Author Topic: Balancing is hard.  (Read 8263 times)

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So I've been doing some more FREDding, trying to create a convincing large-scale battle, against the advice of that one article from ages ago and probably against my better judgement. It's...annoyingly tricky, largely because I'm trying to create a situation in which the Shivans outnumber my Terran fleet but don't automatically roflstomp them.

Various stuff I've learned:

Terran destroyers, particularly Orions, go down really quickly. Part of it might be just due to the orders I gave some of the Shivan ships, or their natural AI targeting them first, but they have ludicrously low survivability. First several times I ran the mission, the Shivan cruisers and corvettes were mostly obliterated, along with the Terran destroyers, and it basically came down to a bunch of Deimoses with a few cruisers slowly whittling down a Lucifer, two Ravanas and two Demons. I had to add a Colossus just to make things less ridiculous.

I eventually noticed one of the Orions would mysteriously end up several clicks out from the battle, and would spend the whole time slowly making its way back, before getting sliced apart by beams upon arrival. In the end I figured out the cause. You know how people compare the Colossus to a baseball bat? Yeah, that's not just a metaphor.

Giving several dozen warships five random attack orders each so that they'll actually move takes ages.

My brilliant plan of a hierarchical command system, where groups of cruisers would be ordered to guard larger ships, is actually a terrible idea. Partially because cap ships don't actually have a guard order, just the "stay near ship" order, and partially because the corvettes would quickly outpace the cruisers, get killed, and leave them sitting there with no orders.

Now, I eventually remembered (well, suspected and then confirmed) that you can put warships into wings. This'll be invaluable, because it lets me automate respawns so that you don't have situations where all the weak ships get blown apart immediately and leave only the durable ones. It also makes working with orders a bit easier. Unfortunately, it seems to make cruisers behave like fighters, staying really close to each other, which makes the battles incredibly cramped, even by my standards. I'll have to see if there's a way to spread out the wing formation so they don't clump together like that.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Don't use attack orders.

Use dynamic waypoints (you can use set-object-position events on waypoints).

Don't put warships in wings.

Use armor.tbl or special hits to make ships tougher.

Don't let warships decide to fire beams on their own, keep beams locked and use fire-beam events.

 

Offline qwadtep

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Don't let warships decide to fire beams on their own, keep beams locked and use fire-beam events.
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Offline General Battuta

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Oh, triple-A should stay under its own volition, almost always. My bad!

 

Offline Vrets

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Balancing an actual mission is even harder, because you have to account for human behavior.

I've been working on a short campaign for a few months and translating ideas into playable, fun missions is a struggle.

The Vrets Process of Campaign Design

  • Plan out an intricate, "****ing badass" mission on paper. Put in pile of mission plans.
  • Come home from stressful day at work and binge FRED
  • Return to mission a week later. Realize that I am stooopid and delete entire mission.
  • Drink heavily

edit: sorry, the last part of this post was suffering from step 4 of the process

« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 10:04:10 pm by Vrets »

 
Yeah I have noticed that beam spam actually looks pretty terrible. This is why I generally tend to prefer pulse-style weapons in my science fiction, but eh.

Well there's a certain tension here between the concept of a "mission" and the concept of a "battle". The two aren't mutually exclusive, but they are distinct. Most missions in the Freespace games are just that, and while that's probably best for the bulk of the missions, you probably want to have at least a few big setpieces that really feel like full-scale battles in a war. Part of it is that warships can jump in and out at any time, so you get weird lopsided combat dynamics rather than fleets engaging each other straight-up.

Furthermore, there's a tension between game-as-narrative and game-as-challenge. Often what I'm trying to do with these sorts of things is create a big, visually impressive ambient battle for the player to enjoy, except that in the typical Freespace frame of mind, it's hard to enjoy a battle because you're focused on winning. You're not thinking "oh man that Shivan warship looks awesome shooting at that Orion", you're thinking "crap, that Shivan warship is shooting at that Orion, kill it". It's a matter of how active the player is, as opposed to essentially being a bystander. Immersion in cases like these can actually be a bad thing, because astonishingly enough, being part of a war is not fun. So if you're too invested in the outcome, you can't enjoy the eye candy.

