Seperating resources into team and personal. Why?
Ronarch
Join Date: 2012-03-24 Member: 149332Members
Join Date: 2012-03-24 Member: 149332Members
Sorry if this topic (I guess it is) is previously discussed.
I am quite a big fan of NS1. The feature of this game combines FPS and RTS and this forged my dream game. Despite of that I've just relocated my attention to NS2 a few days ago from other games, like SC2, BF3, FM2012, LOL.
And I am surprised to find NS2 is in close-beta stage and is open to people who pre-ordered the game. Then I immediately pre-ordered it.
Unluckily due to some technical problem my game key was not succesfully generated and now I am still awaiting for the team's feedback.
Today I just found that a big gameplay difference between NS1 and 2 is the resources thing.
There is team resources for commander to build things and upgrade tech and perosnal resources for marines to buy their own weapon...
Why is it neccessary? Shouldn't the marines wait for their commander to give them weapon and equipment?
Yes it's a gd idea to see marine approaching an armory to get his weapon but IMO it should only happen under the commander's permission.
I think one-pool resource (I am talking about the Frontiersmen side only) can allow the team to have better flexibility to allocate the resources and help to see tactics and plays which are more creative and freer.
I can spend all the res on SG or other weapons because I am going to a HUGE rush.
I can also spend all the res on defense and tech because I want a long strategic game.
Being seperated into two pools of resources makes a boundary for strategic freedom.
Like some features which I think very lame in RTS game.
You have 100 unit capacity. But for infantry, the capacity is 30. For vehicle, it's 30, for worker/farmer, it's the rest.
I hope I got the idea wrong. Please let me know.
One question too. Is the commander able to allocate a resources point to be "team res" or "personal res"?
If yes, it helps subsiding my complaint.
I am quite a big fan of NS1. The feature of this game combines FPS and RTS and this forged my dream game. Despite of that I've just relocated my attention to NS2 a few days ago from other games, like SC2, BF3, FM2012, LOL.
And I am surprised to find NS2 is in close-beta stage and is open to people who pre-ordered the game. Then I immediately pre-ordered it.
Unluckily due to some technical problem my game key was not succesfully generated and now I am still awaiting for the team's feedback.
Today I just found that a big gameplay difference between NS1 and 2 is the resources thing.
There is team resources for commander to build things and upgrade tech and perosnal resources for marines to buy their own weapon...
Why is it neccessary? Shouldn't the marines wait for their commander to give them weapon and equipment?
Yes it's a gd idea to see marine approaching an armory to get his weapon but IMO it should only happen under the commander's permission.
I think one-pool resource (I am talking about the Frontiersmen side only) can allow the team to have better flexibility to allocate the resources and help to see tactics and plays which are more creative and freer.
I can spend all the res on SG or other weapons because I am going to a HUGE rush.
I can also spend all the res on defense and tech because I want a long strategic game.
Being seperated into two pools of resources makes a boundary for strategic freedom.
Like some features which I think very lame in RTS game.
You have 100 unit capacity. But for infantry, the capacity is 30. For vehicle, it's 30, for worker/farmer, it's the rest.
I hope I got the idea wrong. Please let me know.
One question too. Is the commander able to allocate a resources point to be "team res" or "personal res"?
If yes, it helps subsiding my complaint.
Comments
From a commander standpoint, you should usually be focusing on the big picture of things, and avoiding as much tedium as possible. Dropping individual weapons for up to 10-12 players across 15 minutes of gameplay, when they die in between 30 seconds to a minute, would be tedium. It cripples your ability to continue to focus on watching the map and managing your tech, because you have people whining for a simple shotgun. Not only does this hold up the commander, but from the marine standpoint, you know you are annoying the comm. Plus its more waiting, and who wants to play a game where they wait(farmville)? Perhaps on an organized play standpoint, it could be argued the team would want to decide as a whole where to go, what to do, what to buy. The game has to be made for public play, however, and a lot of this organization can be lost.
Therefore, it is better that the resources be split. It gives the most options in terms of gameplay. You can rambo, spend your res on your own stuff, and see how much damage you can do. Not effective, but you can still do it if you want to. You can go with the team, and keep your personal res until the commander signals for a larger push. This is far more effective, and usually will lead to wins and therefore more "fun" gameplay. By winning, teamplay becomes reinforced and the essence behind an RTS/FPS collaboration is maintained. The result is the same, but does require a slightly longer learning curve than your method.
At any rate, I'm sure we could dive into this deeper, but I don't think it is necessary. Once you play the game for a while as marines, I think you will see how this all naturally flows together. If you are interested in seeing this at its peak, I'd suggest trying to get in on some organized play. This really demonstrates the flexibility of different ways to use this resource system.
The new Resourmodel of NS2 can handel 1vs1 or 16vs16.
F.e. If a round in NS1 started in a 1vs1 the alien player would get all the res and could get lots of them in a short amount of time, 1 per RT per tick. But on a 16vs16 all the alien players would get only 1/16 per RT per tick. Thats why RFK was needed that the aliens could atleast get res by killing in bigger games, so that 16vs16 felt like combat because RT had 0 importance.
In NS2 the splitt in Tres and Pres grants a fair game even on 1000vs1000.
pg2
In NS2 the splitt in Tres and Pres grants a fair game even on 1000vs1000.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes... I agree for Alien side, seperating Tres and Pres is a gd idea, as that an Alien does need indiviual res to develop its own lifeform. And the alien commander needs Tres to upgrade.
But for marine side, I see your point seperating Tres and Pres can help commander to have his/her focus on the big picture of the game instead of giving SG to a yelling marine.
