Strategic Uncertainty - Keeping Strategy Games Fresh - Extra Credits
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- Опубліковано 17 січ 2017
- Too many strategy games are over hours before you actually win the game. Once you build up enough of a lead, you have the resources you need to respond to all the game's minor challenges. The key to fixing this problem is uncertainty: hidden information or unexpected events that make you change your plans and keep the game dynamic.
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"Sir they are attacking with fishing boats!"
"weird, let me take a look"
*sees admiral Yi*
"RUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNN!!"
+
Connor C lol I agree
Iösee that you watch Extra History :)
long live united korea lol love yi
Never mess with yi sun shin.
"Attack them with the fishing boats"
I laughed so hard.
Ionlymadethistoleavecoments The fishing boats of war
*what*
actually, this kind of happened in real history, and was successful - see extra history series about Admiral Yi^^
I was playing Crusader Kings II as a Germanic Pagan in Britain. I formed the British Empire, reformed the Germanic religion and held land from Iceland to Moscow. I thought I had it all when I got an event. The Pope has called a Crusade for France. The remaining Christian nations threw all they had at me, and I barely scraped a victory together. My empire took years to recover. This is that uncertainty that more strategy games need, an unexpected kick to rethink your strategies.
Shawn Mattox but you did win, didnt you? And thats the problem, you never lose at those moments! A lot of grand strategy games will mever let you lose, since theyre afraid you will never play again....
@@detachsoup6061 A-The avoidance to have players loose everything has more to do with the length of the game play than anything else (apply the design idea to a game who's playtime isn't measured in days and the design considerations change)
B-You can "loose" crusader kings and other grand strategy games
C-Those games are often more about a sliding scale of success than a win/loose binary.
D-Taking lessons from those fuzzy victory states to apply to AI (having them band together to stop runnaway victories and weigh when to stop from chasing the top win spot to switch to goals that could be achieved) could help heighten the intensity, push back the point when you know you've won, and then shorten the winding down period after the game has reached its climax.
E-In general, having the gameplay become increasingly asymmetric as one player pulls ahead is a great way to keep things interesting longer as the strategizing for all players is constantly changing based on how well they are relatively doing.
Get an increasingly large empire? Deal with more internal strife.
Get increasingly ahead technologically?
Increase the research rates of all civilizations that have contact with you and increase how much they have to gain by going after you.
Etc etc.
@@detachsoup6061 You must have never played a Paradox grand strategy if you think they won't let you lose.
@@detachsoup6061 You clearly haven't played crusader kings 2 then. That game is fucking brutal.
@@detachsoup6061 well, despite using all my gold and prestige buying mercenaries and troops, and even using cheats to get money for extra mercenaries, I still got absolutely crushed by the Mongol Empire.
5:10 so that's why people love Nuclear Ghandi so much?
It sends fear into any Civilization player's heart when you see the words "Gandhi has reached the Atomic era"
Gandhi's actually pretty easy to suppress just because you know exactly what he's going to do. If you see Gandhi, you go to war with him early and either take him out or do so much damage to his economy that he can't recover. In the most recent incarnation of the game, I have found Gilgamesh to be much more unpredictable than Gandhi. He pretty much always either goes for science or domination but you never know which one he's going to pick and the period where he has the greatest military advantage is early game, requiring you to devote resources preparing for a military attack that may or may not happen during the point in the game where you are the weakest. I don't think this really comes out until you play on higher difficulties but, due to the way Civ balanced difficulty (By giving the AI huge bonuses in the early game on the highest settings), I think early game threats like Gilgamesh tend to be way more nerve wracking than late game threats like Gandhi.
Honestly, yeah, I think that's why that little mistake worked so well. It's a late game shift that affects everyone, even the most overpowered player, if they aren't on Ghandi's good side.
Is that... Cutts the Butcher? Also, I've only just got the joke in his name...
Aben Zin, yup, most people think it's nestor. You're actually the first to get it right first time.
This is why i love Pardox games, It's filled with uncertainty. From the beginning to the end game there's always a chance for you to fail or succeed at the most unexpected times.
"comet sighted" "swords mightier than the pen" "nobles are worried" "France declares war".
The economy, fools!
Stellaris mid-game?
Paradox is great but I think that the only game with real mechanical uncertainty is CK2. In every other Pdx game you may become a great empire, but only in CK2 your empire could crumble with an unlucky ruler.
For example: as Byzantium I managed to restore the Roman empire, conquering almost all the map, but at a certain point my ruler was an Empress and she died of childbirth leaving two twin sisters: during the long regency his sister declared independence splitting the empire in two, then the two twin sisters started to fight for power.
By contrast Stellaris endgame is just a sequence of war where you are absolutely overpowered
I wish I lived in more enlightened times...
Sergio Longoni But that's the point of the game right? Building a dynasty with capable rulers that lasts throughout the ages. It's never meant to be a world conquest simulator, It's a "who can build the strongest dynasty" simulator. That's how kingdoms worked under feudalism.
"Sir, enemy forces advancing on the coast!"
"Composition?"
"About 300 Fishing boats sir!"
"....."
"Send in, like, 1 frigate or something. I am pretty sure that is just cannon fodder scouting..."
i mean you don't know what they mean by fishing boat it could be regular fishing boat or they could be hunting whales with massive harpoon cannons
True. True. That's why we're sending out the frigate, as opposed to a Galleon.
Sir! The frigate is lost! There were marines on the fishing boats!
-"We've been had! Those are not fisher of fish, sir! They're fisher of men!"
-"What do you mean?"
-"They're sending us Christs! Three hundred boats, each with their own Jesus Christ aboard!"
-"You don't mean..."
