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Original post by Sandman [...] Maybe you guessed your opponent would take Pikemen, and chose lots of Archers, but instead he chose Cavalry. Oops, you lost the game because you guessed wrong. It's all too dependent on WHAT you have in your army, and not enough on HOW you use it. The environment barely factors in at all.

I came to the same conclusion this weekend when explaining this idea to my brother. I honestly don't know how to get around this and as far as I know WH40K suffers from this as well (when you don't ask your opponent, obviously). I was toying with the idea of putting squads into reserves so that you would have a 2000pt game with 1000pt reserve. In that case if you are heavily overpowered, you can call in ANY one of your premade squads to make it a fair fight. As an example, a player would call in a squad of Heavy guns to take out tanks. I believe WH40K does have a system like this, actually, using drop pods.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

The system is partially role based because you customize the role of the unit in the squad (ie. Is he a melee guy, a Captain, a Heavy gun). But I don't like the idea of strictly going with this because the creation of your army becomes more aesthetic then functional. Unless I'm missing your point :P.

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Unfortunately, as a side effect it basically turns your game into a glorified guessing game.

Only if it is a hidden information game (ie: that you don't know what your opponent is going to put out until it is too late to change your choice).

In a TPS or an RTS, there are three ways to escape this "Hidden Information" problem. The first is scouting or removal of the Fog of War, manoeuvrability, or generalisation.

With scouting, you use some technique to reveal your opponent's choices and then have the opportunity to change your own choices.

With manoeuvrability, it is about being able to change the positioning of your units so that the one aspect of your army meets the aspect of your opponent's army that it is bets at dealing with.

And finally, with generalisation, each unit of your army capable of dealing with any aspect of your enemies army.

But I do agree that a pure Scissors/Paper/Rock system is not very interesting even with these factors. What you need is something that allow you to change the relationship strengths between the different choices.

For example:
On grasslands, Cavalry can move quickly and close fast on Archers. This means that under normal circumstances, Cavalry would beat Archers (and pikemen would beat cavalry and archers would beat pikemen in a SPR system). And, if that is all you could do, it would be very boring.

But, if Swamplands slowed Cavalry to a crawl (heavy loads and horses churn the mud and thus slow their progress down) but archers, being lighter can avoid this hindrance, then in this situation, archers can beat cavalry (or at least not get beaten so badly by the cavalry).

The relationship between the types has been changed. Even though the basis is that of an RPS system, the environment creates a factor that changes the balance between the units, and if a battle field was made up of many such environments, then how you use the units would become important.

It is not as simple as RPS is bad and not interesting. It is that RPS by itself is not very interesting, but using it as a basis and having other factors that change this basic relationship can make it interesting.

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All RPS does for you is eliminate the need to worry about dominant/obsolete units.

This is the important reason for including an RPS as a base system. It means that in general, the system is balanced, but by having the other factors that can change the basic balance, you end up with a more interesting system.

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It's annoying enough in an RTS, but in a turn based game where you have to design your forces at the start, it's even worse. Maybe you guessed your opponent would take Pikemen, and chose lots of Archers, but instead he chose Cavalry. Oops, you lost the game because you guessed wrong. It's all too dependent on WHAT you have in your army, and not enough on HOW you use it. The environment barely factors in at all.

But the whole point of my previous posts was that you can't just use the simple RPS system. You need to have more than the basic system. You argument is only true is you only have the basic Rock Paper Scissors system and nothing else.

When you add in other factors that can change the balance between the unit types, your argument falls apart. Because if you can then use one of these factors to make your Archers able to beat Cavalry (say moving them into a swamp), then your concern is no longer valid.

Now, lets assume that we only have environment as a factor in winning (this is as you have done to my suggestion of assuming that only unit type is a factor despite the fact that I have been stating that other factors are necessary). Then if you just position your troops in the right environments, then you will win, there is no strategy and the game is boring and the player who places their units first will win. Just like if you only consider unit type as a factor you end up with a situation that if you guess wrong, then you will loose.

