Corporal Punishment wrote:Zarel: I second Josh. Auto-recycling the experience of a unit upon death encourages suicidal tactics. People would just throw wave after wave of flamer cyborgs at each other which get stronger every time. Really Zarel, this is pretty much the worst idea ever. Let people scream. Casualties are the nature of war and whoever plays a war game better gets used to it.
I'm going to take your words "worst idea ever" as reason not to be polite in my response. That, and the fact that everything you've said is completely useless.
"At each other"? You
do realize experience is meaningless in multiplayer, right? This idea is purely for balancing campaign. It's not like people are going to say "oh, no, in addition to all the money I spent, I'm going to lose ONE OR TWO EXPERIENCE POINTS if I sacrifice these cyborgs! I must keep them alive!" in multiplayer.
People don't throw wave after wave of flamer cyborgs since they can't afford to (I hope you realize that saved experience doesn't mean the next unit is free). Except on high oil maps, in which they spam units regardless of whether or not experience is retained. How stupid can your logic be?
And tactics involving sacrificing units are quite valid. All's fair in love and war, they say, and this is
war, and surprise surprise,
stuff gets destroyed in wars. Even
your stuff. Ask a skilled MP player if he/she makes sure that none of his/her units die; I'm sure you'll find that the answer is "no". Heck, ask a skilled MP player if he/she even pays attention to experience, and expect the same answer.
And it's not like people will stop suicidal tactics in campaign just because they don't want to lose experienced units. They'll just micromanage so that it's the inexperienced units that die. Nothing but micro, and I wouldn't mind doing away with that kind of micro.
Though some kinds of micromanagement can be fun (hit-and-run lancers, for instance), others fall under the category of "pure frustration" (StarCraft I's selection limit, for instance), and we, as game designers, try to minimize those of the second category, which I argue is what keeping your inexperienced units as bait for enemy weapons is (not to mention that Warzone's pathing does not make individual-movement-based micro very fun at all).
And what if people just use fewer sacrifice tactics because the micro is so difficult with the pathing bugs and high APM required to make sure it's not an experienced unit that dies? Do you
really want Warzone to be less strategic
and more frustrating
just because
you don't want units to get killed in a war game?
Most games take away the frustration of losing experienced units one of these ways:
1. Making it easy to get the experienced unit back (e.g. Pokemon; Warcraft III)
2. Making it easy to get to max level (e.g. Red Alert 3, Wesnoth)
3. Making it hard to die (e.g. Final Fantasy, nearly every RPG in existence)
4. Not having an experience system at all (e.g. StarCraft)
I challenge you to name a
single game other than Warzone that doesn't fall into one of these four categories. You can't? So why should Warzone be more frustrating than any other game in this aspect?
j0shdrunk0nwar wrote:That would mean taking away a little sense of loss from the game. Then nobody would be careful when it comes to planning strategies with experienced units.. They would just relax and build another unit.. Maybe there's a better way to deal with the one-hit-instant-death for units.
That's a very good point - the sense of loss is important.
In multiplayer, the sense of loss is conveyed through the price of the unit. You lose the unit, you lose the money you spent to make it. You lose more units (and the money you spent on them) than your enemies, and your enemies will either have the money for way more units than you and overpower you, or maybe they spent that money on research and now each of their units are 3x as powerful as each of yours.
Experience doesn't really come in handy in multiplayer - you never get enough of it to make a difference.
In campaign, though, it's a whole different story. Unlike multiplayer, it's much rarer to run out of money in campaign, so experience becomes the main reason to keep units. If we retain experience, that causes problems.
Note, however, that campaign doesn't give you
tons of power... It's enough to get by without too many worries, but if you actually try mass suicide cyborgs, you'll find yourself out of money real quick.
Anyway, one solution might be to retain only 3/4 the experience, or half, or experience - 10, or something like that. Enough so that if you mess up once, it isn't
too bad, but if you repeatedly die, you'll lose pretty much all your experience.
What do you think?