   dyth68 Yeah, there are cases where it would benefit everyone for certain things to be worked upon. I am on the fence with Lance and think that the best solution would be to have a min-value-to-shoot setting on the unit's UI. Hell, this filter, whether it be a metal value slider or a list of unit classtypes could apply to all units. For me, that would work. Meanwhile with something like idle scythes... If you're not watching over them, they deserve whatever happens to them as with anything else you don't pay attention to. Maybe they could try to attack the glaive, maybe they could try to run away (to where? We know the best behaviour is manual juking by the scythe player, really, to try to lure and catch the glaive). One thing's for sure, we're in grey territory.
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Not wanting to dwell on specifics too much, that suggested Lance change is something that I believe would remove strategical options from players, which seems to be the opposite of why a lot of people want more automation (giving more time for strategical decision making). Someone building fleas to distract enemy high-damage-single-shot units should be rewarded, and the Lance player already has a perfectly good solution available which is to set his unit to hold fire then target what he wants to kill.
+1 / -0
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quote:
This line is something I don't understand. I have played this game for quite a bit, but I could never tell you what a unit on free-roam is going to do, or how a unit on fight-move will behave. Chase, skirm, low-priority target classes are changing without the player knowing about it, and even if they didn't it is very hard to follow the unit AI's decision making without looking at the code. I know Scorchers should automatically dive against some units and kite some others, but this is something I have been unable to predict. Then they also retreat from buildings when the building is about to explode and other special behavior. At that point I feel the scorcher dive/kite decision might as well be dictated by a neural net. |
I am not going to spend the time to attempt to communicate my full criteria. I tend to make up/discover answers on the fly based on my intuition of what makes ZK good. Neither did I claim that this "line" is a good guide for all cases or that all cases are perfectly implemented according to it. Some of what you're saying barely falls without the purview of the fuzzy idea I was attempting to express (units have to fire at something, for example) and other bits are ongoing problems. The important thing is that we've reached this: quote:
As a somewhat related, but non topic furthering point: I like the current level of automation at work. It's in the right sort of ballpark to allow the AI to handle things you want it to handle, whilst allowing the player to absolutely be the guiding force behind that AI. It's shepard. I feel as though more assistance than we have now just begins to erode the need for skill, experience and APM. |
quote:
Could you elaborate on what makes a ZK player human, 'cyborg' or a bot? It really isn't obvious to me. Would a human player with today's interface still be a human player if he played 10 year old ZK with the modern interface? |
The cyborg concept is that players are sets of commands sent the server and the server should not care in the slightest how those commands were computed. Players are merger of their abilities as a person as well as all the code that is enhancing them. Nobody "is" a cyborg, so such specific questions are incoherent. That post is a complete mess and you should not expect anyone to look through it to find the thing you're referencing. quote:
But I'm not convinced that's the real issue (I expect you'd probably accept PRs for most widgets provided they are disabled by default). |
As I said, a widget disabled by default barely existed for the purpose of this topic. Not everyone knows what the word 'widget' means to get the subtlety of what you were alluding to. quote:
In Starcraft, AIs without APM limit play a completely different game than humans. A human would never be able to replicate what such an AI does. My goal for ZK would be that a human can always (at least theoretically) replicate what the AI does and use it for himself. This is not possible if some micro automation is inaccessible for the player.
This might seem like an impossible task, but ZK is fairly close to it currently. Depending on how we decide, this may in the future lead to AIs cheating by definition and void the "if you can't beat the AI, learn from the AI" slogan. |
Sure, and if we are fairly close currently why put up with the extra issues? See "scraping the bottom of the barrel".    malric I think people mostly make widgets to make widgets. They want to play the coder sandbox or test their cyborg abilities. Winning can be a way to test a widget but I don't think people first set out to win at all costs and then decide to make widgets to do so. Other people obviously only complain about the widgets that are effective because they don't want to feel like they have lost to an exploited mechanic. If someone makes a widget to shoot themselves in the foot then everyone else is fine with them using it. quote:
There are still lots of low hanging fruit. Just look at any unit that requires lots of babysitting which should be fixed.
