Per,Per wrote:You can't please everyone. Chojun, can you say some more about what you did to the power system in regards to balancing?
I just went through the revision history. The changes are as follows:
* Effectively doubles [per-cycle] power output
* Power penalties are only enforced after 5 mins game time
* A player's power levels are limited to 2000 per generator.
Essentially, these simple changes have the following effects:
Higher strategic importance of power generators. If your generators are destroyed, your maximum amount of power goes down, and you lose power every cycle.
Players must have very large bases if they want to have a lot of power on reserve
Players can no-longer have obscene amounts of power available to them
These are just a few of the effects of the changes I made to power. But I don't think that this resolves the gameplay problems with Warzone's power. I think the topic of power needs to be revisited and some Gameplay Mechanics drawn up that make sense. For example, Warzone offers Low/Normal/High power settings. But the power setting really only slows or speeds the gameplay and the game is already a VERY long game as it is (I know 2-3 Hr games can be possible if turtling players are playing). I think the ideal game time for the Warzone community would be in the realm of 30-60 mins. Power is a factor in that equation.
Warzone has also seen its fair share of High-oil maps that are similar to the "Big Game Hunters" maps of the starcraft era. This gives rise to the need for players to be able to construct multiple hundreds of units in order to make their attack (and conversely, construct multiple hundreds of artillery and hardpoints to make their defense). This kind of thing turns the game into an attrition/slugfest that I don't think was intended by Pumpkin. Raising the unit limit was one of the very first things done when the source was released and it is one of the things that I disagreed with the most.
My whole point is that high power (and other power problems) favors a game where the person with the biggest club is the person that wins the game. In 1999 Pumpkin departed from the conventional RTS wisdom at the time by removing resources as a strategic element so that players could focus on the combat strategy elements of the game. However, the power system they implemented doesn't quite meet that goal because it is either hinders game speed or gives way to wars of attrition.Strategy by Design