Why units are produced so fast?

[ChronA]

On 26/07/2022 at 1:13 PM, Frederick_1 said:

"less easy to replace lost troops" will make it even more difficult to revitalize after an lost battle. I would guess that this will make a game to tip over even faster, because a one time defeated player has even harder to compensate his losses. An early victory can decide a game even more.

True, but a savvy balance designer could counteract this tendency by increasing friction of war (https://www.army.mil/article/185864/fog_friction_and_logistics). The best examples I've found of this being done successfully in the RTS space are in Starcraft Brood War and in Supreme Commander (and other TA-a-likes).

In both of these games the normal re-max time is 2-3 times longer than the typical main base to main base rush distance. That would normally mean that whoever gains a decisive local advantage, namely by one-sidedly destroying the enemy's army, ought to snowball very quickly into a total victory. Just walk your surviving army and reinforcements over to the enemy base and win every subsequent engagement by virtue of Lanchester's square law.
 

The reason this doesn't work in the above games (compared to some other games of note) is that fighting a series of (even individually advantageous) battles disconnect from resupply infrastructure exposes the player to an exponentially compounding risk of cascading homeostasis failures.  The reasons for that are specific to each game, although there are some common factors: namely imperfect pathfinding and unit level target acquisition, strong counters, glass cannon units, strong static defense, and a heavy dependence on exhaustible meat shield units for composition effectiveness.

For Brood War, add also the stringent limits on unit selection and control making perfect micro impossible, economic micromanagement demands, and the indispensability of vulnerable and exhaustible spell casters (i.e. High Templars, Arbiters, Defilers, and Science Vessels). For Sup Com there's the slow movement speed of units (and projectiles) compared to typical engagement distance making it hard to extract units from danger once they fall into it, and the asymmetric ability of the defender to salvage resources from battlefields.
 

The end result in both games is that any blitzkrieg-style, decisive attack will almost always get bogged down and picked apart before it can cause game ending damage. Consequently the normal path to victory becomes a sustained campaign of incremental pushes, flanking maneuvers, and raids, rather than one big game ending battle. 

Could 0 AD do something like this. Maybe.
Static defense could be buffed. Heroes and other support-or attack-role aura sources could be more effective. The role-differentiation and indispensability of melee infantry infantry as tanks, and cavalry as assassins could be boosted. Defensive building auras could play a bigger role. Time to kill could be lowered. Etc.

The trick would be balancing it against the rest of the game design. Raids need something valuable (but not indespensible) to raid in order to prevent the game turning into a lane pushing tug of war. Game feel needs to be preserved. It could be a very big project.

Edited July 29, 2022 by ChronA

[alre]

33 minutes ago, ChronA said:

Could 0 AD do something like this.

it can and it did. in A24 it was quite important to maintain constant stream of reinforcements. granted, this was mostly true in bigger maps, but I appreciated that aspect of the game.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 26/07/2022 at 1:13 PM, Frederick_1 said:

"less easy to replace lost troops" will make it even more difficult to revitalize after an lost battle. I would guess that this will make a game to tip over even faster, because a one time defeated player has even harder to compensate his losses. An early victory can decide a game even more.

Well, such a hypothetical change in the pace of the game would come with other changes that would extend the build-up phase.

[ChronA]

On 29/07/2022 at 8:11 AM, alre said:

in A24 it was quite important to maintain constant stream of reinforcements. granted, this was mostly true in bigger maps, but I appreciated that aspect of the game.

That's not quite the same thing as friction of war; actually it's kind of the opposite. Although it is definitely a good thing to incentivize streaming reinforcements, and the covert implication that this might no longer be the case is worrisome.

Friction is basically the idea that the deeper into enemy territory you get, the less effective your military assets become. When this is the case you don't actually want to follow up your attack with a stream of reinforcements to push deeper into enemy territory. You actually want to pull the attack group back and link up with the reinforcements in the previous no-man's-land so together they can consolidate the gains by either fortifying the newly claimed territory or attacking on a newly exposed flank.

To really appreciate the distinction, look at the difference in tactics between Starcraft Brood War (a high friction game) and Starcraft 2 (a much lower friction game). SC2 features a lot more all-in deathball-style battles and decapitation base trades.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 minutes ago, ChronA said:

the covert implication that this might no longer be the case is worrisome.

Specify

[ChronA]

On 30/07/2022 at 10:07 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Specify

I just meant that alre's comment that (to paraphrase) "back in alpha 24 it was important to stream reinforcements" would seem to imply that in alpha 25 (and maybe the in development alpha 26) it is no longer vital to stream reinforcements like it used to be.

I haven't kept up with the evolving 0 AD meta during alpha 25 unfortunately--haven't had the time--so I too was kind of hoping they would elaborate. Do they mean that the technique was more popular back then, or that some of the more prominent players made very good use of the technique at the time, or that alre personally has just not played that way a lot or maybe played many matches in general since a24? Certainly nothing about the game appears to have changed that would alter the foundations of gameplay so profoundly! The idea that continuous reinforcement is suddenly no longer required to sustain a push or was a special property of a specific alpha is very odd, I agree.

[alre]

the game changed a lot from A24, battles are a lot quicker now. where it was once important to stream reinforcements towards a current push, now it's more usual to just retreat when out of juice and regroup/pause to do eco/fortify. the game is different now and micro has changed too.