For instance, Lances will fire at fleas rather than waiting for the enemy Lance that's just about to enter range, Recluse will wander into Stingers and a group of Scythes will just sit there getting murdered by a Glaive if discovered (though the AvoidanceAI I made helps here). |
Such Lance AI sounds fine. See the years-old ticket on it.   Dregs I think it should be obvious that dyth68 is suggesting some sort of state toggle or more advanced configuration because not providing any sort of UI would make it a terrible idea. It goes back to the question of whether the behaviour resulting from the command is understandable.   PRO_rANDY if someone wants to have their Lances not shoot at anything that costs less than 200, then I am fine with letting them do that without watching their Lances to make sure they shoot at things that cost more. Someone spamming Fleas at Lance should not be rewarded simply because Lance is finicky to control. What I will not do is accept any sort of Lance widget without anyone first making a serious attempt at extending the target priority and overkill prevention gadgets. This is another way that widgets don't "help development" that I failed to mention. There is actually very little low-hanging fruit, and most things that look like low-hanging fruit are bound to be expensive and suffer from latency issues if implemented as a widget. The lowest-hanging fruit for unit AI these days needs to be done as a gadget (a more powerful, game-only, type of widget). Gadgets have powerful abilities that make such unit AI much cheaper and requires them to be written in completely different ways. This is another reason that I view writing widget unit AI as a bit of a personally-indulgent waste of time that doesn't lead to any game improvement. Scythe is trickier but think about it in terms of decisions. I think it would be fine if Attack-Move cloaked units set to Hold Fire automatically avoided nearby enemy units. The player has chosen where to send the Scythe and that they want to avoid decloaking while they are trying to get there. Implementing this decision is mostly a matter of moving away from enemy units whenever they are near. That said, there can be some important decisions about pathfinding, but just as with the autoskirm AI, you have to accept simple predictable-ish behaviour when you use Attack Move.
+1 / -0
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quote:
Not wanting to dwell on specifics too much, that suggested Lance change is something that I believe would remove strategical options from players, which seems to be the opposite of why a lot of people want more automation (giving more time for strategical decision making). Someone building fleas to distract enemy high-damage-single-shot units should be rewarded, and the Lance player already has a solution available which is to set his unit to hold fire then target what he wants to kill (which is how I'm use my Lances the majority of the time). |
So we should reward people for abusing poor unit AI and punish people for not setting their lances to hold fire? I am strongly against this statement. if your "strategy" is based around people playing with units on fire at will which is literally something you can't affect I say your strategy is really poor. If you wanted it to be actual strategy, everyone should be forced to have Lances on fire at will so everyone can abuse it equally. This also applies to Artemis. The very reason I made ArtemisTargettingAI (and later other targettingAIs) was to prevent shot baiting with things like Blastwings or armored Halberts, not to mention the Claw mines that sprout from anywhere a Badger goes.
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Seems like ZK has good principles for mainline automation, the combination of Gadgets and Widgets (or Gidgets for short). The way I see it:
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Gidgets should automate things the player wants to do but doesn't want to do. Unit AI is squarely in this category. I could kite with my Rogues and swarm with my Glaives, but I'd rather do something else.
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Gidgets should not make decisions for the player. Deciding to send the Rogue pile against an approaching Ogre or the Glaive pile against some Recluses is my job.
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Gidgets should add essential UI. Outlines for eco grid, decloak radius, and weapon range are essential.
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Gidgets should not burn up your CPU. This keeps the game accessible on modest hardware.
+3 / -0
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quote:
I think people mostly make widgets to make widgets. They want to play the coder sandbox or test their cyborg abilities |
And I think the idea of developing for the sake of developing (when correlated with winning which is one of the main ideas of RTS) is something to be encouraged, otherwise in 10 years most of us will get bored of ZK because it will feel the same. quote:
Sure, and if we are fairly close currently why put up with the extra issues? See "scraping the bottom of the barrel". |
Change the barrel. ZK did not appear because people were happy with the games they played. The same could have been said before widgets were even possible. I get is hard and might not happen, what I hope is that it is not "discouraged" just because it is hard/complex. quote:
The important thing is that we've reached this: quote:
As a somewhat related, but non topic furthering point: I like the current level of automation at work. |
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While as a old player of the spring engine (since ~2006) I fully understand and agree with the statements, as a long time player of a dynamic and changing ZK I am really afraid that believing automation "is fine" will make the game less innovative, hence boring in time. Yes, I like the automation, but I think it can be better!
