@per about accuracy

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Iluvalar
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@per about accuracy

Post by Iluvalar »

Since you seem to read me at the moment (alleluia)

Can you copy that you read this :

The damage on the weapon is substracted by the armor. It is a DESIGN choice to allow different weapon family to have various efficiency against various armor type. We cannot, change the damage arbitrarily for balance purpose. A) because it doesnt scale nor linearly nor at the same rhythm for every armor value. B) because ultimately it need to be fixed on purpose on values that will match the armors and our intent on that matter. (If i'm not wrong, damage of light weapon must be even with heavy armors values and twice as high as medium body).

The price : If we want relevant designs choice and viable light bodies, we need to match the price of the light weapons with the price of the light bodies. That stat is NOT available for balance purpose.

What is left for balance is range (which is a pain to really evaluate and therefore use as a valid option), accuracy and rate of fire. All of which is also part of the personality of the weapons. By turning every direct weapon accuracy at 100%, you were forced to throw all those changes directly into rate of fire and nothing else. What you did is bound to not balance right... and even if someone else do manage the balance in the future, it will stop at every direct weapon having roughly the rate of fire that a medium cannon (or whatever is the mean).

There is no other way to balance the lack of accuracy unless we had something else that scale linearly with damage instead. But I don't see what would be more straight forward and intuitive for beginning players then accuracy.
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Per
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by Per »

We had a very long discussion on what to do about accuracy, and its problems at close range. I am not going to reopen that discussion. I consider 100% direct fire accuracy a decent compromise solution. Mods may bring back less than 100% direct fire accuracy (but will run right back into the issue 100% accuracy fixed).

The problem of re-balancing for 100% direct fire accuracy is a concern. I have not made up my mind about what we should do about it - if anything. I'm still not sure how big the impact of the re-balancing is going to be, because remember, accuracy wasn't whatever % that the weapon had before, either. It was dependent on whatever stood next to it, hitbox sizes and splash damage radius. So maybe the impact will in fact be negligible and no re-balancing is actually needed. That is an option that should be tested as 3.2 nears release, I think.

Another option I plan to introduce at some point is % armour (or "resistance" perhaps), in addition to deduction armour. Whether this will be used in default rules, I do not know, but it could help, possibly.
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Re: @per about accuracy

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Per wrote:because remember, accuracy wasn't whatever % that the weapon had before, either. It was dependent on whatever stood next to it, hitbox sizes and splash damage radius.
And I had the patch for that. To make it works as intended. It's not like it was even hard, I made it in 1 afternoon. The only problem was people wanting a more complex using conic models and gaussian distribution. I don't think they are more happy now that you removed the accuracy completely for direct weapons.
Per wrote: Another option I plan to introduce at some point is % armour (or "resistance" perhaps), in addition to deduction armour. Whether this will be used in default rules, I do not know, but it could help, possibly.
That's a body stat... and It wouldn't be much different from just increasing the hp of it.
Per wrote:I'm still not sure how big the impact of the re-balancing
I do, I was making fully operational mods with brand new balance back in the days remember ? You assume that I didn't played with accuracy ideas before, for some weird reason. I made about 300 versions of my NRS+ mod, say 50 of them were big balance changes. My experience with warzone2100's balance is pretty much unmatched. I'm telling you, the simplest way possible : In mass accuracy changes can only be shifted to rate of fire, and rate of fire only.

The first significant (+25%) bug with accuracy is when a heavy machine gun meets a mantis body right now. Which is late game and not very preoccupation to be honest. From there a small rebalance is doable. But any other changes you did there is just unbalancing the game.
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Per
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by Per »

Iluvalar wrote:I'm telling you, the simplest way possible : In mass accuracy changes can only be shifted to rate of fire, and rate of fire only.
That is just lack of imagination speaking. There are lots of things we can do to make weapons more diverse and interesting in addition to balance them out, without touching rate of fire, once you stop thinking that the existing stats are the only stats that are ever going to exist in the game. But first let's identify the issues that need fixing by playtesting in an alpha/beta release.
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by Iluvalar »

Sorry for the lag.