If victory is dependent on a single factor, then if you make a mistake with that factor, then you will loose. It doesn't matter one iota what that factor is, IF victory comes down to a single factor, then you will win or lose on that choice.

If victory is dependent on the combination and accumulation of success in multiple factors, then this naturally means that the players have more control over their victory or defeat.

Although I do agree with you to some degree, I also think your agruments against Rock Paper Scissors is not really applicable to what has been discussed as you argument is a kind of Strawman against it.

A Strawman is when you change your opponents argument form what they are actually saying in such a way as to make it easily refutable.

You have taken my argument for an integration of a Scissors Paper Rock system within a larger system and states that by its self SPR does not factor in the environment of the battle field.

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I prefer a role-based approach to unit design; this gives the designer much more scope for creating interesting and imaginative units without having figure out whether it's a rock, paper or scissor. A pikeman unit is not a Rock, it's a heavy melee infantry unit.

Actually your role based system is not different to a Scissors/Paper/Rock system at all. You specify a role, and then have another role that is to beat it. By any other name, this is a scissors/Paper/rock system.

One role might be range attacks. Then you can create a role that can beat ranged attacks, say something fast so that the ranged attackers can't skirmish against them. Lets call them Cavalry. But you can't have cavalry the best unit in the game, so lets create one that can beat cavalry, but can't beat archers (so they aren't better than cavalry). Lets call these a "heavy melee infantry unit".

But hang on, this is exactly a scissors/paper/rock system, only that we defined it through "Roles" rather than fitting it to an RPS system first. It is no different it is just looking at the creation using different terminology.

A Unit type that is beaten by Unit Type A but can beat unit type C is a role. But it also can be called "Scissors".

If you use your "Role Assignment" system to create unit types, I am sure that if you create a balanced system it will form an Intransitive "Scissors Paper Rock" system (and it can have more than 3 choices in the system and it doesn't have to be symmetrical either).

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I came to the same conclusion this weekend when explaining this idea to my brother. I honestly don't know how to get around this and as far as I know WH40K suffers from this as well (when you don't ask your opponent, obviously).

The answer is simple and what I ahve been saying all along: Have other factors other than just the Unit Type.

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Original post by Edtharan Only if it is a hidden information game (ie: that you don't know what your opponent is going to put out until it is too late to change your choice). In a TPS or an RTS, there are three ways to escape this "Hidden Information" problem. The first is scouting or removal of the Fog of War, manoeuvrability, or generalisation. With scouting, you use some technique to reveal your opponent's choices and then have the opportunity to change your own choices.

As mentioned, this doesn't really work with a 'select your army before you go' type game. The other two do work; but ultimately if your opponent's is strong on hard counters to your units, and you're weak on hard counters to his, you're going to struggle.

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This is the important reason for including an RPS as a base system. It means that in general, the system is balanced, but by having the other factors that can change the basic balance, you end up with a more interesting system.

It doesn't really give you any guarantees of balance per se, at least not unless you make it boringly symmetrical. It does give you a reasonable guarantee of usefulness.

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It's annoying enough in an RTS, but in a turn based game where you have to design your forces at the start, it's even worse. Maybe you guessed your opponent would take Pikemen, and chose lots of Archers, but instead he chose Cavalry. Oops, you lost the game because you guessed wrong. It's all too dependent on WHAT you have in your army, and not enough on HOW you use it. The environment barely factors in at all. But the whole point of my previous posts was that you can't just use the simple RPS system. You need to have more than the basic system. You argument is only true is you only have the basic Rock Paper Scissors system and nothing else

And by the time you've got something interesting it looks nothing like RPS. So why do we still call it that?

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Although I do agree with you to some degree, I also think your agruments against Rock Paper Scissors is not really applicable to what has been discussed as you argument is a kind of Strawman against it. A Strawman is when you change your opponents argument form what they are actually saying in such a way as to make it easily refutable.