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i think widgets are fine as look as they are easy to access, and we get to see some kind of whitelist for the public games to avoid balance breaking. for people like me, who just play the game and have absolutely no idea how to code, widgets are not in our reach, and sometimes, daunting to even think of trying to download/install or whatever. Most of them, as far as i understand, dont give huge advantages, but in small games, it can make the difference, or even in bigger ones. info is crucial, so if one player has all the info he needs at the glance of an eye, while we have to spend time and effort to gather it, its kinda start to be unfair. Honestly, i dont really think what an ideal solution could be. i could say that such things should be banned from ranked matchmaking, but then again, the counter argument could be that they allow people with some kind of disability, or low reflexes due to age to play, so we again start going to the direction of whitelisting some of them, which is time consuming. for big team games, same arguments could be used, +1: the fun of experimentation for those creating them. this whole discussion reminds me a bit of similar problems with skins in other games, where people would use skins with only one color to be able to easily distinct enemies, which was unfair but also helpful for those with eye-problems or shitty monitors. same things with graphics in some games---> turn them down to low to have a clearer picture, bringing massive advantages compared to those with high and beautiful graphics. so yeah, my conclusion of this messy paragraph would be to start white-listing and adding some of them into the base game so that more players can use them, reducing the amount of unfairness, and have an option to enable/disable them in some games if the majority agrees.
+1 / -0
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quote:
This reads a bit like you are trying to defend your competitive advantage you hold due to higher APM (and/or good hotkey usage). I think that's antithetical to the ZK philosophy of reducing micromanagement burden.
Why exactly should a particular play be rewarded? |
Reducing micromanagement burden is not quite a central philosophy of ZK. It would be a very different game if it was. Something closer to what you are trying to get at could be the philosophy of removing non-decisions. quote:
Eh?
Are you using discoverability as your criteria for what counts as a "cheating" widget? Because the widget list is way more discoverable that things like circle guard, fire-once and pressing "B" to sink buildings. |
I did not say "cheating" as this topic is much broader. And I did not say discoverability as that is only a part of the issue. I dispute that the widget list is more 'usefully discoverable' or that the widget list is even the same type of thing as something like circle guard. On particulars:
The widget menu, on the other hand, is a minefield. It may be technically easier to discover if you happen to press Ctrl+F11 (otherwise you need to untick Simple Settings and tick Advanced Settings), but it takes a lot more work to discover how to use it without blowing up your UI. The widgets that are disabled by default are bound to be a bit temperamental and it can be hard to see if they are doing anything at all. The descriptions are not helpful. I assume the followup to the claim "the widget list is discoverable" will be "therefore simply putting the current player widgets there fixes fairness", which just makes the minefield worse. The widget list may as well not exist for this topic simply because if you put a widget there I don't expect very many people to even notice.
+2 / -0
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dyth68 I think we've reached a point where we split paths massively in opinion. I'll address two points, respectfully and as neutrally as possible (We fell out once, it's not my intention to do so again). quote:
How does that make the game more fun?
I don't think the word "deserves" really has a place in ZK discussions, that way lies Starcraft style "if you are unable or unwilling to set a dozen hotkeys and flick between all areas of the map several times a second you deserve whatever happens to your unattended units". I don't think that kind of constant need for attention makes thing more fun, I think it makes things less fun. |
The need and application of attention is what separates good players from bad. Being capable of multitasking is tantamount to good play. The superfluid update actually made things a little easier in this regard, as you have much more time to react to unfolding events before you lose your raiders or constructors, for example. But how far do we go here before there's nothing a talented person CAN do to differentiate themselves from a person who's automated everything? I know a person who's automated a lot of the stuff in their house and they're the laziest cunt I know. I see this whole movement as threatening the same outcome. Automation doesn't create gladiators, it creates an endless cycle of code adjustments. You say the following to Randy: quote:
This reads a bit like you are trying to defend your competitive advantage you hold due to higher APM (and/or good hotkey usage). I think that's antithetical to the ZK philosophy of reducing micromanagement burden.
