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would this work?

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4 years ago
what if all units are made op and cool..

and the average % they are constructed once during a game by the top 50% of ranks = the % of the initial cost
the initial cost = all stats added together ie. speed + hp + dps ect..

confused yet.. what i mean is an auto balance

so a duck might cost 1000M/E initially

so its not worth making.. because it was not made it then costs 0% so you make heaps.. then next game it costs 50% because it was in half of the two games but 500M/E is too much so you dont make it again....

a few games later and we are free of the nerf buff restrictions.. all units can be made powerful and the costs will reflect the choices of the meta.. quake missile will cost 1M .. so will blastwings .. but if thats op then it will cost more metal.. and units wont have to become mutated by trying to make them fit the price-tags

i maybe said all this badly =/ sorry
+2 / -0
it makes more sense then the current buff/nerf approach

if only we had a historic database of games played and a website that ran analysis on those replays... o wait we do (or did, cant find link)

is modstats still a thing, cant reach it
+0 / -0


4 years ago
It's certainly an interesting idea. Here are a few quick independent answers:
  • I don't think anyone has tried it so it is hard to know.
  • It could but would need to be more thought out. There are a lot of edge cases.
  • It could but what sort of game are you trying to make? The types of things you do in such a game are different so you need to know who you are aiming the game at.
  • I doubt it would make the balance of ZK converge to anything stable.
  • What do you mean by 'work'?

Some initial questions:
  • How do you deal with map variation?
  • How do you deal with fads of the meta?
  • How do you weight units that were made later in the game after it was already won?

The game would become more about valuation. Players would need to track the costs of everything and pick what is currently cheaper than it should be to win particular games. I would expect the balance to flow around in cycles that are much wilder than manual balance, at a rate limited by the magnitude of the changes. The game itself would be less about playing individual battles and more about tracking the meta. It would be more hardcore.
+2 / -0


4 years ago
It's just a cyclical, phased and limited variant of speedmetal in some ways.
+1 / -0
i bet if it was well enough designed it could be limited by things like:

only counting the team that wins

using the % chance of a units use as its % influence over costs (so experimenting with units has less effect then using them consistently)

a means to stabilize the balance:
maybe waves ~ balance influence occurs @ 5% per day.. so that a 20 day cycle is one meta cycle inline with new units and stuff
a way to mitigate inflation =P

to be honest idk how all the issues you mentioned get solved but if they did get solved after a while the game would present you no units not considered effective for the price
but maybe that's not fun > kinda like pokemon has useless status moves for stupid people to instantly identify.. if pokemon moves are all super balanced then players would sweat and develop anxiety

too much strategy makes the right choices less clear cut and this makes it more like 'GO' (the chess like game) and less like beer pong

fads would strangely get balanced too.. so if it was fun to make reef every game they would cost more until it was average fun =/
+0 / -0

4 years ago
i once visited Berlin. there (at the time) was a beer stock exchange bar. beer prices would be secondly calculated by the latest consume. meaning, many buy, price goes up, less buy, price goes down.

so, here my suggestion the other way around:
all units are changing costs all the time. if a unit is low counts on the map, it is discounted in price. if the present (and/or dead unit numbers taken into account) number rises, it gets more expensive to build. and voila. everyone is confused. all the time.
+5 / -0
lol =P zero-k stockmarket edition..

can we buy shares in units?

you could buy an army just so the enemy cant afford anything =P
buy buy buy all the stocks now! ~ will need a way to sell ducks on the black market to foreign investors
+0 / -0
USranknop
4 years ago
Making a unit more expensive as its population increases comes off as a hacky way to prevent monospam compared to having actual balance and counters.

Having some kind of "automatic" unit tweaking doesn't solve a problem of balance. ZK is already decently balanced, with some exceptions which are sure to be brought up. It might solve a problem of variety and keeping players engaged, but the automation would need to be extremely sophisticated to effectively listen to what players are saying and make appropriate judgements.

Automation that speeds up the process of testing balance changes might be worthwhile. E.g. testing the entire matrix of units against each other with unit AI and recording results and video clips for comparison and analysis. This kind of automation helps to inform a decision by simulating the consequences.
+3 / -0

4 years ago
Zero-k Midas mode! Midas mode is a silly tournament for DotA 2 in which picking and banning heros costs a meta currency, and the price of heros changes match to match based on what was picked/ banned in the previous games.
+1 / -0
4 years ago
Meta madness; once someone builds a unit no one can build that unit anymore
+0 / -0

4 years ago
Build strider hub, win it for you team
+0 / -0
4 years ago
I think it wouldn't work, no.

Some people are irked by the frequent balance changes but I'm not sure how else they expect the game to be balanced.

What might help is setting some things in stone. Take a core unit such as the Strike Commander and say "These are the stats we want for this unit, this is how the interaction between two strike coms should look like, this is set in stone" and then balance the entire rest of the game around that. That could help dispel this feeling of that the balance of the game is "floaty" and subject to change in any direction.

But I think the devs already have something like that behind the scenes. I have heard of formulas and such. I am now speculating.

+0 / -0
3 years ago
i heard i even more improved version of that, capable of comprehending skill level, preferences, player choice, randomness. A network capable of generating new units from the entropy of the cosmos.


hint:
[Spoiler]



answer:

[Spoiler]
+0 / -0
the forum doesnt balance the units vs costs..
it talks about allot of things..

but the balance done by the devs does not reflect unit demand.. thats why some units like reef are know to be under powered for cost by the community and it will be months before anything changes..

i had proposed a real-time balance mechanism that does not wait around.. however as GoogleFrog stated its too hard to get it perfect so until the age of AI we may have to wait for the perfectly balanced rts

or someone willing to put in 1000 hours of code to make an amazing balancer that can be used as an additional option

since GoogleFrog has probably put 1000 hours into the balance already it might be a nice retirement option for him but i bet he will care for the game as-long as people care for it too
+0 / -0