Couple design ideas to inspire players to choose the underdog faction.

Regiment the more powerful faction's gameplay mechanics making the player feel forced and controlled to play a certain way, the loss of freedom will discourage many players who seek freedom as a very important ideal worth fighting for. In addition to the gameplay, the progression could request the player to carry out missions that go against common moral comforts sustaining the factions authority quietly but forcefully.

Visually inspire the player to choose less powerful units. When I played Diablo 2 I played the Necromancer the whole time simply because he was more interesting to watch (no matter how useless he was).

Expanding game play depth of less powerful factions inspire skilled gamers to stick with the underdog often because the more powerful faction quickly becomes boring to play.

Explore the stronger faction in a single player campaign, giving the player every reason to hate them, then offer the other factions as alternatives for multiplayer and single-player hard mode and ultra hard modes.

Having a faction designed to be very powerful isn't necessarily a good idea. Everyone will want to be the powerful person, and people will be discouraged from experimenting with different factions.

Thank god for single player where no one gives a crap.

Dude anyone who plays Dominions knows that you are wrong though. Not everyone picks LA Ermor every game and some people don't like it at all, even in multiplayer. The only people who want to play the optimal faction every game are idiots who don't matter.

Couple design ideas to inspire players to choose the underdog faction.

Regiment the more powerful faction's gameplay mechanics making the player feel forced and controlled to play a certain way, the loss of freedom will discourage many players who seek freedom as a very important ideal worth fighting for. In addition to the gameplay, the progression could request the player to carry out missions that go against common moral comforts sustaining the factions authority quietly but forcefully.

Visually inspire the player to choose less powerful units. When I played Diablo 2 I played the Necromancer the whole time simply because he was more interesting to watch (no matter how useless he was).

Expanding game play depth of less powerful factions inspire skilled gamers to stick with the underdog often because the more powerful faction quickly becomes boring to play.

Explore the stronger faction in a single player campaign, giving the player every reason to hate them, then offer the other factions as alternatives for multiplayer and single-player hard mode and ultra hard modes.

Alternatively one could simply make factions that play quite differently than the others thus reducing the value of using the best faction. In many games the factions are so similar that there is no motivation not to play the best one.

Having a faction designed to be very powerful isn't necessarily a good idea. Everyone will want to be the powerful person, and people will be discouraged from experimenting with different factions.

Thank god for single player where no one gives a crap.

Dude anyone who plays Dominions knows that you are wrong though. Not everyone picks LA Ermor every game and some people don't like it at all, even in multiplayer. The only people who want to play the optimal faction every game are idiots who don't matter.

It isn't rocket science that people who like a game like things that are in the game. I could say something along the lines of "dude anyone who plays Dwarf Fortress knows that no one cares about the user interface", but that doesn't mean that the people who play other games in the same genre don't care about the ui, nor does it mean that no one who tried Dwarf Fortress and otherwise would have loved it didn't play it because of the bad ui.

Single player isn't really relevant. It's typical for non-player opponents to be stronger or weaker than the main player. However, the strength of an ai opponent in single-player varies even when the opponent is of the same race. Besides, there is a reason that many people play multiplayer in games that have a singleplayer mode. Having a good singleplayer mode doesn't actually replace multiplayer.

A multiplayer game is supposed to be a battle of strategy and tactics. Someone shouldn't be outmatched just because the opponent picked an overpowered race. There shouldn't be a faction for players who want to win and a faction for players who don't care about winning. That's not the point of having a variety of different factions. The point is supposed to be to increase the number of strategies ant tactics someone needs to outsmart and defeat one's opponent.

I understand that it can be fun to play a game where one player is overpowered, but that's what custom maps and self-imposed handicaps are for. Not everyone wants to play the same type of game, and not everyone wants to play the same type of game all the time.

You made a slight error here.

YOU made a claim that EVERYONE would want to play the strongest race. I refuted that with an example. I never said everyone would do such an such. And yet in your Dwarf Fortress example you yet again said something about ALL players while my statement was about SOME players.

Maybe you should bone up on your reading comprehension.

On to stuff you said that wasn't condescending while at the same time wrongly focused on something I never said.

Its true that in a 1v1 match having one clearly superior race could be bad, but that's why people tend to not agree to a game where one player can use an unfair race in a 1v1 game.

In Dominions3 the rule is that if someone picks LA Ermor and they at any time appear to be gaining a large lead everyone gangs up on them. And you def have to kill them before they start casting Ermor's trademake global spells that start raising fuckloads of undead. The probability of an Ermor player winning may actually be less than the chance of a player with another faction winning since they tend to get allianced on quite a bit.

