Zero-K v1.5.1.5 - Commshare testing, global storage removal

In theory it is possible without comm-share to allow each player to focus their APM on the most critical points of the battle at any given time, by sharing units (and resources) manually to one another as appropriate. The comm-share system streamlines this a lot and requires less APM in overhead.

Removing overhead APM is not a new thing to Zero-K. Many widgets (and even more fundamental mechanics) exist to remove the tedious APM that exists between thinking of what you want and making it happen. The repeat, line-move and fight commands remove a lot of the APM "sinks" which exist in e.g. Starcraft.

Ideally the new mechanics still allow for finesse and the use of APM to increase the effectiveness of your units. This is certainly the case for line-move and fight; even though your tools for controlling your units in ZK are much more powerful than they are in Starcraft there is still plenty of scope for skilled micromanagement. Furthermore, the skills required to play ZK are more dependent on quick and intelligent thinking than they are on manual dexterity and low ping.

So you might say "More powerful tools (like commshare) to remove APM overhead are good, because the ones that exist have improved ZK". Not so fast. There are two fundamental rules which almost everything in the world follows.

(1) A little of something is good; more is better; too much is fatal.
(2) A little of something is bad; more is worse; too much is fatal.

More powerful management tools fits into category (1). However, too much is still fatal; for example, if humans played ZK by loading up their favourite AI and having it play the entire game for them, it would not be much of a game any more. If a sufficiently game-breaking widget was developed I suspect that something would be done about it.

I believe that whether Comm-share is "better", "meh" or "fatal" is a matter of taste - but there are valid arguments for each of those positions.

(I'm yet to play a game with or against comm-sharers, but I'm not at all sure I will enjoy the experience. For that matter, I view playing against somebody who uses the constructor automation widgets a bit unfavourably.)

quote: You say that global effective apm is higher in comshare mode than in normal mode because in normal mode, a fraction of the potential apm is left unused as the controllable units have a lower APM requirements than the available APM. Sorry, but it is very rare in a ZK game that I feel I have some spare time and spare APM that I could have spent on other units if I could. ON the contrary, I am about 100% APM all the time.

I can't speak for Dancer's argument, but I expect that if you are at 100% APM all the time you are prioritising the most important units to micro. Comm-share allows you to make a choice of "most important" from a wider range, which on average will result in you microing more important units.

Commshare is useful

If you want to share APM and decrease load, and help you:


If you need to micro something else, you can let someone take over your units
If you get attacked and need defense, just call upon those very close units towards you
If ally wants unit, just drive the unit they need so you can share
You can utilize more different tactics as you can get your ally's units so you can merge and make exotic strategies
No more getting annoyed with no scout, you can just pull a random unit as it's free

quote: Still i don't understand how this comshare works. We have this option but i didn't read any serious article with explanation. Except bunch of comments about it it. Only thing i understand that any player control merget units, coms and building. But what about resources in comshare? They are shared totally? So if i will have my used BP larger then any other player i will suck more metal? And what will happen if i will put all my caretakers on high priority? What about dmg output and dmg get? I got all dmg statistics from players who i send invation?

There should be a wiki page written about it. Commshare can be thought of one player playing the game with two computers. They can give orders to their units through either computer and there is no distinction between the computers. This double-computer player behaves exactly as an ordinary player would. There is one resource storage that all the units owned by the player use for construction and income. There is no well-defined sense of either computer owning particular units.

[G0G0]Dancer I know what APM is and have often thought about it when designing. One of the core principals of Zero-K is to avoid mindless clicking or, in other words, not to reward pure APM. I like to think about this in terms of minimizing the number of clicks required to implement decisions. Much of the ZK UI has been developed to make decisions require few clicks and I have avoided implementing mechanics which would just add useless clicks.

For example you might see a few enemy Zeus approaching a group of Rockos and decide that you want the Rockos to safely harass the Zeus. This is one decision and can be implemented with the Fight command in one click. However, the game is not being played for you because there are other choices you could have made. Perhaps you want to kill the Zeus rapidly and stop them from retreating, at the risk of your Rockos, so run the Rockos right in (this prevents the Zeus from dodging as effectively as well as from running). Make the situation more complex and there are even more choices. Perhaps there is a Chainsaw near the Zeus and you choose to dive in and kill it. Perhaps the terrain gives the Rockos two choices of retreat direction. The number of choices is massive once you look at a real situation in the context of a whole game. New information is coming in all the time and there tends to be a lot of fighting and interaction.

