Yeah, the style of the map is a huge factor here, in a defense, I'd have it help them out a ton as it doesn't hurt other players much, but in a map like Storm the Fort(They need a new map type name for those...) you can't just keep them completely even, as it takes some skill to get ahead of the other player, I think that maybe if you also added a delay from the time that they fell behind and the time they started getting help, that might improve the system even more.

STF style maps are called AoS style maps ain't they?

AoS=Aeon of Strife I believe. I dont have it but i want it.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 19 2009, 7:07 am by zany_001.

Actually, this doesn't hurt the gameplay. In fact, it should improve it.
If you're more skilled and etc., and you're winning, then you'll feel that the game is treating you right by giving you more powerful weapon/upgrades or etc. .. If you don't get stuff for winning, then what's the point?

It is a concern for some casual/hardcore but tired players, and most maps can help out by giving ppl who died for example 3 times w/o getting a kill, a bonus weapon or "rage" (like in brawl, you get the smash ball if you die 3 times w/o getting a kill). Some maps can also include little bonuses like these. But, a map should always award the winners more than the losers. So I think those money system u said (losers getting more money) isn't a good deal for most games :S. It just takes out the incentive to win.

For TS, I used to give the person a free civ when they finished the tutorial session.. (altho it was removed.. i'm thinkin' of putting it back)... also, the game works on many levels, so losers can still become winners by doing the right thing. Like, if their enemy captures the outposts, they can still win if they play right, and recapture them. It is just.. harder.. since you lost the chance in the first place. This gives incentive for the loser to replay this game in order to Not lose that same chance again in the next game, and then hopefully win.

It would still help them, since they would have the good weapons, and they would have an advantage over their enemies, during that time they can use this advantage to wear down forces, capture points, and other such things, however, in most games, as soon as someone hits this, they've won the game, the rest of the game is almost not even worth playing.
Getting ahead gives you an advantage where you can do the permanent damage, then the other player catches up and it's now a fight to pull ahead again.

Well, the real problem is that you want to leave a chance for the underdog to win, but have to avoid rewarding a player for being last. What you don't want is to negate the possibility of a player gaining an advantage; after all, that's what both sides are supposed to be working towards. It sucks to be winning every battle and then have those victories count for nothing just because the map is triggered to help the loser; winning, not losing, should be rewarded. So increasing the income of the losing player isn't really a good solution. If anything, a one-shot income boost would be slightly better, because it lets them start pushing back at the winner, but the using-up of the emergency money counts as an accomplishment for the winning side, who will still have their own emergency money coming to them if they get pushed back that far. Sure, it might be a less "professional" solution, but professionalism for its own sake is worthless.

Building in a turning point at the middle can be a bit better, but all it really does is slightly delay the onset of the original problem while simultaneously adding an incentive for a team to deliberately give ground at the beginning. The more you stretch out the battle to "tilt the balance", as it were, the more unsatisfying it will be for the players to do anything, because they'll get so little progress towards that tilting point back in return for their effort.

The only truly adequate solution to the problem is to make strategy sufficiently important to the gameplay that a weaker side can defeat a stronger one through superior play, be it by outmaneuvering the opponent, choosing a different form of attack, or some other means. Ideally, a game has one or both of the following two possibilities:

1) The weaker player can, without any artificial "help", become the stronger. This might happen through being able to rebuild in secret in another part of the map, being able to bypass enemy forces to take over territory, being able to develop a counter to the opponent's forces, etc.
2) A weaker player can win without having to take over as the stronger. Perhaps there's some way to pull off a decisive attack on a certain target to end the game, something that a fast, heavily-armed strike force might accomplish if skillfully maneuvered through the opponent's defenses, or some way to kill the enemy by landing a good shot with some weapon or spell even though they are the stronger one.

Probably the best example that I've seen of this sort of balance is BattleCruiser Command. Builder losing ground? Relocate and rebuild; get some defenses up in a new place before they know you're there. Enemy troops mopping up your bases? Have your builder get up some air before dying and make a strike at the other cruiser. Can't hit the other ship hard enough? Board it and kill it from the inside. There's almost always hope, even if it comes down to trying to get the other ship to overextend itself as it kills the last of your base, but at the same time, any advantage is a real, material advantage, not something trivial that the other team can take away because the map is designed to prevent advantages. That balance might have something to do with why that map is still played after so many years despite needing a decent group of non-newbs to get a game going.

