--neither are particularly attractive or fun options.

I don't mind increasing the importance of resources to the game, but I do not think making resources the main aspect is the correct direction.

[kangz]

Leeches and drills corrently gatherer less and less bp.

[Viech]

Suddendeath avoid buildings, if I am right? So less abrupt ways of reaching the same effect could be:

• make gatherers leech less and less resources over time

This is exactly how we're doing it with the new resource system. Read here for more information.

Currently, destroying buildings does not give personal resources. Instead of giving resources only when an enemy player is killed, adding some personal resources when someone destroys a building could fix that point, too. (But I guess this have been discussed previously)

That would help but I'm not sure if this fixes the problem completely. The worst case scenario is that the defending team camps hard enough so the attackers don't manage to kill either players or structures. I'd be open to both approaches – replacing the freekill period with some RGS driven income as well giving some credits on structure destruction. I think the combination of both could work well, since a high degree of map control gives you a subtle permanent advantage while simultaneously giving the enemy a greater opportunity to recover (by destroying the countless forwards). I'm just not sure if any of this would be overreacting to a single issue that we have already addressed a lot and that didn't yet come up in any of our (biased) dev games. I'd like to hear everyones opinion on this matter.

I think one of the underlying issue is that players, especially humans, can efficiently defend their base without leaving it. Humans can just sit in one corner and spam fire down the entrances while aliens can wait behind the next corner and play out their close-quarter combat advantage. Camping aliens have one big disadvantage though: The grenade and lucifer cannon can still be used for kamikaze style attacks if the attacker isn't stopped at a distance. Kamikaze style alien attacks have been discussed a lot lately and I think we'll be trying something like this in the future.