Re: Campaigns revisited

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

On Saturday 13 March 2004 02:16 pm, Jens Granseuer wrote:
> b) Campaigns in multiplayer
> b1) When playing a campaign against the computer, maps will get
> harder the farther the campaign progresses. This means that later
> maps will not be balanced for multiplayer.

Is it really necessary for the maps to get harder the farther the campaign 
progresses?  Not that I object, the underlying assumption is usually that the 
player gets better with each progressive map.  I ask because I'm really in to 
story-driven games, and it makes sense to me that the maps should only get 
harder or easier if the story requires it.  Some campaigns make perfect sense 
that the maps would get more complicated, because the assumption is that the 
player is playing the FNA, and the FNA and the revolution in general should 
be growing with each victory, allowing for more units to be put in the field 
and larger battles fought, hence the battles themselves get more complicated, 
although not necessarily harder.  I guess you'd have to define 'harder'.  
Because if you're defining 'harder' as 'more complicated', then I think this 
is a non-issue.  :)

> b2) Multiplayer campaigns get really complex. When playing
> against the computer the player will only advance to the next map
> if he wins. You can still have branches (e.g. a map with two main
> objectives, and choose the next map depending on which one the
> player accomplished). In multiplayer you'd basically need to
> provide a branch for each map. That doesn't seem feasible.

The two main problems I see with branching are the pure number of maps needed 
and making sure the story is always consistent in any path the players go 
through.  So that makes branching for two player campaigns somewhat beyond 
the current level of development, but not an unachievable goal in the future.  
Is it possible to allow for branching now, but have campaigns single player 
so that we could allow two-player campaigns later with branching?  You know, 
later when there are more maps?

> That's why I propose to make campaigns single-player only.
>
> (In that case we could actually call difficulty levels "easy",
> "medium", and "hard" for campaigns. We'd still need names for
> single-map games, though)

Well, to be honest I think that every map should be in a campaign, which is 
why I think that single-map mode should open up every map for play.  :)

It occurs to me that maybe all maps should be available only in two player 
games, and single player only allows campaign play.

> c) Difficulty for campaign maps in multiplayer (single-map) games.
> As mentioned before, campaign maps tend to be biased. Do we just
> accept that as it is or can we do something about it? If we live
> with it, I guess that means we need to keep the (1) or (2) player
> markers in the map list.

Well, to be honest, right now my preference is to have all maps available in 
single-map mode just because there aren't a lot of maps (and those of us who 
first heard of battle isle heard about it in the description of crimson 
fields don't happen to have any battle isle maps laying around to play).

Anyway, I'm not certain that campaign maps have to biased, but how biased the 
maps are depends entirely on how good the AI is, so my thinking here is that 
since the intent is to make the AI much better and more configurable then 
it's too early to be able to really fine-tune a map for the AI vs. a human 
player and it's entirely possible that the target AI is good enough that the 
balance issue won't be an issue at all.

Dave

> That's what's currently on my list. Solutions and suggestions
> requested. Now's also the last chance for (major) corrections and
> objections.
>
> Jens

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