Rock-Paper-Scissors of Victory types

from Elemental Forums

Here's an incomplete thought that I wanted to get to the community to see if it has any merit.

What if Magic trumps Warfare, Warfare trumps Civilization, and Civilization trumps Magic?

This is all presumptive on the point that there will be 3 equally viable and balanced ways to win:

Civilization (alliance) victory, typified by having enough influence to have everyone else rally to your banner without having to essentially buy a military victory by stealing other people's combat units.  In this case, you wish to always operate without war being delcared anywhere.  Under those conditions, you get 100% more diplomacy points, movement anywhere is unrestricted, and gold generation is increased by trade.  You want gold mines and influence sites.  The win here is to just be nice to everyone, have everyone be nice to everyone, and you come out on top.  Hoever, this is a world ravaged by magic previously, and so the people (rightly so) distrust magic and all who practice it.  If magic is growing again in the world, Civilization players want to squash it out, and so, through their actions, can essentially reduce the output of mana for every node and increase the spell casting cost for all players in the game.  Of course, if war is declared against you, all of the civilization perks go away, and some penalties accrue instead.  Civilization trumps magic, and is trumped by warfare.

A Warfare (conquest) victory, typified by building a bunch of high end units and going out and stomping on opponents.  This player wants to have a constant state of warfare existing, and gains power for his units which are built during a time of open hostilitiies.  "Fight early, fight often" is your motto.  You want iron mines, forests, and materials nodes.  While warfare is declared, your production is increased, your units are tougher, and them sissy civlization players are going to pay, pay, pay.  Of course, all this mayhem you're seeking out awakes the spirit of the Titans, who begin to pump power into magic, with intent to punish those who would disturb their slumber.  Any spell cast against your combat units, in overland or in tactical, becomes twice as effective (slow, DD, AOE, all of it).   Your ability to harvest nodes withers and dies as your iron mines grow without bound, and even as the nodes grow stronger. Warfare trumps civilization, and is trumped by magic. 

A Magical (spell of mastery/quest of mastery) victory, typified by acquiring and retaining nodes, and as many of them as you can.  As this player progresses, nodes become more powerful, spells become more powerful, and the ability to summon creatures or put fantastic power into your champions becomes yours; you're effectively recreating your own little band of titans, armed with the weapons and armor of the titans, that can go around and change the very fabric of the land to your will.  Spells become cheaper in mana, and so you should be slinging it around like the aroused Lord of Titans that you are.  You values nodes and crystal to support your arcane researches.  Of course, every city, and every citizen that you gain, every building that you build (but NOT every outpost you place) civilizes things a bit, and as your population grows, their mistrust of the magic that brought the world low once before grows; your power wanes as your civilization grows.  You'd almost prefer to have just you in your tower, a few trusted minions, and your band of heroes do to your bidding.  To you (and you alone) comes the secret of teleportation for your band of heroes.  They can crush any army beneath their feet, and can move quickly enough to stop an almost infinite horde of incoming armies.  If only your population would just STOP REPRODUCING, and give you some time to think.  Who can discover the secrets of the universe with all those titan-damned BABIES crying just outside your tower?!  Magic trumps warfare, and is trumped by civilization.

Winni

11,933 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

What would be the point of having a system like this?

The way I see a game like this playing out: turn 200. You come across an enemy that you are "strong" to. You steamroll him in 20 turns. Alternative: Turn 200. You come across an enemy that you are "weak" to. You get steamrolled in 20 turns.

I have to say the current system where you can focus on either magic, military or civ is preferable. You will be a fighting force no matter what, you just play it differently.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The way most 4x games are structured, victory is a race. You choose which route you want to take, and you race down that path. I don't see how encouraging or forcing a player to switch strategies mid-game would improve the game. Yes it might add new strategy, but it also makes it much harder to play the game and makes the game take much longer. What if there are 3 people, each with a different strategy? Who wins? Have you ever played rock paper scissors with 8 people at once?

 

Right now the game uses the fairly simple and mostly unanimous conflict for victory: Timing. If you spend too much time building up your economy, and not enough on military, some wandering monster or another army will come and destroy you. If you spend too many resources on military and not enough on research/exploration, then you can easily fall behind and be outnumbered or outclassed. 


This is a very hard thing to balance, but it is core to the genre of strategy games and familiar to most players. It will be present even if you do add a rock-paper-scissors system on top, but that would distract both players and developers from the more important strategic decisions in the game.
 

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Rock-Paper-Scissors sucks. <-period

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

And I still want to know exactly how Paper beats Rock. I mean, come on! Seriously if I was in a fight with some dude and I tried to beat him by wrapping him up, he would kick several tonnes of shit out of me. Rock would totally kick Paper's arse every time. Paper is just into hippy love shit! And I'll tell you something else, you try and beat me with that paper, rock, scissor crap I'm gonna whip out a flamethrower and totally pwn your arse.

That is all I have to say on the subject.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Have you ever gotten a paper cut? It hurts way worse than being bludgeoned!  X(

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Aside from the balancing nightmare that would result (and assuming the AI can pursue anything beside conquest), I'm not sure why you would want this. It's true that it'll create a strength/weakness for the factions, but all that would really mean is that you need to pick your fights early,  eliminate your weaknesses first, which will turn it into a one sided beatdown later.

For example: Let's say I'm going to play for a warfare victory, so I start out by pretending to buddy up with the civilization factions to wipe out all the magic factions. Then I war their faces and mow them over. Both phases would be pushovers because of the bonuses (always on my side). It's like playing rock-paper-scissors, but you always know what the other players are doing. If you can't win, you need to learn how to play rock-paper-scissors.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Ok.