-"They're aiming for the Religious Victory condition!!!"
-"RUN! We're no match for such a fleet!"
"We have but one choice left sergeant... Bring the Ghandi."
Stellaris's endgame events are precisely to eliminate that "I've already won" feeling. They're the strategy equivalent of a Boss Battle - a final test using everything you've accrued. That might be why strategy devolves into puzzles; there's no final test or challenge at the end because everything is just incremental victories that landslide.
Actually, I used to *love* this stage of the game in singleplayer: The battlefield turns into a sandbox and you can experiment with the units. Warcraft 3 and Red Alert 2 _really_ rewarded this, with Red Alert 2 actually allowing you to create entirely unique units sometimes.
Dan's sarcastic "oh no I will have to give up 2 food" voice was priceless!
Paradox interact players where you at
I got my thrifty ambitious king in charge now. Ha! You shall perish before my economic... cancer?
At least I got his brother to be quite a good general, now my thousands of soldiers will... great pox
Guess i'm staying with the one-handed babbling buffoon then... ok
I do think that both in ck2, and in eu4 you always past a point around 200 years after start where u have snowballed so far nothing can stop you, defensive pacts did solve some of that in ck2, after the rework, and coaliton can still be a problem in eu4, specially in europe late game. On the other hand you can work around that pretty easily. The best thing they have done for this is in stellaris, where the late game crisis events can be a real problem if you have not prepared
Not a very good one at the two games I play (EU4 and Stellaris) but here!
I am also here, winning half the galaxy, only to suddenly find myself fighting (hordes of intergalactic locusts/invaders from another dimension/the robot uprising). The late game crisis of stellaris sidestep unpredictability by always happening at SOME point in late game, but maintain uncertainty by not letting you know exactly when they'll happen.
Paradox employee here, does that count?
One difficulty for the 'going through the motions' stage - once you've become strong enough to win, is that there is a great amount of satisfaction to be had reveling in that moment. The moment you aspired for. You want to see your forces, your city, your base, whatever it may be, repel any attack withstand the possible uncertainties and prove that you were successful in all your preparations. You want to see your upgraded units succeed in their assault with minimal casualties. The problem however comes in determining how much time the player needs at this to be satisfied and not become bored with their current 'godliness'. Sure, some players thrive on fierce competition and level playing fields, the risk of everything going wrong with the slightest lapse of concentration. Other players like to wait for obvious superiority before engaging in conflict, so it's a very hard line to draw in determining that 'winning-line'.
I am reminded of times in the past (for instance Age of Kings) when enemy opponents have simply resigned before I've even managed to unleash the army I've been building to assault them. After all the preparations are made, and ready to unravel, the AI just decided to anticlimactically resign.
Yet on the other hand, games where you must scour the map looking for the one lost or hidden remaining unit or building to destroy become highly tedious and more like a frustrating puzzle in a point and click adventure game.
In Civ, they should add Guerrilla and Counter guerrilla abilities by adding a "supply train," forcing a player to recreate the Vietnam war sometimes.
Here's an idea. What if each civilization has a desperation ability that kicks in whenever an opponent gets too far ahead of them in any particular score (military, science, etc.)? This would give those falling behind a way to potentially catch up, and force the players who are winning to plan around the fact that their opponents will eventually get a boost that could make them a greater threat at some point? The desperation ability would stop working after some time (not sure how long), and it would have a penalty attached once it wears off, because they aren't getting this bonus for nothing, they're essentially scrambling to catch up, working themselves harder, using whatever they have on hand, or making rash decisions to catch up as fast as possible. I think this would make for some interesting end game situations for the player to work around, and possibly an unpredictable one, but at the same time, if the player keeps track of their opponent's desperation abilities, they'll be able to plan around them, and deal with them strategically. I don't know if this would really work, or what it would take to implement such a system, but I'd really like to hear any ideas people have on this subject. Hopefully this will at least get some ideas going that could help deal with the predictable end game problem.
They kinda have that now with dark ages in rise and fall but it's somewhat abusable
That could work really well with WWII strategy games. For example, if your playing as Japan, when the Allies start closing in the nose of steel around your neck, you could get access to Kamikaze weapons and civilian militias armed with whatever they can find.
But plumbuses ARE pivotal!
NerdSync Q
Lel
"We've won, we know we've won, it's just going to take 4 hours of slogging before the PC realises we've won."
Perfect description of World War 2 after 1942.
Also a perfect description of World War 1 after August 1918.
dernwine Sir, you have made my day.
Sometimes, you need to break from reality for the sake of an enjoyable game.
OK but if the game ended immediately once victory was assured, you'd skip the all important 'crushing your enemy and hearing the lamentations of their women' part of the game. Also you could get cocky and make a mistake that loses you the win.
They never said the game should end immediately once victory was assured, they said that part of the experience could be made more interesting.
So... Build your army. Once it's built, you win! Defense from your opponent? Nah...
The thing Starcraft 2 does is the enemy AI puts forward a plea for surrender, which the player can either accept or, y'know, ignore as they playfully slaughter the remaining enemy forces. Always nice to have the choice.
+Malcom Chase mm yeah I was thinking about it from a purely systems-focused point of view because I've never played Civ myself. Personally, I don't really think I'd be into that "crushing the weak" sort of experience and it didn't really even occur to me that some might want to design for it tbh. Maybe the EC crew is just in the same boat there.
Min Lungelow I've done that in hearth stone. I had so many minions on the feild and my health high while they had 3 so I put all my cards out of the feild just for fun and screwed around basically, suddenly, jaraxxus comes and a few turns later I'm dead. don't get cocky kids
"Who's ready to talk game design?"
