Equality?

posted on April 24th, 2004, 8:47 am

The game should not be equal. in the movies the borg are more powerful than feds and roms are more into science. the reason for unequality is to make a game fun and challenging if you are the lesser oponent.

posted on April 24th, 2004, 9:16 am

"Balance > Canon"

Put simply, sometimes you have to compromise how Trek-reslistic something is (only a bit) to make a balanced game. I mean, where'd the fun be in playing Romulans if you got your ass kicked by AI-Easy Dominion....

However, each race does have its unique style to represent how they are on the show. It seems reasonable, and probably better than if it were 100% true.

posted on April 25th, 2004, 12:23 am

True but there has to be somewhat of a challenge

posted on April 25th, 2004, 1:48 am

The challenge is online, and this mod is based on balencing the races for than making the races uber canon where the borg build one cube and skrewed or the dmominionn build 500000 ships and u just get f'd in the a.

posted on May 6th, 2004, 6:53 pm

I belive that balance is what kills many RTS's. I don't believe in no balance either.

Too much balance = A boring game
Too little blance = A bad game

In the middle = Perfect.

If you ask me the Romulans are too powerful. Build the "Fire When cloaked" station, then build 2 Tavara class Dreadnoughts. It's just

posted on May 6th, 2004, 8:28 pm

look dude the game CAN'T be realistic, if you realy watched the movies you wuld know that in every single borg attack there were 5 cubes top. so you see if we allow the borg to be realistic every cube should count at least 1 credit or it should be expencive as hell, you don't want that do you

posted on May 7th, 2004, 4:07 pm

A: There was only one borg atack in a movie, ST:8
B: There has only been 2 Borg atacks, One in TNG and one in ST:8
C: They only ever sent 1 Cube per atack.
D: One cube could destroy a fleet, does this make a good rts? Unless it was for a single player mission where u defend against a canon borg atack.

posted on May 7th, 2004, 4:15 pm

this movie and tv blancing, is useless for a realtime strategy game, because, in the movie the good are every time the winner

if you want a movie blancing, then i say a galaxy class can destroy a borg cube

u see, this makes no sense, so we have done a blancing system that can be used in a game

[KL0K]

posted on May 8th, 2004, 1:13 am

Last edited by KL0K on May 8th, 2004, 1:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

the victory was just a random thing... cause they didnt know each other, and the borg were "undereducated"... and they won just cause of the "we need a happy end-hollywood"-scenery

i think the same way.. it could be more trek-realistic tho.. and btw i wouldn´t be annoyed of huge cubes that cost credits or beein much expensive, if they would be like what they supposed to be.. like i said before.. lesser ships but more powerful... klingons more ships wit more firepower but low shieldings.. feds better shieldings but lesser firepower... roms more into science but a bit weaker..

take that all and it would be balanced well at all...

[Optec]

posted on May 8th, 2004, 9:02 am

Last edited by Optec on May 8th, 2004, 9:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

and what about a klingon player who builds many bops at the beginning and then rushes a borg player who has no ship at all, cause thy are expensive?

the borg are already more expensive and more powerfull, the klingons do already have fast-to-produce vessels with lower shielding and the romulans are more the stealth guys... but the gap between them cannot be that large if you want to create a playable multiplayer game.
but the differences between the races will increase with the next betas, but not that much.

[volume]

posted on May 9th, 2004, 5:54 am

Last edited by volume on May 9th, 2004, 5:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

i prefer a game like that, where there is no major species, in armada 2, you could build 2 tactical fusion cubes and destroy 7 ai hards, but a better way to do it would be equal amount of ships to build, and closely equal (Weaker sheilds, stronger weapons, enhanced sensors etc. )
oh and really, they do have their major differences which is canon. The borg can build their transwarp crap, romulans have their cloaking technology crap and the klingons have their battle plan crap because they love to kill =]

[KL0K]

posted on May 9th, 2004, 9:06 am

Last edited by KL0K on May 9th, 2004, 9:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

but the use of this transwarp crap and assimilating and/or adapting is one of the main tactics of the borg..(btw it costs credits and is available near the end of a game).. try playin as borg and against the roms or klingons ai hard, u almost gettin killed if ur not fast enough, and i really mean _fast_ .. cause the borg ships dont got enough firepower for the time they need for the producin of ships at the beginning.. for example.. a sphere should be one of the main ships(, next to the cubes..) and last time it got beaten of 2 rhienn without refits... and thats definitly dumb..

posted on May 9th, 2004, 9:25 am

yep i must admit the borg have a few unbalances exspecially in the early game stage. this will be fixed in beta3. in beta4 they will get a complete new techtree and way of playing.

Greetings,
Optec

posted on May 26th, 2004, 8:39 pm

I think if you really want to talk about balancing an rts you should look at blizzard, who are the undisputed champs of balance. The key is to make each race distinct yet at the same time equal. The way they do this is a counter system. Every unit in the game has a counter, and every counter has another counter- for each race- and they are all distinctly different yet not necessarily stronger. Each race is just a slightly different style of play. They also use a class system, where every unit in a given race has an "equivalent" but its not really the same kind of unit. That would be boring. A lot of rts's (c&c comes to mind) just have carbon copy races with equivalent tanks for all sides around.

I like how FO doesnt really have an equivalent unit system, but this can become inherently unbalanced. Think of 8472 in A2- it is completely different. How did they balance it? Well they played a bunch of games and decided if 8472 won too often. Thats not balance and you have to be careful with this approach. In natural selection (and most games) this happens all the time: aliens win too much=nerf them, marines win too much= nerf them now. The result is changing the gameplay every 2 weeks. My advice is if you want to make balancing changes then try not to go too far and really think about whether this will be a fair change a month from now when people change their tactics to compensate.

posted on May 26th, 2004, 11:05 pm

yep, that's right. I'm a fanatic warcraft and starcraft player and of course blizzard games have influence on Fleet Operations too.
i'm pretty pleased with the beta2 balancing (well okay there are some flaws in it ). The new beta3 balancing tries to underline the character of each vessel by increasing it's unique abilities. short range ships have more hitpoints, long range ships more firepower and so on.
The planed new Borg techtree is no mather of balancing, i just had a few good ideas how to make the borg more borgy and i will try to include them by redoing the borg sometime
a perect balancing system is a very difficult - if not impossible - goal, but we will do our best to keep the balance and make every race and every vessel unique

Optec