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 Brief Review: 1.0 
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Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2011 3:33 am
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Post Brief Review: 1.0
Good points: the engine's slightly faster, there's new content, character movement got a little love, players that hit zero money but have Brains can keep playing and get free cash, which keeps the AI alive-ish and is probably a healthy thing for newbies.

Bad points: I've already beat Metagame, 1 v 1 first try, maximum advantage CPU, no base customization allowed.

Haven't even bothered doing 3 v 1 yet but I already know it's still not difficult, merely boring.

Why? Well, this gets long, and brutally honest:


Sat Sep 29, 2012 8:22 am
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Honestly it sounds like 90% of your complaints stem almost directly from the navigational AI.
I solidly agree, it could use a lot of work. Is it liable to happen? not really, sadly.

Overall the issue comes from the fact that CC was initially designed as a game to play on the couch with friends, the AI have always been a side show.
on the bright side, they're still not pre-Lua incompetent.


Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:39 am
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
I think the biggest issue is that the AI do'nt know a lot of tactics. The easiest (and probably best) fix for this is to actually let the AI "cheat". Like letting the AI get more jetpack fuel, just to help the units actually get around. Especially on offense, as the AI can never get past a single covered person in a corridor with a gun. Let the AI cheat some health, so it becomes slightly harder.

Edit: TL;DR: The AI can never be NEARLY as good as a human player, so some cheating with health, jetpack power and fuel, and vision in undiscovered areas should at least be a "handicap" option.


Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:44 am
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
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Overall the issue comes from the fact that CC was initially designed as a game to play on the couch with friends, the AI have always been a side show.
I agree; I've always gotten the impression Data thought most people were playing it MP.

However, it's pretty obvious that, like practically everything else where MP means a fair amount of hassle (and in the case of CC, it's not like online match-making is easy) most players are playing it SP, with mods to add some flavor.

So fixing SP so that it's vaguely competent and could cheat if players need a challenge would be useful.

That said, if it merely worked with my mod again, I'd have all of these features, even if they're a bit rough; I tweaked the pathfinder and sorted out practically all of the navigation issues with Lua. It isn't perfect, but it satisfied me, in lieu of something official.


Sat Sep 29, 2012 4:46 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
hey guys, the entire AI implementation is exposed in lua scripts and readily available for editing if you want to try to improve it :) just check the base.rte folder


Sun Sep 30, 2012 5:43 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Data, I know that; I even built a TC mod that went very deliberately about fixing all of the issues while you were away. Apparently, nobody bothers to tell you when stuff happens around here, it caused a bit of a stir at first, lol.

I fixed practically all of this stuff. It wasn't polished or balanced but it all worked... and now my mod went from being randomly unstable in B27 (engine crashes, no feedback) to hard-crash (engine crashes, no feedback) when loading Metafight.rte (which my mod does not modify).

See the buglist, I documented it and provided a 1.0-ready build that doesn't halt until it reaches Metafight.rte, whereupon the engine crashes.

As soon as it's fixed, we can all go back to merely having philosophical arguments about whether or not CC's a better game when these things are addressed :)


Mon Oct 01, 2012 1:04 am
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
This is a very interesting and important topic. One thing to consider is that difficulty isn't necessarily the ultimate goal.

There are some things I have to say about that, but now isn't the time for that.


CC is, as you've mentioned, a cute game - and I think it's important to ensure that the gameplay reflects that.


That is a weird sentence, but I hope I get my point across.


Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:29 am
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Well, in other contexts, I've often said that you can never make a game "too easy"; the whole goal is to make sure that people have a good time, after all. It's easy to make a game, especially a twitch shooter, much harder; increase the damage the enemy does or increase their hitpoints.

That said, people expect a lot of challenges along the way, but in a way that they can overcome them; they expect to have to solve problems, make choices and reflect on the outcomes and then, if it doesn't work out, try again.

If people lose, they want to lose because they've picked a bad strategy or because their twitch skills weren't up to the task.

They never want to feel like they won or lost due to the decisions of the game developers.

That said, most of the problems with CC are in that category:

1. Tutorial missions that don't really teach very well, because they were built in a hurry and nobody went back to do another polish pass.

