After making some single-player challenges in my map thread, i'm getting a bit confused. Just how to make the challenge interesting?
In most of the challenges i tried (or made), the enemy gets weaker over time. Once you are able to survive the early rush and hold your ground for a while, and then manage to control just one more oil derrick, you already won. Simply because you were already equal, and now you have one more derrick, which both makes you stronger and makes your enemy weaker.
This is a simple monotonic curve: you get stronger with every tick, sit there and do nothing but defense (with tanks or towers) most of the time, and then destroy everything in the last 5 minutes.
Most of the challenges around boil down to: survive the early rush, hold your ground for as long as necessary to come up with the winning design (its components may be different), destroy everything with the winning weapon.
That's what i have noticed. And i sort of find it boring. Am i the only one who feels like that? (:
How to break this pattern? How to make the challenge non-monotonic? How to, for example, make timing frames in which you are stronger and then other frames in which your opponent is stronger and make it vital for the player to push in certain frames but then fall back, receiving only a certain energy advantage for this attack, once the enemy is ready to strike back? What other sorts of things will make a single player challenge interesting?
This theory doesn't apply to easy challenges (eg. back to basics), where you can easily beat the challenge in under 10 minutes, and then compete for the time record.