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Elemental – polishing for Alpha 0

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Elemental – polishing for Alpha 0

from JoeUser Forums

image So much going on this week and at the same time, so little. A lot of vacations here at Stardock pop up in June since this is one of the prime months here in terms of weather. 

On a sad note, Trent (Mittens) had his last day today. He’s off to Salt Lake City to take a position as a designer at a new game studio.  We’ll miss him.  Combined with the people on vacation, the studio area feels like a ghost town.

My executive planner and marketing manager gave me a “CEO make over” today with a bunch of new clothes. I guess trade show shirts and ratty shorts just aren’t good enough anymore.

Right now, we’re looking at dozens of issues that need to be addressed before we can even do the alpha build of the game.  Everything from the fonts looking crummy to setting priority on what should be on the setup.

For instance, if someone wants to create a custom civilization and in there choose “good” or “evil” that’s fine. But I’m having them get rid of being able to have pre-existing factions be good or evil because it would literally double the writing involved for each faction’s back story.  While that’s interesting to have, I would rather have more depth per faction rather than half the depth but a mirror universe version of each one.

The screen you see here will likely be significantly altered between now and release. But this gives you an idea of how iterative the process is.  I’ll probably eliminate the appearance area and put that into the custom race area. Right now, “design your race” is the only option. There isn’t a formal “choose your faction” area.  Elemental comes with 2 built in races and 12 factions but we plan to let people create their own races and factions as well, but that should be a separate area that is a lot richer. If you try to mash too much stuff together, it’s confusing to new players but still too weak for experienced users.

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Reply #176 from Elemental Forums Top

My reputation is in shards, I'll never recover from this terrible slander.

This is the Internet.

You could rape a dog, and they'll have forgot it by tuesday.

Reply #177 from Elemental Forums Top

Being the internet, I could provide video evidence and the claim still wouldn't be taken as serious.  Thus the incident to forget would be someone bullshitting, I'd hope something everyone is assuming occurs with regularity.

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #178 from Elemental Forums Top

Especially if the perpretator posted the video himself. Then everybody will assume it's just a publicity stunt for self-promotion.

Reply #179 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting psychoak, reply 18
This is why auto-resolve is gay.

In a game with tactical combat, people whine about how auto-resolve will suck.  To make it not suck, you make it complicated.  Then the people, that don't want tactical combat to begin, with complain about how it's too complicated to use the auto resolve.  Then you make it simple by taking all the complicated stuff out, and they bitch about how it uses a spell, or doesn't use a spell, or loses too many troops.  Basically, everyone whines regardless and you can't win.

Meanwhile, someone else makes a game with no tactical combat that does horribly gay shit, like killing high level units off at 99% odds, and everything is right with the world.

Think about it.
Dude. Your conclusion is basicly "people bitch".
Well no shit.

:p

It's still true, however. If you add tactical combat, people that don't like it will complain. If you add auto-resolve on top of that, it will invariably suck in comparison, forcing the usage of tactical combat regardless. Make it horribly convoluted and you're actually just digging a deeper pit to be heckled in. Remove tactical combat and those who dislike it will be happy, because the issue of auto-resolve as the lesser option is moot as everything settles into a unison equilibrium.

Quoting pigeonpigeon, reply 23
[...]
All he's saying is this. You put in Tactical Combat - people complain about not liking tactical combat. So you add auto-resolve. Then people complain about auto-resolve sucking - it overvalues/devalues units and doesn't use spells intelligently. So they make auto-resolve more complicated and give you some indirect control over it via scripting or constraints - then they say it's too complicated, it takes too much time and they don't want to spend time on battles.
[...]
I don't like the turn this is taking. "Scripted Combat" (using Dominions 3 as the example) is not a natural progression of the discussion, as in "make auto-resolve more complicated [...] via scripting or constraints". It's a completely different system that should be judged in it's own right, independant from Tactical Combat vs. Auto-Resolve.

While it is an intermingling of both, it's merits to those that enjoy it are greater than the sum of it's two parts. It's not a compromise between two systems - it's it's own system that pulls on the merits of the two other ones. A third positionist approach, if you will.

Reply #180 from Elemental Forums Top

It's still true, however. If you add tactical combat, people that don't like it will complain. If you add auto-resolve on top of that, it will invariably suck in comparison, forcing the usage of tactical combat regardless. Make it horribly convoluted and you're actually just digging a deeper pit to be heckled in. Remove tactical combat and those who dislike it will be happy, because the issue of auto-resolve as the lesser option is moot as everything settles into a unison equilibrium.

 

Thanks, ckessel can probably figure it out with such a clearly displayed example to work with.

 

I don't like the turn this is taking. "Scripted Combat" (using Dominions 3 as the example) is not a natural progression of the discussion, as in "make auto-resolve more complicated [...] via scripting or constraints". It's a completely different system that should be judged in it's own right, independant from Tactical Combat vs. Auto-Resolve.