I don't think single player replaces multiplayer, I think its vastly superior to multiplayer. There should certainly be games that focus on multiplayer, because clearly a lot of people like it, but why does every single game have to focus on multiplayer? Every single damn game. If we have 50 multiplayer RTS games would it kill us to have one or two single player ones? I don't think so.

Single player has its own set of strengths.

To quote you:

"Not everyone wants to play the same type of game, and not everyone wants to play the same type of game all the time."

You should be careful because your post is tripping over itself with wild contradictions.

[quote name='AltarofScience' timestamp='1358111406' post='5021187']
Maybe you should bone up on your reading comprehension.

On to stuff you said that wasn't condescending while at the same time wrongly focused on something I never said.
[/quote]

I don't really think that was necessary. Please keep it civil.

While I love Dom3, I would be very cautious of taking lessons in game balance from it. I'd be doubly careful about taking those lessons and applying them to a different genre, as while RTS may still be a 'strategy' genre, it has very different rules.

Dom3 has:

• A lot of factions (more than there are players in a typical game) so factions can be unique within a game - only ONE player in a game can be Ermor. The enabling factors are: a) the graphics are pretty terrible, so the resource cost of adding new units is relatively small and b) The developers didn't give a monkeys about balance, so there was no need to balance every unit/faction against every other.
• Support for a relatively large number of players (20 or so I think) so even fairly large differences in faction strength quickly become irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The enabling factor is that it is turn based, PBEM style, so people can take some time over their moves and there are no issues with network performance. It's also much easier to get a large number of people together, as they don't all have to be at their computer at the same time, so not only are large games possible, but they are actually quite common.
• Only one game mode: FFA. Games are long enough that alliances can be made and broken over the course of the game, but at the end of the day, only one player can win.
• A relatively small but tightly knit playerbase that will happily ostracise people who don't play sportingly.

RTS Games typically have:

• Fewer factions than the maximum number of players, so generally it is allowed for multiple players to play the same faction. Many RTS games are played quite competitively, and typically have higher graphical expectations than TBS games, so balance and appearance tends to matter a little more.
• Much higher demands on the network code, as for each player you have to manage the positions and actions for a whole load of units in realtime. Consequently, few RTS games these days go above 8 player.
• Multiple game modes: FFA, 1v1, 2v2 etc, plus the occasional more unusual mode.
• Larger, but generally less organised playerbases than comparable TBS games.

In short, as I said before, Dom3 gets away with imbalanced factions by having enough players that you can nearly always gather together a big enough mob to gang up on the big guys. This is further helped by the fact that there can only be one player playing Ermor, so once you've dealt with him you're OK (at least until R'lyeh crawls out of the deep and eats your brain, anyway)

However some of Dom3's tricks are not so applicable to an RTS. How will you ensure that the 'weaker players will gang up' argument is viable? What about a 2v2 team game with Super/Super vs. Normal/Normal?

I had a big response all type out but what I realized was that I made a mistake in framing the discussion. I used the phrase RTS and that crippled any helpful discussion.

I had used exploratory strategy game in some other posts and the feedback was always far more useful even when it was negative. RTS can never escape the chains of Starcraft when people think about it. The number of responses about balance and 1v1 and 2v2 and anything related to competitive is drastically higher if I use the term I used here, RTS. And I don't give a giant doo doo noggin about those things.

I'm sorry I wasted everyone's time. I'll work on figuring out my opening post a lot more for any threads I may make in the future so that I can avoid mixing in irrelevant ideas.

Its true that I may not make a game which generates any interest in people, but it will because I mangled the execution and not because I don't see the point in cloning wildly successful e-sport RTS games when they already have dozens of them with far more resources and personnel than I could ever compete with.

From what I read in your initial post about Romans vs barbarians. Perhaps romans cost more to build, and take longer, but you get 5 at a time, instead of 1 when they come out.

Then perhaps barbarians are created faster, but you have less control for instance, instead of being able to target a building or unit with a barbarian, you can just target an area, and then the barbarian will attack what ever they want in that location. The idea being that the romans won with banding, lines and organization. Where as the barbarians simply charged, attacking anything.

Something I thought may or may not work is to try experimenting with different methods of resource gathering. Most RTS games factions all use the resources the other guys use. Why does zerg need minerals? They're organic.

What if one group needs wood for all their stuff but the other faction relies on devotion to their god? The holy group will tend to turtle up naturally cause all they need is alters and their god gifts them with the needed materials. Where as the forest group needs to strike out and find more material, thus creating a naturally expansive group.

From a balance stand point since the holy guys sit around a pray all day they can't take much for damage and the forest guys chop wood all day and make for some tough face punching.

I apologize, but it seems I misunderstood you. While I'm not going to argue who was more polite, I wish you the best of luck.