So many contests, so little time

Summer is here and both Valve and Blizzard has released a fan contest and I want to win them both. The only slight flaw here is that I'm quite busy with work and probably won't have time to do great in both of them (and the odds of winning are astronomical).

I have the feeling that it's easier to reach your maximum potential faster in the novel contest, mapping takes a really long time. Mapping also happens to be a thing I really enjoy so I suppose I'll focus on that on my days off and then try to write the novel on the days that I'm working and only have a couple of hours to spare.

The good part about the novel is that I've already planned a single-player campaign for Starcraft 2 and thus had the story and characters mostly done. The hard work with writing only starts after you have all of the story down though and you have to revise your own words (or have other people do it). Reading something you wrote yourself for the n+50th time is likely to make you go insane.

I've made some progress on the art pass map as well, screenshots included after the jump. If you want to you can check out my tf2maps.net thread and post any comments there.

For anyone interested I've also enabled comments as well as subscription since my updates are currently quite unpredictable. If someone knows of a widget that allows you to put permanent links on the side, that would be excellent for my mapping projects.









Sunday update with WIP picture of capture B:


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Game design and the sunk-cost effect

The sunk cost-effect or the sunk cost dilemma is a theory of economics and game theory. The basics of the problem is that as projects keep going, it's more and more expensive to change your current implementation but you keep on working on it instead of starting over because of all the time already spent. Since most game developers seem to be working iteratively, all the fast iterations are in the beginning of a project and that's when most of the big scrapping of design happens. Most of the testing in a development cycle still happens near the end though, after all the modelling, animations and sound effects are already close to finished. After that, only minor details are changed to fix things like game balance and timing.

This is where I feel the cost-effect really start kicking in. Starcraft 2 is nearing it's development cycle now with beta phase 2 launched and only two weeks until full release. Blizzard's MO has always been (officially) to only release a game "when it's done". But is it really done?

In my own humble opinion, there are still several units that could use a change. It's just not going to happen. I expect the game to release mostly as it is now, with only one or maybe two minor balance patches. I had high hopes for the patch between the two phases of beta but it didn't really do much.

There are three units that I feel have the biggest issues in the game as it is now: the corruptor, reaper and ultralisk. The corruptor and the reaper have problems since their roles are so narrow they don't allow for any creativity. Now that the corruptor has even lost its corruption ability (given to overseers), it doesn't quite live up to it's name.

Since it has extra damage against massive targets and a long range, the corruptor seems to be intended as a counter to the tier three air units as well as colossi. As of right now, ninety percent or more of my games played don't last long enough to get any tier three air so the only reason to ever get corruptors is to kill colossi. After your opponent's big walkers are all dead, your heavy investment is basically only useful as extremely expensive scouts. Once games start lasting longer, the corruptor might be useful to great to get air dominance, until then I feel like it could have something like Brood war's Devourer, a small aoe that makes your units do more damage.

The reaper's main problem is that it costs a massive amount of gas, enough to not be cost-effective against anything else than workers and zealots in low numbers. They are also fragile to the point of dying near instantly to anything with a ranged attack. While this makes sense because the reapers have excellent mobility and decent damage versus light units, it also makes them worthless (except as scouts, jumping up on a ledge) after around five minutes of a game. If we compare the reapers to other tier 1 (or 1.5) units, there is the marauder, the stalker and the roach, which are all viable throughout most of a game.

I would like to see something that makes the reaper be a bit more useful later on, like allowing the combat shield upgrade to give additional health to reapers as well as marines, maybe even allowing them to stim and be a sort of anti-light part of a unit composition. This would allow a terran to micro better against banenings while having really expensive units up front, making for an interesting dynamic.

The third and biggest unit is the ultralisk. While Blizzard has said they would work on ultralisks for the beta 2 patch, the only changes have allowed them to no longer be stunned by Thor 250mm cannons and have less health, which I guess evens out. The purpose of the ultralisk seem to be as an anti-mech counter as well as base destroyer instead of cracklings but they are still terrible as tanks. The biggest problem with ultralisks is that they are simply too big.

The other expensive units like colossi, thor and tanks all have the benefit of having a ranged attack which means they don't need to be close to the unit they're damaging. It also means they can use a choke to their advantage while ultralisks need big, open areas. Most of the maps in the current active pool have really few open areas to fight in, meaning the zerg player will have to be extremely active with creep and try to flank and pincer their opponent, which is a lot trickier than a-moving. Just letting ultralisks walk over zerglings would fix a whole lot of problems.

All in all, the zerg feel a bit stale. They have a couple fewer units than the other two races which means they have fewer options to be creative with strategies. They're not bad and the balance feels pretty good. But I played 300+ games as zerg in the beta and I've decided to switch to terran for release which should say something, I'm just not a satisfied customer. The protoss are the only ones with no units I could find to complain about and they're also the ones who have the most viable unit compositions in my opinion. They also have storm, drops and warp gates which allow for excellent mobility and interesting games.

Do I expect Blizzard to go back to their drawing board and change any of the units? Not at all, the game has just come too far to stop but people have been talking about the ultralisks since patch 7 and that was three (?) months ago. The cost has just been put into the game and there is no going back, the game will be released as-is.

Is it ready? I don't think so.
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The marginal advantage versus defender's advantage

In my recent forays into Starcraft 2 tactics I've come across Sean "Day9" Plott, who has a web stream (Day9 daily) several times a week where he discusses strategies and tactics. While he doesn't cast a ton of games like other commentators, I watch most of his shows because since he pauses mid-game the strategic discussion has a lot more depth than other casters. He also does hilarious intros, which you might or might not like.