This is directly saying that the next major build will break the support for legacy right ? New stats, creative ways, thinking outside the box... If you had a motivated game designer in the dev team at the moment, I'd be curious. But now it's just scary.

I listed all the straight forward stats in the first post. The remaining, high rof (mg), dot (flamer), aoe (cannon), ammo (rocket). We cannot maintain the game sane with the premise that we'll balance the game by tweaking the size of the aoe of the cannon every time we have a minor retouch to make. Remember that our tech tree is a tree. Any change on a node also affect the balance of all the parent and all the child node. Some of the research for cannons require the advanced factory module, which mean that the cannons eventually use the 3 initial research. In other words, any changes in the game require a tweak on the cannon efficiency. Of course we have so tolerance and blabla, but that mean that in theory for a perfect balance we'd need to reassess the range of AOE of the cannon in every single release. Unless you plan to balance trough even more obscure stats, but now I'm out of creativity for real. How about you ?
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by vexed »

Iluvalar wrote: This is directly saying that the next major build will break the support for legacy right ? New stats, creative ways, thinking outside the box... If you had a motivated game designer in the dev team at the moment, I'd be curious. But now it's just scary.
Yes, things have changed in master, some for the better, some things, maybe not.
Balance is, and always will be a huge thing to get right, and yeah, master is going about it differently than all previous versions of Warzone.
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Iluvalar
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Re: @per about accuracy

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Oh... and who is the game designer in charge ?
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vexed
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by vexed »

Iluvalar wrote:Oh... and who is the game designer in charge ?
Fairly obvious who did the changes, it shows in the commit message.

For what it is worth, I do agree that there needs to be LOTS of work on master to fix all the issues that all the changes have caused.
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by crab_ »

vexed wrote:
Iluvalar wrote:Oh... and who is the game designer in charge ?
Fairly obvious who did the changes, it shows in the commit message.

For what it is worth, I do agree that there needs to be LOTS of work on master to fix all the issues that all the changes have caused.
If I understood correctly We cannot estimate changes exactly.
Seems we need play year on master and then make balance patch based on testing new balance during that year.
(Well. I do nor understand clearly what was changed in Master)
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by stiv »

random thoughts:
  • 100% accuracy? Oh Noes!
    Compared to it's WWII counterpart, a modern main battle tank with a gunnery computer, stabilized gun and thermal sights has a pretty good chance of hitting it's target. By 'pretty good', I mean much, much greater than 0.0 and approaching 1.0. Same thing with a modern missile with electro-optical terminal guidance. Considering the gap between WWII and Now is roughly the same as between Now and 2100, maybe just rounding off the accuracy to 1.0 is a reasonable approximation.
  • WZ is a game.
    Warzone is a game, not a physical simulation. It may be fun to model Circular Error Probable and and other fine details, but we care more about gameplay than exact physical models. An obvious example is how we do not model ammunition supply.
  • Rock-Paper-Scissors.
    Part of the charm of WZ is it's Rock / Paper / Scissors nature, for every design, there is a counter to it. In Game Theory terms, there is no dominating strategy. We refer to this as Balance.

    Variables like Armor, Rate of Fire, Projectile, etc give us knobs we can turn to tune the Balance. "OK, but we just lost our Accuracy knob. That's bad, right?" Not necessarily. If Accuracy is close to being a constant, it doesn't really change the results.

    Also, more knobs is not necessarily better. Think of it like over-fitting a curve to a dataset because your equation has has too many parameters. With too many knobs, your equation becomes more complicated and while it may match a particular map and set of units perfectly, it may be a poor general solution. Simple is good.
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by Darkling »

Some thoughts from a lurker:

Just thinking about the maths, accuracy and RoF are too sides of the same coin. Changes to accuracy can be offset by changes to RoF so that you get the same number of hits per unit time. However, (I don't really know how it's implemented in-game) it's possible that changing the accuracy of some of the weapons will reduce their effectiveness against massed enemies. Against a cyborg zerg rush, the machine gun family could be effective not just because of it's high rate of fire, but because it's also hitting more than one enemy.
Compared to it's WWII counterpart, a modern main battle tank with a gunnery computer, stabilized gun and thermal sights has a pretty good chance of hitting it's target. By 'pretty good', I mean much, much greater than 0.0 and approaching 1.0. Same thing with a modern missile with electro-optical terminal guidance. Considering the gap between WWII and Now is roughly the same as between Now and 2100, maybe just rounding off the accuracy to 1.0 is a reasonable approximation.
Except of course countermeasures are also being developed as well. I don't think there's been an engagement between current generation MBTs so we don't really know how it will work. However I was just reading about the new Russian tank, T14 Armata and it carries some interesting active countermeasures (although how effective they are remains to be seen), and there's also simple passive countermeasures such as smoke to hamper sight and thermals. So setting the accuracy of direct weapons to 100% seems a bit unrealistic for me, but this is a game, so if it works within the game that's fine.
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Re: @per about accuracy

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vexed wrote:
Iluvalar wrote:Oh... and who is the game designer in charge ?
Fairly obvious who did the changes, it shows in the commit message.

For what it is worth, I do agree that there needs to be LOTS of work on master to fix all the issues that all the changes have caused.
No... that's the programmer. I talked about game design. The accuracy stat didn't happen by mistake or for fun. Someone in the old pumpkin studios team (probably Keith Ledger) deemed it necessary. And it is truly.

It's not one of many knobs. It's THE knobs we have. All the remaining is constrained one way or the other.

As far as I know, I'm the only one around here who managed a balanced tech tree using the game engine. And I'm in the regret to insist that I couldn't manage it without accuracy.
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by stiv »

The point about evolving countermeasures is valid. But I'm going to engage in some hand-waving and suggest we treat that as something we don't model and ignore it - for now. Note that Per has done some work in Electronic Counter Measures (ECM), for example. And the idea of popping smoke to hide movement is certainly interesting.

Pumpkin included Accuracy in their model because that is how they decided to model damage. I think we can do without it - at least for now. To suggest that Accuracy is the only knob to turn seems a bit over-heated.
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Re: @per about accuracy

Post by vexed »

Iluvalar wrote:
vexed wrote:
Iluvalar wrote:Oh... and who is the game designer in charge ?
Fairly obvious who did the changes, it shows in the commit message.

For what it is worth, I do agree that there needs to be LOTS of work on master to fix all the issues that all the changes have caused.
No... that's the programmer. I talked about game design. The accuracy stat didn't happen by mistake or for fun. Someone in the old pumpkin studios team (probably Keith Ledger) deemed it necessary. And it is truly.

It's not one of many knobs. It's THE knobs we have. All the remaining is constrained one way or the other.

As far as I know, I'm the only one around here who managed a balanced tech tree using the game engine. And I'm in the regret to insist that I couldn't manage it without accuracy.
It still is the same answer.
The committer is the designer.
Sorry if you think that there is someone hiding in a cubicle with statistics galore to back up all the changes, that just isn't the case.

Heck, I have even made the game have actual stats, where I can dump the data into a file, but, alas, it just wasn't meant to be.

I already have said that master needs a ton of work to get back into shape, don't know what more I can say on this.
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Re: @per about accuracy

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vexed wrote: The committer is the designer.
Sorry if you think that there is someone hiding in a cubicle with statistics galore to back up all the changes, that just isn't the case.

Heck, I have even made the game have actual stats, where I can dump the data into a file, but, alas, it just wasn't meant to be.

I already have said that master needs a ton of work to get back into shape, don't know what more I can say on this.
No, the committer is not a valid designer per se. I'm sorry but no. Anyone doesnt need to know the basic of game design to contribute to the code. Obviously. It doesnt mean either that the project can still keep going indefinitely without any knowledge and discussion about game design.

Yes, master need a lot of works to be viable. One of which being the return of the accuracy, or something solid to compensate. Just like meanwhile the 3.x serie still need a fix for that accuracy.

I don't know what to say about it either. You guys are aware that you are pilling the work on balance in a corner, but no one seem seriously willing to talk about anything. How is that meant to work ?
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