2.1 Team Progress wrote:Team stages in Tremulous served the purpose of giving a match a number of phases. At the beginning of a match, the ability to extend the weak default base was guaranteed by the fact that access to strong weapons was restricted, even if individual players managed to gain a good amount of personal resources quickly. Higher stages offered new guns and shifted the gameplay from building towards destruction, even though stronger defense buildables dampened the effect a bit.
Strictly speaking, it would have worked pretty well if stages were simply reached after a timer ran out but it was obviously more fun to reward teams for playing well, even if this introduced a slippery slope effect. The definition of "playing well" has already shifted with the introduction of confidence and we also started abusing the stage concept to punish passive gameplay by having teams stage down again. However, the basic concept of match phases remained intact.
Manipulating a teams decisions by forcing them into a "soft" match phase is one of our most valuable tools to achieve a number of important goals. The most apparent ones are allowing base improvments/moves/forwards without artificially preventing the players from attacking the enemy early on as well as making sure a match ends with a winner by decreasing the matches stability with the introduction of devasting weapons in the late game. For that reason, I take the general concept of team progress as a given.
Ishq wrote:In general, I agree with the notion of the three phases and generally gear our upgrades to these phases. Also, strictly speaking, a timer wouldn't have worked because you remove the incentive to rush since you are guaranteed upgrades. There is no reason to not to camp all game until the most powerful upgrades are released. Rewards for teams that do things right are key to creating balanced and fun gameplay. But, I digress, since we aren't really ever gong to consider this.
