0 AD's focus on balance has crippled its design

[chrstgtr]

15 hours ago, alre said:

we can talk for days about what the balancing team should do or should enjoy doing, but we have seen already in the past what it was capable of doing. it didn't prevent A24 "debacle" and it couldn't predict much of what would happen in A25. it was just luck deciding that A25 has been received so much better than A24. you do an other alpha with the same premises, and you are rolling the dice once again.

It wasn't luck.

A24 tried to do a lot of stuff. In hindsight, a lot of people have summed up a24's mistakes by saying something to the effect of "in a23, slingers were too strong and archers were too weak, so a24 just should've lessened the dmg of slingers and increased the dmg of archers." That obviously sounds reasonable. But rather than taking that simple approach, a24 tried to do a lot of complicated changes. Some of these changes, like pathfinding, projectile speeds, and rotation times are massive changes with effects that seep into every aspect of the game and ripple through unexpected areas. When you try to change that much all at once there are a lot of unintended and unexpected changes. It's no surprise that the full effect of all these changes wasn't appreciated during development.

In comparison, a25 was not as ambitious. It changed relatively few things and the changes that occured to the bigger things, like rotation speed, were far more modest. In short, the changes were more modest, humble and incremental. As a result, their impact was more ascertainable during development. 

There is a reason to limit these massive changes that impact everything--because it makes balancing possible. If you try to change everything all at once then you're basically making a new game with each alpha instead of adjusting an old game to keep up with current needs.

With that said, basically all of the feature changes that are being discussed here (and elsewhere) aren't of the type that would have rippling impacts.

[Stan`]

I feel like everyone forgets that A24 development was an excruciating 2 years, while A25 was only 4 months.

So of course it was bound to have more changes. So many cleanups, so many engine changes, so many new features. If it had come early 2019 it probably would have been much smaller. But the technical difficulties, combined with the team split, and the very special period made it incredibly hard to release. But we managed eventually. And then there was the outcry, a burnout, and we managed to get A25 out of the door. Hopefully A26 will stay on trac and still be interesting to play.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

I feel like everyone forgets that A24 development was an excruciating 2 years, while A25 was only 4 months.

So of course it was bound to have more changes. So many cleanups, so many engine changes, so many new features. If it had come early 2019 it probably would have been much smaller. But the technical difficulties, combined with the team split, and the very special period made it incredibly hard to release. But we managed eventually. And then there was the outcry, a burnout, and we managed to get A25 out of the door. Hopefully A26 will stay on trac and sti be interesting to play.

Indeed. A24 had more than double the changes than a more "regular" alpha, precisely because it had more than double the development period.

Imagine the outcry some of the current players would have over the changes from Alpha to Alpha in the early days. lol. Each Alpha adding a slew of new features, new bugs, random stats changes, and entirely new civs! The horror.  

[Stan`]

12 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Indeed. A24 had more than double the changes than a more "regular" alpha, precisely because it had more than double the development period.

Double that

12 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Imagine the outcry some of the current players would have over the changes from Alpha to Alpha in the early days. lol. Each Alpha adding a slew of new features, new bugs, random stats changes, and entirely new civs! The horror.  

Capturing did wreak havoc 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

38 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Capturing did wreak havoc 

Still does IMHO.

[clavz]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

entirely new civs

I think there is quite a large consensus that civs should be added.

It looks like there is some attrition between balancing advisor and devs, that probably is due to balancing advisors mostly complaining. I feel like the only tool balancing advisors have is complain on this forum ("thats why we made this forum section") and to make mods/patches ("if you want to try it, you can make a mod yourself"). Complaining is the only usable one, because mods/patches don't help much since you can't balance if you don't convince the more players as possible to play and try the new balance. While being theoretically possible, looking back at the last two alphas it never happened (there were few matches, mostly 1v1 or some the last week before release). What's more, you need to make all the svn stuff to make it work. I did it for a25 and it took a long time and around 20 giga of space and lot of network data and I needed to get rid of it to update the OS. Again, it is possible, but it is kinda complex and many people will just give up, and the number of people is important. 

So by now there are balancing advisors complaining of balance because that's the only thing they can do and devs complaining that they can do nothing without balancing advisors complaining for balance. I'm neither a dev nor a balancing advisor, but this is what I can see from outside.