YEEE
Not me.
This is why EU4 gets referred to as a map painting simulator by experienced players
Yeah, the best part is durring 1550-1700
You have really big armies and you can have some challenging battles against the majors, but after that it gets borring. EU4 in single player is only worth it, if you are hunting those achievments.
nah
and by the new players quote
"how am im at war with the whole world"
7 years later this still holds up
Part of the reason I love Stellaris so much: You are the most powerful expanding civilization in the known galaxy/a founding member of the biggest federation of various intelligent species. NOTHING can stop you now!
- Uhm... my emperor? We're getting some strange messages from that xenophobic fallen empire...
- It's okay, fallen empires don't expand and we've almost gathered enough forces to conquer even their enormous fleet. Soon, their ring-worlds will be ours!
- That's the thing my lord... They woke up. And yeeeah, their fleet is now kinda sorta twice as strong now. And growing.
And then you're frantically scrambling your allies and existing ships to either fight an enemy thousands of years more ancient and advanced than you... or be utterly defeated and forced to become their thrall. Not a perfect way to solve late-game tedium sure, but certainly one of the best and most fun I've seen. Emergent story ftw.
Yeah I agree but I lots of my games do still devolve into me just working my way through the tech tree as a wait for the end game crysis i do play tall lots so that might affect stuff
End game in strategy games, there can be fun for the winning player in the feeling of power. And there can be fun for the losing player in doing anything that's possible to still force the other to react.
Paradox seems to have mastered this balance to a higher level than that of most studios. You should do a case by case analysis of their designs' evolution someday. It would be a pretty popular series, of that you can be sure.
Its clear they didnt
F
Too many strategy games are over hours before you actually win the game. How do we fix that?
PLUS! Vote for Extra Credits in the Shorty Awards: shortyawards.com/category/9th/gaming
hey
welcome back i for am extrmely happy you're back :D
Time to switch to hard mode?
Or switch to a Paradox GSG.
Make the game more dynamic, improve ai, and add endgame threats, like the unbidden or ai rebellion in stellaris.
1:53
I don't know why but watching the player react in disbelief at a fishing boats act made me laugh like there was no tomorrow.
For those looking for the perfect profile picture: 2:25
Arlo Mates Lol! I thought you meant 2:24 at first
Finally I can stop bingeing on old episodes!!!! Woooohooo!!!!
When autocorrect changes "bingeing" to "binding".
Kevin O'Neal oh shit tru (Fixed)
I was thinking the same lol
Welcome back. I missed this.
As a simple solution, the aforementioned games could include more fully fleshed rebel factions that will always seek to hinder you.
Kevin O'Neal Dude I was thinking this! Of course I am someone who hasn't played a fourX game so I have no clue how well it could _really_ translate to the game, but yea, having those really pesky-ass subversive enemies would potentially add a whole other phase to the game before your total domination. It only really makes sense as a natural evolution of your pesky rivals once they all see how thoroughly overwhelming and overpowered you are
Kevin O'Neal Sounds like your vassals in Crusader Kings II
Kevin O'Neal i was thinking a trade mechanic with treacherous allies. Like your neighbor will turn on you if they advance faster than you or if you trade with the wrong faction. Then have certain groups in control of certain resources with opposing factions in control of complimentary supplies
thats like rebel activity in rise of nations
That "attack them... with the fishing boats!" moment was perfect. Can somebody make that a shirt? Or a poster? Or a screensaver? Or anything really?
5:28 Catan anyone?
There's another way around this, one the games Bravely Default and Bravely Second found: automation.
In those games, you can turn on autobattle. This lets you speed up the action up to 4x and repeat the same action as you did last round. That enables players to grind rapidly, or get straight to the end of any battle they've already clearly won. It's honestly just as big of an innovation as the brave / default system.
If the results of a battle are obvious, give the player a button to continue / repeat their current action while fast-forwarding through the game. You'll avoid wasting the player's time, enable more efficient grinding for JRPGs, enable players to skip the boring end parts of strategy games, and in general allow your players to play your game more than they otherwise could.
Why... is there a plumbus there?
because plumbus are awesome
But everyone needs a plumbus!
Hey ive seen you in door monstars comment sections.
Why not? They're commonly used items.
More importantly, why is the demand for it not higher? I mean, every household has a plumbus!
Another way to keep player engaged is to have independent winning conditions that leverage different kinds of resources. E.g. in the classic Master of Orion you can win by conquering all other players OR by winning the galactic elections. And if you play aggressively, normally, other leaders will not vote for you or even would unite against you. So a diplomatic player could unexpectedly win even in the late game.
I love that Catan reference!
You guys are amazing, thank you for continuing on making these videos!
my favourite genre on extra credits again? YEAH!
I think sudden and lethal uncertainty is why people like Dwarf Fortress. It's a game that's essentially impossible to win, because so much of what kills you off is unpredictable and impossible to adapt to, and all you can do is try to keep your fortress going as long as possible. But it's still fun to try to survive as long as possible, because the longer you survive, the better the legacy you leave on the world. And the better your legacy, the better you can make your next fortress, in the exact same world, right where your old one died off.
There's also the fact that the longer you play, the more likley it is that your fortress falls apart from within.
I'm subscribed to you.
