right, but just because it hasn't been done well doesn't mean that games shouldn't have it.  Maybe some people like said Dune game.   I said 'almost offensive' because I understand the idea behind it.  Games really shouldn't put some sort of artificial limit on your experiance like that without at least the option to turn it off.  But again, its not like games shouldn't have it, because some people might like it that way.

Its like, you might not want games like that, but it doesn't belong with things like "make text options available for color blind", "gamma correction should always be available" or "you should be able to leave a game at any time" that should be pretty standard.  As a game developer, I am frustrated to see people shoot down such high-level concepts without any direct function.

Noctilus does have some valid points in the context of strategy games. I think we just have to rephrase them a bit:

Strategy 1&2: No arbitrary cap on unit logistics. No limiting the size of armies "just because we can". The longer a conflict lasts the more resources are deployed to win it. Not the other way around. It is possible to win any conflict by turtling and building up an overwhelming force. Games often make this impossible just to make it impossible. It is a wholly viable tactic, the only reason it works every time is that your enemy isn't smart enough to or is incapable of doing the same thing.

In otherwords, resources should never be totally finite. If I ask questions like "I have the resources for another unit, so why can't I build one" and the best answer you can come up with is "you have maxed out your unit cap" then you either need to rebalance your gamplay for larger battles or manage the availability of resources so that the unit cap will rarely if ever be met.

Unit caps are something that can kill the immersion in an instant. Its like learning how to fly, hitting the ceiling of the matrix and discovering the sky isn't real.

Strategy 3: Strategy games must retain some sort of continuity. My descisions and actions of the now should define and shape the later, that is the essense of strategic thinking. Strategy utilized in a limited setting is not strategy, it is tactics. Tactics are about responding to the actions of your enemy, strategy is about defining when and how conflict takes place.

It is okay if your game is divided into limited tactical scenarios, but if these do not connect in some way then strategy does not take place. Whats the point of building a huge fleet of fighter jets if I can't call them for air support in later battles? Tactics is fortifying your base to fend off an enemy assault today. Strategy is using as few defenders as you can, because you know you will be attacked tommorow.

What is the difference between tactics and strategy? To a tactition a defeat is a failure. To a strategist a defeat is a lesson.

Usually unit caps are put into place so that the machines intended to run the game can.   That is why Warcraft 3's was so low, because they wanted the game to be pretty but still run on average systems of the time.  They could couldn't have 200 units running around the stage at once.   Sadly though, this was right after starcraft, age of empires 2, and Red alert 2 (which was all 2D) so it seemed very limiting.

A better one would be "don't not-think your game mechanics through to set boundries that might harm gameplay in the end" but thats a given.  Not something we should have to remind developers of anyway, because most of them are trying to do that anyway, and most Q&A isn't going to be able to put a check-mark next to that the way they could with the rest of the list.

That is fine in a multiplayer setting. But what about singleplayer? A 200 unit cap in a multiplayer game of 12 people indicates that the game engine is more than capable of hosting 2400 units at once.

Its not really meant as a mandatory feature, just a big tip.

Soviets. Cloning Vats. Base soldiers.

OM NOM NOM NOM for the war machine!

Holy self-contradicting semantics coupled with completely inappropriate analogy Batman!!! I guess if my DVD player forced me to watch a movie again from the beginning every time I wanted to take bathroom break then I could compare it to unnecessarily limiting game design decisions.

I don't play console games so I can't comment on those example. I was thinking of 8 bit home computing systems. As much as I loved the games back then their save limitations would probably cause me to smash my system to pieces with a lump hammer were I to play them now. Those games had an excuse given the hardware; modern games don't. For example Hitman's ridiculously limited save system caused me to uninstall it. I can only assume that in the Hitman developer's utopian universe games never crash, contain scripting bugs and player's never want to turn of their systems or multitask.

Gothic 3 and The Witcher spring to mind as recent and particularly inexcusable examples. As far as I can recall the saves are labelled with a tiny screenshot, date stamp and region name; none of which is adequate to tell my why I saved the game at that particular point.

But they do, or at least from the nearest chapter start.    If you want to turn off your movie and start it again later you will be at the begining or closest scene selection point if its a DVD and up.   The number of hours I've spent waiting for somebody to fast-forward / rewind through a movie to find the place they left off could beat me a really long JRPG.  Especially in high school where movies watch in classes were never finished in 1 sitting.   

You can 'pause' your movie for a bathroom break, But its been a long time since I've encountered a game that you couldn't pause.  Some multiplayer games can't be paused or have the option on game creation that lets you turn on and off the power for players to pause.  But that is like watching broadcast TV since its live for multiple people at once, you can't pause broadcast TV...  you could wait for a commercial, but thats like waiting to die and rushing to relieve yourself while waiting for the respawn counter to finish.