Also, I'll tell you guys a secret: I haven't started using events at all yet. I don't know how. I'll get into it sooner or later, but right now I'm just setting things up and letting them play out.

 

Offline General Battuta

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You don't have to accept that warships can jump in and out at any time. If you set rules about when, where, and how ships can jump, you have the foundations for a tactical paradigm. What if preparing to jump soon makes it harder to fight right now? What if you have to maneuver against not just the warships and fighters you're engaging, but the warships and fighters you know the enemy may still be holding in reverse?

If the player has a clear, actionable objective - it can be as simple as 'destroy that ONE ship' or 'fly to this point' - they can appreciate basically arbitrary amounts of **** going on around them. It's only when the player is asked to wander into the **** without understanding the rules that they get mad.

 
Well, maybe it's just me, but I tend to feel responsible for the whole engagement, and feel like I did something wrong if my side loses any ships. Which is absurd, because these are battles involving tens of thousands of people, and I'm just one guy. But that's sort of the mentality I'm talking about, that's cultivated by the way missions (at least the retail ones) work.

 

Offline Lepanto

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If you want the players to enjoy your spectacular battle, find some way to get them to look at it without being distracted with gameplay. Show the battle in progress with a cutscene, start the player far enough away from their objective that they can watch the battle while approaching the objective, etc.

Just don't drag the eye candy segments out too long, or the player will get bored.
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Offline NGTM-1R

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Well there's a certain tension here between the concept of a "mission" and the concept of a "battle". The two aren't mutually exclusive, but they are distinct.

They're not really distinct at all, though. FS1 and FS2 were limited by the capablities of existing computers to include only those ships you need directly interact with, but you are not. Even my old horrible stuff was more than happy to throw in things going on that aren't your problem, and I have made harsh criticism on occasion of campaigns that let you go off-script during their battle sequences too much. Give the player a job and make them do it or they fail.
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Offline Trivial Psychic

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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
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...WIH?

EDIT: war in heaven derp

 

Offline karajorma

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Also, I'll tell you guys a secret: I haven't started using events at all yet. I don't know how. I'll get into it sooner or later, but right now I'm just setting things up and letting them play out.

Seriously, put the mission aside and do the walkthrough. Events are the heart of any FS2 mission. Sure you can set up the ships and watch them shoot each other, but if you don't have any real events the mission is going to be pretty second rate.

Events are really not that hard to get your head round. They're all really just saying "If A do B". In fact it was only after about 10 years that someone decided to a add a more complicated "If A do B else do C" :D
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 11:56:52 pm by karajorma »
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Offline General Battuta

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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!

I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.

 

Offline procdrone

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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!

I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.

I do not believe you can make quality missions WITHOUT events these days. They are a bare essential now.
And balancing is bad, someone, do it for me please.
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Offline Black Wolf

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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!

I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.

I do not believe you can make quality missions WITHOUT events these day. They are a bare essential now.

Fixed that for you. :P

Events are now and have always been the very core, the DNA of FS missions. In a very real sense, FS missions are their events - everything else just gives those events a place to happen.

There's nothing wrong with throwing a couple of ships down and watching then destroy each other. It's fun. But it's not building a mission, not really FREDding, without the events editor. :nod:
« Last Edit: July 03, 2015, 02:45:12 am by Black Wolf »
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Well, yeah. That's a given. I'm not exactly going to be able to make anything publishable until I learn events.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
The only "massive battle single mission" that comes to mind is "Her Finest Hour"; is that what you mean? (It's just that I wouldn't really classify that one as "thrown-together" in any context.)
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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
The only "massive battle single mission" that comes to mind is "Her Finest Hour"; is that what you mean? (It's just that I wouldn't really classify that one as "thrown-together" in any context.)

I think he meant Delenda Est or Prime Meridian?

 

Offline General Battuta

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No he means the one in the tech room called BP Massive Battle.