What Kafkaesque offspring would spring forth from the union of Big Brother & a Stepford Wife...?
OOPS - Wrong thread.
How this came about: From the APM thread.
.........
Interesting. My experience with WZ MP is just the opposite. Which is to say I think the GPM bias is weighted too far on the side of Build Order such that outcomes are rote determined very early on, prior to in theater combat (this is how I also understand Iluvalar's work & insights which coincide with my own experience and experiments over the years).
In turn this build order bias has the direct consequence of narrowing down the scope of mid-late game in-theater combat tacs to a simplistic arcade style that practically eliminates a whole combat world of viscerally compelling victory tacs based on risky, but clever & complex, asymmetric maneuver.
Which if you refer to my previous posts you can see my obvious focus on expanding the range of combat tacs in-theater and specifically doing this my evolving Commanders based on WZ Creator's original GPM vision for them which I do not see as being just a variant of sensor system mechanics. Thus to offset the early game bias weighting of Build Order mechanics, I would introduce Commanders earlier on along with those intimated enhanced abilities.
I am (& have been since day one) very keen on Commanders for reasons that embrace Pumpkin's original vision for them along with some of my own insights into compelling game design vis-a-vis the combat experience (purely visceral & by mechanized extention), 21st century warfare doctrine, hard-wired heuristics identified by the cognitive-neurological sciences of last decade + and last, but not least, the good interactive fiction crafting that creates the virtual visceral immersion known as the willing suspension of disbelief (this last would be entirely sacrificed by both elliminating Commanders as such or by demoting them to sensor system variants).
I speak to Commanders from a very different place than any of you here. I actually had long, detailed, deeply interesting & thoroughly enjoyable conversations with several of the original creators of the game from the Pumpkin Studios team about them (& l8r when they became Pivotal Games) - along with much else about the game. This doesn't by any means make me an authority but it is a fact of my relationship to the game and does speak to the lasting formation of my perspective (first hand 1998-2012) which comes through in most everything I have to say about it along with all my acts & deeds throughout.
- Regards, RV.
Emdek wrote:Rman Virgil, can you share with us their opinions / ideas (as list with points, but in "short" form )?
That's a tall order. And not just because of the concision you request.
I must balance the past with the present, WZ Creators original vision and intent with their standing position since shortly after source liberation of staying strictly out of the public mix (best believe they still follow the proceedings and play the binaries).
Let me sleep on it. I'll do my best to respond within those total parameters tomorrow, Sunday.
- Regards, RV.
Emdek wrote:Rman Virgil, OK, good idea.
Personally I think that such information should be placed in separate place, like that thread with unimplemented things, to be not lost.
I cannot do this overnight. It will become obvious shortly why that is. However, I will procede step-wise because it is of value to me.
I also must state flatly that this is no way an effort to persude or convince anyone to do any work along these lines. The tools to make this a reality are already in development and that is all that is essential, at last, to go forward, at least, in the form of a mod at some point within a year I'm guesstimating.
Some Prefratory Remarks: My baseline for going foward.
This is the begining of an attempt to whittle down some 200 + pages of raw material collected since 1999 just on Commanders (and made up of various conversations in BB posts, Emails & Irc chats between myself, WZ Creators-Pumpkin devs & contributing community members going all the way back to retail release) into a Twitter-type listing that addresses the thread's topic heading. (Good luck with that... eh... ?)
In the broad stroke this thread will, I hope, simultaneously speak to an historical perspective vacuum, be an effective counter to ubiquitous reductionism (& egoic selective exposure) as well make clear that WZ is an emergent system dynamic sandbox in the form of a fun RTS game of visceral, virtual, martial decision-making and entertaining myelination opportunities.
(At the same time, truth be told, I must also be mindful of my ROI for partcipating because it has mostly been spiking in the red 2012 - a fundamental cultural disconnect, I am guessing, to give it a neutral expression. To warm it up a tad - I'm very old school & a gadfly to boot... which means I can rub some folks the wrong way (& I'm sure I have but we won't get into the consequences or mention any nicks).
I think of my being as a vital composite of Sophoclean, Elizabethan & Victorian sensibilities in a Steam Punk da Vinci mashup (if anyone can make sense of that). And I ain't sacraficing or compromising a minute of any of it for anything or anyone. I also don't suffer fools or boors with anything less than a Wildean wit. Though I am by nature fair-minded and empathic.
Still, to paraphrase good 'ol Honest Abe Lincoln: You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time but never all of the people all of the time. So, since I am not here running for any position, trying to create a consensus to do anything in particular or make any money, then what's left is the fun of learning and doing what I find enjojable and that's plenty good enough for me.....
But enough of what I'm about as a man, my transparent motivations and my history with the game.
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Ok, we'll kick this off with a quote from a WZ creator made in these BBs a few years ago which is in fact the most concise statement of WZ Creator's original vision for Commander's role in WZ's MP GPMs & the why of their subsequent crippled state to this day.
That most recent statement by a WZ Creator:
whippersnapper on Sat., Jul 04, 2009, 6:57 am wrote:
Couldn't resist after just reading Alex Lee's answer to a question posed by Per....
(Alex Lee was on the original Pumpkin Team, aka WZ Creators, & was their A.I. Guru. Also note that the italics, underlining and bolding of the text are mine.)
Per wrote:
Was there many things that you were planning to do with commanders that you never got around to ? The source code certainly gave that impression.
You can read Alex Lee's postings in their entirety HERE..alex wrote:
Yes, commanders did a bunch of extra things during development, but they got scaled back, both the control mechanism and UI got very complicated.
We wanted them to order units realistically, not just become a grouping with a bonus and a common goal.
In subsequent postings I will break that quote down & post link references from the past to some of the relevant & practical details (but by no means exhaustively) of going forward with Commanders.
I will be reserving some post spots to that end but feel free to share insights going foward starting now If you are so inclined. It's all good and we'll eventually get this all concisely organized. There's no rush because the project tools in the works already won't be fully mature for some time yet (I'm guessing a year) and that is what it will take to pick up where WZ Creators original Commander efforts and vision had to be drastically scaled back.