NS 2 Economy mod - No p.res system
Xarius
Join Date: 2003-12-21 Member: 24630Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Join Date: 2003-12-21 Member: 24630Members, Reinforced - Supporter
I'd would like to create a 'no p.res mod'. I reckon it wouldn't be too difficult from a coding point of view so hopefully, with some help, I'd be able to put it together without too much trouble.
Why get rid of personal resources? Firstly, I'm of the sincere belief that the whole p.res system is detrimental to this game's balance and ultimately, at least in its current implementation, heavily favours aliens who require no T.res research prior to being able to spend p.res on lifeforms. In addition to this, it forces the commander to make a trade-off between teching up on the one hand and investing in players on the other. (By giving them better weapons and lifeforms to maintain map control) As a result of this relatively simple economic change, there would also be no more tech explosions like there are today.
Secondly, as an NS 1 veteran, I very much miss the days where commanders would have an actual say in what players run with when. Instead of merely 'unlocking' shotguns, I want to be able to decide at what time I want my marines to use those shotguns, jps, exos, whatnot.
Ultimately this will give the commander the ability to coordinate his team and execute a given strategy A LOT better than it does in NS 2 vanilla. Yes the price is loss of individual freedom, though I am of the opinion that this is a small price to pay for achieving greater balance, tighter teamwork and deeper, more effective, strategy from the commander's side of the game. Also, surely for competitive games in general, such loss of personal freedom would practically be no price at all?
I may need to think of some way to evenly distribute lifeforms in particular among players, to prevent a situation from arising where one or more players are stuck as skulk for the entire game, which obviously wouldn't be fun. Perhaps players would still be given 'credits' to choose lifeforms, rather than having to race to lifeform eggs. But that's only a concern for later implementations, first we would need to get the basic mod concept running, and adjust t.res values accordingly.
Thoughts are appreciated.
Why get rid of personal resources? Firstly, I'm of the sincere belief that the whole p.res system is detrimental to this game's balance and ultimately, at least in its current implementation, heavily favours aliens who require no T.res research prior to being able to spend p.res on lifeforms. In addition to this, it forces the commander to make a trade-off between teching up on the one hand and investing in players on the other. (By giving them better weapons and lifeforms to maintain map control) As a result of this relatively simple economic change, there would also be no more tech explosions like there are today.
Secondly, as an NS 1 veteran, I very much miss the days where commanders would have an actual say in what players run with when. Instead of merely 'unlocking' shotguns, I want to be able to decide at what time I want my marines to use those shotguns, jps, exos, whatnot.
Ultimately this will give the commander the ability to coordinate his team and execute a given strategy A LOT better than it does in NS 2 vanilla. Yes the price is loss of individual freedom, though I am of the opinion that this is a small price to pay for achieving greater balance, tighter teamwork and deeper, more effective, strategy from the commander's side of the game. Also, surely for competitive games in general, such loss of personal freedom would practically be no price at all?
I may need to think of some way to evenly distribute lifeforms in particular among players, to prevent a situation from arising where one or more players are stuck as skulk for the entire game, which obviously wouldn't be fun. Perhaps players would still be given 'credits' to choose lifeforms, rather than having to race to lifeform eggs. But that's only a concern for later implementations, first we would need to get the basic mod concept running, and adjust t.res values accordingly.
Thoughts are appreciated.
Comments
People are generally against this in the real world
Seriously though, it sounds like it would actually be a really easy mod. Just disable a few things like the armory and prototype lab GUIs, lifeform selection buttons, and the p.res displays in the HUD and player list. Then increase the amount of resources given to the team by each resource node. An experienced NS2 modder could probably have this done in an hour or two, though I'm not sure how well it would survive NS2 patches. (i'm not an experienced NS2 modder).
Might also want to set p.res flow to be always 0 just in case there actually is some kind of overflow system like I've heard there might be.
P.res and starting p.res should definitely be set to 0. I'll also need to come up with a solution for hydras. I reckon there could just be a 'commander hydra pool' that commanders pump t.res in to allow gorges to place hydras. With such t.res cost attached to it, one could technically allow hydras to be more powerful or upgradeable by the com (so they scale better into the game) but that's not really part of the core business of this mod.
There's also a question of scaling, i.e I think ideally the t.res economy adjustment would be aimed at an average 18 player came (so 8 active players on both sides, not counting the comms) which is the average of what most servers run (16 - 20 player servers). In the long run one could even look at ways to scale weapon and lifeform costs based on the amount of players in a team.
In summary:
- Set p.res income and starting p.res to 0
- Recalibrate t.res income and perhaps weapon/lifeform costs for an average of 16 'active' players.
- Disable armory and protolab menu. Alien lifeform menu needs to stay in place as aliens need it to select upgrades.
- Have hydras as a free 3 per gorge (perhaps on cooldown) for the initial release
Aliens will probably also need some prereq 'unlock' tech in place for (lerk), fade and onos to put these in line with the marine t.res sinks that are in place for equipment. I'd also contemplate tying upgrades of a single type (i.e both cara and regen) into a single upgrade structure for aliens, so at least there aliens are given more freedom, but that's not an immediate concern.
Look for "[CPC] Louck", if you want to discuss about this, on steam
All it would take is setting harvester pres generation rate to 0 and adding a new ability to commander's command card - "Give personal resources". It would cost some tres and add some pres to every player on the team. The conversion ratio could be dependent on team size, solving the scaling problem as well.