Every time I played DF I ended up building concentration camps for the unsubmissive dwarfs which made the fortress more and more profitable which increased drastically the amount of dwarf rushing to immigrate in my fort. This forces me to establish a compulsory internment for all Dwarfs as I could barely keep up with them anymore. I used them to quickly dig massive areas underground to use as provisional detainment center. I picked off each dwarfs and sent them in two separated rooms. One room allowed them to join the main fortress and become a productive dwarf but the other room had a much darker use. When ever dwarfs got piled up in it I would lock the door behind them and open up some flood gates spilling massive amount of lava in the room burning them clean. The lava trickled down to inferior levels due to strategically places grates on the floor and the room was ready for another set of prisoners. Eventually one of them survived. A young child named Urist McBerg. He was barely a few seasons old but was struck in grieve and pain as the rest of his family had been vaporized in my contraption build solely for this purpose of purging the dwarfs. I felt a this point an insufferable feeling striking me deep inside. I realized the monster I had become and could barely walk for days on end. Never before had I realized that I was crushing small families seeking better lives in my fort but their poor skills and uselessness to me made me commit the worst atrocities. After using the poor Urist McBerg corpse to craft a soap bar I have never played DF again.
I'm Very Angry It's Not Butter dwarf fortress is great-I wanna see it completed someday.
StrategyJoe Oh god why am I laughing so hard
Guys I started watching and honestly binged on your show during the holiday break.
Great episode this one here folks.
Thanks for making some real cool UA-cams and keep up the good work.
Nothing's better than an episode of Extra Credits after a huge break of it. You guys are amazing 😎
The Paradox grand strategy games run into this a lot, and are a pretty good case study for the use of randomized events to change play. EU4 has an interesting way of giving the player agency in this uncertainty: over the course of the game, you "opt in" to different pools of random events, and many of the events will only trigger under certain circumstances
"Now, who is ready to talk game design?"
I literally, literally, jumped up in my chair. I need my fix of extra credits!
This was a really good episode. The thing I enjoyed most was, that strategy game are puzzle games with uncertainty. This is not a perfect analogy, but it allows me to make a valueable connection in my understanding of games. Thanks.
Welcome back!!!!! It's good to start watching your videos again! I hope you had an awesome break! :)
6:03
A WILD PLUMBUS APPEARED!!!
6:04 Slick Rick and Morty reference.
A good way to give players major surprises while also not having them feel the frustration of redoing a whole plan is to give them flexibility, allowing them to have thing like easy material/progress conversion so they can quickly shift into another plan
I'm sorry, I didn't have a good holiday, I missed you guys too much. You guys make my week/month.
These words... they explain why i never finish my games in Civ 6...
Thanks :D
What? My whole reason for playing Civilization is to dominate the world, perform speak-to-the-hand diplomacy and let my tanks roll over other peoples' phalanxes.
Welcome back! Really missed your content :) Great job like always.
glad you're back I really enjoy the series and teaches me new things about gaming
"One-off events are bad"
Somehow I feel like Paradox never got that Memo.
Maybe because no one ever sent that memo. Re-watch the video they never say they are bad, just dangerous , since done wrong they can really ruin the play experience.
Yeah my headphones is a bit meh nowadays. Thank you for the correction.
Still, Paradox.
Yea, Paradox.
Paradox "Hey you know that great heir you got?"
Me "Yea"
Paradox "Hes dead"
Me"..."
Comet Sighted!
Paradox: "Oh, and your new heir is a 0/1/0 that will live forever! Have fun!"
I love startegy games.
I love strategy.
Actually I would love to do it as my job.
I was playing rainbow siege 6 1v1 with a friend and I was amazed by how complex and strategical the game can get i.e. Blowing up different entrances to make the feel surrounded, faking your position, or simply waiting in a supposedly safe place I would love to see a video about how to incorporate strategy as a sort of side into other games
Finally!!! The first thing I had to do was smashing the like button 3 times to make sure it was pressed in hard enough!!!
Love this show :)
This what EU4 does.
Quantumplatinum you never know what France is gonna do
Comet sighted.
I wish I lived in more enlightened times...
Quantumplatinum Ottomans can always recover.... I HAVE EXPERIENCE!!!
The blue terror strikes again
If we are talking about uncertainty in strategy games, I think stelaris is getting close. The crisis events and awakening ancient empires gives more challenges and uncertainties to the late and mid game where most strategy games start to fail. Stelaris even has quite a few of those complex random events that can turn good or bad, ex the underground society chain or the hallucinogenic flower event. Though I think stelaris still suffers from a boring early-mid to mid game and a lack of a way to handle ethics divergence and non agreeable pops peacefully. Though I think the game is getting there with the support the devs are giving it.
Glad to see you guys again!
I'm surprised you guys didn't mention the game jam, given your involvement this year. I'm so excited for this weekend! :D Me and 8 of my friends at SCAD are planning to build a VR game around the theme. We'll be keeping your design lessons at heart. Thanks for everything you guys do!
Long-term uncertainty. Like Muscovy and Ottomans suddenly becoming best of friends allies. Damn thing halted my eastwards expansion for a good while until I was able to finally find a way to go to war with one wihtout involving the other and then forcebreaking their alliance.
Most of my RTS experience is Warcraft/Starcraft (WC3 and SC2 primarily).
The issue I have with the majority of modern RTS games is the "start from nothing, build a massive army" style of gameplay. There should be a word to describe this, but I can't think of it. The antithesis to that style of gameplay is the "attrition" style - start with your full army (or nearly so, there's room for reinforcements) and win by eliminating your opponents forces.
For whatever reason (risk aversion), the industry continues to stick (mostly) with the "build up" model.
Let's consider one of the greatest strategy games of all times: chess. Chess is an attrition game (with a minor 'reinforcement' method in the form of promoting pawns). Both players begin the game on equal footing (arguments about whether white or black is better notwithstanding), and so victory is determined entirely by the skill of the player in moving the pieces (not acquiring them). Chess never gets old, never gets boring, never gets stale.
