Imbalancing Balance (Campaign systems)

[Sonar]

Skip the paragraph below for the suggestions if you don't want to read the whinge.

 

I can't help myself from wondering and speculating about the campaign.  I had no idea how it is currently planned, having missed out on the exploit that enabled the campaign.  The only campaign system I'm familiar with  related are either board games, like "World in Flames", "Seventh Fleet", etc.  and computer games like the nostalgic "Great Naval Battles" series.  The campaign that I envision most is of course the "Rule the Waves" series, which has already been stated as not something the dev's are trying to copy.  That all being said,  I'd like to put forth a few suggestions that would push the game to a more historical reality.  Lots of people post about balance and accuracy and so on an so forth.  In reality, nothing was ever balanced.  Balance was something that you did not want in a war, and it never, every happened in real life. Name one perfectly balanced real life naval engagement.  If you can, tell me if that was what the commanders wanted.  Want to balance the scenarios?  OK.  Don't "balance" the game campaign though, because if you want boring, predictable game play that is how you get it. 

 

So how do you add variety and imbalance then while keeping the historical mouth feel?  I suggest adding systems that occurred in real life.  It takes a committee to design a ship.  It maybe shouldn't but it does.  Politics play a big part too, the bigger the project, the bigger the politics too be it 3 battleships or 30 destroyers.  Maybe Franze has a hand in the steel industry and really wants to sell the nickel steel so a few strings are pulled and the Krupp armor is suddenly delayed and unavailable for the ship design in question despite being unlocked in the tech tree.

The system could work like so:  When a player designs a ship in campaign it has a few components that get "committeefied".  Player hits submit design and one or more components get the below treatment:

 

Popup:  "Component "12 inch Mark 4 barrels" have been diverted to another project by Admiral Poopface.  "12 Inch Mark 2 barrels" have been assigned to this design instead.  This reduces the design cost by "$$$" amount.

Now the player gets the option to deal with this.  We can handle it a few ways.  The most basic way to handle it is to just end it there.  The players design isn't as top notch perfectly designed as they want it to be, such was the real life.  

OR

The player gets a choice.  Maybe they get an option to pay more money (and so get fewer ships) for the design they want originally.  Maybe they have a simple political system where they can spend political capital to get what they want.  Maybe another option.

There should also be chance to get a better part rarely as well...

How many vehicles in history would have been great if they only could have gotten the planned parts and not been forced to make do?

 

When a game like this is perfectly balanced it's easy to win.  You crunch numbers and do the math and apply the formula.  With my current income and tech I can make X amount of Z type ships with Y type components and that will get me the win.  It then becomes a yes or no option.  Force players to deal with bad hands, push them to think of more than numbers.  That's where you will get longevity in the game, that's where the great stories will come from, and that is where the game will shine where other similar games won't.

 

[Cptbarney]

As long as it doesn't severly gimp ship design, and is a toggable option. I would be fine with this too be honest.

[Shaftoe]

The campaign is BOUND to be imbalanced, like it or not. Much like in HOI4, some nations will be much more challenging to play. This is how it should be, or else you run the risk of making the game unrealistic and restrictive. 

Wanna go big? Pick major naval powers. Wanna added challenge? Pick a nation with weaker tech, economy, fewer numbers, etc - and expect to fail. Victory should not be guaranteed - it must be earned, through ingenuity and advantages that the game naturally gives you, not through forced "equality" or "fairness". 

[Marshall99]

I agree. Campaign should be inbalanced.

What I want to know, that how can we imagine the upcoming campaign. Because if I remember correctly I did not read anything about the campaign. For example how it works, is it like a board game style, etc... So I think the dev team should post something about it. Just few sebtences.

Secondly, do you guys know about Total War Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai? There you can play with ironclads. But this is not a reason why I mentioned this game. The reason why I mentioned this game is because how the fleet works on maps.

As you can see in this picture, when you click on your fleet, you will see your maximum travel distance, the enemy fleets attack range (when you enter it's attack range, you can attack the enemy fleet, or the enemy fleet will attack you), you can see how many ships are in your fleet, how many HP each ship has. Anyway, why am I showing this to you? Well I think this map/fleet system works very well. And I don't want to copy this, because TW is a different game, but I think we should study this system. What do you guys think?

 

[TotalRampage]

9 hours ago, Marshall99 said:

I agree. Campaign should be inbalanced.

What I want to know, that how can we imagine the upcoming campaign. Because if I remember correctly I did not read anything about the campaign. For example how it works, is it like a board game style, etc... So I think the dev team should post something about it. Just few sebtences.

Secondly, do you guys know about Total War Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai? There you can play with ironclads. But this is not a reason why I mentioned this game. The reason why I mentioned this game is because how the fleet works on maps.

As you can see in this picture, when you click on your fleet, you will see your maximum travel distance, the enemy fleets attack range (when you enter it's attack range, you can attack the enemy fleet, or the enemy fleet will attack you), you can see how many ships are in your fleet, how many HP each ship has. Anyway, why am I showing this to you? Well I think this map/fleet system works very well. And I don't want to copy this, because TW is a different game, but I think we should study this system. What do you guys think?

