MIH-XTC wrote:95%+ of all multiplayer games currently use the high power setting and the low power setting is rarely used. This means the range of available power settings needs to be shifted.
NoQ wrote:Dunno, people would just play NTW with more power.
That should be okay, there are some people who currently like 60 oil NTW (not me) and the new high power setting would be somewhere equivalent to that. But if some players don’t like that then they should have the option to play how high power currently is using the medium power setting. This is mostly about the high power setting giving more power on low oil maps.
NoQ wrote:
Also it doesn't fix the desire to play flat maps (such desire exists and is very strong because otherwise flat NTW maps would have been replaced by beautiful high-oil maps ages ago).
That’s a good point, I haven’t given any thought into why flat maps are played. I’ve only considered the number of derricks. I just realized I've been conflating the two.
MIH-XTC wrote:Maps with 8 - 10 oils per player are generally too slow for fast players and they want more power.
NoQ wrote:Strongly disagree. Startup 1x1 games often take 5-10 minutes and involves a lot of action, compared to normal NTW games that take 20-30 minutes and involve a lot of boring 5-of-everything base building.
By “slow” I mean the rate of research progression, not the amount of time lapsed. You’re right, startup 1x1 games take 5-10 minutes but the problem is that not much stuff can potentially happen in that time period because there isn’t much power. We can only research so many things in certain orders in the first 10 minutes. For good players, they will quickly figure out what’s optimal. After playing the same map for ~5 times it starts to become obvious what the best strategy is. If there was more power though, more things can potentially happen and there’s more strategy involved. There’s also more units involved. I guess a better word to use is evolve. I don’t think game play on 8-10 oil maps evolves fast enough for it to be interesting.
MIH-XTC wrote:This is also the reason why battles are cutthroat, sensitive and unforgiving. For example in a T1 no base game if you have 13 tanks and your opponent has 16 then the game can easily end within seconds of an attack. The reason is because derricks don't produce power fast enough to replenish your army while your opponent is pushing. It's very difficult to come back after small imbalances in army size.
NoQ wrote:I agree with that partially. With decent terrain and carefully measured defined rush distance, the weaker side would have defender's advantage (better concave and larger portion of units in combat) that would prevent the stronger side from attacking. At most, the stronger side would be able to capture some derricks, but it won't be able to go for an instant kill, unless advantage is enormous. That's pretty much the role of homeground advantage in RTS games - to make sure games are less random and more advantage is required to win. In NTW advancing your army through the map doesn't give you any advantage, as you're not capturing oils, and the further you advance the longer the tail of catching-up units you have compared to the defender, which promotes longer and less random games and it's a good thing, though having more terrain would have helped.
I think in low oil games home ground advantage isn’t as much as it should be because things don’t evolve that fast. Not much is going to change in the amount of time it takes to travel across the map. Maybe like 2 extra units and a research upgrade. This is a generalization.
NoQ wrote:
So we could improve upon that even further by putting more oils in the well-defended base and less oils in the open. I believe that's a great thing to do and the classic oil distribution is flawed. Probably by doubling the amount of oil in the main base and halving the amount of oil on the map we could get much more attractive classic-map matchmaking.
Yea I highly agree that the classical oil distribution does not work. This is especially true because the value of derricks at present moment are cheap. If a tank costs 70 power and it takes 1 derrick like 90 seconds to produce that power, it's not really worth spending a couple of tanks defending the derrick. It might be 3 minutes before I get my investment back and the game could be over by that time. In other words, forget the oils in the middle of the map, they’re not worth defending or pursuing. I like maps with oils spread out in the bases and on the perimeter. I'm not sure how to best create incentives for capturing oils around in the middle of the map.