I think that balancing should have some "release process" as well. If each new alpha had the new features in the engine, but set so that it does not to affect gameplay (or it does as less as possible), and changes to gameplay are in an "official" mod, then devs and balancing advisors could just try the new gameplay and include it in the next alpha. If it's just a mod and people are pushed by wildfire games it is possible that it gets popular in the competitive community, helping a constructive balancing process.

Edited December 24, 2021 by clavz

[alre]

10 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

It wasn't luck.

A24 tried to do a lot of stuff. In hindsight, a lot of people have summed up a24's mistakes by saying something to the effect of "in a23, slingers were too strong and archers were too weak, so a24 just should've lessened the dmg of slingers and increased the dmg of archers." That obviously sounds reasonable. But rather than taking that simple approach, a24 tried to do a lot of complicated changes. Some of these changes, like pathfinding, projectile speeds, and rotation times are massive changes with effects that seep into every aspect of the game and ripple through unexpected areas. When you try to change that much all at once there are a lot of unintended and unexpected changes. It's no surprise that the full effect of all these changes wasn't appreciated during development.

In comparison, a25 was not as ambitious. It changed relatively few things and the changes that occured to the bigger things, like rotation speed, were far more modest. In short, the changes were more modest, humble and incremental. As a result, their impact was more ascertainable during development. 

There is a reason to limit these massive changes that impact everything--because it makes balancing possible. If you try to change everything all at once then you're basically making a new game with each alpha instead of adjusting an old game to keep up with current needs.

With that said, basically all of the feature changes that are being discussed here (and elsewhere) aren't of the type that would have rippling impacts.

the problem with hindsight is that it always work, even when it shouldn't. you can make everything out of hindsight, depending on your own biases. Truth is, gameplay changed enourmously from A24 to A25 too, in a large variety of ways. But I agree of course that small changes are more predictable, that was kind of my point too.

[Grapjas]

1 hour ago, clavz said:

but it is kinda complex and many people will just give up, and the number of people is important. 

I agree. Getting into installing SVN, Trac and Phab, can be frustrating, intimidating and time consuming. It's quite a bump you must get over before you can actually try contributing or feeling like you're actually helping (<- of which i'm often not so sure of myself).

Edited December 24, 2021 by Grapjas

[clavz]

I mean, I can do it. But it’s gonna be hard to convince most lobby players. There is a big difference between what is possible and what is going to happen. Instead of fighting this inertia, I think it would be wiser to accept it, let svn to developers and make balancing easier for players

Edited December 24, 2021 by clavz

[smiley]

Before Alpha 23, there was weeks of testing over multiplayer with some of the best players of the time along with devs. There were 8 players who patched the game in between matches, so its entirely reasonable to assume that continuous play testing is very possible. Before Alpha 22, when Kushite was added, the same was also true for reference. I assume its still a thing because most of the same players still post on this forum and I assume they are around on the lobby too. Although, a dev who was also an active member of the multiplayer community isn't there now. He was the one who organized the svn matches at the time.

There are no gameplay developers on the team. There are a bunch of programmers who quite frankly don't have to tweak attack stats. Maybe, that's the solution here. Get someone whose task is to actually conceive new gameplay elements and tweak those stats. I am fairly certain that role has been vacated fairly recently relative to the project's lifetime. The same person should also optimally be an active player online who can organize svn matches by typing in the chat "svn teamgame in 10".

[LetswaveaBook]

3 hours ago, clavz said:

I think there is quite a large consensus that civs should be added.

I disagree here.

3 hours ago, clavz said:

mods/patches don't help much since you can't balance if you don't convince the more players as possible to play and try the new balance. While being theoretically possible, looking back at the last two alphas it never happened (there were few matches, mostly 1v1 or some the last week before release). What's more, you need to make all the svn stuff to make it work.

Hoplite tradition was not tested a lot and it was added to the game, so I think this point is not true either.

 

2 hours ago, clavz said:

let svn to developers and make balancing easier for players

You can just put a post on the gameplay forum and see if you get support. For example, I suggested affordable kushite pyramids in p1, and vali made a patch for that. If you do a good suggestion, then you can find people(like me) that can be convinced to make a patch. So it is not so difficult.

What the balancing team lacks, is mainly one thing: Action.

1 hour ago, smiley said:

Before Alpha 23, there was weeks of testing over multiplayer with some of the best players of the time along with devs.