I'm arguing against RPS systems. What are you arguing for? Because while you might be calling it RPS, it's sounding increasingly unlike it. In fact I think you're more or less agreeing with me. [grin]

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Actually your role based system is not different to a Scissors/Paper/Rock system at all. You specify a role, and then have another role that is to beat it. By any other name, this is a scissors/Paper/rock system.

RPS is a role based system (Rock is a Scissors Killer, Scissors is a Paper Killer, Paper is a Rock Killer), but role based systems are not RPS.

Why constrain your thinking to the idea that everything has to be a hard counter to something else? Some things might not be a hard counter to anything, but are invaluable for other reasons, like scouting or capturing strategic points. Another advantage is that we are now thinking about the unit and it's role in the army in it's own right, rather than trying to place it against every other unit in every other army in existence to try and figure out what it's for.

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The system is partially role based because you customize the role of the unit in the squad (ie. Is he a melee guy, a Captain, a Heavy gun). But I don't like the idea of strictly going with this because the creation of your army becomes more aesthetic then functional. Unless I'm missing your point :P.

If you're going with something like WH40K's system where you have some basic unit types which you can configure to varying degrees it's not too hard; you can constrain your choices to those which fit the role of the base unit. Some units might be completely un-customisable (like for instance, eldar aspect warriors which IIRC have very few or no options available to them) or extremely customisable (eldar guardians, which can be configured almost as you like, with heavy weapons, melee weapons, jet bikes, the works)

If you're going as the OP suggests for something completely open ended like spore, where the unit's role is entirely up to how the player chooses to equip it, it may be a lot harder. It may be that just ensuring that every piece of equipment has disadvantages in line with it's advantages is enough; don't rely too heavily on points cost as a balancing tool. It's often much easier for a player to manage a small army of elite uber troops that can do everything than a large army of highly specialised troops, so steer clear of just making better stuff more expensive. As a rule of thumb, more powerful = more specialised. An uberlaser of ultimate one-shotting might make for a wonderful sniper weapon but worthless at just about everything else, e.g crowd control, melee etc. Make it heavy and hard to move, and give it a whopping great big cooldown time.

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If you're going as the OP suggests for something completely open ended like spore, where the unit's role is entirely up to how the player chooses to equip it, it may be a lot harder. It may be that just ensuring that every piece of equipment has disadvantages in line with it's advantages is enough; don't rely too heavily on points cost as a balancing tool. It's often much easier for a player to manage a small army of elite uber troops that can do everything than a large army of highly specialised troops, so steer clear of just making better stuff more expensive. As a rule of thumb, more powerful = more specialised. An uberlaser of ultimate one-shotting might make for a wonderful sniper weapon but worthless at just about everything else, e.g crowd control, melee etc. Make it heavy and hard to move, and give it a whopping great big cooldown time.

This is why I mentioned that the units would have stats that are more inline with an RPG (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, etc). These will be modified heavily by what you equip your men with. For example, Heavy armor kills your Dex score. Therefore your uber-sniper unit with the uberlaser of one-shotting will be hindered heavily and might have a hard time aiming. So this would mean that the uber-sniper unit will have to be in almost no armor to be effective making it vulnerable to melee or other long range spray weaponry. But, in order to augment the fact that this unit will not need extra armor, the gun will be very expensive and, like you said, have long cooldowns. Therefore, This sniper unit will be expensive and very vulnerable (lack of armor) and possibly very slow due to the size of the gun. But on the other hand, it will be very powerful against single targets, and might have good cover due to the lack of bulky armor.

But to join in on the RPS conversation, this is exactly what it is. Except that the sniper rock can be trumped by much more then just paper. The combat system boils down to RPS at some level but its abstracted and built upon so much that equating it to RPS is rather moot.

