Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger

Parting Thoughts

These are my final recommendations for Armada 2526. My reaction to the micromanagement required for population transport system is mostly personal to me. This issue is material to the extent it reveals greater issues with the game, and the cause is a common and obvious one for these types of games:

Galloping Feature-itis Threw Off the Balance of the Four X’s.


Ntronium’s innovative and otherwise excellent implementation of wormhole discovery and use technologies extended the early game phases of eXploration, eXpansion and eXploitation into the eXtermination phase, but Ntronium omitted necessary game-balancing design tradeoffs to avoid conflicts between these 4 X’s. The game has other such problems. Population transport micromanagement happens to make it impossible for me to play the game I want to play it at the impossible difficulty level. While I expect that a not-insignificant number of players find it irritatingly cumbersome, I’d be surprised if more than a few dislike it as much as I do.

My speculation as to how this tradeoff omission occurred is, however, well-informed based on my considerable fan experience helping develop the three Master of Orion games. Ntronium, which is basically Bob Smith in Thailand well outside the game industry, lacked the resources for effective reflection on such tradeoffs during the design phase. In particular it lacked an outside producer at that time who could provide constructive criticism in making Bob defend and sharpen his ideas before mistakes got too embedded in the game design. Microprose and Atari did a good job in helping Steve Barcia, Ken Burd and Quicksilver Software in that regard for MOO1, MOO2 and MOO3. Game producers really do add value to the product, and the earlier they get involved, the better.

You guys may think MOO3 was a disaster, but you have no idea how much trouble Atari’s producers headed off before the game was released. It was unplayable.

Getting back to Armada 2526, these are the things I believe most need changing, or enhancing, in order by priority.

1) I still believe eliminating the unrest penalty for humans is the single most important change. Humans are the public face of Armada 2526 for almost all new players, who will decide whether to continue playing the game based on their fun/frustration experience as the human empires in the introductory scenarios. I also strongly recommend here that the humans be given the largest possible bonus in assimilating conquered races. This would minimize the dangerous frustration of new players with unrest in playing the humans, foster the existing conception of almost all players (i.e., Americans & British Commonwealth customers) about the assimilative abilities of their culture, and make the humans a fun conquest-oriented race to play.

2) My second-highest priority remains getting Bureaucracy out of the popularity/unrest system, and making it a stand-alone feature which directly affects player finances. Players simply should not be penalized for success in expanding their empires. I would prefer that Bureaucracy only affect the costs of ship & military construction plus ship & military maintenance (as opposed to Structure cost & maintenance), but that might be too big a change for an early patch. Just having it reduce revenue is an acceptable short-term solution.

3) My third-rated priority remains reduction of the maintenance expenses of Structures, and elimination of the cost penalties for construction of Structures on poor planets. The reason is that almost all players will already have experience playing turn-based space 4x games and use play-styles based on those other games. That starts with expanding as fast as possible (new colonies are almost always a good thing), and developing new colonies as fast as possible (increase population and fill the planets with as many buildings as the population can operate). Such play-styles are fatal in Armada. New players should IMO be given an easier transition to Armada’s quite different system. Ship maintenance expenses are more important to Armada’s economic model so I’d sharply reduce Structure maintenance expenses. If any planets should have higher Structure construction & maintenance expenses, it should be those with unfavorable environments.

4) My first enhancement request of Naval Bases/reserve ships looks even better in hindsight. IMO it would revolutionize game-play and give Armada some much-needed publicity. I’d make the reductions in ship maintenance expenses moddable. Having major differences in ship maintenance expense between peacetime and wartime will really educate new players about the importance of maintenance expenses.

5) The economic model needs major fiddling to make empire revenues increase much faster than overall maintenance expenses as technology advances and empires grow in size. This is necessary so players can build more new ships using the newly developed technology. It is frustrating to research the tech for nifty new ships but not have the money to build any, and frustrating players is fatal in marketing. Give the players the money to buy the new toys the game system makes available, and not just a few. Playtest each race at each difficulty level to make certain they can build & maintain significant fleets (50+ active warships, not counting transports & arks) by turn 150.