In the future (and I hope that someone starts making a VR based RTS soon), I'd like to see more chess-like RTS games. I'm not a huge fan of turn-based strategy when it comes to video games (although there are a couple that are noteworthy), but I believe that you can have an attrition style, chess-like RTS.
The two games I know of that at least approach this style are Dawn of War and Total War: Warhammer (not familiar with any of the other Total War games). And even DoW has some resource acquisition, but it's not as important.
Giving people armies (and some minor reinforcement mechanic) forces the readjustment of tactics and strategy due to the fact that you can't (easily) replace lost units. You have to change your strategy each time you lose a unit you didn't expect to lose or your opponent loses a unit. The possible "moves" changes each time a unit dies. In an acquisition based RTS, you simply replace lost units and continue on with the strategy, making it feel like a "push" the entire time, rather than a dance. If you lose 20 Marines, just build 20 more. But what if you started with 20 Marines, and weren't going to get anymore for the rest of the game? That would make you think about protecting them, and it would make you think about your next move if you lost some of them, rather than just pressing the "build more" button.
I pretty much dislike acquisition based RTS - I think acquisition is more suited to slower, turn based strategy games, but would prefer a fixed, finite army in an RTS.
I'm sure there's a lot more that could be done to make RTS more interesting, which will probably come along with better technology - better environmental effects, better base building, etc. But I think the issues I outlined above is the most important.
Also, on a side note, it's possible Star Citizen may be an interesting space combat RTS, as there have been hints of a "command and control" module that can be added to larger ships that will essentially give the player a holographic interface and fleet communication tools that will allow them to command an entire fleet of ships from their command vessel, turning this space sim (at least for those that possess a command module and the desire to do this) into an RTS at times.
5:32 ahah, a Catan reference! First UA-cam channel to actually acknowledge it's existence, props to you
Happy new year! Best of luck with your videos :)
I have a question for you. What do you think are the options and downsides of the possible enemy encounter mechanics in RPGs you can think of? I'm developing an RPG and I'm estimating how encounters should work better. It could be a Chrono Trigger style, with enemies already on screen and by so already scripted and decided for every room, so I know exactly what every player will encounter in every game room. Or it could be classic Final Fantasy/Pokèmon style, with screen transition in battle after a certain random number of steps made... and in that case, how can I tell if encounters are not enough or made too often so the player could be annoyed? etc. There are many choices to make when thinking of random encounters but I'm not sure of what should be better or at least what are the good and the bad sides of every encounter mechanic I can think of. What do you think? Mmmmh... I'm not sure if I've explained myself correctly. I'll make some examples: In a (usually turn based) RPGs, a designer wants every player to make more or less a certain number of encounters in a certain area so the player can meet every kind of enemy, or gain a certain amount of exp/gold, etc. In chrono trigger, this is simply done by literally placing X enemies in every room (more or less avoidable) so the designer knows that at the end of that area the player should be at a certain level (grinding not considered) and has met every kind of enemy needed. In Cthullhu saves the world there are dungeons that the player needs to complete in order to progress through the story. In every dungeon the encounter rate is very, VERY high. Frustrating I should say; BUT after a certain fixed amount of encounters, you can turn the encounter rate to zero in that dungeon, so it's made sure that the player has made at least that fixed amount of encounters at that point of the game. What method applies better basing on a circumstances? Why should I choose a method or another? Also: how can I tell more or less if there are too many encounters? Of course testing is the main solution, but I'm afraid that testing my own game could lead to a wrong judgement, and make some testers play could still be not enough. What do you think?
Fabio Costa I like the idea of having the enemies visible on the map, makes you rethink and strategize a bit before the encounter (if you want to fight or have no way around it)
Pulling from tabletop RPGs, a mix of planned and "wandering monster" encounters works pretty well with a bit of flexibility built into the system. Let's say you've planned for the player to need X amount of experience from the level they're on in order to reliably defeat the next boss (ignoring for the moment the possibility of clever strategy reducing this amount).
Put in about enough planned and obvious encounters to give the player the XP they need, but have these encounters be a bit stronger and more resource consuming (including health damage, mana costs for spells, consumable items, e.t.c.), while including the possibility of running into random encounters. These encounters are relatively weak and might chip off some HP or eat up a mana potion's worth of magic, but their primary goal is to fill in some of the challenge and lost XP that a player would miss out on if they avoid the obvious encounters.
Every time they go into a battle, the chance of random encounters decreases, so that if a player is regularly hitting every "major" battle, they'll experience very few "minor" battles, but if they're mostly dodging the harder battles, they'll slowly get chipped down by a large number of "minor" battles as they go.
This is of course based on D&D logic, which works slightly differently as a video game doesn't have as reliable a way of judging the player's status as a living game master does, but AI directors in games like Left For Dead make a reasonable approximation possible.
As someone who makes RPGmaker games as a hobby, I prefer the "on-map-encounter" style. It makes a little game out of evading the enemies, while also allowing players to avoid or engage at their discretion.
I also throw in little reasons to fight them too, though (equipment drops, etc) so players have a reason to get into fights aside from just EXP. It tends to work most of the time.
In this game, battles should be the main reason to play. The battle system wants to be what makes this game stands out, but that doesn't mean the players will go and search for encounters just because the battle system is (or at least should be) fun, so I need to be sure that every player finds at least some battles. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: in the game there's no exp but there are other things to gain in battles. Anyway, the AGrumpyPanda answer was probably what I was searching for. Thank all of you for your kind suggestions.
You could go for the system that the RPG Maker game "The Way" had, where you've got enemy silhouettes moving around the screen and if you run into one you have to fight the specific group of enemies associated with it. It lets you have something similar to random encounters without taking away control from the player completely, so they can try to avoid or instead seek out battles. It also means you get to fine tune respawns in such a way that the player knows what to expect.
