Instalar o Steam
Iniciar sessão
|
Idioma
简体中文 (Chinês Simplificado)
繁體中文 (Chinês Tradicional)
日本語 (Japonês)
한국어 (Coreano)
ไทย (Tailandês)
Български (Búlgaro)
Čeština (Checo)
Dansk (Dinamarquês)
Deutsch (Alemão)
English (Inglês)
Español-España (Espanhol de Espanha)
Español-Latinoamérica (Espanhol da América Latina)
Ελληνικά (Grego)
Français (Francês)
Italiano (Italiano)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonésio)
Magyar (Húngaro)
Nederlands (Holandês)
Norsk (Norueguês)
Polski (Polaco)
Português (Brasil)
Română (Romeno)
Русский (Russo)
Suomi (Finlandês)
Svenska (Sueco)
Türkçe (Turco)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamita)
Українська (Ucraniano)
Relatar problema de tradução
Regras e Orientações das Discussões
21 
Denunciar este post
After 400+ hours - This is the most straightforward way to go. Slowly over time you recognise whats good and also set up various forces. i.e. I always have a cloaked strike group that hit's particular targets (such as Instigators) but is a small force.
I think it is too late now. But I think the various weapon systems and ship types can be meaningfully represented in other forms. Basically a different abstraction can be used to assist comprehension.
For instance.
Instead of having numeric values that are extremely hard to parse, like 0.1 to 10 etc and then having weapons does does extra damage to them coded in numbers. (300% damage vs <0.5) It is often easier for the human mind to parse representations.
Can be replaced with something like.
Weapon: Laser
Damage (Applies to All): 100
Effective: ++ Dark Symbol, -- Shiny Symbol
Enemy: Mirror Corvette
Attribute: Shiny Symbol (Or Color Or some other abstraction)
I do think that with say about 10-20 different symbols and colors which can be introduced gradually (from difficulty), players will be able to parse the damage systems effectively.
It accomplishes the same thing that raw numbers do, albeit with less granularity. But that can be modded with more ++++ and --- etc.
I think the numeric weapon and armour values makes things almost impossible to parse and a vast majority of players cannot be bothered to hover over everything to get the numbers to even begin process what is actually happening when fights occur. Which is a huge shame in an otherwise superb game.
Well, its not 'entirely' too late. Again, see the 'formatted' tooltips setting which is my own (arduous) work and while it does not make the bonuses or stat-comparisons 'non-numeric' it does show them in a much easier to read way (in my own biased opinion).
Give em a peek maybe!
Ultimately though I'm pretty much with Chris. It was a well-intentioned effort that didn't go as well as it could have. It was a hard spot - if you simplified it (which would have been my preference) you'd end up with a lot of AI War 1 people thinking you 'dumbed it down' or that it wasn't like AI War anymore.
What is this formatted tooltips?!!? I have to go find them asap!
Edit: Found it in Tooltip Writer! Checking it out now!
Edit2: Sorry did not work out for me. Made the info worse actually... :(
The pokemon advantage (and of rock paper scissors) is that their types have inherent mnemonics to them. In other words, fire beats grass, that's pretty obvious. And a lot of the others make intuitive sense.
An alternative symbology for wargaming in particular is certainly possible, but probably needs to be a bit smaller to be comprehensible.
Well, darn. If you have feedback about them i'm very much open to it. Maybe stop by the arcen/aiw2 discord sometime and drop me your thoughts!
Disclaimer: A whole new representation for bonuses, i have to agree, is probably out-of-scope. But im interested in any ideas for improvements, and if anything feels -worse- about formatted then id like to address it.
Ships of the old types can provide some mnemonics.
1. Battleships
2. Cruisers
3. Destroyers
4. Submarines
And the weapons that can be carried on each are fixed (or special ships can have customized weapons).
Tropedoes killl big ships.
Rockets kill smaller ships.
Laser for single target focus.
