Have you ever played a strategy game, beaten your opponent (be it a computer or human opponent) and felt the end game to be somewhat anticlimactic? Or have you been beaten squarely by someone else, and sat watching helplessly waiting for him to finish you off completely? It seems to me that many strategy games have a rather disappointing endgame. Rather than going out with a bang, your opponents tend to put up a good fight for a while, then gradually fizzle out towards the end, leaving you the task of ''mopping up''. Either that, or your opponent just surrenders. This applies to RTS and TBS games pretty much equally. I''d like the last fight to be truly apocalyptic. I''d like my opponent to be able to make a decent last stand before I wipe him off the face of the map entirely. I''d like to have tools at my disposal which can prevent the game from becoming a tedious game of hide and seek. I want to finish the game on a high note, regardless of whether I win or lose, knowing that at least I had some fun in the last few minutes of the game. In short, I''m proposing giving the losing player a bit of a boost once certain victory conditions have been met. Enough of a boost to get some decent carnage going on, but not so much that every game yo-yos between the players endlessly. Any thoughts/suggestions?

how about the winner gets lots of nukes and nuke the whole map

quote:
I''d like to have tools at my disposal which can prevent the game from becoming a tedious game of hide and seek.

Something like the Hunter-Seeker Drones from Tiberian Sun offers a good solution to this, as it automatically seeks out an enemy unit and destroys it, saving vast ammounts of effort and boredom during the ''mop-up'' phase of a game. The drawbacks in this case however are that the Hunter-seeker chooses its target automatically and cannot be controlled by the player in any way, and that only 1 can be possesed, and can only be used every few minutes. Perhaps somthing similar, but not quite so powerful (ie. something that doesnt instakill any target), but which is more readily available and/or can be controlled more could help to improve endgame for the winning player somewhat, at least in the area of having to hunt down remaining units.

Some other things that can help in the same vein include units or structures that can locate enemy units for you, fast mopup units which may not be so helpful in the heat of major battle, and of course if applicable, victory conditions that make a player defeated once they lose all structures, so that miscellaneous units dont have to be hunted down.

I''m not really sure about giving the losing player a boost once they are defeated for sure... for one thing, how do you judge when thats happened, and whats a suitable way of providing such a boost? Increased firepower, rate-of-fire, armour, or speed for thier units are a possibility, as are some reinforcements, but these things could turn a sure defeat into a victory, and that''d change the whole dynamic of the game - especially in situations where both players are almost dead, and battle it out with thier last few units and/or structures (it happens sometimes), it would be very difficult to judge when and how to implement this.

The reaction of opponents depends on the period of time when the battle is fought. In historical time, the reaction of generals depends on the way they make war: they plan before attacking and then commit their units according to their plan. During battle, either they can amend their plan to counter the enemy or they prefer to retreat to save their fighting value. Still you can use some tricks to balance out your armies at the end:
- Renaissance period: the armies recruited many mercenaries (even generals). A mercenary unit may defect to the highest bidder during battle, break into fleeing due to lower morale, or decide not to fight.
- Ancient period: the army was composed of units of people from the same cities (greek armies) or of auxiliaries from the country where the battles takes place (roman auxiliaries). Some units may defect to the other side or refuse to fight an allies fighting for the opponents.

You can add unforeseen reinforcements (due to poor scouting) or ambushes (hindering your deployment and giving to your opponent some advantages).

Still, we are stuck with the fact that the player fully controls all his armies elements. You could also let the player give orders and calculate the probability for each order to be rightly executed according to each corp general characteristics (e.g: an ancient army has 4 corps, middle, left and right wing plus reserve. The player would directly control the reserve and give orders to the rest of the three corps. These orders may be rightly or wrongly interpreted/executed). Thus, for your end of battle, you could decrease a little the probabilities for orders to be correctly interpreted (dued to pursuit anticipation, enemy bagage looting perspective, or loss of general, ...).

