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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

The obstacles to indie RTS games aren't art style/production related. If anything, the top-down or isometric-ish view makes that part relatively straightforward.

The requirement for online multiplayer (while dealing with hundreds of units) is the bigger obstacle. Especially if they're working with Unity. Pathfinding (in a way that lets large swarms of units move smoothly through narrow choke points) is a non-trivial problem, too.

Then there's the design problems. How to get away from standard build orders, and how to make a game that's more accessible than Starcraft but still allows high-level competitive play.

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True top-down (allowing software rotation) is as cheap art-wise as side view is, but the only indie hit I can think of that used it was Hotline Miami. It's a very unpopular art style.

Isometric views take wildly more art assets than side view. Notice how there are far fewer indie overhead adventure games than there are indie platformers. The engines for these are nearly identical, and Zelda is just as much of a cultural touchstone as Mario. I attribute this to these games taking 3x or 5x the art assets.

Needing multiplayer and pathfinding are good points. I don't think RTS multiplayer is particularly hard (the hundreds of units hardly matter if you're doing it right), but the fact that everyone expects the genre to have multiplayer at all is still a significant barrier to entry. Mass pathfinding is definitely a problem - the discussions I've seen online about it are mostly people confidently telling each other to use A*, which really isn't sufficient in an RTS.

I don't think design problems are that important for indie games. If the barrier to entry is low enough, there will be enough games to brute force the design.

You could eschew online multiplayer and just make a single player or LAN game. Most RTS games never got any real competitive play anyways because balancing is a very long and costly process. For indies it also matters that this process must be mind-numbingly boring.

I never understood why balancing an RTS is such a difficult problem. Couldn’t you simply reduce each unit to a score that’s a combination of its cost to build, time to build, cost of buildings required to build it, speed, damage, defense, and damage per second, and make sure that all units in a class have roughly equal scores?

I think the previous comment refers to player (human) balance. Not in game unit balance.

You know Elo rating, as in chess? Something like that is needed in order to match players against each other.

An online multi-player game that fails the matchmaker system, will lose players eventually. Because if you match the newcomers with seasoned pros, everyone will be unhappy and churn rates will be high.

No I think we are talking about balancing units. It’s not super satisfying to play a game with hundreds of units if only one or a handful of them are worth building.

Yeah it’s about units. It is also however important to balance the game at most skill points.

For example if a strategy that is easy to implement and relatively strong emerges, then you will have very boring games at low level and the only way to get out of the low rank would be to learn to counter one specific strategy. (This is for example what happened in the beginning of SC1 with Zerg rush and SC2 and M&Ms)

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of the problem. The interactions between all the stats you listed can’t be distilled to to a single number. For example maybe a very slow but powerful unit gets a normal score, but when paired with fast units to protect it from getting kited becomes unstoppable.

A contrived example obviously, but you really do have to see how the units interact with all other units, and how players actually use them, balancing damage etc is not enough.

Interesting. So the Zergling is a weak individual unit but when amassed into a large group they become overwhelming and the overall effect is that the Zerg rush is emergent behavior.

The Zerg Rush is not an emergent behavior; it was part of the fundamental design of the Zerg. Hell, the "Zerg Rush" was part of the cinematics released with the first SC.

It's funny that in SC2 high-level competitive play, the roles tend to be reversed, now: the Zerg usually turtles up until the mid-to-late game and the Terran usually harasses very early on. Zerg tends to be the defensive, macro-heavy race and Terran tends to be the offensive, scrappy race.

Though some Zerg players like Reynor are starting to buck this trend a bit and are known for more aggressive, agile approaches.

(Or at least this was all the case as of about a year ago; haven't followed the game much this year.)

It depends what we mean by emergent. It was designed to be this way, but there is no switch in the code that says “if there are this many zerglings, buff their attack”. Instead it’s a consequence of their mechanics (they die quickly but in large numbers can do enough damage fast enough to offset this).

That's still not "emergent," because that is expressly how the unit was designed to function, and how it has been balanced since then.

Emergent would be something like zerglings can burrow, so use them to burrow in the enemies chokehold to prevent them from constructing a chokehold until they can get to the next tech tier and use radar.

That is the fundamental design. They are strong against a few marines once they have speed because they can get a surround, but weak against a critical mass of marines, since the surface area to damage ratio of the marines decreases.

Also their speed upgrade gives them mobility to counter attack exposed buildings. Also their half supply means that they can be worked into compositions when close to the supply cap. Also their fast and parallel time to make means they can reinforce fast after a long battle. Also their general upgrades and late game attack speed upgrade means they can take down buildings fast if there is nothing around to do damage to them. Also if they are spread out they can draw splash damage from power but slow firing units like siege tanks. They can also be sacrificed to burrow and delay an enemy base, used to scout cheaply ...

All that is just from the first attack unit in the game.

The knowledge you need to come up with the score is the same knowledge you need to balance the game. Just because you’ve devised a simple sounding deliverable doesn’t mean the problem is simple.