 

That has indeed been the natural progression of this thread.  Automated resolve.  If you do not have reactive powers during combat, it is automated.  A more complicated form of auto-resolve is still auto-resolve.

 

I consider the Dominions 3 system to be an excellent substitution for a one button click implementation of auto-resolve.  Something so simple would never be used by me on account of stupid ai decisions, like blowing all of my mana to make a pointless kill, or killing my best units by turning them into hamburger instead of using my grunts to brunt an attack.  I doubt I'd use the auto-resolve anyway, but then I like tactical combat.  You don't, and wont be happy no matter how easy or how well it works.

Reply #181 from Elemental Forums Top

Meanwhile, someone else makes a game with no tactical combat that does horribly gay shit, like killing high level units off at 99% odds, and everything is right with the world.

While poorly phrased, I think that's one of the reasons I like tactical combat as well.  Not only does it make it very unlikely for that situation to happen (I've seen it happen in Civ4, and I'm always ticked) but a human player can 'see' it coming and go 'I'm getting out of here!'

 

Retreat:  FTW!

 

Reply #182 from Elemental Forums Top

While poorly phrased, I think that's one of the reasons I like tactical combat as well. Not only does it make it very unlikely for that situation to happen (I've seen it happen in Civ4, and I'm always ticked) but a human player can 'see' it coming and go 'I'm getting out of here!'

Civ4's probability calculator was poorly written, by the way (and not always reflecting the truth). You shouldn't criticise these auto-resolve based on it.

(bloody hell. I'm trying to find the TvTrope article that mentionned this. It's in the sub-section of "the Computer is a cheating bastard". I'll get back on you about it)

Edit: Found it

  • What you're seeing here is a bug in the game due to a programmer who doesn't understand probability theory. The displayed battle odds are calculated by the naive method of multiplying each unit's hitpoints by the odds of winning a single round of combat, and using that ratio as the odds of winning the battle. The actual odds of winning, based on the battle mechanics, are much harder to calculate, and can deviate significantly from the displayed odds: your "95% victory" fight might actually be a "0.1% victory". Once you do them right, though, it becomes clear that the computer isn't cheating in battle, just lying through statistics.
  • For context, units fight multiple rounds within a single combat until one dies. Thus winning one round in actuality only reduces the opponent by a certain amount of HP. So while a unit with low life may have a 50% chance of winning a round, if they can be killed with one hit, the first hit they take in combat (pretty likely at 50%) will kill them.
  • Reply #183 from Elemental Forums Top

    Civ4's probability calculator was poorly written, by the way (and not always reflecting the truth).
    Do you mean the actual battle calc? What annoys me is when I smash through dozens of units over and over again (In any game like this), and then one of those dozens gets a lucky hit in for massive damage. Had it happen in GalCiv2 where a standard stack I had killed dozens of times attacked, the enemy ships consistently dealing 0 damage, and then one of them randomly does 50 damage, one-shotting one of my ships.

     

    :fox:

    Reply #184 from Elemental Forums Top

    No, the actual battle calc was working correctly, in theory. What he meant was the tooltip that showed you before combat what your odds were. In some cases it was completely out of sync with what your odds *actually* were, which makes it worse then useless.

    That was actually possible in GC2, if the fight happened to go such that the ships rolled high and burned your ships defenses. 0 means they didn't do damage, but the defenses had a limit before being ovewhelmed (either turn or combat, I forget which). After that anything hitting it could do full damage.

    That's how I beat an otherwise vastly superior Arnorian Ranger that the enemies got. It blew the hell out of my big ships, but a fleet of mediums managed to overwhelm its shields and then tore a hole in it before they all died.

    Reply #185 from Elemental Forums Top

    Do you mean the actual battle calc? What annoys me is when I smash through dozens of units over and over again (In any game like this), and then one of those dozens gets a lucky hit in for massive damage. Had it happen in GalCiv2 where a standard stack I had killed dozens of times attacked, the enemy ships consistently dealing 0 damage, and then one of them randomly does 50 damage, one-shotting one of my ships.

    Yep, that's a inherent problem in the 1-roll, winner takes all type of combats. While overall the odds are the same, the variance is much higher in that kind of system. A better system is a multi-roll simulation where it takes multiple battle rounds to resolve a battle and one side comes away damanged.

    Most games, including GalCiv2 and Civ4, have gone the multi-roll route actually. How far they've gone I don't know, but in both you rarely escape a battle as the victor without some damage or potential for damage. Still, as long as dice are being rolled, you can get oddities in the distribution. Having played enough poker, god knows I've seen quite a few 1000-1 things happen (well, 1/23*1/45).

    With the massive armies Brad has mentioned I think the variance problem may be reduced somewhat. If you've got 1000 vs 1000 infantry being modelled and you're really rolling 1000 times, plus doing it over a few rounds of battle, then the odds of a freak event happening go way down. Civ4, GalCiv, all of those tend to have very few units at any given time, so even if you do multiple battle rounds you're talking maybe a dozen rolls, not thousands.