 

Range for ships is definitely going to play a factor between naval bases, that's why they have that slider bar to add more Range i.e. fuel storage. The only problem I see is how the TW approach would work with battles because if you go to the max range of your fleet like how most people do in total war how would that transmit to the battle per-say. Would my ships be almost out of fuel and or is fuel even a factor in battles which it should be because what happens if you try to outrun an pursuer or chase someone down myself.

Then also on the campaign map would my ship move instantly in one turn like TW or is it more real time when you can actually see your ship move which I think would be damn awesome but thats me. Also they are going to use an random battle generator that just introduces variables and then creates a battle in a zone so we wont have fleets with exact compositions out because nothing ever goes as planned and they want to make sure we cant pick and choose our battles to much to make it alittle harder. They have that up on the website but that really doesn't say how we would actually move ships to regions just how an battle would commence. On a side note I hope they implement treaties in to say refuel at an neutral nations port during a war or even get interned there but moving on.  Getting to my main point I do like the system TW uses but it might not fit well into the game with the random battle generation. 

Finally damn straight campaign should be imbalanced, im gonna make Italy the roman empire again and there aint no way the Brits are stopping me though. 

[Cptbarney]

1 hour ago, TotalRampage said:

Finally damn straight campaign should be imbalanced, im gonna make Italy the roman empire again and there aint no way the Brits are stopping me though. 

Not if barneh can help it! 'w'

But yeah i agree, should of read the initial message more closely, since i thought i was about treaties or something. But yeah the campaign should be imbalanced as thats historically accurate. Plus it also means some nations will be harder to play (China!) and that can be fun in its own right since you are the underdog and you cna basically rise from the undergrowth so to speak.

[Marshall99]

Oh and another thing from TW. I don't know how realistic is it, but personaly I realy liked the ship positioning befor battle. What I mean that you can click on a battleship and drag it into position, like you want a flagship wich leads your fleet. Like in this picture:

This is good for making your battle formaton before the battle. But I don't know that is this realistic or not. What do you guys think?

[Cptbarney]

16 minutes ago, Marshall99 said:

Oh and another thing from TW. I don't know how realistic is it, but personaly I realy liked the ship positioning befor battle. What I mean that you can click on a battleship and drag it into position, like you want a flagship wich leads your fleet. Like in this picture:

This is good for making your battle formaton before the battle. But I don't know that is this realistic or not. What do you guys think?

This would be a cool idea in general since your ships would naturally be information before, during (usually lol) and after battle. Im very curious as to how this will all turn out, not sure if it will come before alpha 8 doe.

[Marshall99]

56 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

This would be a cool idea in general since your ships would naturally be information before, during (usually lol) and after battle. Im very curious as to how this will all turn out, not sure if it will come before alpha 8 doe.

The dev team is a small group, so yeah, we have to wait a lot, but I think it is worth it

[Shaftoe]

1 hour ago, Marshall99 said:

The dev team is a small group, so yeah, we have to wait a lot, but I think it is worth it

If they are such a small group, they shouldn't waste their efforts on implementing "balance" to a singleplayer game.

[Marshall99]

I have an other thing that I would like to see in the game. Naval forts. And not only on sea shore, but in little islands/reefs.

So this is the Fort Drum. It is quite famous. I hope we will see forts like this in the game.

Edited March 24, 2020 by Marshall99

[arkhangelsk]

On 3/24/2020 at 12:05 AM, Sonar said:

Popup:  "Component "12 inch Mark 4 barrels" have been diverted to another project by Admiral Poopface.  "12 Inch Mark 2 barrels" have been assigned to this design instead.  This reduces the design cost by "$$$" amount.

In the abstract, I agree with the idea of political influence, but your example makes me shudder. First, unlike in the present world where defense seems to be increasingly pork barrel, pre-WWII people were still somewhat serious about defense. Further, the choices are in some ways simpler. People can easily understand the real consequences of such a blatant move as deliberately assigning obsolete guns or crappy armor as opposed to the effects of using an inferior ESM system.

Further, all games are ever under the suspicion of cheating to help the computer and a system like this fans the flames of suspicion.

Real choices are much more subtle and will only be between at least prima facie defensible choices, but how can you program such a thing into the computer.

Finally, to a great extent the tech tree already incorporates this kind of policy debate. For example, there are no technical reasons you can't have a dreadnought all-big gun layout in 1890, but naval thinking just wasn't there yet and it would be politically impossible to push for one over the objection of those fossils in your design team. So when you are pouring the research funds into "Hulls", you are not so much inventing anything per se as doing the work needed to mentally prepare all your opponents in the navy and the legislature for the merits of the dreadnought. When they are sold, all of a sudden Dreadnought becomes available and the old designs become politically impossible to build and disappear from your list.

[Hangar18]

Why reinvent the wheel when the system in RTW2 was pretty good?