On the current state of the game and why i think it needs more permanent Advantages.
Obstkuchen
Member
Disclaimer: I originally posted this one the Discord. This is just a straight copy/paste with minor formatting changes. If you've already read that, just skip to comments. The original post:
I think something that contributes to some problems (like the drawn out though onesided games) is the nature of the titans. I feel like they give a bonus while they're out( obviously) but the moment they're killed, unless the controlling team did something else in the meantime, they could have easily never existed.
I think this contributes to teams not going in with their titans unless pushing to end the game (non interactive gameplay, quite boring, as both sides pve) and situations where, as long as you've made it to minute 30 and are maxed out, it's basically irrelevant who played better the major part of the game. Not that i think that's inherently a bad thing, after all, comebacks should be possible, but it feels like it should be less punishing to seek the engagement as the winning team instead of just chaining titans and waiting it out until the enemy has no more buildings. It feels weird how basically one engagement gone wrong completely resets the game. It should bring the odds closer (duh), but completely resetting seems a bit harsh.
I think most of this boils down to the fleeting nature of advantages in the game. There seems (at least to me, and obviously noone has really figured out the game completely right now) to be almost exclusively what i would call boardstate advantages, like army positioning, vision control, active titans and such. The kind of advantages that completely reset when you lose an engagement. I think this discourages the winning team to take any but the safest engagements, as there is such a huge risk attached and it seems smarter (even though more boring) to just wait for and push with two titans. The only semipermanent/permanent advantages are (iirc) hero level (mostly useless) and resources, which turn irrelevant after a certain point anyways, and upgrades.
(This will turn into suggestion dump now)
While conceiving (and writing) this, two major ideas came to my mind. I know you've done extensive testing, so don't mind if you've already tried and/or dumped these.
First is replacing the current way to spawn titans with a resource-based System I imagine roughly like this:
You gain the resource, whenever you kill (or deal dmg maybe) to enemy units, and can then turn in some amount of that resource with your hero at one of the main stations for a titan. In addition, holding the stations (or whatever they're called ) may provide each member of your team with resources passively to insure and encourage players to come and fight there.
Another version of that would be the same resource system, but instead of turning them in for titans, titans spawn for both teams periodically and the resource (in this version the team would likely share a single pool) can be used to buy upgrades for the titan. An interesting game with kind of related mechanics that comes to mind would be Demigod (Gas Powered Games, 2009) which you should totally try out sometimes (although it had its own share of problems).
Maybe instead of regularly spawning Titans one could also replace hard camps with Titans, I think some game may have done something similar once, maybe hots? idk. (I'm thinking of the beat-them-and-they-join-you-for-a-limited-time kind).
These System may also be overlayed, this would introduce an interesting dynamic of teams having to decide whether to stall and upgrade or to get titans out onto the field. In this case, though, destroying enemy structures would likely have to be rewarded quite well to circumvent the 'getting one before you're able to finish is a waste of resources'-problem.
I've been typing for quite a while now so I'll stop. Maybe I'll have some more feedbacks later.
Comments
Hey, awesome to have more posters on the forum!
I disagree with what you are saying on many levels. I'll briefly try and reconcile our views on what the game is about and how the game progresses. Then talk about riskiness.
Atlas Design Objectives
On Risk
I was going to talk about permanent advantages down here but I already covered it above. Apologies if I am being rambly and digressive.
I agree with many points you each make, but I also tend to disagree with others. I'll try to break things down that I feel differently about.
Snowballing
In particular I think the claim Tokowa makes that Snowballing is not a function of the game is a stretch. I feel the degree to which snowballing is possible is always a function of the game itself, and it feels kind of unreasonable to assume that games intrinsically feature the same degree of snowballing just because both sides start out equal. Equal starting points have no intrinsic bearing over how downhill a game becomes when one side gets a lead.
Comeback and Winning
I think the point here is that weakening the Titan chain mechanic, which most players seem to support, would possibly require advantages to be made slightly more permanent in compensation. Ideally, they would be more army- or econ-focused so they would favor the army battle side of the game more than the tower-defense portion.
Chain of good decisions
"A chain of good decisions will win the game for either team." This is a little broad to me, as there are cases where the opponent has a moderate lead and can overcome a chain of good decisions with a chain of safe decisions. This is a balancing act and it's impossible to say with confidence whether Atlas has this balance in a good place yet. "A chain of good decisions SHOULD win t he game for either team when combined with good mechanical play" is a safe thing to say, I think, but I don't think we have remotely enough data to say with authority that's how the game plays out absolutely right now.
This is clearly the ultimate goal for any competitive game but most games never totally get there - assuming Atlas is already there while still in Alpha and with minimal test data/no arranged teams yet is glossing over a lot of valid critiques, I think. We'll end up with a much stronger and more fun game if we keep that goal in sight but also stay critical of whether it's been achieved yet or not.
On conclusions
I do think that more semi-permanent advantages would probably lead to further snowballyness based on Tokowa's analysis. However, I think that is looking at the idea of "permanent advantages" in a vacuum that does not involve a redesign of Titan mechanics and the potential for Titan chains. It also does not take into account games where a team is stuck defending for long stretches, but is outkilling the enemy team (which happens quite often). It does not take into account scenarios like Capture Zone games where a team can win engagements but lose objectives - thus falling behind because their "gains" in army battles were too transient to mean anything long-term.
The idea is that semi-permanent advantages can possibly be transferred across the spectrum from PvE to PvP, and in doing so possibly invite a more interactive tug-of-war. I think that is worth exploring and at least considering, even if it ultimately proves less compelling.