6) The game interface needs work to reduce player frustration. There have been lots of suggestions.

7) Turtle-defense players will bankrupt themselves building missile bases and orbitals, and then give up on the game, given that it puts no limit on the number of those which they may build on a given planet. Building impregnable defenses lets them express a personal security issue which is very important to them. This is why every other turn-based space 4x game I know of has put hard-coded limits on the number of local defenses which can be built. I recommend you do so the same for Armada 2526. Also consider my having my recommended new Planetary Defense Center Structure reduce the maintenance expenses of missile bases, orbitals, etc., the same way Naval Base Structures would reduce ship maintenance expenses.

8) The otherwise excellent wormhole system extending the eXploration, eXpansion and eXploitation phases into the eXtermination phase makes significant changes in colony management desirable so it is less distracting. The use of transport ships to move population to new colonies is THE leading consumer of time in colony management, outweighing all other matters. I’ve read the responses & comments to my I Can’t Stand It Anymore thread and believe the best solution is to drop population transport as such, and go with an abstracted Emigration/Immigration system based loosely on Structures, somewhat as follows:

An Emigration Structure on a colony exports its population, in some fashion, into an abstracted population transport system. An Immigration Structure directs an empire’s emigrants to colonies with these Immigration Structures. All colonies with less than five million people have a built-in Immigration Structure, just as they all have (or should have) an Industrial Structure. How many population points are exported each turn by Emigration structures, and how many imported by Immigration Structures, should be moddable. Note that the excess population problem some colonies have can be dealt with by Emigration Structures – the excess population is shuttled off-planet into limbo. I’d assume that they’re in some sort of deep-space hibernation. When a new colony is founded, it could be filled up fairly quickly if there are enough potential colonists in Emigration storage.

And of course it takes some abstracted time for the hibernating colonists to be moved around. U.S. Army General Leslie McNair, commander of U.S. Ground Forces in World War Two, said that his manpower projections were ruined by the unexpectedly horrendous transportation overhead requirements, aka a “filling the pipeline” problem. McNair’s description of it was hilarious: “That invisible horde of people always coming and going, but never quite arriving.”

Good luck.

quote:

You guys may think MOO3 was a disaster, but you have no idea how much trouble Atari’s producers headed off before the game was released. It was unplayable.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aroddo

quote:

You guys may think MOO3 was a disaster, but you have no idea how much trouble Atari’s producers headed off before the game was released. It was unplayable.

#1
You sound like a human supremacist. And besides, you're wrong. Wrong in the sense that a bad human race makes the whole game suddenly bad - something you bitch about in every third thread or so. I always check the alien races and use the humans as yardstick. I have no problems playing aliens. I agree that humans have it difficult, but damn - you can make it work. And the aliens are there, too.

#2
If I remember correctly then it was YOU who hoped pre-release that there was some heavy-foot-of-government thing inside because otherwise armada would make it too easy for big empires or so. Now you got it and it's suddenly a bad thing. And while I kinda like the way bureaucracy throws stones in your expansionist way, I would at the very least like some gameplay mechanisms that would let me react to these circumstances. Like giving independence to colonies to get them off your back.

#3
I think that's solely your problem. You want to make colony management so easy that even the wallstreet banksters couldn't fukc up that economy. Yeah, seeing your monetary resources dwindle in the light of reckless spending is not good. And you are supposed to decide where to spend money and where not and not spend like there's no tomorrow.

#4
I like the idea of "mothballing" unused ships, too, but there should be a drawback. Just stationing your ships at a conveniently built naval base to save money is just another way to make it easier for those too lazy to worry about maintaining a good development plan.
But if it would e.g. cost time to reactivate a mothballed vessel (the bigger the ship, the longer it takes) then it would create a very interesting strategic decision: "Can you really afford to mothball your fleet in the current political situation?"
Mothballed ships can be destroyedm of course. Quite easily.

#5
You always have money problems ... I see a trend. I'd tackle the more-tech-than-money by increasing the cost of tech. I tend to reach the end of one research field too soon and I indeed can't enjoy the latest tech long enough before it becomes irrelevant by the next one.

