Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Victory Conditions for GSB

cliffski

For a long time the code that checks for the end of battle has basically looked for the first fleet whose number of live hit points as a ratio to its total (damage is ignored, only active or destroyed ships matter) drops below 10%. At that point you lose.
Theoretically you can pull back from 10% of your fleet to victory, but the code is there to prevent the game going on for hours trading shots between two closely balanced fighters.

Some play testing today has made it obvious that there are other clear cases of victory / defeat that need detecting. You may well have played an RTS where it’s pretty flipping obvious whose won, but you have to endure another hour of it. Hopefully this won’t affect GSB.
The new rules include this:

  • If three minutes has gone by without any ship being destroyed, and one fleet is less than 50% of the strength (in percentage terms, not absolute hitpoints*) of the other, then it loses.

also:

  • If one fleet is reduced to nothing but fighters, and the other fleet is not, AND that other fleet outnumbers you by two-to-one in hit points. You lose.

As I code this, I’m wondering if that initial 10% calculation should also be contingent on the three minutes without a ship destruction being introduced too. It should at least consider extending it if it’s a close battle.

This is the kind of stuff that gamers who want to be game-designers think designers do all day. In fact a lot of the time its more obscure crap like “If the player designs a cheap ship, then edits it in the editor and goes back to the deployment screen, but the fleet is now too expensive, do we prune ships automatically? or do we put up a dialog or disable the fight button? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

*on expert difficulty, the AI outnumbers you, so this needs to be calculated as a fraction of totals.

9 thoughts on Victory Conditions for GSB

  1. Hmmm, just thought of something… will it be possible to play user-designed battles? If so, would the user/designer be able to specify custom rules to decide on the winner? Like, “hold the attack for 10 minutes”, or “destroy ship X”, or something?

  2. Is there going to be a possibility of a draw/stalemate? I’d have thought that if nothing is getting destroyed by either side any more, then that’s not really a win for either side, regardless of relative fleet sizes. But then i guess there’s always the possibility of building a fleet designed to beat the system and achieve a stalemate every time, by, say, just loading up with tons of shields and no weapons. Hmmm…. users are a pain in the arse arent they?

    An alternate way of calculating victory, rather than just taking current fleet sizes: Track damage to each fleet over the last couple of minutes or so. Once the battle has gone on ‘too long’ without anything significant happening, extrapolate that damage vs the remaining hitpoints of each fleet.

    E.g. in your example where one side only has fighters left, the fighters might all be heavy strike fighters, and none of the opposition’s capital ships have any PD left, so the fighters might eventually win despite having far fewer hitpoints at that given moment. If you extrapolate the damage done by the fighters to the capitals ships, and vice versa, you can maybe pick a ‘fairer’ winner.

  3. I’d suggest including some kind of “fight it out” option so that a player can continue playing through a win or loss condition if they want to. That way, the player could either witness the total victory of his or her fleet, or try to turn around an apparent loss with some clever maneuvering. It’s good that these conditions exist (to avoid the flagship stalemate you mentioned a few weeks ago), but if a player wants to mop up the remnants of the enemy fleet, it would be nice to have that option.

    As for the compare damage ratios suggestion, that seems very sound, but I’m not sure if it’s necessary. A battle where you’ve lost all your capital ships and only have fighters left might well be called a defeat, even if you could theoretically win by attrition.

    I’m not entirely convinced that the existing conditions need expanding upon, save that the Only Fighters Left condition should also include the Time Between Ship Destruction condition. That way, if your fighters are actually destroying their ships, you won’t even trigger the loss condition.

    Of course, there are probably lots of situations I haven’t thought of yet that aren’t covered by the Time Between Ship Destruction condition!

  4. Although I like the “Fight it out” option to some degree, it sounds like it’s just sometimes punishing the player’s that don’t want to grind it out.

    Maybe design in a clear win condition. (If you have no capital ships, you lose) or (If you reach less then 25% of your starting force, you lose).
    This is just because some of the win/lose conditions you have are rather complex & unclear. Players are going to lose without really knowing why.

    – Michael.