Not to encourage digression into quibbles about an analogy, but my current DVD player is much better than my first one because when I press Stop, it remembers the exact time stamp. I can power down, ignore the box for days, and come back to *exactly* where I stopped watching.

As far as I know almost any DVD player you buy now will do the same. Pressing stop once will stop the movie but remember exactly where you left off; pressing stop twice will usually discard your position.

Yes but that assumes you leave the DVD player on or in stand by mode. I don't like that at all because it just wastes power and I could calculate how much money it costs me every minute I leave it plugged in.

21. In-game backwards compatibility in regards to patches. Patches are usually a good thing but sometimes they also break things as well. Perhaps a new hotfix changes something that breaks your favorite mod. Or a beta build has overwritten your game files and the only way to return to your last version is re-installing. There should be some easy way of rolling back and forth between different patches that does not require you to jump through hoops.

One way of accomplishing this is to make all patches self contained. If my game version is 1.00 and I want to update to 1.50. I would go and download the patch. This patch would simply be a file called patch150. Installing it is a matter of placing the file into the game directory. When the game boots up it recieves a list of all the files that patch150 changes and loads those updated files from the patch file instead of the installed archive. This way switching between patches is as simple as pointing to one file or another. Modding would also be dead simple if you could handle them in this way Essentially what this does is package all patches and mods into self contained modules. There are a couple games that do this, the most recent ones I have come across are Mount and Blade and Diablo 2.

There is a forseeable problem that is easily avoided. If you build up multiple patch files the game will start to load slower because it has to go digging for all of the updated files. All you have to do is give players an easy button that installs a patch permanently over the existing game files. So if I had game version 1.00 and a set of patch files ranging from 1.1 to 4.0. Installing all of these patches would update the game files and delete the patch files, leaving me with game version 4.0 and an empty patch folder.

In betas it would allow you to play with the beta content, then when the beta is over delete that content by removing a single file and then patching your game files with new and improved version.

--

Now I'm not sure what technical limitations would stem from a system like this. But there IS historical precendent and the convenience added is obvious.

Yeah, but you can't take out the DVD and put in any other movies.  You could leave the game on and paused...  it would be the same thing.    You can pause the game, and put your computer into hibernate.  *bam*    I used to pause games and just turn off my TV all the time.  I still do, I guess, but I leave bigger slots of time to play most games so it doesn't really come up as much I feel.   (when I was a kid, I'd have to go to dinner, or whatever.  Now I control my life so I can schedule 'game time')

 

The mod thing is trouble.   You can't much improve your game without changing some things, and it isn't the responcibility of the game creators to check up on all their mods.  When the game changes significantly (look at some stardock patches) some other features will break.

I think think a better thing would be is for all mod sites to be deticated to keeping their mod up to date so that if a big patch comes and breaks their stuff, they update it.

I do wish there was like a save game converter or something like that though.  I know I've lost saved games I wanted to keep because of *insert major patch for game here*

But if you had the ability to downgrade your game version without too much trouble, you would have no problems using mods that rely on outdated game files while being able to load the most current game version whenever you want to. This is important because a new trend is for content delivery systems and multiplayer hubs to automatically update your game, often without your consent.

In other cases you are free to download any patch you wish even if they are not the most updated version. A module system like this allows you to do the same thing only it saves you the hassle of reinstalling your games. Convenience is a huge plus for gamers in all its forms.

For modding it could only make things easier. If all of the patch files are self contained in one archive, it makes it easy for modders to figure out exactly what has changed between versions. If a fix is not possible you are free to roll back your game version one notch and continue playing as normal.

22. In-game volume controls. Multiple subcomponents here:

22a. Mute buttons. Notice the plural? Having a mute button is great but something that would be even better would be to include multiple mute keys. One key would mute all game sound period, others could selectively mute things like announcements (like map pings), music and voice chat if that was included.

22b. Volume dimmer switch. When playing Left 4 Dead for example, whenever someone speaks using voice chat the volume of the other game sounds will dim automatically by about 40-50%. This would be a handy feature to have if you were using a seperate program for voice chat such as ventrilo.

If I bound mouse key 3 to be my push to talk button in ventrilo. I could bind that same mouse button to dim the game volume by 50%. So whenever I hit the button to talk the volume of my game would reduce and the people on the other side of voice chat wouldn't have to listen to things like gunfire and screaming zombies. Binding the dimmer switch to a second key would allow me to kill the noise when someone else is speaking to allow me to hear them clearly. If voice chat is integrated this could be automatic depending on user preference.