Apart from his dailies he's written an article, "The marginal advantage" that discusses expert play across several different games. While I recommend that you read the post in full, the focus of it (my interpretation) is that higher level players have a smaller edge on their opponents. A smaller edge takes longer to turn into a big enough difference to defeat your opponent (like a poker player has to play thousands of hands to realize their edge). As players learn to handle all the standard strategies you will have to invent new things to try and keep them off balance and try to force them to make the mistakes.

Instead of discussing it from a player's perspective like he does, I will try to approach the subject of marginal advantages from a designer's perspective. While his article discusses several genres of games, I will mostly write from a RTS standpoint and with Starcraft and Starcraft 2 as my major examples.

If balanced games make for interesting matches, where does the balance come from and how do we allow the marginal advantage without turning it into a slippery slope?

I will try to make the argument that defender's advantage is a feature built into the Starcraft games and intentional or not, it makes for exciting matches. Most high-level players grasp intuitively that attacking someone too early is bad but I'm not sure they define why.

One of the things from the first Starcraft game that has been discussed to the second one is high ground advantage. Instead of having a flat percentage miss chance they've removed the ability to attack things you can't see. If you have vision there will be no reduction. I think this has a reason and a good one at that: defender's advantage. If two players had exactly equal economy and production, the one who killed a unit or two early on would eventually win because of higher damage. Defender's advantage works like a kind of equalizer, forcing players to get a bigger edge than the defender's advantage blocks.

Let's say two armies worth 100 points clash in the middle of a map. After the battle one guy has 55 while the other has 50, making one player have a 5 point edge. If you make the defender's advantage be worth 20 army points, if the player with the edge attacks he will lose more points attacking, making the action in the game be back and forth. Not until one player has a big enough edge to overcome both the opponent's army and their advantages will the game end.

A defender has more types of advantages available to them than high ground and the importance of all of them change as the game progresses. High ground is good for blocking off armies during the entire game but blocking vision becomes harder late-game since most armies usually include some flying unit. The races in Starcraft are designed to have different types of defender advantages. The zerg relies mostly on mobility and vision, terran are slow and can turtle up and and the protoss are somewhere in-between.

One advantage that becomes less important later on is the shorter reinforcement path. Having your opponent near your base means the units you build to counter his army show up earlier. In the beginning of the game every single unit is a bigger percent of your army and will make more difference as they pop out of your structures. Being closer to your own base allows you to pull workers away from the resources to work like temporary army units. Another slight effect is that it's easier to keep macro up in your own base, something that matters more at lower levels.

Scouting and intelligence is another factor that heavily influences your troop movements. It becomes more important later on as players get more bases and instead of just having one or two ways of attack you have several different choices. One of the features of the zerg is the creep which gives you vision. Spreading it out between your bases allow you to predict your opponent and make traps with flanking and/or burrowed units. Having your tanks pre-sieged in a good position as terran will make a significant difference.

As the game progresses, troop movement becomes an issue. This part of defender's advantage has different designs for the separate races. The zerg have creep for mobility and almost perfect vision. Protoss have invisible observers for vision and warp gates to teleport in units. Terran suffers a bit from having slow units but the medivacs are pretty easy to get and stimpacks let your infantry move quickly while sacrificing some health.

It is not a coincidence that most early advantages result in some kind of contain by the victor of the early battles and then a focus on economy. Since the defender's advantage is a big factor early on, instead of trying to overcome it taking a safer route is a way of maximizing your expected value. The edge itself is something that works like an economy in itself. You can sacrifice your army edge now to try and get an economical advantage, giving you a bigger army edge later or you can use your edge to attack. The attack might give you a bigger edge or hand it over to your opponent but either way it's usually riskier. If you think you have a skill edge, you want the game to take longer but if you think your opponent is better you want to push early edges hard and finish it off quickly.

Am I reading too much into things that are features in most of the games of the genre? I could be but if it hasn't been changed, there usually is a reason for it. Even if it was unintentional to begin with, the reasons why it's still there are solid. The easier it is to defend, the longer your games will last but don't make it big enough that games are lost long before they actually end. Defender's advantage should be a small thing but it really makes a difference.
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Metagame integration: YABOT

As you might have noticed by my earlier post, I'm all for anything that helps players get better at a game. The YABOT (Yet another build order tester) is one of the best tools I've seen in a game yet. And it's a fan-made custom map.

Since the Starcraft 2 beta is currently closed and I've had a big interest in both Starcraft games at a high level, I wanted to be able to practice while I can't play on Battle.net. What YABOT does is allow you to choose a build order (or make one yourself) and practice it against an AI opponent that does a specific build order (or a random one). Essentially, it allows you to test a strategy to find it's weaknesses as well as try to get better at building timing to make your resources match better.

What it doesn't do is react to what happens in the game. It will still spawn the exact same army even if you killed all his workers or didn't even scout. It is probably the only bad side but it should be mentioned.



Since it is a small fan-made project it doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a release product but what it does is show potential. If one (or a few) custom mappers can create this in just a couple of weeks, there shouldn't really be anything stopping the game developers themselves. If you want to create a game for competitive play, making good practice tools should probably be high on your list of priorities. Good spectator tools like those in SC2 are a huge improvement but they don't matter that much if the players don't get good enough for anyone to want to watch them.

Even though I've never been top level in the SC2 beta and I don't expect to play enough to ever get there, I still like to be good at a game. Unlike a lot of designers I know, instead of playing a lot of games for a couple of hours I'm more interested in metagaming and strategy development over time. There's a good feeling that comes from just having perfect timing when you have the exact amount of minerals and gas for the building you want to build. Practice makes perfect and when you can practice enough playing single-player to not get killed within a few minutes in a multiplayer game it's a good thing. This is where I'd like to see more development instead of having more bloom on your shoulderpads.

The YABOT site with downloads can be found here, the TeamLiquid.net thread here. Click for full post