Missiles for evasion ships (submarines)
Etc. We'll be able to read more about sea battles of the past to understand the rock-sissors-paper better and can make more educated guesses.
It should provide enough leeway for a complex system and still allow gamers to have a handle on how weapon systems may possibly interact with each other. More intuitive so to speak.
Disclaimer: This is not a criticism of AI War 2. I think it's fantastic, just that the information is a bit too dense to be able to parse properly for my brain.
A good rock paper scissors setup has bonuses that allow for artificial divisions within roles, and across types. For example, it's how you get all the different cavalry variants in a historical range. Just because they are cavalry doesn't mean pikes will be good against them if they have one of the other bonuses like using muskets or something, for example.
That ability to cross-section roles is one of the more interesting things. So you have something that is a bomber role, but it's actually really good at crowd control as well, that's interesting. Suddenly you can build a strike force in a different way. Etc.
We spent ages on that sort of thinking after AI War 1 was done and before AI War 2, and it was always just these huge lists we'd come up with.
- It would take a huge, and I do mean huge, amount of time and effort
- It would be for almost no gain as the players it's most intended for - newer ones - would not use it because it would be a mod and if they bounced off the game, they'd do so before even knowing it exists. Only a relatively very small number of others would benefit.
It really just gets back to what I mentioned earlier about the number of ship types. Lots of people - both modders and official volunteer contributors who designed ships and players - wanted, to use the examples given, 'cruisers' with 'submarine' capabilities in some area(s). I.e. more freedom was desired than the regimented categories allow for. In a vanilla AI War 2 game with no mods or expansions enabled there are several hundred unit types available. You basically have to be willing to say NO to a lot of that if you want to use such an approach; the higher variety is more dynamic and flexible ... and also more messy.
I can't blame AI War 2 for taking a different direction than I would personally have preferred, particularly when a *lot* of players wanted it that way.
The Pokemon model on its own isn't enough, because each mon is only one or two types, and that's not flexible enough. To have hundreds of types in open warfare in a meaningful way all the time, the "types" (Grass, Fire, Ghost, etc) all have to be attributes instead.
So "this weapon does bonus damage to anything with the grass attribute," regardless of whatever other types a target has. Pokemon does have "does less damage against X types" also, in their chart. So the chart, from memory, is something like this:
12-15 different types
Each type gets a buff in damage against 2-3 other types.
Each type gets a debuff in damage against 2-3 other types.
All other types it does normal damage to.
So with types becoming attributes, it's like "oh, you do 2x damage because that target has the grass attribute, but then you do only 75% damage because it also has the ghost attribute." You wind up with some pretty interesting combos there.
If each ship had something like 2-5 colored attributes, then people would be able to remember those, probably. I do recall that in the first post about this, cicoles did say colored, and I think that's important.
If we use elemental type weaknesses, then we expect red to be strong against green and brown. We expect cyan to be strong against red. We expect yellow to be strong against cyan. And so on. The names of the colors almost become irrelevant -- fire, grass, ground, water, electric are all just mneumonics for the colors in that design.
I actually had wanted to introduce some "elemental" specialization into Heart of the Machine, but had avoided it for a couple of reasons (most of them having to do with readability of tooltips and flow of things. If I had to make up a ton of different types of sci-fi armor, and it's super unclear why any one unit is strong or weak in that armor, or why one weapon is good or bad against it, that's just a monumental writing task where nothing is clear.
But keeping things smaller than Pokemon, perhaps more to the Persona level where there are 8 very distinct colors that are visually clear... I think it could be interesting to adapt that into a sci-fi environment. It's now on my list to experiment with, because I think it would add some depth to unit customization and deployment strategies in Heart of the Machine.
I know that some games that are light sci fi, like Borderlands or similar, have used elemental weapons. And it's in stuff like Dying Light, which doesn't exactly feel fantasy, but is zombies but elemental weaknesses, etc. I don't want to literally go with elements, as that is very much fantasy, but going with colors and then having names for those which are... way less important than the color itself... is I think something I will likely do.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, that's really clear, and it allows for customization. And with most of the combinations being "no bonus or malus," and then a minority of cases being "bonus or malus," it's really interesting.