#6
Yeah. More spreadsheets! Just kidding.

#7
Turtle tactics don't work in space. You need to SPACE TURTLE!
You can't just defend everything, so turtlers have to adapt. Walls and pitfalls don't work here.

#8
I wished there would be civilian trade and "inland trade", possibly represented by civilian ships zipping around the systems. And planets with nearby wormholes would have access to more potential markets, those increasing trade income and making wormholes even economically desirable.
But the transport solution right now is great! But like ShotmanMaslo said, a combination of the current one and an additional layer of automatization for the large empires would be the best solution.


And I don't think MoO3 was a disaster. It was a festering pile of ****.

Sorry, I know you were involved in that game, but boy - you did **** that up royally.
If MoO3 wasn't part of the ORion series, then it would just have been a not very interesting game. But that junk was in no way a sequal to MoO2.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger

Parting Thoughts

These are my final recommendations for Armada 2526. My reaction to the micromanagement required for the population transport system is mostly personal to me. This issue is material to the extent it reveals greater issues with the game, and the cause is a common and obvious one for these types of games:

Galloping Feature-itis Threw Off the Balance of the Four X’s.

Ntronium’s innovative and otherwise excellent implementation of wormhole discovery and use technologies extended the early game phases of eXploration, eXpansion and eXploitation into the eXtermination phase, but Ntronium omitted necessary game-balancing design tradeoffs to avoid conflicts between these 4 X’s. The game has other such problems. Population transport micromanagement happens to make it impossible for me to play my style of game at the impossible difficulty level. While I expect that a not-insignificant number of players find population transport (even with automated repeats) irritatingly cumbersome, I’d be surprised if more than a few dislike it as much as I do.

My speculation as to how this tradeoff omission occurred is, however, well-informed based on my considerable fan experience helping develop the three Master of Orion games. Ntronium, which is basically Bob Smith in Thailand well outside the game industry, lacked the resources for effective reflection on such tradeoffs during the design phase. In particular it lacked an outside producer at that time who could provide constructive criticism in making Bob defend and sharpen his ideas before mistakes got too embedded in the game design. Microprose and Atari did a good job in helping Steve Barcia, Ken Burd and Quicksilver Software in that regard for MOO1, MOO2 and MOO3. Game producers really do add value to the product, and the earlier they get involved, the better.

You guys may think MOO3 was a disaster, but you have no idea how much trouble Atari’s producers headed off before the game was released. It was unplayable.

Getting back to Armada 2526, these are the things I believe most need changing, or enhancing, in order by priority.

1) I still believe eliminating the unrest penalty for humans is the single most important change. Humans are the public face of Armada 2526 for almost all new players, who will decide whether to continue playing the game based on their fun/frustration experience as the human empires in the introductory scenarios. I also strongly recommend here that the humans be given the largest possible bonus in assimilating conquered races. This would minimize the dangerous frustration of new players with unrest in playing the humans, foster the existing conception of almost all players (i.e., Americans & British Commonwealth customers) about the assimilative abilities of their culture, and make the humans a fun conquest-oriented race to play.

2) My second-highest priority remains getting Bureaucracy out of the popularity/unrest system, and making it a stand-alone feature which directly affects player finances. Players simply should not be penalized for success in expanding their empires. I would prefer that Bureaucracy only affect the costs of ship & military construction plus ship & military maintenance (as opposed to Structure cost & maintenance), but that might be too big a change for an early patch. Just having it reduce revenue is an acceptable short-term solution.

3) My third-rated priority remains reduction of the maintenance expenses of Structures, and elimination of the cost penalties for construction of Structures on poor planets. The reason is that almost all players will already have experience playing turn-based space 4x games and use play-styles based on those other games. That starts with expanding as fast as possible (new colonies are almost always a good thing), and developing new colonies as fast as possible (increase population and fill the planets with as many buildings as the population can operate). Such play-styles are fatal in Armada. New players should IMO be given an easier transition to Armada’s quite different system. Ship maintenance expenses are more important to Armada’s economic model so I’d sharply reduce Structure maintenance expenses. If any planets should have higher Structure construction & maintenance expenses, it should be those with unfavorable environments.