The point of all this? There's no decent solution that you can just tack on to a map to fix the advantage problem; the gameplay has to be designed from the start with being, well, a good game in mind. Yes, that means you can't take any old idea, no matter how "cool" it might seem, and make a good game out of it; sorry, but too bad.

In a perfect world that would work, however random B.netters don't care about a fair game.



The loser only gets enough money to catch up with the winner, so it becomes a struggle to be the winner for a short time, and during that short time do the real damage.


Perhaps you missed my post that there is a delay from the time that a side starts losing and when they begin receiving money, the idea of this is to keep the high action part of the game alive--when both players have to play their hardest in order to pull ahead of the others, during this time that they're ahead, they can also set themselves up to stay ahead, even with the increase of minerals, it's not like I'm going to start quadrupling the losing side's income, just a bit of a boost so they can catch up, they won't immediately, it will take time, so pulling ahead has the award of having that time ahead to do damage.

It's pretty naive to believe any old idea can't be tweaked to make it a good one. That's basically how every idea begins... something that isn't quite good yet. Not all can become good, but that all depends, now, doesn't it? I don't believe I originally had the idea for sacrificing one of my reactors in Life Force for special effects, but that can be a pretty strategic way of saving yourself as if to cut off an infected limb, and have that limb turn into a terrible monster (if anyone's reading bleach, lol?).

I believe one of the most useful fixes is the system of two different rewards. One style goes to the winner, and one goes to the loser. It's up to you to make them work out properly, but that's what I was saying I did with Dominance, in that the winner basically gets minerals (necessary to actually win) but the loser gets a small bit of fuel for becoming strong, keeping the game more exciting STILL, even though they may have used most of their fuel in a failed spell or two, and are in a worse position in points to win as well. The fuel basically helps heal that wound and prepare them for the next fight to win or lose ground in points.

Outright altering the income is pretty blatant, no matter how much you think you can predict and control it to be "even"... so I can't say I like the idea, nor do I like the "secret stash" concept which is essentially just a 2nd life for each player.

I still think my previous large post can be helpful, so consider it: http://www.staredit.net/122677/

Well, I figure that if you do the math properly, and don't add too much, and also add a delay from the time they fall behind and the time that they receive extra, and maybe even have a certain amount they have to be behind in order to get the help..

Vastly, i never had the problem myself in any of my maps, its quite to fix everything without much of an add:

in RPG's balance out possible classes, which AINT that hard overall as it seem, and make rapid monster spawns like in diablo RPG maps, if you want to see such an option check out True Diablo RPG or Truer Diablo RPG, they re all the same.

For example in my Enemy Territory map, you get to choose amongst 5 classes, Medic, Covert Ops, Soldier, Engineer, Support Ops, and all of those are heavily balanced, if a player dies i saw him changing the unit multiple times and getting back to an old unit.

in Defence maps simply put a trigger which declude the first player or a few first in the kill table from a mineral bonus depending on lvl's, you can see that in Vortex TD and other versions of this plain map, where normally u get a bonus of about 40 minerals per turn, however the first in the leaderboard doesnt get the bonus and have to relay only on given kills.

Lotrish/Strategy might be harder to balance like this but here u dont need the balance at all, hence u mostly get to start with a small force and have to expand and depending how u expand u get that much strong, cheers to diplomacy maps.

This still leaves a single player in the dust, sure the first player won't pull too far ahead, but the last one can easily be left behind.

Not rly, since after a while thx to outcome bonus coming from other players one will gain the 1st leaderboard place, then he will probably switch within a round or two, and the last player gets the bonus ALL the time, this means that he may get on top as well.

Also in RPG's u can enable an option to share exp, hard to do, but balances it out ALOT.

Works perfectly.

The first and second players will just swap back and forth, one will get the money, pull ahead, and then the other will, all other players except for one is getting helped as much as the worst player, only reason that they would ever get back up is if the money reward is ridiculously high.