My concern now is, how would you handle customizability in real time, on the battle field. So, two parties already created their armies without knowing what the other party has (Maybe I should allow viewing of armies?). When you get to the battle field, party A realizes that the enemy is overpowering and can easily defeat him. In order to get a level playing field, I was thinking that either party can call in reserves. These reserves can be any squad but cannot be over a certain point limit. For example, you find out that the enemy has nothing but uber-snipers which makes your tanks and slower moving vehicles sitting ducks. Without reserves, this is a pointless game that will end in victory for your opponent. In order to level the playing field, you could send in (say, 200pts worth of) fast moving melee units. Its a limited number of units and you can only call in reserves every, say, 5 turns.

Do you guys know of any other ways to call in reserves or to level the battle field?

Also, I was thinking of harboring healers on the battle field that can carry injured or dead units to a safe area and resurrect them or restore their health. Or possibly have them grouped in a squad. This might be a good option to have when reserves are not available. I don't remember WH40K having options like this.

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Original post by RealMarkP But to join in on the RPS conversation, this is exactly what it is. Except that the sniper rock can be trumped by much more then just paper. The combat system boils down to RPS at some level but its abstracted and built upon so much that equating it to RPS is rather moot.

The sniper is an example of a Spiker. It's strong at range against high value targets, but vulnerable vs any melee and massed weak range troops. It's also vulnerable out of cover (where it becomes a target) or in dense terrain that blocks its line of sight.

While you could fit it into some kind of horrendously complicated multiply nested RPS framework, I don't think there's much point in doing so. It's behaviour was not created by deliberately saying "well we have all these scissor units wandering around, lets create something to beat them". It was designed with the following principles:

1. Everything needs one or more useful role.
2. The more powerful a thing is within its role(s), the narrower it's scope.

The RPS terminology tells us nothing useful about it's behaviour, all it tells us is that it beats something and something else beats it. Which may not actually be true of all roles; like the scout or spotter, which is a completely useless unit on it's own; it's effectiveness only becomes apparent when combined with the rest of the force.

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For example, you find out that the enemy has nothing but uber-snipers which makes your tanks and slower moving vehicles sitting ducks. Without reserves, this is a pointless game that will end in victory for your opponent. In order to level the playing field, you could send in (say, 200pts worth of) fast moving melee units. Its a limited number of units and you can only call in reserves every, say, 5 turns. Do you guys know of any other ways to call in reserves or to level the battle field?

You might be able to get away with allowing the player to drop back into the customisation screen to create reinforcements in a TBS, but it's definitely going to slow things down a lot. It would probably better to try and find ways of avoiding this if possible.

Some ideas off the top of my head:

Mercenaries: Developer-designed mercenaries (which will be designed reasonably sensibly and will have something for all the major roles) which can be hired at any time, although perhaps they take a turn to arrive.

Weapon drops: The ability to drop supplies onto the battlefield that can effectively reequip the unit that picks them up, perhaps changing their role completely. It could be interesting to limit the times and/or places that the drops can happen; so getting the right men to the resupply point at the right time can become a temporary objective in itself.

Just an idea (using arbitrary numbers); each player gets 1500 points to build their army, but they can only bring in troops worth up to 1000 points. Troops are organized in groups with a point limit off 100. Each turn (or after 5 turn or whatever) each player brings in 1 additional troop from his army. So you can make your specialized troops if you want, and as the game progresses you can choose exactly the ones that you need.

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Original post by Spencer Bowers Just an idea (using arbitrary numbers); each player gets 1500 points to build their army, but they can only bring in troops worth up to 1000 points. Troops are organized in groups with a point limit off 100. Each turn (or after 5 turn or whatever) each player brings in 1 additional troop from his army. So you can make your specialized troops if you want, and as the game progresses you can choose exactly the ones that you need.

Thats what I was thinking, except with squads instead of troops. Everything is squad based.