Depends on the player. Mine remembers the last 5 discs I played. But I am a little curious about how much power it uses when it is "off" but still plugged in.

That would be nice. Could put a little horn or lute icon in the UI to pop up audio controls instead of having to step out to the Options pages.

Exactly that was my point, once resources run out you typically reach a point where whichever "sitting duck" happens to have the best army standing will win. No offense intended by the way, just my experience in a lot of cases. And Dune was a particular example because this design didn't fit the whole story behind the game. If it fits the background of the game, fine but at least try to prevent the resulting stalemates as much as reasonably possible.

My other point was born from the same thought "what are common points of criticism or annoyance towards many strategy games". But I'd rather not re-open that discussion here

One thing I'd like to add about music and sound settings: games should remember your latest settings. It's not a big waste of time but still annoying having to access menus every single time you start some games, just to reduce the music/sound volume, though the suggested in-game volume controls would make this less cumbersome.

Another point: customizable hot-keys. Nowadays a common feature but all the more annoying when it's not implemented. In particular if the hotkeys are not dependent of the keyboard, e.g. for an azerty keyboard user it's not that straightforward that "," should be the hotkey to open the map just because on a qwerty this happens to be the "m".

23: Patches should not change game settings if possible. I didn't happen to me but for some of my friends one of the L4D patches reset thier video settings, this included turning multicore support back on resulting in a well known stuttering issue. If there is a technical excuse why patches must do this, they should at the very least inform the player that this has taken place.

24: Include the ability to back up game settings in an external file. This has multiple uses. If the settings are stored in an external file the same way most savegames are, they are more likely to survive a crash. If you allow players to store custom keybinding configurations they could transfer it to new installations of the game or even to other players.

This is a bit like being able to backup your web browser bookmarks. Not all of us need to but its a useful feature to have nonetheless.

 

 

*oops forgot to edit this into the first post.*

I hate this so much. In a finite resource situation its possible for the game to become unwinnable without the player being aware of what has happened. All gameplay after that point is a big fat waste of time. Whats worse, the second time through I can actually see this happening and it aggravates me even more.

The real problem is balancing such a situation. If resources are not limited then competing for them is pointless.

That's not true. Even if resource nodes are unlimited, controlling more of them can (and usually does) result in a higher rate of accrual of said resources. Just because they don't run out doesn't mean competing is pointless, because in this case absolute value is less important (completely irrelevant, actually) than the rate. Someone getting 2 iron ore per turn will be at a disadvantage to someone else getting 15 iron ore per turn; just because neither will ever run out of iron ore to mine doesn't mean having more sources of it is irrelevant.

But then you are dividing resources into nodes and only so many nodes can fit on the same map. The resources might not be finite but the scale and setting certainly is.

I really don't see where you're going with this? First, you argued that infinite resources removes competition over resources, but now you're saying that it's not a problem? I mean, ALL games with infinite resources that I've ever played haven't just thrown them at you - they are present as nodes of some sort on the map, and you have to harvest them. It's just that they never run out, and you can mine them forever. But the rate at which you can gather resources from a given 'node' is limited, making having more better and thus meaning there is still competition for resources. It seems like you're agreeing with me but in a contrarian way..

First I would like to point out that this is a 4X game, so it would probably be a much more helpful idea to keep ideas relevant to the genre, for example how many 4X games can you name with unit limits, or checkpoints?

That said, my comments are just about games in general

To add to the argument on infinite\finite resources, I would assert that it really depends on how the designers want the game to be played, making resources infinite implicitly diminishes the value of the resources and hence the units made by them. Conversely finite resources means you are less likely to waste units because each is an investment that reduces your capacity to do other things.

Personally I have always been a fan of finite resources because it forces people to expand, and provides natural conflict points, yes you can say the latter about infinite resource nodes but when you aren't sitting on a infinite pile of resources fighting over the next point takes on a much greater sense of urgency, and hence accomplishment. That said I like the SupCom approach to infinite resources, by which i mean stock limits, making it so that it's better for you to be spending your resources than just accumulating them.


Secondly for the argument over save games, you can take away my ability to save at any point the day you give me a game that A) doesnt crash, ever, and B) has a way of making sure that save games don't corrupt. Because I have lost far, far too many hours of gameplay to those two things, sufficiently so that I always save twice, once through quicksave and once through normal procedures, even on games that Autosave. On which note I would give the suggestion that No game should be with out automatically created save backups

Maybe sort of?

I think we tied that thread of conversation into a knot, I'm not quite sure where its going.