On objectives becoming "mini titans"
I do understand the comparisons to HotS, a game I've played quite a bit of. I could see something like this working, to a degree, but without creep waves this would create an awkward semi-laning phase I'm not sure would fit the current gameplay.
I also don't know if the system of towers/buildings is properly configured to handle this kind of gameplay. It's possible this could be done without feeling like a rehash of HotS, but if so I hope it would be done sparingly and not involve every creep camp so it's not just a checklist of "gotta send this wave" styled gameplay.
I've been meaning to come back to this for a while. Thanks for the reply, as I realised some of my points were out of wack and I'd like to clarify what I meant.
Obviously I did not mean that games intrinsically feature the same degree of snowballing and explicitly stated that permanent advantages would increase the amount of snowballing, i.e. the snowballing slope. I guess the Rate of Snowballing would be more apt term. I'll admit my first two sentences in that paragraph are shitty as hell so I'd like to amend that a little bit.
Here goes. Given that the game is about repeatedly gaining small advantages on your opponent, and this is done through many interactions with the opponent. Assuming that the higher skilled team has a higher chance of succeeding in those interactions, we can infer that the existence of snowballing is fundamental in the game.
So we are instead discussing what shape or form the leads in the game should manifest. I'll start with what I prefer and then give my opinion on the other suggestions.
I prefer that advantages manifest through permanent changes to the visible gamestate. Gradual removal of base structures, as in the 3-titan iterations. Increased access to tech units. One advantage of the titan's is that the game ends in a timely fashion, which is preferable to people with busy lives.
So, obviously the gradual removal of base structures seems to be the element that you want decreased. Basically, the narrative of the game should be progressed by armies venturing into the opposing base and destroying them personally. This would certainly feel more intuitive and 'fair' for the losing side. I have stated why I personally do not like this in another thread, so I'm not going to repeat myself at length, but it basically boils down to the game directing my actions twice in succession.
Now the main suggestion of the OP was the addition of further permanent advantages. Reviewing the post however, I feel like a lot of assertions and conclusions are quite not in line with the game. I already feel there is a large variety of strategic choices to make with your resources gained from leads. There's two things I imagine can happen from increasing permanent advantages. Create army advantages to the extent that you can eliminate the consequence of errors. Obviously this would erode comeback possibility. I think OP ruled this out. The other thing that can happen is that you add choices, which is almost the same as adding bad choices, which is kinda like introducing arbitrary complexity. I wouldn't mind this middle ground, but it goes against the game's accessibility goal. I think these issues hold even when removing titan mechanics completely and or weakening it significantly.
I think you misunderstand my usage of 'decisions'. The way I use them, it is the outcome that dictates whether it is good or bad, as opposed to an inherent nature of the decision itself. I also think that the game revolves around increasing the space of good decisions for yourself and reducing the space of good decisions for the opponent. So what you considered a chain of good decisions might have been good decisions in 90% of games, but because your opponent did a chain of "safe" decisions, and ended up winning, that is the same as him making the good decisions and reduced the space of your good decisions, so that what you did was no longer good decisions. I think right or wrong might be more clear of me to use, but I wanted to maintain the gradient that you would get with good-bad.
This concept isn't reliant on the game being figured out or not. The concept does not judge what decisions are good or bad. We can give opinions, or inferences, but in the end, the concept functions independently of what we think of the game. It only says that if you make decisions that lead to you winning the game, then those decisions you made were in total more correct than not. Given that I've defined my terms and assumptions clearly (which I admittedly and regrettably didn't), it is a statement ("A chain of good decisions will win the game for either team.") that cannot be refuted.
Now, what can be changed is how do the decision spaces develop through the game. That is the crux of the issue being discussed, right? Does the Titans strangle the losing sides decision space too much, and too quickly? Can another solution like more permanent army advantages and less base destruction at the hand of titans create a better development of decision spaces? Maybe. It is worth testing.
Hopefully I've addressed your first issue above, as I've tried to look at permanent advantages and titans in conjunction. There are definitely scenarios I've ruled out like Capture Zone because I thought they would be ruled out eventually due to the bad gameplay situations that they created. Personally I didn't see the need to discuss cases that I didn't think was relevant, primarily because of the insane length of our posts. I don't really equate killing figures with success in a game. It is too insensitive of high energy strategies or low energy strategies. If you play against goliath's, obviously the other team is very likely to have more kills than you. It can however, be a rough indicator for winning or losing. But I don't think by any means you should use it as an argument for whether you should have won or not.
Yeah, like you mention above I am/was aware that you were introducing broad concepts with somewhat narrow language and wasn't trying to hit you with "gotchas" so much as frame your claims a little more in line with new players' experiences and expectations.
I don't think your language was shitty! I know exactly where you were coming from - it's just that it's pretty easy for those of us who have been playing Atlas at a "high" level for a while now to make pretty absolute statements about the game and I know I constantly have to remind myself that for most people with limited play experience that's less helpful than exploring the thought process that got me there.
I'm super guilty of making broad claims "xyz ALWAYS beats abc", "n strategy/unit is the absolute best thing you can be doing in q situation" and the like, which is probably why in my long-winded forum posts I try to force myself to take the perspective of a newer player whenever possible. Most of the high-level stuff I like and appreciate about the game I try not to write about at all because it's invisible to most players at the start - if I'm going to waste ink, I want to make sure it's dedicated toward helping bring in and retain new blood.
Anyway, I think your expanded explanations are helpful for giving players insight into why you feel the game functions in certain ways, thanks!