Seems clean and simple to me.
That being said, if the commander just provides p.res instead of specific lifeforms and weapons, he is no longer given greater coordination ability and strategic control. What if instead of just handing out p.res he would invest in a weapons or lifeform pool that players then could 'freely' pick from? Though I just now realise that this is just a more elegant way of dropping weapons and lifeforms... :P *(It'd be cleaner at least, go up to the armory and you would see the amount of SGs, mines, etc available)
You'd still need a way to prevent a small amount of (bad or otherwise) players from 'hogging' all the lifeforms on top of this though (Cooldown system?) as we definitely want to ensure all players can get to play a higher lifeform at some point. I mean, you could have the same player pick up the lerk egg, then die, pick up the fade egg, eventually die and then pick up the onos egg when in a p.res system those would have gone to three seperate players.
As for bad players "stealing" all the lifeforms for themselves, I think this is something that is beyond control of game designers. It's a matter o team communication, tactical awareness and good manners. It was always a problem with multilayer games having vehicles (Unreal Tournament, Battlefield etc.) and in my opinion there's not much that can be done about it.
I mean, yes you could also go about fixing the economic problem by getting rid of the alien khamm, THAT would pretty much be a light version of NS2C.
Well yes and no, if the comm drops 70 p.res fpr every player to use then he still has no ability to determine what they use that on. Likewise, if he gives everyone say 50, some players may still use that to go lerk instead. Since, like you pointed out, we want to encourage teamwork/coordination and empower commanders in terms of strategic control, I think we should just see if we can run this without some artificial system giving players 'personal freedoms'. It worked fine for marines in NS 1, I don't see why it couldn't work here!
I'm thinking we will probably have to tie the onos to 2 hives and the fade to 1. Getting rid of hive requirements would enable the alien commander to save up for an onos at the start of the game and that would be a completely broken strategy. I also think we will probably have to make the commander unlock fade and onos first before he can drop them, to put their timing more in line with the marine's tech. I suppose if the prereq tech is expensive enough we COULD do without tying onos to 2 hives. (This way aliens could still get onos at 1 hive and force a comeback just like they can in the current setup)
Example: the commander decides to never use the hypothetical "give pres" ability, every team member has 0 pres. Later, the commander decides to put 1 Gorge egg and 2 Lerk eggs using tres, same as it is possible in current NS2. As soon as players take those eggs, he now has 1 Gorge and 2 Lerks on his team. That's what I meant by "control over team composition". Adding the "give pres" option doesn't change that.
As a result, it'd probably be a needlessly complex situation to offer both and make it easy for rookie commanders to 'screw' up. I do understand the flexibility argument, though I think initially we should run with just t.res 'drops' and see where that gets us in terms of gameplay.
I've sat down and looked at the economics of it all and adapting the game's economy for both sides to a T.res only approach is a little more complex than one would at first hand imagine. It's not a matter of just setting p.res and p.res income to 0 and calling it a day, it actually requires a more comprehensive recalculation of both side's costs.
What I have done is I basically took NS 1's marine team res balance, http://www.unknownworlds.com/oldwebsite/manuals/comm_manual/basic/marineTechTreeClassic.htm, and with some modifications applied that to both sides. While I could very well work out something from scratch, doing so would be a little silly given the extensive fine-tuning that has gone into the marine's economy on NS 1.
Most importantly this means that the t.res per tick is changing from 1 t.res/6 second (NS2) to 1/4 seconds, this to compensate for the fact that both sides now have to provide their players with 'equipment' rather than them buying it by themselves. At the same time however, this also means that some other costs need to go up as well, as one side may very well decide to skip investing in its players to 'rush' tech. This IS going to be a viable strategy, but the slightly higher costs will keep the timing of said strategies 'in check'.
Two challenges remain, the first is balancing the alien economy for a t.res only approach. As there is no precedent in NS 1, I basically have to develop a proper 'approach' from scratch. In the initial version we will probably have only the onos tied at 2 hives, to prevent alien teams from just saving up for an onos ASAP that marines are simply not going to be able to counter. That being said, given that the alien economy has a lot less t.res sinks and prereq tech, I'm thinking about balancing this by making alien lifeform drops significantly more expensive in cost than their marine counterparts. (Their harvesters would also be relatively more expensive because of cyst costs).
The second challenge is one in regards to 'scaling'. Ideally we should and probably could have lifeform and weapon costs 'vary' based on the amount of players in a game, else a game with more than the 'intended' amount of players is simply going to have less lifeforms and equipment available, making it play out completely differently. For an initial release though, I would like to just put that 'intended' amount at 8 active players per side, so 18 player servers which is pretty much the average server size.
- No P.res system.
- Cost change for few items (weapons, hydras...)
- Restriction to 2 hives for the Onos egg, and no restriction ("1 hive") for the Fade egg.
After this version and a big playtest, we can discuss about changes and improvements around this gameplay.
Note: I offer my support for earlier versions. I'm pretty busy these days, and I have another mod (Forsaken) and a game to code
MOD ID: 77a6753
Version: PROTOTYPE
Have fun!
18 player limit
I will try to keep it up to date; but if someone would reply here whenever the mod or NS2 itself gets updated, it would help me stay on top of it.
Also if you guys have a better name for the server I'll change it.
If anyone else has a spare server we can use for testing in Europe as well, I would be very grateful!
It's an experimental concept and I really think it has some potential, so hopefully we can at least get to try it with a full server sometime.