Another idea I had was to accumulate extra bonus points either by capturing objectives, getting these "power ups" that randomly appear (as mentioned in a previous post), or by redeeming points from kills. These will all add up and when you really need reserves, you can use them to call in those reserves. Mind you, by this point the user will have a fairly large array of squads to choose from (both custom built or stock).

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Original post by RealMarkP Quote: Original post by Spencer Bowers Just an idea (using arbitrary numbers); each player gets 1500 points to build their army, but they can only bring in troops worth up to 1000 points. Troops are organized in groups with a point limit off 100. Each turn (or after 5 turn or whatever) each player brings in 1 additional troop from his army. So you can make your specialized troops if you want, and as the game progresses you can choose exactly the ones that you need. Thats what I was thinking, except with squads instead of troops. Everything is squad based. Another idea I had was to accumulate extra bonus points either by capturing objectives, getting these "power ups" that randomly appear (as mentioned in a previous post), or by redeeming points from kills. These will all add up and when you really need reserves, you can use them to call in those reserves. Mind you, by this point the user will have a fairly large array of squads to choose from (both custom built or stock).

Sorry, every time I said troops I meant to say squads (or units. Units are good.) I don't know why I chose that word...

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Original post by RealMarkP Another idea I had was to accumulate extra bonus points either by capturing objectives, getting these "power ups" that randomly appear (as mentioned in a previous post), or by redeeming points from kills.

This is a positive feedback loop. The more kills/objectives/powerups you get, the more troops you can get. The more troops you can get, the easier it is for you to get more kills/objectives/powerups.

One idea I have been toying with is to have a slow acting Negative feedback loop that attempts to maintain the status quo of the game. But then also have short lived (because of that negative feedback loop) positive feedback loops that a player can exploit to change the status quo.

For example:
There might be several strategic points scattered over the map. A player has to maintain these points by keeping troops near them or they revert to neutral.

The player who has only their troops near a strategic point keeps the point. If there are no troops or enemy troops are also near the point in sufficient numbers, then the point will slowly, but eventually, revert to neutrality.

To capture a point, you need to eliminate all enemy troops from near a strategic point for a certain period of time.

Strategic points give you resource, but not much, just enough to maintain the force needed to keep the point.

This forms the slow negative feedback loop that maintain the status quo. No matter how many point you have you only have enough troops to maintain the points you have.

The positive feedback comes from the fact that points won't revert to neutral instantly. This means that a player can increase their army size by easily capturing neutral points.

They can also attempt to capture enemy points, but it will be likely at the cost of their own point reverting to neutral (which they can then recapture later if desired).

In a WH40K game, this would be implemented on a territory map (rather than a battlefield map). Each territory would only be able to support a certain number/points of troops.

Too many troops in an area would mean that the resource could not support them. Too few (or no) troops in an area would mean that your ability to maintain the territory is reduced and it reverts back to neutral. If too many enemies are in the territory, then they disrupt your ability to maintain that territory, and Neutral territories are easy to capture as there is not significant opposition for you to overcome.

The main difference is that you don't accumulate points/gold/resources/support/whatever over time like in typical RTS/TBS games.

More territories allow you to have a larger army, but not an increased ability to concentrate them.

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Original post by Sandman While you could fit it into some kind of horrendously complicated multiply nested RPS framework, I don't think there's much point in doing so. It's behaviour was not created by deliberately saying "well we have all these scissor units wandering around, lets create something to beat them". It was designed with the following principles: 1. Everything needs one or more useful role. 2. The more powerful a thing is within its role(s), the narrower it's scope. The RPS terminology tells us nothing useful about it's behaviour, all it tells us is that it beats something and something else beats it. Which may not actually be true of all roles; like the scout or spotter, which is a completely useless unit on it's own; it's effectiveness only becomes apparent when combined with the rest of the force.

RPS does not tell us about its behaviour, instead it allows us to analyse the role of a unit to see if it is balanced with others. It can also allow us to locate parts of a system that needs some unit to fill it so as to maintain that balance.