Why exactly should a particular play be rewarded? |
Randy's talent and anyone else who was it ABSOLUTELY should be rewarded. They have put in the research and practise, and combined it with their own innate ability, and became a better player than the majority. Why should that be nerfed down? I can see why those without skill or the time to gain the skill would want to level the playing field, but the better question is why should THEY be rewarded? You mentioned earlier that people associate their ladder ranking with social standing and that's such a can of worms. The ranked ladder, labelled "Competitive" is exactly that; a competitive ladder for competitive people to manifest the results of their effort. We should be enjoying the success of the good players as much as we should be encouraging up and comers. It doesn't have to translate into social standing, although people will ALWAYS project their interpretation of what being succesful means onto you, particularly when there's envy or idol worship involved. It's all bullshit filler and drama. What's not bullshit is the idea that the competitive ladder should remain a place where people with talent should stand out from those without. Again; they put in the work, they climbed, they get the "rewards" if you can call the amount of flak you get for doing well around here that. Where I'm going with this is to say that if widgets threaten to water the above down, you can be pretty sure that people with a similar mindset who value player skill are going to push back against it. You can't automate away skill discrepancy without trivializing the purpose of the whole ladder.
+2 / -0
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I disagree with the above post in a complicated way that I may figure out later. Edit: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/219442#219442
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quote:
This reads a bit like you are trying to defend your competitive advantage you hold due to higher APM (and/or good hotkey usage). I think that's antithetical to the ZK philosophy of reducing micromanagement burden.
Why exactly should a particular play be rewarded? |
Not at all, my APM is nothing special nowadays as I'm getting older (in gamer years) and slower now, I rely much more on my decision making and strategy. To answer your final point, I think a particular play should be rewarded if it is a smart, strategical decision.
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quote:
The need and application of attention is what separates good players from bad. Being capable of multitasking is tantamount to good play |
I think these two sentences both capture the things I least enjoy about RTS, and what makes it so daunting to the uninitiated.
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How does one get started helping out with development? As in, if I had ideas for a way to improve unit AI (Lance targeting based on unit value, for instance), where can I find the code to make a fork that does just that? I'm assuming that's how you'd prefer someone help out with development.
+0 / -0
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quote:
I think these two sentences both capture the things I least enjoy about RTS, and what makes it so daunting to the uninitiated. |
Doing many incredibly complex things at once while under incredible pressures of time is what defines RTS. It is not something the majority will ever enjoy. They pretended they did - back when they didn't get to choose between this, and DOTA. But now, they do. Thus, ZK - the Dwarf Fortress of RTS - is a niche game in a niche genre. [Spoiler]
One simple thing done under no time pressure is. Ugh. Well. Something i don't find fun, so i don't do it, so i don't know about these, but surely they exist.
One complex thing done without time pressure makes things like Chess or Go, where you can only move one thing per turn.
Many complex things done at once but without time pressure is traditional TBS like Civilization and when even more complex, simulation games like Dwarf Fortress.
One (reasonably) simple thing done under time pressure is genres like FPS.
One complex thing done under time pressure is perhaps the MOBAs.
Many complex things done at once under time pressure is where you get to RTS - and when even more complex, ZK (or Achron).
+2 / -0
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But remember Istrolid? My fleet was 80% AI scripted, with just a bit of human oversight. It was brutally effective even in competitive 1v1 until new components that rewarded micro (jump, cloak etc) were added. great RTS. AI does not need to be multitasking hell to be complex, or for the decisions involved to be complex.