This idea would not work in two-sided games. No matter how you dress it up, someone will be royally pissed off. If someone falls behind in the game, it means they were either worse than the other team, messed up, or went afk. For any of these instances, I would hate to see that these actions go unnoticed with a generous bonus. If a team makes these mistakes, then the game should be lead to its conclusion. How do you think people would feel when they lose to a pro who purposely goes afk for the first five minutes of the game? Granted, similar situations can happen now, but helping the underdog in this case would only inflate it.

I don't play Diplomacy, but I would imagine that people wouldn't host the version where the loser gets a mercy-city.

However, this idea would not be a bad idea for many other types of games.

Team defense games should not be based on kills-to-cash unless you want specific players to gain dominance. The only solution I can see to this would be to reduce the kills-to-cash reward and have a fixed amount of money given to each player at the end of a round, or eliminate the kills-to-cash completely.

The only time this would be used in a VS map is if there is more than two teams. That way, the losing team/person would not necessarily get the bonus to win the game, but get enough to perhaps change the outcome of the game.


In any case, this idea would make games last a lot longer, and I don't think public UMS players can sit through very much. At least we don't have to worry about this for bounds

On a side note: Is there an equivalent to Line Tower Defense from Warcraft III for SC? Or is Income Defense the closest we have to that? (Don't bother replying to this unless you're already replying to what I said earlier).

It is fundamentally impossible to make a fair map that helps the underdog in pvp.

If a player is losing, and the map gives them the advantage, you're simply changing the objective to making players try to have less points.

The best way to avoid such a problem, is to prevent exponential growth. For instance, if the object of the game is to make money, don't make it so it's easier to make money, the more money you have.

Another solution would be to make advances small.
An rpg with 50 levels, for example, would make it easier for a level 21 to catch up to a level 24 than it would be in an rpg with 10 levels, for a level 4 to catch up to a level 6.
In the 50 level game, there is a difference of 3 levels but only 6% overall, but in the 10 level game there is a difference of 2 levels but 20% overall difference.

Also, exponential growth might actually help the underdog. Take the level 21 for instance, if he only needs 2000 exp to get to level 24 but the level 24 needs 1000 exp to get to level 25, the 21 guy is getting a ratio of 1.5 times more levels per exp than the 24 guy. It also helps that the difference between levels in a 50 level system is much less than the 10 level system. The 24 level guy might only be 6% stronger than the 21 guy, like calculated above. Of course, if the 21 guy just sucks, he's never going to get back into it, but if he's reasonably skilled and the map has enough complexity to allow for some trickery, he can get back in it fast, especially when they get up in the area of say, level 40ish: i.e. Unit with 9000 health, level 24 guy --> level 43, level 21 guy --> level 40. 6% difference in health is a unit with 7740 and 7200 health (respective to their levels), vs at level 24 and level 21, 4320 and 3780. At higher levels, 6% difference in total health is only 7.5% of the lower guys health, but at the lower levels, the 6% difference is 14.3% of the lower guys health.

Edit: Terribly sorry, that's actually logarithmic growth, since the EXP required to get the next level is exponential.

I think you, like everyone else, is thinking that this will be a massive help, it will not, only enough to give the losing players more than their enemies, while they are also trying to get points. Hence, if a player was AFK, they would get no points, the problem is that in some games the other player pulls so far ahead that the opposing team can't even get points, in this case, the few points they manage to scrape out equal the large amounts that the enemy has.


It is not, the objective does not become having less points, as you will never do any permenant damage, you won't pull ahead of the other team, you'll just not fall behind, the point is to change the game focus from simply pulling completely ahead, to staying ahead and doing damage while you're ahead.

Logarithmic growth is a good way of doing it, but IMO it's not enough, but a map should have something like this:

(woops, wrong way, swap the power and cost )
If nothing else, however, that's definitely a limited method, as what happens is the game eventually comes to a slowdown as it gets harder and harder to advance.

rofl'd until I saw you meant it the other way around.

This has no purpose then, other than to stretch out the inevitable end. If the bonus is small, then the game will go on for one to five more minutes before the underdog finally fails. If the bonus is large, then someone could purposely be behind and qualify for the "underdog bonus" to win the game. In a 1v1 or Team v Team, this concept would either extend the boring part of a game or ruin a great game.

This allows the underdog to actually pull ahead if they work hard enough, and keeps the game active, rather than just one player pwning the other without any chance of change.