Many RTS games contain decisions that require continued action as upkeep. For example in Starcraft you might decide that your Barracks should keep producing Marines. However, due to the queue limit and reservation of resources you have to input actions just to keep this decision ticking over. One could argue that each Marine produced is a decision but it is, at best, often a fairly trivial decision that distracts the player from more interesting decisions. The 'real' decision being made by players is when to start constant Marine production and when to stop.

This core principal helps ZK fail gracefully when it encounters players with really high or really low APM. Many units would be awful in the hands of low APM players if not for powerful UI and unit AI. Likewise, the powerful UI lets everyone play as if they had higher APM so units generally behave closer to how they would behave in the hands of really high APM players. This lets me balance according to highly skilled unit usage without leaving low APM players behind. To be concrete, Rockos can do their basic job of kiting Zeus mostly regardless of who is using them. Also, if you have multiple simultaneous Rocko battles they do not suddenly become countered by Zeus.

quote: "First you should realize that this is no balance change in the sense that the implications of the mechanics of ZK have remained the same. New strategies have not opened up or changed in power. You could already share units and resources freely between teammates to put resources and BP where they are needed. As an extreme example you could just have the entire team share everything to one goddelike player and have that player play the game. Anyway, I have seen big unit rushes come out of large teamgames before commshare. It just takes some coordination." If you honestly think this doesn't change balance, then neither would a tacpause for the same above reasons. It does not effect mechanics. But... Commshare does effect mechanics. Rather than constantly giving resources to another player in the old fashoned style, which would require constant updating, since the income is dynamic... (to share it as soon as you earn it isnt easy if your also trying to play the game).

You missed the important part. "The implications of the mechanics of ZK" is what ZK solved to. For example the implication of the rules of chess is either that white wins, black wins or that the game is a draw. Commshare has no effect in the sense that the strategies employed by infinitely smart players with infinite APM are unchanged (at least up to minor technical details). This is the sense in which I have not touched balance. Of course the strategies employed by actual people have shifted in power within our section of the finite APM landscape. You can replace the word "coordination" with "APM" in my previous post and get prettymuch the same ideas.

The model of infinite APM players allows me to rapidly not implement many mechanics. For example in Red Alert 2 there is a Spy unit which can be made to look like opponents units (I think the Changeling in Starcraft II does this as well but it's not what I first think of). This unit does not respond to your orders so the mechanic doesn't even exist for players with infinite APM. All they need to do is give every one of their units an order every second of the game and if the unit doesn't respond it is a Spy. Generally if I can imagine a widget which would render a mechanic moot I don't implement the mechanic.

I'm unconcerned by the meta changes introduced by commshare for a few reasons.

• The 'graceful failure' from a few paragraphs back also protects us from increases in UI power (or increased APM force multipliers). Powerful UI helps us approximate the actions of players with infinite APM and UI power tends to have diminishing returns.
• If our UI is more powerful then we are probably better approximating the players with infinite APM. If the increased UI power reveals an imbalance then it is worth fixing.
• I have never really thought of the individual players on each team when thinking about balance. This has allowed me to mess with overdrive resource distribution and only pay attention to how it affects the social dynamics of the team. Idealized balance is unaffected by the particulars of who gets the resources.
• Previous UI improvements have not broken anything vital. Making it easier to implement decisions has just increased the number of decisions that can be made.

APM is not even unimportant in ZK. The rate at which you need to make decisions can be high. The nuanced choices in decisions mean that many will inevitably require many clicks to implement. I've tried to take a coding theory approach here by making the most common and granular decisions one would want to implement take fewer clicks to implement.

quote: More powerful management tools fits into category (1). However, too much is still fatal; for example, if humans played ZK by loading up their favourite AI and having it play the entire game for them, it would not be much of a game any more. If a sufficiently game-breaking widget was developed I suspect that something would be done about it.