For instance,if you had a Sniper unit, and a Sniper Killer unit, then these are two roles. However, using just pure roles it doesn't actually highlight what type of unit is necessary to make the balance. However, RPS analysis does. We can see using RPS that a unit has to fit in so that it can kill the Sniper Killer, but be vulnerable to the Sniper (or ahve several units that form a chain to fit those constraints).

With Role analysis, you can know that you need a sniper Killer Killer, but without RPS analysis, you don't immediately see that you also need the unit (or chain of units) to be vulnerable to the sniper.

With such a trivial system as a 3 unit system it is easy to intuitively see this, so that does not invalidate this. If you had a system where you had 11 units for each faction, and with 5 factions, then you can't simply "intuit" the role that is needed. An analytical tool that can be used to aid you in this task is therefore invaluable.

And that is what RPS is used for. And it is also why it is a good idea to use RPS to build up you system in the first place (while using role analysis to specify how the units interact).

The two system are complimentary rather than exclusive as you seem to think.

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Original post by Edtharan RPS does not tell us about its behaviour, instead it allows us to analyse the role of a unit to see if it is balanced with others. It can also allow us to locate parts of a system that needs some unit to fill it so as to maintain that balance.

Except it doesn't tell us much about balance either, unless our RPS system is boringly symmetrical. As soon as you get into more complex mechanics and start fiddling with DPS figures, cooldown rates and unit costs, build times etc. RPS becomes completely useless for balance, and you really need to start playtesting. All it does, as I've said, is give you a guarantee of usefulness. However, so does the role approach, as you're specifically designing units to be useful.

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With Role analysis, you can know that you need a sniper Killer Killer, but without RPS analysis, you don't immediately see that you also need the unit (or chain of units) to be vulnerable to the sniper.

I'll grant you that the RPS can make a useful design pattern within a role system. But it is far from the only system.

The Uber Sniper unit I described does not need a specific counter unit at all. It's basically strong vs. high tier (high cost, low number) units, and weak vs. low tier (low cost, high numbers) units. It's also strong vs. ranged and weak vs. melee. Note that this is not really RPS: it beats and is beaten by entire general categories of units, without needing to know much about what those other units do to each other. All we need to know is that each faction has something in each of those categories, and we know the sniper is useful, without being invincible.

Other roles are even less RPSish. What about the Spotter, or the Tank? Neither of these roles exist to actually kill things by themselves; in the case of the former, it's job is simply to give Line of Sight to some powerful ranged unit (like perhaps, the Sniper) sitting miles away across the map. In the case of the Tank, it's job is simply to keep the enemy occupied while flimsier, but more damaging units can get on with the business of killing stuff undistracted. They're both support units that can make a big difference to the effectiveness of your army, yet neither of them specifically need to 'beat' anything at all.

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With such a trivial system as a 3 unit system it is easy to intuitively see this, so that does not invalidate this. If you had a system where you had 11 units for each faction, and with 5 factions, then you can't simply "intuit" the role that is needed. An analytical tool that can be used to aid you in this task is therefore invaluable.

I think the more complex case is a fantastic example of why you DONT want to use RPS.
With the uber sniper mentioned earlier, you could try and concoct some kind of giant, sprawling diagram that represented all 5 factions' eleven units and how they interact to try and understand where everything fits in. It would probably take months to create, and any small changes in the unit statistics could quite possibly change it significantly.

Or you could just check, as I already suggested, that each faction has something in each of the categories that the sniper wins against, and each of the categories that it loses against. Twiddling the numbers might shift the size and frequency of those categories, but ultimately so long as they still exist, then your sniper is good.

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The two system are complimentary rather than exclusive as you seem to think.

I don't think they're exclusive, I think RPS can be a useful design pattern within a role-based system. It's useful to be familiar with it, but I don't believe it should lead your unit design.