Solo vs. multiplayer, campaigns, and difficulty

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr@gmx.net>]

Hey there,

first of all, in case you don't make it to the end of this mail, a
short question I'd like to get a few answers for:
Do you think the maps in Crimson Fields are too easy, too difficult,
or just about right?

Now, let's descend in medias res.

I've had a bit of a private discussion about this with Dave already,
so I'll try to summarize the points we have and throw in a few more
of my own for good measure.

Basically, the question is whether we need to rework the way Crimson
Fields handles scenarios with respect to player settings and difficulty
levels.

There are a number of drawbacks with the current situation:

A) We have a separation of solo and multiplayer maps. Due to the limited
AI solo maps are usually not very enjoyable against a human opponent
and multiplayer maps are usually very easy against the computer. It
would be nice if we could find a way to make maps work for both setups.

B) In single-player you can only control one party. Right now it's not
really useful the other way around as the Kandelians have vastly
superiour numbers in most single-player maps, but if we can solve 1)
this may no longer be the case.

C) There have been a few "complaints" in the past especially regarding
Revelation and to a lesser extent Anthill as well that they are too
difficult. Personally, I think those two are the most challenging we
currently have and we need more maps like that. Others may disagree,
though, and some kind of difficulty setting could be a way to make
everybody happy.

At the same time, the current approach also has a few nice aspects I'm
not willing to give up easily.

a) Campaigns. Campaigns consist of an arbitrary number of maps. Later
maps can be played only after you have successfully finished earlier
ones. (Solo) campaigns usually only make sense when the human player
chooses the side the mapper intended. (It _is_ possible to have branches
depending on who wins a scenario, but this requires _a lot_ more work,
obviously.) 

b) (Also connected to campaigns.) Campaign maps are not available until
after completing the predecessor. Not even for multiplayer games. IMO
this is a good thing, as it provides incentives for completing the
campaign.


Below I'll try to outline a possible solution. It doesn't fix everything
mentioned above and in a few places it's not very elegant, but I think
it's suitable as a discussion paper.

1) Introduction of difficulty levels. Let's assume [easy, medium, hard]
for now. This can solve A) (a solo map on [easy] is basically the same as
a multiplayer map) and C) (if a map is to easy for you, play on [hard]
instead of [medium], or the other way around). There are two ways to
change the difficulty of a scenario:
 * enable/disable certain AI features, or
 * modify the scenario itself (add/remove units, crystals; change a few
   tiles...)

With the current, weak AI, changing the feature set does not look
promising. It is bad enough with everything enabled so it should always
do the best it can. That leaves changing the scenario itself. It has the
advantage that the mapper has much better control over how the scenario
plays and it's easier to balance a map on all difficulty levels, but on
the downside it's more work for the mappers as they need to consider 3
modes when balancing instead of 1.

It gets a little problematic when we also try to resolve B). As soon as
the human player can also choose to command the second party, [easy] is
not just [easy] any more. Consider an imaginary scenario. If the human
player is restricted to Player 1, the mapper can define

if DIFFICULTY is [easy] then
  add 3 Medium Tanks for Player 1 at 3/5, 4/5, and 4/6
end if

If the human player can also select to be Player 2 the above statement
would actually make the map harder instead of easier. We could assign
a difficulty to the player instead of the entire game, but that would
complicate things very much (e.g. if Player 1 plays on [hard] and Player
2 plays on [hard] the difficulty would essentially be [medium] for both;
[hard] and [easy] would mean [very hard] for P1 and [very easy] for P2;
and so on). This looks like a mess (and a nightmare for mappers). I
currently have no idea how to solve this.

2) A clear distinction between campaign and non-campaign maps. One way
to do it would be to take the current main window, leave the maps list
as it is but label it "Play map" or so as opposed to "Play campaign".
You would still have all maps in the list, you could play all of them
as FNA or EoK or in multiplayer, and you would still need passwords for
maps which are part of a campaign, but if you played a map from a
campaign in this mode you would _not_ be taken to the next map in the
campaign.

In addition to the current "saved games" tab we'd have a third one called
"Play scenario". This list would only contain the very first map of each
scenario available, and each of those could only be played as Player 1.
(Should campaigns also be playable (as campaigns) in multiplayer?)
This preserves both a) and b).

There are a few technical consequences we need to consider eventually (we
need a new main window; the AI as is doesn't work when it's Player 1) but
those are relatively minor issues so we can neglect them until things are
properly sorted out, I think.

So there, let me know what you think.

Jens