Welcome back!
Ok, enough small talk. give us extra history.
Porter Rodney Even as a fond lover of history I must say I prefer regular Extra credits, and I'm super happy to have it back ^_^
I know, I was just joking.
I know people who enjoy the last few hours, and feel a kind of power trip from knowing they can't possibly lose. My little brother loves these moments even more than the uncertainty.
You know i enjoy watching your videos. I have a game in mind that i've been teasing around for about 2 years now. It's an MMO that allows for super flexibility and strategy. It would give something for the lore nerds to do, the pvpers, and those just wanting to explore and quest. While work hasn't actually begun yet, these videos help me flesh out the mechanics before hand, so i thank you for that.
Homework can wait. Tomorrow's history exam can wait. IT's EXTRA CREDITS TIME!
The world is dying!
Player 1: I will try to make less waste and exhaust
Player 2: MORE COAL FACTORIES AND START COLONIZING OTHER PLANETS.
Don't be a player 2
If you have space travel why the fuck would you use coal
Ya just GO TO MARS!
Colonize other planets then return return with resources to save the planet. Don't be a player one.
@YertleTheMFnTurtle I get that, but by then wouldn't you have more potent methods of ecological destruction?
I never got the colonize Mars strategy. I mean, if we can't even manage the climate with a few degrees on earth how the hell are we supposed to make a huge climate change happen on another planet?
I always enjoy these videos! you guys do great work
You have no idea what kind of ideas you gived me at 6:50! Thansk!
I have to admit for me, the endgame of strategy games often does the power fantasy fulfilment thing (but then, maybe I'm weird, because I don't like the power fantasy side of shooters - I prefer the "I'm being hunted by everything" feeling of Halflife 1 over the "I am a god among men" feeling of Halflife 2). Directing your all-powerful forces to destroy the enemy, gobble up vast tracts of land, etc just feels awesome to me.
One event that I wish Civ did a little better is natural disasters. Consider, for example, an earthquake/tsunami. First consider the Boxing Day quake in the Indian Ocean - most of the people hit by that were in fairly poor, relatively low tech fishing villages. Not to belittle the shit they went through, but the reconstruction process involved rebuilding their relatively low cost housing out of largely local materials, mourning their dead, and getting back to normal life. Constrast that with the quake in Japan and its tsunami, which flattened several essentially modern cities and nearly made a nuclear power plant go into a meltdown. The amount of resources Japan is throwing into the recovery process there is VASTLY greater than what was necessary in the Boxing Day quake. Rebuilding an entire city is mind bogglingly expensive, and they've got several to rebuild. And that's without the immediate blind panic phase where they brought Fukushima back from the brink.
(I'm not trying to belittle the suffering the victims of either of these quakes have experienced, and my suggestion that the Boxing Day quake is largely recovered from is based solely on the fact that it's been 12 years and that surely things have started to settle down an eighth of a century later. A earthquake of that kind of power is a shitty experience for everyone.)
In game mechanics, it'd be pretty easy for the game to determine how developed a given city is and thus how vulnerable it should be to earthquakes. Certain buildings should have particular sensitivities to certain event types - city walls crack from earthquakes, for instance, or nuclear power plants being exposed to tsunamis (Future infrastructure planners: please DON'T build nuclear power facilities or anything similarly volatile on the coast of an earthquake zone. It's a REALLY bad idea.). General productivity, trade, food and population would be good indicators of general development level. Perhaps a more developed society should have the option to take an empire-wide debuff on food in order to supply the city effected, or a special build project in all cities that speeds up recovery in the other city (All of your construction workers and such going over to help in the emergency).
If I can take it this far, the Civ team could make a game mechanic of it. Their design team is miles ahead of me.
Unfortunately, too many devs fall back on random and frustrating plate-balancing mechanics in order to force artificial difficulty on the player who is doing well. Total War for instance, has recently loved shoehorning pointless squalor and corruption mechanics, as well as random events, into the game in order to prevent large empires from getting 'too' powerful or secure.
What I'm basically saying is that devs need to stop making strategic uncertainties feel like punishment for playing the game well, which a lot of their efforts feel like. Good strategy game players will have that 50 food you mentioned to make sure that a -2 penalty doesn't screw them over, and arbitrarily hitting them with penalties in order to prevent their snowballing, while it might prevent the game becoming dull, instead just annoys the player, because instead of it being that they end up stalled because their strategy is faulty, it's because you've just chucked a spanner into the works of the well-oiled machine they've just built, with no real reasoning beyond 'well you were getting too powerful'.
Invariably this is a difficult balancing act, but game devs really need to think about it, because 'artificial difficulty' and unavoidable penalties are the quickest way to make players bored, not letting them snowball.
I think it can maybe work in a fair manner in which there are consequences within your empire for the actions to do. For instance, the more industrialised you become, the more you harm the environment. Having internal threats steadily become a larger and larger problem with more serious consequences as the game progresses would give a different dynamic to the end game that came about organically, but still meant the end game was a challenge. I think if it's clear from the beginning that there are consequences to all your decisions that become more severe as the game goes on it can work.
I think the difference is whether these penalties are unavoidable, or not. If your objective is to conquer the map, the game shouldn't penalise you for having a large empire - that's the whole point. If having a large empire is a decision you make but not the only way to win (Civ goes in that direction somewhat, with its non-domination victory conditions, while the Total War series has only the choice between large empire and even larger empire for victory), having slowly accumulating negative effects attached to a large empire is more feasible.