There was also some testing for A25. My personal experience was that without autocivs hotkeys, it was difficult to judge.

[clavz]

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

I disagree here.

frankly this is the first comment against inclusion of new civs that I see.

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

so I think this point is not true either

I agree that testing is possible and sometimes happens, even as things are now. I believe, but maybe I'm alone, that few testers can't be as good as many testers. For example, what I see is that most of the ones that tested a24 were rushers, that mean that inside that bubble the game was probably fine. When the game was then tried by the community, turtling and archer spam were discovered in a week after the release.

3 hours ago, smiley said:

here were 8 players who patched the game in between matches, so its entirely reasonable to assume that continuous play testing is very possible.

Well this is easier. It was done even recently (I think for a24) but the last week before release. Still it looks strange to me, but I'm not a dev, that creating new installers and ask everyone to download is easier to make a "gameplay mod" as the one they were referring to in this post.

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

You can just put a post on the gameplay forum and see if you get support. For example, I suggested affordable kushite pyramids in p1, and vali made a patch for that. If you do a good suggestion, then you can find people(like me) that can be convinced to make a patch. So it is not so difficult.

Again, it is not a problem of me not being able to install svn. It costs too much effort to the average "competitive" player in the lobby. If the effort is similar to the one needed to install autociv, maybe more people will do it.

The point is, sure balancing can be done this way. But if it's easier, more people will help and test. The more they are, the better it would be.

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

What the balancing team lacks, is mainly one thing: Action.

What do you mean?

 

 

[LetswaveaBook]

8 minutes ago, clavz said:

The point is, sure balancing can be done this way. But if it's easier, more people will help and test. The more they are, the better it would be.

 

9 minutes ago, clavz said:

What do you mean?

We are lacking a crucial step: namely that not a lot balance patches haven't been made. We may have a bunch of competitive players, but it does not result in balance patches. Lack of opinions is not the problem, it is just that people don't translate that opinion in something that can be added and tested.

I think all balance advisors would probably need to think how can I have an active role in balancing, instead of just waiting for something to happen. Balance advisors that are just sitting back are not contributing anything. Unfortunately, we have to much balance advisors that are not contributing anything. You can have an opinion and knowledge about the game which is all fine, but you need to think about how to turn that into a result.

 

Currently the balancing team is not providing a lot of results in the form of patches.

[smiley]

34 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

Currently the balancing team is not providing a lot of results in the form of patches.

This is partially because balancing changes usually die on phabricator if it's not already accepted here. However, most balancing changes proposed here or as patches are subjective opinions. If you provide objective values with the changes, the likelihood of it being committed goes up exponentially.

Rather than saying slinger attack rate is too high, maybe provide a chart of DPS or something so it's obvious that slingers attack rate is indeed too high. If I was committing stuff, the latter would give me a whole lot more confidence to actually make the change. If something is supposedly overpowered, there would be numbers to quantify that. It's a whole lot more work, but we only need so much advisers, we need more contributors.

For the more savvy, run nonvisual Petra tests on the same seed and match up civs maybe. Or hell, integrate such tests on CI too if they offer meaningful insights.

As is, forum balance proposals are not doing anyone much good as they don't go anywhere far.

Edited December 24, 2021 by smiley

[LetswaveaBook]

8 minutes ago, smiley said:

However, most balancing changes proposed here or as patches are subjective opinions. If you provide objective values with the changes, the likelihood of it being committed goes up exponentially.

I think that is indeed part of the problem.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, clavz said:

frankly this is the first comment against inclusion of new civs that I see.

Honestly, I've seen a lot of (well-meaning, but ignorant) comments like:

They shouldn't spend time on new civs, they should spend time fixing lag (or insert the commenter's pet peeve)! Ignorant in a sense that generally the people who work on civs aren't the ones who are going to fix lag or networking issues. I think there are a minority of multiplayer players who would prefer fewer civs for balance-sake. Single player players, in general, and I think a plurality or majority of multiplayer players appreciate greater content, which may often include new civs. I'm using a lot of weasel words because hard data is difficult to come by. And even if a player doesn't want new civs, there's no rule telling them they have to play those civs or even allow them in their multiplayer matches. 