4) My first enhancement request of Naval Bases/reserve ships looks even better in hindsight. IMO it would revolutionize game-play and give Armada some much-needed publicity. I’d make the reductions in ship maintenance expenses moddable. Having major differences in ship maintenance expense between peacetime and wartime will really educate new players about the importance of maintenance expenses.

5) The economic model needs major fiddling to make empire revenues increase much faster than overall maintenance expenses as technology advances and empires grow in size. This is necessary so players can build more new ships using the newly developed technology. It is frustrating to research the tech for nifty new ships but not have the money to build any, and frustrating players is fatal in marketing. Give the players the money to buy the new toys the game system makes available, and not just a few. Playtest each empire in the 12 Races scenario, at each difficulty level, to make certain they can build & maintain significant fleets (40-50 active warships, not counting transports & arks) by turn 150.

6) The game interface needs work to reduce player frustration. There have been lots of suggestions.

7) Turtle-defense players will bankrupt themselves building missile bases and orbitals, and then give up on the game, given that it puts no limit on the number of those which they may build on a given planet. Building impregnable defenses lets them express a personal security issue which is very important to them. This is why every other turn-based space 4x game I know of has put hard-coded limits on the number of local defenses which can be built. I recommend you do so the same for Armada 2526. Also consider my having my recommended new Planetary Defense Center Structure reduce the maintenance expenses of missile bases, orbitals, etc., the same way Naval Base Structures would reduce ship maintenance expenses.

8) The otherwise excellent wormhole system extending the eXploration, eXpansion and eXploitation phases into the eXtermination phase makes significant changes in colony management desirable so it is less distracting. The use of transport ships to move population to new colonies is THE leading consumer of time in colony management, outweighing all other matters. I’ve read the responses & comments to my I Can’t Stand It Anymore thread and believe the best solution is to drop population transport as such, and go with an abstracted Emigration/Immigration system based loosely on Structures, somewhat as follows:

An Emigration Structure on a colony exports its population, in some fashion, into an abstracted population transport system. An Immigration Structure directs an empire’s emigrants to colonies with these Immigration Structures. All colonies with less than five million people have a built-in Immigration Structure, just as they all have (or should have) an Industrial Structure. How many population points are exported each turn by Emigration structures, and how many imported by Immigration Structures, should be moddable. Note that the excess population problem some colonies have can be dealt with by Emigration Structures – the excess population is shuttled off-planet into limbo. I’d assume that they’re in some sort of deep-space hibernation. When a new colony is founded, it could be filled up fairly quickly if there are enough potential colonists in Emigration storage.

And of course it takes some abstracted time for the hibernating colonists to be moved around. U.S. Army General Leslie McNair, commander of U.S. Ground Forces in World War Two, said that his manpower projections were ruined by the unexpectedly horrendous transportation overhead requirements, aka a “filling the pipeline” problem. McNair’s description of it was hilarious: “That invisible horde of people always coming and going, but never quite arriving.”

Good luck.

Edit - it is easy to program a feature that planets can be blockaded when ships of empires you lack non-agression pacts with are in orbit. The effects of blockade can of course vary, but at the very least I'd halt all population growth, both local and via population transport/immigration under any available system. No population growth is no population growth.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger

SireChaos, someone else here, not me, said that playing the humans on easy was like playiing most of the other races on hard.  The reason for having an easy level of difficulty at all is defeated in such a situation, i.e., this game's introductory scenarios are self-defeating.  Worse, playing the humans given their degree of unrest is frustrating.  Frustated players who find it difficult to win at easy in the introductory scenarios will give up on the game and tend to bad-mouth it others.

The No. 1 most effective way to sink this game in the marketplace is to leave its unrest penalty for humans as is.