The whole challenge of balancing a game is that you’re forever wrong about that score.

Underestimating the score of a single unit (or a more complex combo of multiple units) is precisely how you accidentally create an imbalanced metagame where that unit/combo can be spammed.

That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve? Watch a bunch of games, figure out empirically how effective different units and combos are and try to come up with a scoring rubric that is incrementally more accurate than before.

I am not trying to trivialize the problem at all. I don’t know much about it and that’s why I’m asking why it isn’t simple.

A large issue with this is the fact that certain armies of different strengths can only exists in certain time-frames, so even if you could perfectly calibrate for "this army combo is as strong as every other", the fact that one unlocks parts of these at different times makes this approach totally unrealistic. Since the unlocking of army combos is extremely rooted in economy, map layout/resources, power spikes of opponents ect.

> That makes sense. Doesn’t that then seem like a perfect problem for a neural net type system to solve?

In theory. However if you change the balance then the mega game will change as well and you have to throw away the training data and start anew.

Also it’s very important to not change too many stats at the same time because then it will be hard to learn the game and the new meta will take too long to emerge.

I think I’m starting to see the picture. Since we so far don’t have an AI capable of playing as well as the top human players, in order to figure out what’s out of balance you have to watch a sufficient amount of PvP games. And then you rebalance and must start the process from scratch. And unless you hit the perfect balance by accident you will always need to keep rebalancing.

The only other way I can think to do this would be to either change units incredibly quickly to not allow players to get too far into any particular strategy development before the unit is retired. Or introduce things like variations between units: two different marines might have different stats to not allow their 0.2 DPS advantage to add up, etc. Or I guess introduce acts of god type situations that might throw off a specific strategy. Napoleon supposedly lost at Waterloo partially because of a stomach upset that required him to keep running to the latrine and unable to focus on the battlefield. Imagine if you suddenly got fog of war over the area of combat because of “broken communication”. Basically more variability that would require the players to not concentrate on a single strategy and instead having plans A through Z for various eventualities. I’m not sure if that would make for a more exciting experience or not but might be fun to experiment with.

Some multiplayer games (like hearthstone) introduce a lot of randomness and quick variability to keep the game entertaining for new players. Even as a newbie you can win say 30-40% of games against skilled players. However, this also means that skill is only shown in long term and thus you attract a different crowd.

Much like in VS fighting games, people like that time and training translate to good skill.

> Since we so far don’t have an AI capable of playing as well as the top human players

AlphaStar is a grandmaster at Starcraft 2. Training it on a new game would cost too much though AFAIK.

Thoughts:

You've missed some obvious issues around balancing range, special moves etc. All of which are hard to price and balance. Also, some things will not scale linearly, I expect. A particularly strong mob might only be attackable by 8 melee mobs at once. If it's a 16x strength mob itself, then maybe it wins an even "points" battle.

How damage is applied is also interesting, for example. Slow big hits vs fast small hits. Obviously continuous damage is far easier to balance, but plays un-engagingly.

Finally, whilst you could argue that health and damage are interchangable. How do you balance speed vs health? What are reasonable distributions of numbers? At what point do you create a fast ranged unit which can kite melee indefinitely etc.

basically even in a boring game, there's a lot to think about - and your playerbase if you get one will jsut be better than your devs at finding power spikes/discontinuities.

Interesting points. I suppose damage vs range can be a big thing if your melee units can’t even approach the ranged units to deliver the damage. But are there no formal analysis methods that can be applied to this problem?

It's very complex. AOE2 DE is patched monthly, and most patches include balance changes. I think one of the complex parts is the way balance changes interact with each other. Ie you make one change to address a specific unit being too useful. You unwittingly affect something unintentional, like making it useless against one civ's unique unit.

Some variables for each unit: - Speed - Range - Attack speed - Attack damage - Health - Melee armor - Ranged armor - Pause between stopping and attacking - Attack bonuses against specific units / classes - Training time - Cost - Cost balance among resources

Balance patches may tweak any one of these aspects. Interactions then occur with all other units in the game, econ stats that are also subject to balance etc.

People are very good at exploiting strengths and ignoring weaknesses. A slight advantage will be exploited quickly by experienced players; then others will catch on.

I don't think high-level competitive play matters at all for success - the biggest issue with SC2 IMO is that they prematurely optimized for competitive multiplayer. If they spent the majority of their time worrying about how to make multiplayer fun for new players instead of trying to ensure that it works for existing StarCraft pros and would make a viable esports game, we may not be talking about the death of RTS).

The fact that the co-op mode was released in 2015 with LoTV (5 years after the initial release of SC2) despite this being a substantially better default multiplayer mode that's unconstrained by multiplayer balancing speaks volumes about Blizzard's blind spot. They also learned the wrong lesson from DotA - SC2 isn't just a game but an incredible game engine, but Blizzard wasn't very good at taking advantage of this to broaden its appeal.

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