Definitely. I tend to be pragmatic here though. RTS AIs tend to be bad and that is in games without powerful UIs. If someone decides to let an AI play for them then are they not just cheating themselves? Still, there are risks with widgets and in the end they are blockable (requiring a custom engine build to circumvent). Here are two things that might warrant it:

• Someone invents some amazing UI tool but refuses to share. They could disrupt games with it and it is unfair to play against someone with a more powerful UI. So far, the user-implemented UI has either been mostly unnoticeable or incorporated in ZK. The potential for incorporation and the fun obtained from creating your own widget are two of the main reasons local widgets are enabled.
• Someone implements some widely used strategic unit AI that takes most or all of the decisions from a sizable portion of the playerbase. Additionally there is some social situation that traps everyone into using this widget instead of trying to play the game themselves. In effect, the playerbase might lose the prisoners dilemma and we would have to step in. (However, look at the big teams room to decide for yourself how likely it is that we would manage to step in).

I don't think commshare is at this point. I don't see how anyone could use commshare without voice chat. It just seems chaotic.

quote: Raw APM alone can't show the difference between a genius micromanaging all the details of a battle at 100 APM and a jittery idiot spamming blob-move orders at 200 APM,

Situation:
Raiding against 3 LLT
Genius: 1Reaper
Idiot:3 Felons.

Because the Reaper can take the defenses on by itself, and the fact it is very very strong, using anymore than a few clicks to make it turn it's turret is wasteful.
On the other hand, the Felons are somewhat outranged, and cannot fire repeatedly since the shield will deplete, and thus let the LLT take a shot at the weaker body of the Felon.




It's more or less about efficiency, making good, tactical/strategic decisions will lower the amount of APM you need, as your not trying to suddenly micromanage your Rockos because 20 Glaives went behind your warriors, which will boost the APM requirement.

APM is useful, especially in dense battles where you just need the Reaper to fire at the Zeus but the Banishers are in the way, or when you get surprised attacked and need to micromanage all your units lest you end up losing the battle. But it isn't a win or lose situation if you have less APM than the other.

quote: most good players know about everything about strategy and manouvers

No.

quote: most good players know about something about strategy and manouvers

Aquanim

Lifting the negative stigma on tacpause could help to make sure everyone knows their next move, and let the nooby computers catch up.. Unless your talking about a different sync.


I've only tried commshare with a human ally against 5CAI, and while that had little impact on us getting stomped, it seems more useful as someone with overflowing storage can now share to team, or E stall newbs can now have more E.

I believe coordination and leadership is more needed in commshare than anywhere else, such as 1 person doing all the eco and defense, a few attack, raiding or assault, depending on which fac their using, and now if a newb is using an expensive unit wrong/someone overwhelmed, someone in team can drag that out instead of screaming #@@# you!

If the team isn't coordinated, I'm sure it will die faster than a stardust getting attacked by impalers

I think the unenjoyment is just a phase. It's relatively new, people are checking it out. I'm sure with time it will get better. If it becomes prevalent, it could evolve team games into more team-work based given time (like months). That's an optimistic outlook though. I want to watch this trend, see if it becomes degenerative. I had a lot of hope when Firepluk and co discovered it in the 3v3 games.

It's my hope if it feels necessary to use that it will evolve people into more coordination/etc through the reinforcement of good behavior (coordinating,communicating) with win rate increases. EG: people with good coordination skills will force the other players to evolve and learn.

Give it time. I'm mostly gonna work on UI bugs commshare causes. I think maybe units need default initial states/inherent from fac for commsharing teams. That and some unit selection viewing upgrades might help alleviate some of the frustration. If you kindly will, please report all widgets that commshare breaks and I'll take a look at them. Thanks.

Commshare breaks all kinds of widgets, since most of them assume that your teamID never changes. Dealing with comshare is actually even more complicated than that, because if you merge into another team then no callins are produced for all of the units you inherit, and UnitGiven is called for all the units that you previously owned, leading to some units being missed and others being double counted. Also new unit states will inevitably conflict with other people's settings which can cause unpredictable results, and other widgets which have settings that can conflict will produce similar conflicts as well.

Unmerging causes similar conflicts in the reverse direction. Widgets may continue counting units that you no longer own, and will then triple count units you get back. Merging and unmerging repeatedly is an easy way to break everything beyond recognition.

"just". That basically amounts to /luaui reload. If widgets can reload themselves I wouldn't know how to do it, and it'd be a screwy thing to do at any rate.