  5. Since the match is basically concluded from the time you click ‘fight,’ shouldn’t there be some sort of “time control” button that allows you to fast forward quickly through the last “three hours” of a near-stalemate? Personally, if I was in a close grudge match against a friends’ fleet, I would want to know whose strategy was better, even if it came down to the last fighter! :)

  6. “This is the kind of stuff that gamers who want to be game-designers think designers do all day.”

    That single paragraph containing that quote is probably the truest thing I’ve read for quite some time. Inexperienced designers often design only the vague rules that govern a typical play session, when in fact massive amounts of complexity can arise due to all the various choices a player can make at each stage, which has implications for both the game rules and the user experience. Yet it would be the same designer that offers the choices.

    To make a programming language metaphor, it’s almost as if such designers need to move from a declarative language to an imperative language. Don’t just state the constraints you’d like to impose; specify the process by which they’ll be met.

  7. So, Cliff. When can we expect a release? Or atleast a trial? – I’m aching to put my hard earned money in your pockets.

  8. In a battle between two players, if you give one player a “Fight it Out” option, you have to give the other player a “Surrender” option.

    In a single player game, if the player is the one whose fleet has fallen to have the strength of the AI, give the player the “Surrender” option. If it is the AI’s fleet who has fallen, have the AI offer a “Surrender”, and leave it to the player to “Accept” the surrender once they are tired of chasing down every last enemy ship. You could also have a “Decline” option which could trigger a change in the AI code, causing them to go kamikaze, helping to end the fight a little sooner.

    Some players would like to spend 3 hours making sure every last AI ship is destroyed in a glorious explosion.

    I play Civilization 4 a lot, and the victory mode I hate the most is Domination. Essentially, it declares victory when I control 60% of the map. It feels like an empty victory handed to me just before I had the real victory. I’ve had to adjust my play style to use a lot of vassal states to avoid reaching that threshold. Games last longer than if I went for a domination victory, but they feel more satisfying.

    If the AI were to offer surrender, that feels like a true victory, since it’s the players decision to accept or fight to the end.

  9. My $0.02:

    The 10% code should also check for fleet hitpoints against starting total, because as it is right now it seems to work heavily against fleets which favor few heavily tooled ships spearheading relatively weak support. (I.e. if I wipe out your support, but your uber-battleships are still alive, you could still lose.)

    As previously suggested, a “keep playing” or “fight it out” option would allow people to enjoy the final and full extermination of their enemies, or let a close battle play out. However, the drawback seems to be that in multiplayer, both players must agree to “fight it out”, for fairness, but this can easily be abused by player who should be losing to drag the game on for another x hours by kiting, or something.
    I’m hoping a surrender option is already included in multiplayer, because players should be able to end games early by volunteering to lose.

    Which brings me to a question:
    How easy is it for someone to kite, or field ships which can resist destruction for, say, 3 minutes?
    If one of these are possible, it may perhaps be better to put a 5-minute timer on ship destruction with no other conditions to end the game, and declare the lower % damage taken player as the victor.

    Also, I think a good thing to do would be to check, in the 10% case, that the opponents fleet is not also heavily damaged (say, <15%? <20%?) or else make the game continue. I can’t imagine an 80% strength fleet vs a <10% strength fleet having much of a chance of a comeback for the losing side, but a 20% to 10% is actually very likely. You also may have an easier time working off hitpoints or % damage taken instead of the # of ships, since ships come in varying degrees of strength and toughness.

    Another thing to consider is, in general:
    If the victor is more or less clear, but the potentially defeated still has a chance of comeback;
    Would the potential victor WANT to wait for the comeback? Would the potential loser WANT to attempt a comeback from such a hopeless situation? Does the potential loser DESERVE the chance for a comeback, considering the majority of their fleet was turned into space dust?

    Lastly, if we consider it from a realistic point of view, attack craft are generally not equipped for extended operation, i.e. FTL drives or re-entry shielding. Thus, I think that once a side loses all capital ships, they’ve more or less lost. (The attack craft pilots are more or less doomed since they have not carrier hosts to return to.)
    I have no idea of what the backstory for this universe is, so I can’t say for certain that attack craft operate like that. However, it is logical, considering attack craft are small, and made for space superiority. They wouldn’t carry bulky and cumbersome equipment that do not boost their combat abilities in their main theater of operation.

    ~ sD

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