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[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? [/quote]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.
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[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? [/quote]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.
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@[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.
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@[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[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."
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[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."
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If you honestly think this doesn't change balance, then neither would a tacpause for the same above reasons. It does not effect mechanics.
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If you honestly think this doesn't change balance, then neither would a tacpause for the same above reasons. It does not effect mechanics.
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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).[/quote]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.
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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).[/quote]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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm unconcerned by the meta changes introduced by commshare for a few reasons.
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I'm unconcerned by the meta changes introduced by commshare for a few reasons.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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.
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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.
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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.
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[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.[/quote]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:
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[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.[/quote]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:
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* 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).
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* 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).
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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.
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Zero-K v1.5.1.5 - Commshare testing, global storage removal