Team similarities?

[kharnov]

In what ways should the two teams be similar and dissimilar?

[janev]

The tremulous way was:
Aliens
Melee
Highly mobile
Strong individuals

Humans
Ranged
Limited mobility
Strength in numbers

The melee/range things would be nice to keep the same but I wouldn't mind shaking the other stuff up. Perhaps give aliens more of a boost for swarming humans and better special abilities that allow for great teamwork combos.

[Pevel]

Why not state the obvious? Talking about similarities, I think both teams should depend on more or less specialized units/weapons. So, say, the teams should be similar in diversity of units. I'd like the gameplay to avoid all-purpose units, and somehow punish teams which go for high-damage strategy only.

Another similarity I'd like to see is dependency on buildings. Both teams, of course in different ways, should be fully dependend on building strategy. No buildings, no team.

While the form of in-game progression is still in question, I think that the model of progression and rewarding/score/points system should be similar/analogous for balancing purposes. It's easier to compare both teams' progress this way and estimate current game state (which team is 'winning').

Last, the final goal of the game should be the same for both teams, at least in standard mode. I think the way to achieve the goal should be similar as well, with awarding offensive strategies and punishing camping, no matter what team it is.

[Cadynum]

The tremulous way was:
Aliens
Melee
Highly mobile
Strong individuals

Humans
Ranged
Limited mobility
Strength in numbers

The melee/range things would be nice to keep the same but I wouldn't mind shaking the other stuff up. Perhaps give aliens more of a boost for swarming humans and better special abilities that allow for great teamwork combos.

Strength in numbers should be for both teams. While the tremulous way works ok in public games, it is next to impossible to make it work in clangames.

[janev]

Both teams get stronger the more units they have in play. That is true. In my experience though the aliens are proportionally stronger in one on one situations and humans are proportionally stronger in larger engagements. The logic being that ranged units stack better than melee units. You can concentrate your fire to take down individual melee units one at a time. So in a 3 vs 3 encounter if you can take out the first alien unit at a distance you now have a 1 man advantage moving forward. Of course this hinges on being able to concentrate fire....

To counter large humans groups some sort of group bonus for the aliens is in order, don't you think so? I don't just mean basilisk healing, the basilisk being relegated to a support role is something I generally dislike. Make the granger a booster and leave ninjabasi alone. Anyways, I'm getting off point for this being the "vision statement" forum.

[Viech]

Concepts that should be completeley analogous for both teams

• Acquiring of build points and other team shared and personal resources. Having this in line is crucial for balancing.

• Awarding of non-resource points used for the player ranking.

• How to win a match. (We can later experiment with game modes that do this differently but for a start I don't see a reason why one team wouldn't want to eliminate the other.)

Concepts that may (and should) differ but need to have a similar effect for both teams

• I agree with janev that fighting as a group in Tremulous is generally easier and more rewarding for the human team and I think this needs to be improved on.

• Construction of buildings.

• The skills needed by players.

• Mobility. Aliens are generally a lot faster and currently have a higher reach than humans, making it a lot harder to balance maps. The humans need devices such as jetpacks and teleport stations so they can move along the map as quickly as aliens.

• Dependency on buildings, as Pevel lined out. The humans in Tremulous are significantly more dependet on buildings than the aliens. While the buldings can have completely different effects at least the rough number of crucial buildings should be equal. For example the humans in Trem depend on rc, nodes, armory and medistation while the aliens only depend on om, eggs and booster. So either the aliens need another building they depend on or the humans need to be less dependent on the armory (for example by beeing able to buy equipment before spawning).

[kharnov]

If we can draw an analogy here, the humans function much like the 'hero' type units in RTS games, being capable of a wide range of abilities and the usage of different pieces of equipment. The aliens function very much like various 'enemy' units, sort of like playable NPCs. You have the dretch and basilisk functioning as light scout types, the marauder and dragoon as assault units, and the tyrant as the heavy creature that heads groups of weaker units.

At times I've heard proposals to make the humans have classes, which would be an interesting change of things. For one, it would be a return to the Gloom order of things. It would also probably be a bit easier to balance human classes against alien equivalents. However, that might be boring if they were perfectly symmetrical with one class corresponding to a class on the other team.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at here is that we should emphasize the basic dissimilarities between the teams. We don't want them to be symmetrical at all, regardless of where we take balance. At the very least, any symmetry should not be readily apparent. For instance, the tyrant is mostly better for taking down bases than it is at taking down humans with a battlesuit and lucifer cannon. You would expect the tyrant to be good at handling its equivalent at stage 3, but the battlesuit-wearing human is actually much better at taking down his tyrant opponent than the other way around. The human only needs one fully charged shot and one half-charged shot to win, while the tyrant needs to both get up close and aim several attacks, none of which have the added benefit of range or splash damage.

Of course, that's just game balance. The basic paradigm of the game should be identical for both teams. Build a base using some sort of resource, kill your opponents for advancement credit, win by destroying the other team's base.