However by common sense, I still believe the allocation of weapons or personal equipment is still done by the commander.
Is it also a possible idea for Commander to be able to adjust "Weapon / Equipment budget" for the team?
Then the marines can approach an armory to get what they want within the budget they are given.
The cmdr can do the action "give budget" only once maybe every few minutes and I think this is not too tedious to perform.
It's even better if the cmdr has a option to set "Give xx Res to Weapon / Personal Equipment pool per xx sec"
With the current 2-resource model, isn't it strange if a cmdr needs a distress beacon to save his base but he cannot do it due to the lack of Tres, while some marines are actually holding Pres 10 times more than the Tres?
Therefore I asked if it's possible to switch the res points from one pool to the other.
The 2-resource model seems so set but it would be better to me if the answer to this question is yes.
Then you could make the p-res and t-res income scale with player count with different slope, for example when the number of aliens players double the res flux increase by 25% or whatever, and similar for marines t-res.
The other thing is that the current res system has also a lot of problems, e.g. :
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=116807&st=0&start=0" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t=0&start=0</a>
Just a extreme example on a pub server.
So we lose performance. The res system shouldn't be to dynamic, in the sens of fluctuating RT numbers, something that works from start to end on any playernumbers at anytime.
And the game already do it, an alien rt that produce one res per minute with one player will produce two res per minute when a second player join.
Let's take two marine teams, one with 6 players and one with 16.
First the 6 players team. In a given time interval the marine comm get 10 resources, now we fix as a design decision that in a standard game the marine will spend 2 res for two shotguns and 8 res for infrastructure. So we got 2 out of 6 marine with a shotgun, so 1/3 of the team.
Now if we want also to have one third of shotguns in the 16 players team (which is the proper definition of scaling) and the same infrastructure, the marine comm need to have 13 res (5 sg + 8 infrastructure). So while the player count increased by 2.6 fold (16/6) the res income rate only increased by 1.3 fold (13/10).
The decisive advantage of this over the double res system is that it allows the commander to not spend money on shotgun (army) and to buy infrastructure (tech or economy) instead which is the very basic of strategy games.
But I guess the double res system is more consistent with the combat oriented design in ns2 (cf. google doc).
I hope it's not
This. First minute of Summit, comm's busy overseeing three squads of marines exploring the map and getting bit by skulks - the last thing on his mind is requisitioning mines for individual marines. That would increase micromanagement far too much for anyone's enjoyment.
Maybe it worked for NS1, but I personally prefer NS2's separation of the two.
Ns1 experience speaks the opposite. It takes 5 seconds for a Marine to drop 5 packs of mines.
actually I think 70-80 is gd enough for handling everything for a marine commander
and this is considered low in most RTS game.
True.
That's also why some of us say requiring a commander to individually give weapon/ equipment to a marine is not really that difficult
Depends what you mean by "need", because the Marine Commanders APM is heavily limited by resource flow.
With 1 RT there is not really much you can do/spam, with 5 RT's it can get busy spending all the res.
The other issue is how your marines are split up, having a couple of rambos all over the map requires more APM and micro compared to just having 2 groups of marines.
You can also add "useless" APM by giving waypoints instead of using voice chat.
But 20-30 APM is way too low imho, early game with a low resource flow this might add up and work. But mid game with 3+ RT's, an expansion and 2 OB's you usually can break at least 60 APM just with med/ammo spam (keep in mind that dropping a single med/ammo requires 2 key presses). Depending on how the round goes you gonna have to micro ARC's/MAC's at some point, those tend to add quite a bit of APM because of pathing issues.
Imho it's still an kinda flawed figure to use for NS commanding, unlike real RTS games you don't have to micro every individual unit around. Majority of your units micro themselves, because of that you will never get into constant high APM regions like with RTS games. Also RTS games usually give you an advantage for high APM and keeping it high at all times. That doesn't really work in NS because of resource/energy limitations coupled with the lack of units to micro. So NS APM is not that high on average, but it makes up for it by throwing situations at you where high APM are essential for survival.
On topic: I'm not really that sure about the new resource model yet. As somebody who loved commanding in NS1 the current system feels kinda OP to me, there is no more need to save up res for some nice weapon drops to equip the whole team. But i love how it cuts down on the overall micro, just research something and see your marines run around with it. Makes the whole thing feel like some kind of simulated ant-farm you play around with ;)
On the other hand this removes tons of viable tactics from the commanders playbook. As it's right now, there is basically no reason at all to pool up team resources so you can "spam" something to give your whole team an instant combat boost. But i guess that's in the nature of the whole new resource design.
As an Marine i like the new system, but only because you are less screwed if you end up having a comm that doesn't know what he's doing. But it get's frustrating with control freak comm's who think that shotguns are the only things marines need while wasting res on ARC's/Sentries.
In the end it's mixed feelings all over the place, missing the "total control" feeling compared to NS1 but really like "ant-farm"style equipping your marines as it harmonizes very well with my style of public commanding. Add in the MAC's and ARC's and overall it feels like an more awesome version of NS1 commanding, at the price of feeling disconnected from the marines on the ground.
So try giving the new system a chance, yes it's certainly different but that doesn't mean that it's worse. And once you are used to the different dynamics it really feels like a beefed up version of NS1 Marine Commanding.
<!--quoteo(post=1920223:date=Mar 31 2012, 07:30 PM:name=rebirth)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rebirth @ Mar 31 2012, 07:30 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1920223"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->As an Marine i like the new system, but only because you are less screwed if you end up having a comm that doesn't know what he's doing.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This was a great problem on pubs in NS1 and you can expect to find many of "not-so-good" coms after release.