Debriefing

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Ishq
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Debriefing

Post by Ishq »

Well, it's almost done! Our first successful tournament. For those who watched or participated, what are your thoughts? Suggestions on to do things better. This can be anything from balance to handling of the tournament.

For my part:

Balance:
I think we need to shift the focus of the gameplay. It was more about random rushing and suiciding buildings, not coordinated team strategies that destroy the enemy. We need to strike a balance between base strength and base destruction. Bases that are too strong will lead to slow, turtly games, whereas bases that are too easy to destroy will result in random rushing.

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Viech
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by Viech »

I agree, player vs. base balancing needs more work. Big bases need to be able to handle a single attacker on the same stage without losing too many structures.

Confidence needs to reward more playing styles, so that there can be reasons not to suicide on a structure if you have the chance to.

Stability didn't seem to be an issue in the tournament but it will stay in the focus of our general gameplay.

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kharnov
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by kharnov »

Better verification of registered groups. Two teams never even showed up. I would prefer to see a requirement that groups must come in-game to register, either individually or together, which would signify that A.) they have the game installed on their computers, and B.) that they actually have enough people to play.

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Ishq
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by Ishq »

Yes, perhaps in the future, we can develop a more formal tournament registration system.

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kharnov
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by kharnov »

Image

TOURNAMENT OVER

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Anomalous
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by Anomalous »

We definitely need clan (and, for GT, clam) tagging, much like we have admin levels.

Debian and Ubuntu packages (squeeze, wheezy, sid; 12.04, 12.10, 13.04) may work on derivatives

OFFEND! … no, that's not right… ATTACK!

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ViruS
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by ViruS »

Viech wrote:

I agree, player vs. base balancing needs more work. Big bases need to be able to handle a single attacker on the same stage without losing too many structures.

Thinking of which, I used to say that in Trem 1.1, the aliens were disadvantaged in defense because humans have range and their structures are weak. However their up side is that they build faster. I've noticed that there isn't that much difference in building times for the two teams nowdays, because build timers are dependent on structure formation time. Maybe buff up the human structure health a bit with each 'dcc' (would they "stage up buildables"?) built, and also increase the overall building time for the human buildables. Aliens could have a similar thing.

Only problem is when the dcc/alien staging buildable is in a hard-to-reach spot and fends out enemies too easily.

One of my tactics with alien building in gpp was that I wouldn't rely on atubes as much as in 1.1, but actually use the cades and trappers to slow down the humans, as they both provide them with a target, and the creep and size annoys them. Usually my bases aren't aimed towards killing the human, but rather imparing them so I would have enough time to come back before they finish off everything.

Basically, human defenses are meant to repel aliens out, but alien defenses are meant to slow them down while annoying them at the same time, by reducing them to the point aliens finish them off.

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Tom
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by Tom »

Balance:
I agree with everybody previous remarks, the confidence system must be kept because it manages to do what it was designed for: to prevent the passiveness of players. However as Ishq and Viech said the current system rewards mainly suicide attack on buildables, I think we should reward more the kills—but not just any.

As Viech explained here: killing an enemy inside its main base will also add a small amount of confidence which is proportional to the amount of evos or credits we get.

But I think this is not enough: we need a system that works wherever we are on the map, including in forward bases: for example let's say we are an alien, killing a human worth 200 evos/credits near 3 aliens structures (3 acid tubes worth 8 of helping points each) will reward the alien of 200 - 3 * 8 evos/credits. On the opposite if the human is killed near 4 humans structures (4 turrets worth 8 helping points each) we earn 200 + 4 * 8 evos/credits. Of course killing the human away from all structures—or near allied and enemy structures which compensates—earn 200 evos/credits. And we get confidence proportionaly to those evos/credits but I suggest with a higher proportionality coefficient than currently.

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Viech
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Re: Tournament Debriefing

Post by Viech »

Yes Tom, this is pretty much what we want to try next: We were afraid of a complex confidence system at first and wanted to have a ruleset for it that's easy to remember but it turned out there is a number of situations that require special treatment.

For the exact implementation, we will need to decide what kind of behaviour we want to reward with it. Tremulous rewarded primarily individual skill and at the same time punished unskilled players hwo took the risk of leaving base. Our first implementation rewarded base destruction over anything else and while this is also the ultimate goal of every match, it made rounds shorter since there was no reason to struggle when you had the chance to spend your personal resources on destruction.

We would like to encourage teamplay but it's rather hard to find rules for that. Another option would be to reward taking risks. In theory, this can lead to interesting games as the weaker team gets a lot of chances to exploit the enemy's risk-taking while the stronger team doesn't really get to relax. A typical risk would be moving your base to a better location or leaving the main base undefended to build a forward.

I like the idea of giving rewards for killing players and buildables that are proportional to their resource cost. In order to account for the risk factor, there could be synergy effects between structures and players, similiar to what you describe.

Here's a draft that just came to my mind, mod being a fixed modifier to balance the value of structures against the value of players, all constants are examples:

[table="width: 800"]
[tr]
[td]Building a strucutre[/td]
[td]bp_cost[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Destroying a structure[/td]
[td]bp_cost * min( 4, 1.2[SUP]close_enemies[/SUP] )
[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Killing a player[/td]
[td]normalized_equip/class_cost * mod * min( 4, 1.1[SUP]close_enemy_structures[/SUP] ) * 1.1[SUP]-close_friendly_structures[/SUP][/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

The system would reward not being inside a friendly base. There are still a number of unhandled special cases that would require extra rules though and that's the part where decisions get difficult:

  • In order to encourage forwarding, it might make sense to give a greater reward for building structures outside of an existing base but then eggspam would yield more confidence than hunting down all those eggs.

  • Suicide attacks against bases are still efficient, there is no incentive to kill defenders first.

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Tom
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Re: Debriefing

Post by Tom »

Great idea, I do not see how it could be better.

If we succeed to balance the system, Unvanquished will be—in my eyes—a major milestone in the history of video game in general and in the line of descent of Tremulous and Gloom in particular.

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