Re: Solo vs. multiplayer, campaigns, and difficulty

[Dave Fancella <david.fancella@comcast.net>]

On Monday 08 March 2004 06:10 pm, Jens Granseuer wrote:
> > 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.

Apparently, it's coming.  ;)

> 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?

The problem with the generalized approach is that it's too mechanical.  It's 
too easy to tell that the game is exactly the same, just harder.  Generally 
(you may have noticed this in the soundtrack discussion) I like things to be 
different and unpredictable, so if the difficulty level thing can make it so 
that it's both harder and unpredictably so, it would be more fun to try the 
other levels.  It would also be more fun to keep playing the same level if 
it's always unpredictably different.

> > > 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.

True, but when playing two player, I don't expect to select a difficulty 
level.  Instead, I've selected an opponent.  ;)

> > 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.

I like where this is going.  ;)

> > 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? ;-)

Are you talking to me?!

> > My preference is to have two tabs, one for scenarios that makes all maps
> > available, and one for campaigns.
>
> Without passwords, that is?

Yes.

> 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)

I'm in favor of this, too, actually.  ;)  I've also been thinking that it 
would be cool if there were some way to score the entire game based on 
campaigns won and give the players at the end a score, like Marginal victory 
- FNA,  Decisive victory - Empire of Kand, etc.  It's always nice to be able 
to say "I won the game!"

> > 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.

It's cause and effect.  Theoretically, anyway, at least in a real war, if one 
campaign is won, it would make necessary another campaign, in order to win 
the war.  But if the first campaign is lost, the second campaign can't even 
be done because it depends on achieving positions in the first campaign.  SO 
you do something else.  We don't have to get that detailed, but that's what i 
was thinking, anyway.

> > 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

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