Hmm. True. In unavoidable games like Total War, the threat has to be external really, whether that be ai that gang up (like realm divide in Shogun 2) on you or some sort of invasion (like the Timurids in Med 2). Even then, though, you have to be careful because if balanced too softly it wont make much difference (the Timurids were more of an annoyance, especially if you start further west (or knew they were coming and reinforced the east) and realm divide was more of a mid-game challenge) but too hard and it will become rage-quit type moment.
Just woke up after my rest from the Global Game Jam and thought I'd come on to say that its good to see you guys getting involved with the keynote for this year. Also wondering if any of you guys got involved with making any of the games. Anyway keep up the great work!
Working with a team right now that is going to be diving into this line of thought very soon. Great video and very helpful :)
Well xcom 2 can accomplish this as well with dark events, especially the additional dark events mods. These can make even the late game challenging and does serve as random events.
I think this might be why Ghandi is so great in Civilization. You've got this opponent clearly working toward a diplomatic/"world peace" victory, then BAM! Nukes in your face! How's your strategy looking now that your cities are being destroyed by an opponent who didn't even have a meaningful military last time you checked?
This really helped explain why after getting two strategy games. I needed up liking one much better than the other, the other being CIV. While I liked CIV a lot, it was slow and as you said, very certain. But the other game I was playing was more fast paced, but there was a lot of uncertainty to the strategy. The best time I had in the game was when I was watching my two best units slug it out without even being scarred by the enemy force, and after sometime it was incredibly boring, but while in CIV I would have continued to push on, here one of the units was destroyed and the other immobilized. I ended up losing both units, but it was still fun because after the loss I had fun working out the counterattack
YOU GUYS ARE SO GOOD I LOVE YOUR VIDEOS. anyway, nice weather huh?
I think this topic here is explains why in the Total War series i like playing Medieval 2 way more than Rome 2
Rome 2 basicly gives you an uningaging playrole military-wise. Rome Itself basicly has only one tactic, which is overwhelm the enemy with quaility infantry and once you ve reached the best standard unit you can just inconsequently push them out, full army of max quality unit, even though it doesnt even reflect how roman military worked historicly.
Medieval 2 on the other hand (even if old) balanced the late game challanges way better imo. You can build a giant army of quality units, yes, but since the game has adjusted recruitment and upkeep cost for cavalry and heavy feudal units, it is nearly impossible to maintain a strong moralized effective army. As you stretch over the borders of your Realm fast, you will have to make do what you can get your hands on compositionwise. Also, the invasions in form of Crusades and Djihads make it way harder to just steamroll the whole map, or just continuesly wage on war without angering other major players in the game, and an excommunication can actualy screw you over when trying to hold a big barely staning empire together.
That's just my opinion though. Everyone make his own
Oh!.... I thought you were going to say single-player strategy games should have a mercy rule to let you win when you have so much of an advantage, lol.
There's not many players that would give their enemy the satisfaction of victory. If they could, they would end it in a draw by immediately sacrificing themselves in an all-out attack or drag the battle much longer than it should be. Basically a "If I'm going down, you're going down with me" kind of thing.
StarCraft basically already has this option, but it also proves that it isn't necessarily the answer to the question since you will always have those Terran fucks that fly their buildings all across the map forcing you to upgrade to flying to finish them off.
Love the episode! From the experience I got from making strategy games, I both agree and disagree. I think the most thriving force behind strategic fun is the actual snowballing itself. The machine in full power. It's more about adapting your strategy to snowball harder than it's about adapt or lose. The cumulative nature of the game is central. That's why everyone quits after losing 1 city.
So you're forced to do a few things to throw this off when the game has reached a stable point. You could provide uncertain elements, like hidden information, a random event etc. They're fun the first few times and can shake things up. The downsides is that they're harder to design around, possibly content heavy and expensive, but worst of all, can feel quite unfair. Especially if you've spend hours snowballing.
I myself think the most annoying part of strategy game "clean sweeping" is specifically certainty of outcome. In pvp situations this is mostly canceled by having a worthy opponent. What's really annoying is not that you don't have to adopt (you often have to, like in civ) but that it's trivial to outcome. A good player will be well prepared to whatever you throw it anyway. If it's pivotal to outcome, it can feel way too unfair. But I think there is a way too avoid this. EU does it.
EU has undetermined outcomes for their game. Technically there is a first place, but the fun in the game is more about seeing how good your snowball is: exactly what you want from a strategy game! Can you conquer whole Europe? What about Europe and Russia? Now add Colonizing the whole Western Hemisphere! etc. Then you can pick a weaker nation to see how far you get with that. It also makes you to take risks to "win harder". I've yet to see a player who thought: "Well, I'm comfortably first, I'm not going to annex my neighbor anymore." That highscore way of looking at strategy games is really fun to me. Always try to have the biggest snowball possible. Always try to win harder.
glad you are back
Yesss! The draught has ended!
Solid Catan reference.
I got so impatient waiting for you guys to start uploading again! You should work extra hard to have some videos on reserve to release while you are on vacation!
Thank you this was really clear and useful
I have a counter strategy for dealing with a volcano: raid the refugee relief shipments for resources to finance the Iron Buddha war machine while increasing the strain on other players >:)
I did the fishing boat thing in Age of Empires 2. I realized I could spam them out faster than the AI could produce their fancier, more powerful boats.
*what is our strategy, leader?
-FISH THEIR SOULS WITH THE FISHERMEN!
*...sure.
i love the rick&morty reference at 6:05, goodjob EC, it made me smile
It's amazing how much of this analysis is relevant to real life as well, particularly in business.