The No. 1 most effective way for my critics to sink their credibilty is to contend otherwise.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger
The No. 1 most effective way for my critics to sink their credibilty is to contend otherwise.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger

A week after MOO3's release, I asked Bill Fisher, president of Quicksilver Software, why the humans were the weakest race in the game.  He told me that they intentionally crippled the humans so players would have a challenge playing them.  This was appalling.  I knew from my experience with MOO1 and MOO2 that the humans were the race almost all players started with while they were learning the game.  This was when I realized just how irrecoverable a disaster MOO3 would be.

Armada's humans are allegedly its second weakest race - I haven't played any other races.  I know the humans' weakness in this game is unintentional, but there is a real good chance that it will have the same result it did in MOO3 if it isn't changed soon.  Armada is a fairly good game with major promise, but it has no marketing and so relies almost entirely on player first impressions for success.  Those first impressions will be based on playing the humans.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger

SireChaos,

Intentionally making the humans so weak was indicative of Quicksilver's judgment in game design.  It tended to show that the game was so rife with design flaws that it could not be salvaged with a patch.

quote:

Now you could make an argument that I am engaging in circular reasoning here, based on an assumption that sucky humans are a bad thing, but that is a widely held opinion in the turn-based space 4x game industry.  I certainly consider those who hold otherwise as having conclusively estabilshed their lack of judgment.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom_Holsinger
Armada's humans are allegedly its second weakest race - I haven't played any other races.

quote:

ORIGINAL: nim8or

Nice comment, Lancer.

Looking at this game and forum from the outside looking in as I haven't purchased the game yet. I must say, however, that from my perspective Tom's thoughts, criticism and suggestions only make the game seem more interesting to me. I have owned and played all of the 4x games discussed in the thread and have my own opinions about what makes a 4x game work and where they tend to fall apart for me.

That said, there is enough room for more than two schools of thought. Anyone who is looking to make a contribution, adding contributions and ideas while keeping a civil tone with the criticism should be welcomed by all.

I'm on the edge, considering a purchase, and the clutter from those who insist on promoting their own agenda (i.e., praise MOO3, trash MOO3 ad nauseum) is not only distasteful, but discouraging. I'd hate to see the game and forum become bogged down in a turf war.

I'd love to see the game evolve both on the merits of the game and the vision of the designer with helpful input from the player community.

quote:

ORIGINAL: laika

There is nothing wrong with Toms visions of 4x space games. Thats not my problem. It only becomes a problem when Tom talkes about Leaving Aramada and going to play MOO3 again when they don,t make the changes he wants. Well in my opinion he wants to dominate how we all need to play our games when talking about leaving. But one thing i learned in the past. Never change the core gameplay when a game is on the market. Yes solving bugs, tweaking and make expansions yes that not a problem ofcourse. But another core gameplay needs another or second Armada.
I alway,s upset when peeps talk about games and want changes for there own bussines for his/her gaming style. Thats also the reson why we have so many clones these day,s. This is something different you like or dislike.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aurelian

quote:

ORIGINAL: laika

There is nothing wrong with Toms visions of 4x space games. Thats not my problem. It only becomes a problem when Tom talkes about Leaving Aramada and going to play MOO3 again when they don,t make the changes he wants. Well in my opinion he wants to dominate how we all need to play our games when talking about leaving. But one thing i learned in the past. Never change the core gameplay when a game is on the market. Yes solving bugs, tweaking and make expansions yes that not a problem ofcourse. But another core gameplay needs another or second Armada.
I alway,s upset when peeps talk about games and want changes for there own bussines for his/her gaming style. Thats also the reson why we have so many clones these day,s. This is something different you like or dislike.

Bingo!!! The arrogance "I was involved in..... I spoke to..... The No. 1 most effective way for my critics to sink their credibilty is to contend otherwise." ad nauseum is way over the line. Nor, in all the years of playing 4X games, have I heard any of the stated contentions.

I find A2526 to be a fresh take on what is becoming a stale genre. Now, I think SoTS is a better game, but that doesn't mean I want this one to be a clone. There is room enough on my hard drive for both. And I like that how I play one isn't going to work with the other.

And there is nothing wrong with presenting ideas. But there is with the method.