Persona has 8 colors, and for each enemy and character there is a specific reaction that just that one enemy and character has; which you find out as you play. Most of them are just "normal damage." Some are resist (half damage), some are weak (knocked down and extra damage), some are reflect (damage goes back to sender regardless of sender resistances), others are block (damage completely nullified), and others are heal (damage is inverted into health instead).
A new enemy is always something to pick apart and try to guess the right combos based on what you can tell about it, and then it remembers that for you as you go. There are a few hundred kinds of enemies, and about a hundred personas on your own team, so it really scales very well. The guessing-game component works well for Persona because of the speed and scope of their battles, but in a larger strategy game it would be more about force disposition and customization.
I dunno. This was well-timed. I've been feeling like combat in Heart of the Machine needs a little bit of extra kick, and I think this would be an easy way to handle it. Thanks for the thread, it's been very interesting. I've obviously been trying to avoid the same sort of issues that AI War 1 and 2 both ran into, and in the main that has been find for HotM because combat is not as central in that game. But I would like it to be beefy enough despite it not being the sole focus, so this is interesting.
I had implemented an armor and armor-piercing system in the past, but it wound up being absolutely a mess because it meant that you couldn't understand health bars accurately. This system would also cause that to a much lesser degree, but basically you just understand "if this is a poor match, the health bar is effectively bigger," and "if this is a good match, the health bar is effectively smaller." That's a lot easier for players to follow, I think. It's something I'm likely to experiment with, anyway.
Thanks for the discord invite, I'll see if I can pull myself away (work and game) and drop in a hello =). But I doubt I have anything meaningful to contribute.
Re: the formatted tooltip.
It's hard to describe why I could not benefit from the mod.
I think it has partially to do with the following 2 points.
1) I have come to rely on keyword prompts about shiplines. So missing those and having it replaced with unfamiliar symbols is a bit jarring.
2) It does not solve the bigger problem of understanding what is good at countering enemy compositions.
If I can summarize what goes on in my mind, it is the following.
a) When I select shiplines, I get to hover over the ships and see their capabilities. But I have no context as to which is good and beneficial against the opposition. So I would end up selecting the line with bigger strength number.
Since the game presents it upfront and summarized and it occupies so much (relative) of the info display, it *must* be the most important.
b) This will heavily influence the tech investment, because similarly it showcase the strength summary as the most visible aspect when we perform the upgrade.
c) As a newbie, I do not understand why some of the high strength fleets of mine gets owned (by those super weapons, or some other hard counter to the fleet composition) and it is not *intuitive* enough what can be done to counter them to a beginner. So I can be stumped and hit a wall.
d) Later, I would learn to hover over the enemy and attempt to see what kind of weapons in my arsenal would be good against them. By then it may be a bit late and maybe I had skewed the fleet composition or have not tech up appropriately.
I'm not sure what can be done to alleviate the problem.
Basically, I get info that I have no context to process. And then later, after I have made a series of decisions based on the most prominent visual prompt, I discover that there is much more to the numbers and I am *unable* or *unwilling/unbothered* to change my play pattern.
I am not sure what can be done, but a modification that can allow me to have a quick grasp of what the enemy composition is, and then somehow highlight the best shipline against that composition will be fantastic.
It'll go a long way towards helping me understand how the various shiplines interact with one another.
It would indeed take a prohibitive amount of effort.
But I do think that an essential mod would be picked up even by newbies. Critically acclaimed mods are typically recommended even to starting Newbies. Battle Brothers, Battletech, XCOM all have their must-have mods that are routinely recommended to new players.
I think the effects of such a mod can be greatly underestimated.
Ultimately the experience of most players is always going to be with the default setup in a game, not with what all the options allow for or what mods they can use to change it up.