+1 / -0
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Istrolid has great AI features that are for the most part simple enough for everybody to use, but it hasn't been without community division. The 1v1t mode was created for competitive players to play 1v1 with AI features disabled. It was hilariously broken and nobody seems to play it anymore (correct me if I'm wrong, haven't looked in a long time). I think the AI editor is the best (at least the most unique) thing about Istrolid but they didn't want to improve it because a significant quantity of players weren't into it. In other words, Istrolid is probably a good example of How Not To Do It. They went pretty far to satisfy both sides of the community but not quite far enough to satisfy either imo.
+0 / -0
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   GoogleFrog: Huh, I don't think I've ever seen https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Unit_commandsAsking a few people, they hadn't either. Admittedly, they hadn't discovered the widget list before I pointed it out a while back either... I suspect substantially less than 10% of players know about most of those commands. Dregs: I see the only purpose of rewards (in the context of a game) to be increasing fun. So I don't see a reason to reward one skill (rapidly flitting about the map) when there are plenty of other skills (such as grand strategy, careful unit choices, clever manoeuvrers or just splitting attention between the *non*-trivial things) to reward. I think rewards should concentrate on the skills that are fun to practice and think flitting about and keeping track of a huge number of trivial things is less fun to practice than the other aspects of the game. I also think ladder positioning is only a substantial reward for a few people who are concentrated near the top. As an aside: The biggest reason I care about my own ladder rating is so that my views on balance and gameplay do not get dismissed by those who think they know better.   Anarchid: I disagree. You can lean hard on the real time strategy requirement (requiring you to think about and plan through a complex and evolving situation) without needing to split attention heavily. MOBAs are very tactical and most decisions are very local in time and space. Its still possible to have a game with non-local decision-making without requiring heavy attention splitting. Maybe a slow motion version of 3 player Liquid War might be such an example?
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Istrolid is very relevant to this discussion. I think more went wrong with that game's design besides AI, but let's focus on that. And my take on this is that Istrolid went too far to satisfy the fringes while the center couldn't hold. There is essentially no way in Istrolid to provide meaningful input to AI-controlled units. Some attempts at that were tackled on later (such as units ceasing to execute their AI program when selected), but that was a binary yes/no. There are no unit states and no way to quickly select between multiple AI programs. There is a line move but there is no fight move. Each unit can be given only one global behavior. You can't, for example, tell a unit that is programmed as an armed scout to stalk out a specific position to prevent capture by enemies - the moment you deselect it will fuck off to resume its normal programming. Consequently, the normal AI has to be all and everything this unit will ever have. It's not just the community that is split into hard-ai and hard-human camps. The units themselves are segregated into automated battleships and drone fighters on one end, and darth vader's personal manual-use phase bomber on the other. I think this is a great missed opportunity. Imagine an istrolid where instead of telling your unit that you are ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL because you want to fight its poor little brain by using it to capture points while it desperately wants to be a fighter... you just instead tell it to EXECUTE ORDER 66 (WHICH IS CAPTURE NEAREST POINT AND HOLD IT). So, rather than control the unit with your jerky qwop movements, you control it with your intentions; higher-level orders that it has some brains to interpret as it can. What could that look like in ZK? For example, i think our unit states are quite dated. Roam and Maneuver in particular are meaningless; instead they could be Move Evasively or Move Aggressively, or something more meaningful in that way. (Scythe on holdpos: YOU CANNOT PASS SIR KNIGHT. Scythe on evasive: PLEASE PASS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE SIR KNIGHT. Scythe on aggressive: I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB SIR KNIGHT) (Or maybe those could be commands insted. Aggro movestate is pretty much Fight. A move command with an evasive state could be Sneak. There are many ways to build a clock) quote:
I disagree. You can lean hard on the real time strategy requirement (requiring you to think about and plan through a complex and evolving situation) without needing to split attention heavily. |
I don't think you can reduce a game in such a way without either turning it into tactics, or allowing your opponent to abuse the asymmetry of focus. Conversely, you can often pick strategies in ZK that negate this asymmetry of attentions. Cheeses are one kind of such strategy; and i miss days when there were more of these viable. (You could say that a rush is in fact a method of reducing an unfolding expanding-complexity strategy game into a tactics game)
+10 / -0
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