Last but not least, you could add weather elements that hinder your army (e.g. rain turns fields to mud and hinder your cavalry progression) or that makes you need to finish off quickly your opponent (in ancient time like in middle age, battles were fought during the day only and would stop at sunset. If you are only 10 minutes until sunset, you will need to get a quick victory lest the opponent succeeds to flee away during the night).

All of this can be transcripted to fantasy periods or Science fiction period.

Hope that helps.


Ghostly yours,
Red.

Z Steel Soldiers: the game ends when the heavily defended enemy base is conquered - by definition, the end is not anticlimactic. The game starts with a rush, and continues with a very tense, on the edge mid-game fight. Since in Z production is proportional to the _square_ of the amount of controlled teritory, a rather small advantage at the beggining of the end-game translates into a much larger inbalance between the two players, and the inbalance grows fast into a victory march against the enemy base.

I suppose AI that either goes for a final rush or concentrates for a last stand when it loses hope could help (as opposed to AI that runs away into hiding when it can''t fight head on anymore).

Requiring the player to kill all submarines, airplanes and other elusive specialist units is incredibly stupid.

Kazgoroth''s hunter-seeker drones sound perfect, just have a weak version of them wandering around who would usually be useless when the enemy is strong, but when they can no longer fight back properly the hunter seekers could waste them

quote: Original post by Kazgoroth
I''m not really sure about giving the losing player a boost once they are defeated for sure... for one thing, how do you judge when thats happened, and whats a suitable way of providing such a boost?

How you judge is a good question. I think that it''s something that can be built into the game design.

In the design I have in mind (RTS) the goal of the game is to capture a number of objectives (usually buildings of some sort). Whenever one player/team has 100% of the objectives, the endgame comes into play.

The losing player would then get an extra wave of reinforcements with which to attempt to get back into the game. The winning player on the other hand, gets no more reinforcements than usual, but some of the more powerful units and weapons will be unlocked - which will enable him to flush the enemy out if he chooses to hide.

The injection of troops should not be enough to dramatically turn the game around - but it could be enough to enable the losing player to recapture one of the objectives and thus get back into the game... at least for a while. The loser should feel that there is still something left to fight for.

However, what I don''t want is for the losing player to just hunker down and wait for the winning player to come and get him. Thus the winning player will have access to weapons like orbital strikes which can be used to wipe out everything on a large portion of the map, with lots of noise and flashy explosions. Obviously though, the player doesn''t want to use these too close to his own forces, so the only way the losing player can be safe from them, is to get closer to his enemy...

Note that the motivation here is not necessarily just to avoid a long end game - but to provide a exciting and fun endgame. The players should finish the game having had a final hard fought battle, or else having witnessed the pyrotechnics of one side being utterly obliterated by powerful weaponry, or some other suitably exciting ending. The more possible ways it can end, the better, so long as they''re all exciting - and climactic.

The problem is that the winning player is still trying to build up his stuff at the end of the game. He''s trying to kill off the remnants of the enemy force, and there''s no way the enemy can really win at that point, but he''s still building granaries and barracks, because that''s what he''s programmed to do, or because he gets more points if he wins with eight command posts.

Why not have a button that liquidates all your assets and sends every marines, archer, engineer and sorcerer running across the battlefield with a spear to swamp the other guys? If you really think you''ve got it in the bag, just push the "Armageddon" button and see if you were right. For the sake of decency, lock that feature until ten minutes in or so, and have it reduce your combat effectiveness by 50%, so it won''t work if it''s even slightly close. If the bad guy has a few planes left, or a few tanks, or a means by which to defend himself from your horde, then you might lose, but if it really is a mop-up situation, then by all means mop-up.

I loved the endings in an very old Populous like god game. The Armageddon spell will cause all buildings to be destroyed and all people to storm against each other - it all ends in seconds with a blast. The player that starts the Armageddon only wins if he enjoys a large numerical advantage. (btw, anyone remembers the name of this game?)

[edited by - Diodor on April 29, 2004 11:15:59 AM]

Well, the ORIGINAL Populous for the SNES worked like that... I still have that game, but I have never played the 3D Populous.

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