“Let’s say the ‘earth is dying’ event occurs” lmao the earth IS dying 🌍🌎🌏
may want to take a look at how paradox does it in thei grand strategy games, crusader kings / Europa universalis / victoria 2 ( we dont speak about hoi4 )
Probably too complex for them to make a video about :(
Ideas spurred indeed, or rather conversation topics raised. You got me thinking about a problem that I've found in a number of games; mainly those that ride the line between game and simulator. In this Strategic Uncertainty episode you talked about how, often, the better you do in strategy -- well, the better you do. The benefits of excelling tend toward the exponential, and gains made can quickly accrue to a point where the challenge just isn't there anymore. And neither is the fun. Maybe a near cousin of this problem exists in games that lean heavily toward the simulator end of the spectrum. Kerbal Space Program comes to mind.
If you play KSP in career mode - where you start with the most basic rocket and have to earn the resources to develop more advanced technology - it won't take long to realize that KSP, like many simu-games (or game-ulators) is a game stood on it's head. It is precisely the hardest it will ever be to play the game on day one of a new career. Without in-game tutorialization or some form of skill-gating, new players are presented with the most difficult challenges they'll face immediately, and while the game has given them the barest resources. As you advance through KSP's career path you'll unlock pilots who can hold your ship on course, navigational systems that will allow you to plot more and more accurate trajectories, technology that will eventually make your first Mun landing look like you duct-taped spatulas to the bottom of a trash can and called it a lunar lander. And by playing, you'll of course develop a critical knowledge base of 'how to space.'
Literally the more you progress in this game, the easier every single thing becomes. And from a reward perspective that seems right and as it should be. But from a gameplay perspective, it's upside-down. Because one of two things IS GOING to happen. Either your resource deprived player - with both arms tied behind their back and hopping on one leg - will manage to overcome these Herculean day-one challenges, or... they won't. Scenario 2 sees the player walk away because it's just too hard; the technologies that would help relate what they're trying to do are locked away as the rewards for somehow doing it without them; and the grind of trying to figure it out without these cues and aids, just isn't turning into a fun experience. So they leave. On the other end, scenario 1 sees the victorious player, who overcame the immediate learning spike and do it all blindfolded, eventually do the same because it's, well... boring after that.
The player who manages to intercept Minmus (a moon in orbit of the home planet) without the benefit of a tracking system, and without a pilot who can do such useful things as hold prograde, or find a target's vector (these being upgrades and rewards that aren't immediately available); who crossed the stars to land on a distant body by sense of smell, and the brute-force of trial and failure alone... has already had the most challenging and the most rewarding experience your game contains. Everything from here is downhill. Giving this player the tools that would have made what they just finished doing a lot easier, as a reward for having not needed them is... not rewarding.
Challenge vs Reward. It's almost odd to put a versus between those two in the context of games, but here I am typing it. The conventional norm of gameplay is to challenge the player, then reward them for overcoming the challenge. Reward, in games and probably outside of them as well, is at it's best when it comes in the in the form of a new challenge. For example: Player defeats boss / solves puzzle: You give the player a new skill as the reward, and - yeah - there's a fleeting sense of being more powerful that feels momentarily rewarding, but the point of that reward is to unlock a road to new challenges ahead. The new skill you were rewarded with let's you jump to that platform you couldn't reach before and enter a new area, or grapple across the ravine to that new temple, or finally do damage to the previously impervious stone golem that blocked the path forward. The reward isn't the reward. The reward is the promise of more game ahead.
And it's a difficult balancing act to pull off in a game-ulator. You're working under the limitations of... reality. Having the player develop spaceships, orbit the planet, fly-by the moon, maybe even land on it... before they, say, unlock the technology to build a basic airplane... In the scope of reality, that just doesn't make sense. And a developer working on a simulator-game can't just shoehorn that kind of nonsense mechanic in there because it's convenient to their progression-arch, the way that you absolutely can in a non-simulator.
So, I guess the question is: How do you build a game-ulator right? How do you build a progression and reward arch on top of a simulator without rewarding the player with the very abilities that, in any other game, would have been part of tutorialization and gating. How do you start a player small and weak and let them grow to new challenges ahead without just stripping away everything they should reasonably expect to be given while they're still learning a new and difficult game... ulator?
This episode brought two things to my mind.
First was AI War, the only strategy game I can remember that's designed around coop. Because you're always fighting a computer instead of humans, and because the game sets up a guerrilla-style asymmetric war rather than a more equal civ vs civ or army vs army, challenge can ramp up more naturally. There are ways to affect it, but approximately the better you are doing, the more the enemy will pay attention to you, and the more of their (sometimes, at first implied) forces they will bring to bear.
This issue I find actually both worse and harder to work around in more exacting multiplayer games. I never play strategy games PvP, and I only play MOBAs for limited stretches at a time because the exact issue you mentioned: the game is by all accounts over, and I have lost, yet I have to keep playing or suffer some sort of leaving-early penalty. And yet that has to be left in with a lot of cases, because a better team than mine would either know how to turn the situation around, or have positioned themselves imperceptibly differently such that they can turn it around. Thus, ending the game where it should for me, would be unfairly denying others the chance to turn things around.
6:03 plumbus spotted.
WHERES MY NEW EXTRA HISTORY?!?!?!?!?!? WHY WONT YOU EDUCATE ME?!?!??!?!?!!? DID I DO SOMETHING TO YOU?!?!?!?!!? WHY WHY?!?!?!?!!!?!?
Extra Credits, you are the best! Keep it up! :D
happy 2017 EC team. looking forward this year content!
wait WHAAAAAAT
Game Desgin is *HARD*??? like wtf
i dont quite get what you're trying to say
Inflation is a good idea.
Working on own Civ-style 4x game, good to have this in mind