[Yekaterina]

49 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Honestly, I've seen a lot of (well-meaning, but ignorant) comments like:

They shouldn't spend time on new civs, they should spend time fixing lag (or insert the commenter's pet peeve)! Ignorant in a sense that generally the people who work on civs aren't the ones who are going to fix lag or networking issues. I think there are a minority of multiplayer players who would prefer fewer civs for balance-sake. Single player players, in general, and I think a plurality or majority of multiplayer players appreciate greater content, which may often include new civs. I'm using a lot of weasel words because hard data is difficult to come by. And even if a player doesn't want new civs, there's no rule telling them they have to play those civs or even allow them in their multiplayer matches. 

We need the random/group civ options from delenda EST, so that we can ban certain civs with going for random. For example, random except Iberian. 

Or random greek civ

[Freagarach]

11 hours ago, clavz said:

Still it looks strange to me, but I'm not a dev, that creating new installers and ask everyone to download is easier to make a "gameplay mod" as the one they were referring to in this post.

One does have to keep in mind that the pathfinding changes done in the previous alpha ("unit pushing") can't and thus would not be integrated in such a mod (since it meant engine changes). So by the end of the day, all the work making and testing such a mod would be a compleat waste.

[LetswaveaBook]

5 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

They shouldn't spend time on new civs, they should spend time fixing lag (or insert the commenter's pet peeve)! Ignorant in a sense that generally the people who work on civs aren't the ones who are going to fix lag or networking issues.

It is true that some people use this as an argument, but personally I would like to use another.

I really like the theme of the factions that we currently have. We have a game whose earliest factions represent the era of the summit of the Achaemenid empire, then there are the Macedonians who bring it to its knees and their successor states and finally the era is ended by the rise of the Roman repulbic (Britons seem to be an odd outlier here). It seems a valid question to me why Han Chinese or Zapotecs need to fit into that game. Maybe I am ignorant on this: Epirotes and Thebans fit in the same time-frame and geographic location, but their feats only seem minor compared to those of other factions. However nobody can deny that @wowgetoffyourcellphone put great effort in delenda est.

So do I think the game gets better when these factions are added? It does not add to the story that the other factions share. Do I think 0ad gets worse when these factions are added? Extra factions provide more options so it does not make it worse, but if you add 20 unrelated factions 0ad starts to lose its theme.

 

Finally, it seems bold to claim that Person X should work on this or that. The volunteers are free to work on whatever they like. We should regard those people as skilled volunteers, not as developers that are obliged to deliver a product.

[seeh]

9 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

We need the random/group civ options from delenda EST, so that we can ban certain civs with going for random. For example, random except Iberian. 

Or random greek civ

what about this?

    "url": "https://github.com/hopeless-ponderer/random_civ_groups_0ad ",
    "description": "Allows you to select civs randomly from a group instead of from all civs.",

 

Edited December 25, 2021 by seeh

[LetswaveaBook]

9 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

We need the random/group civ options from delenda EST, so that we can ban certain civs with going for random. For example, random except Iberian. 

Or random greek civ

Now I am wondering.

If I make a mod and use the autociv trick for making mod users compatible with non mod users. Then I could host a game and my mod could allow such a random civ grouping, while not all participants in the game room have that mod. Would that give the intended result of drawing a random civ out of a group?

[Stan`]

44 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

If I make a mod and use the autociv trick for making mod users compatible with non mod users.

No need for tricks. You can add a flag in the mod.json to remove the check.

45 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

Would that give the intended result of drawing a random civ out of a group?

In theory civs are picked before loading so it *might* work.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, seeh said:

what about this?

    "url": "https://github.com/hopeless-ponderer/random_civ_groups_0ad ",
    "description": "Allows you to select civs randomly from a group instead of from all civs.",

 

Exact same code.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:

Finally, it seems bold to claim that Person X should work on this or that. The volunteers are free to work on whatever they like. We should regard those people as skilled volunteers, not as developers that are obliged to deliver a product.

Indeed! If volunteer developers enjoy building new civs instead of doing other things, more power to them!

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:

theme

Mauryas ended who? Kushites what? Spartans are largely a backwater, insular city state, but they're included because they are famous and fun and add diversity. Mauryas included because they are awesome and add diversity, but had zero contact with Rome. Kushites had a few minor border wars with Rome, but are included to add fun and diversity to the civ roster. Han could be included because "If the Chinese and Romans ever fought, who would win?!?!" is a super common what-if scenario people talk about. Plus they add diversity to the roster and the opportunity for new gameplay.