Re: Solo vs. multiplayer, campaigns, and difficulty

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr@gmx.net>]

On 07.03.2004 22:00, Dave Fancella wrote:
> On Friday 05 March 2004 06:27 pm, Jens Granseuer wrote:
> > 1) Introduction of difficulty levels.
[...]
> >  * enable/disable certain AI features, or
> >  * modify the scenario itself (add/remove units, crystals; change a few
> >    tiles...)
> 
> With a better AI, I would prefer to enable/disable features of the AI.  How 
> about this:

Erm, we don't have a better AI.

> The mapmaker decides 3 tactics that are critical to winning the map, such as 
> "Artillery", "Air support", "Infantry", or whatever, in addition to the 
> objectives, of course.  Then, in easy mode the computer would randomly choose 
> one of these and reduce it.  In medium mode the computer would randomly 
> choose two of these and reduce them.  In hard mode the computer would reduce 
> all three (or take the reciprocal approach).  By "reduce", I mean reduce the 
> strength of the units, if the tactic is a unit-based tactic.  I'm not 
> thinking of any non-unit-based tactics right now, but I'm sure there are 
> some.  Well, like crystals.  Say 'crystals' is named as a tactic critical to 
> winning the map.  To reduce it the computer would reduce the number of 
> crystals available on the map, or possibly unbalance them in favor of the 
> computer.

That's another interesting possibility. I keep thinking that those
generalized approaches can easiliy go wrong, but this is mainly gut feeling,
I can't supply any hard evidence. Maybe we'd just have to try it. I'd
like to hear some mappers' opinions, though. After all, they are the ones
who have to live with it in the end. Brain?

> > 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
> 
> This is solved by just playing the map straight.

What do you mean? Playing it without any changes applied? But that's
very much misleading. After all, if I select [easy] I expect the map to
be easier than if I had selected [medium]. And that shouldn't depend on
whether I play FNA or Kand.

> You might offer a handicap 
> feature for two players, in case one of the players is significantly more 
> experienced or whatever.

I was going to propose to support difficulty levels only when playing
single-player. This, however, is exactly the right argument to shoot
that down again. We're basically back where we started.

How about this: Drop the [easy] etc. stuff and call it [normal],
[advantage p1], [advantage p2] instead. We'd have to come up with some
proper names, of course, but this should be enough to get the idea across.
This way we'd have three settings, and three settings only, which can
be applied in both single-player and multiplayer matches.

> In fact, you specifically, Jens, who has been 
> playing this game ever since it was first playable, might start wanting that 
> feature soon.  ;)

Heh, already giving up? ;-)

> > 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.
> 
> My preference is to have two tabs, one for scenarios that makes all maps 
> available, and one for campaigns.

Without passwords, that is?

> In the campaign tab, instead of showing 
> the map in the right-hand frame you'd display the story for the campaign.

Fine.

> I also think that campaigns should be playable by two players, and they should 
> reasonably fork, so if one player wins one map they play a different map than 
> if the other player had won.  This will be more reasonable when more of the 
> story is done (hopefully I'll make another pass at it tonight, I'd like to 
> have the basic story ready for the 0.4.2 release), and also when the world 
> map finally gets drawn (any takers?).  The basic issue here is whether or not 
> the players make the story, or if they're forced to adhere to a certain 
> story, or some compromise between the two.  If forced to adhere to a story, 
> then instead of letting maps fork we'd just not let them advance in the 
> campaign until the Proper Player has won the map.

I'm in favour of players making history. Just replaying a story that's already
been written is only half the fun. I'd also like tighter coupling of the maps
in a campaign. (This somewhat disqualifies the current campaign, but that's ok)

> We can also make sure the 
> story branches in ways that make it possible to reuse many of the maps, just 
> changing up the unit configuration, and that would mean designing the maps to 
> accomodate one or the other player having the upper hand in the campaign.
> Some thought would also need to be put into how the battles in one campaign 
> affect other campaigns, or if they even should.

Campaigns should not affect other campaigns.

> Finally, when allowing two player campaigns, there needs to be some way of 
> scoring the campaign, so that at the end of the campaign one player can look 
> at the other and say "You lost, I won", and do a victory dance.

You can do much of that with proper branching, though you'll get problems
when players keep taking turns winning.

Jens