For example, Tutorial Bunker; it's not made clear where the "line of death" is that triggers the scenario's combat, and newbie players can expect to suddenly die. It's also about 50/50 whether a Rocket landing on that pad (which is where most newbies will attempt to land it) will land badly and explode, killing your guys.

And this is probably the most important moment for a game; that tutorial needs to be polished and nothing should go wrong.

Moreover, there aren't further tutorials explaining the play of the campaign; instead, there are just a bunch of un-connected scenario battles, most of which have nothing to do with the balance of the campaign.

2. Once people get into the campaign, they quickly find out how badly polished it is, in terms of game-design.

What's important to understand Campaign is the "real game", for most players, especially the people who weren't playing it way back when and just play Skirmish or Weegee's missions.

Skirmish isn't a real game; it's a pointless exercise in blowing stuff up with a practically-unlimited budget.

There aren't even points or upgrades or awards that make it something where people can challenge themselves in various ways.

The other missions, like Keepie Uppie, are cute and fun, and Weegee's stuff is great, but they're all basically just advanced trainers for the campaign; the campaign needs to be the place where players are going to have a challenge and use all of those skills.

3. All of the major, unresolved problems with unit motion, mobility, relative balance for gold costs, etc. haven't been dealt with.

Instead of a "how do we change the guns to make CC better", you really need to work on the character balance as a whole; most characters aren't worth their gold and don't have a useful niche.

Take, for example, the Dreadnoughts.

They look great, but are all basically worthless, except as immobile turrets. You don't dare put them on any orders but "stand here", because they're quite likely to fall in a hole and become useless. You can't self-destruct stuck ones, either, so they're eating MOIDs.

They aren't thought out very well, either. I really get the impression that nobody's actually playing the campaign seriously, like you would if you weren't aware that CC's is apparently supposed to be easy.

The missile-launcher one that Brains drop with now, if placed defensively, becomes an one-hit-kill device against enemy brains in Dropships.

The easier solution for this problem? Get rid of the Dropships for Brains.

Or just make them unable to ram each other in the practical time required before the initial landing / takeoff, by slowing their top speed on the X axis. So a big complex solution was put into place, taking up several hours of somebody's time, it fundamentally borks balance... and it wasn't necessary; the fundamental problem here is that Dropships should not be useful as weaponry.

That, and they should be durable enough that you need specialist weapons to kill them, so that they aren't just throwing Gold out the window when used. Shooting a Dropship down should be something that happens only every so often; they're basically meant to be backdrop, they should not become *the* reason why the AI cannot compete with humans.



Anyhow, this is just a couple of concrete examples. The point here is, everything in CC needs to be considered in terms of how it effects the campaign; all balance considerations have to be based on campaign play. Whether weapons and gear stay or go needs to be based on whether it can be abused in the campaign or give humans a huge advantage.

The campaign is what all newbies are expecting as the "real game" here; it's why I finally plunked down my money for B26 (only to see that it wasn't even vaguely functional yet, sigh).

Everything else is just tinsel on the tree, folks.


Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:27 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
3. Bombardment is coming in a later update, also the "magic missile droids" only get 2 rockets, so they're only useful at the start of a match. That's their purpose. They don't wall off the use of dropships completely. They aren't meant to replace bombardment, they're there to prevent using a dropship to ram or pick up the enemy brain as soon as they were dropped, as could be done previously.

5. You can load multiple bodies in one craft.

6. It would be far more frustrating if they started wandering off on their own as soon as they dropped, which is the current case for actors placed in the Build phase. A "Default AI Mode" option would be pretty great though, either in the Options menu or the Buy menu

9. Do "Scan Later" instead. You can land immediately while the map is being scanned. Nobody is really going to take your criticisms seriously when you use cynical jabs like "un-feature" to describe things.

12. Again with the cynical gripe. In a later post you complain about them being too good at being a weapon but in the first post they're useless? I don't follow. They're slower than rockets, but rockets are more volatile and can't move horizontally very well (as dropships are designed to do), so there's a tradeoff. You also suggest in a later post that their horizontal speed be limited despite that they're "slow."

14. I can get out just fine.

16. Remote explosives and special tools are strategic tools, not just intended for bunker busting. Instead of pitting 3 soldiers with machineguns against an oncoming swarm and likely losing them, you can just drop a few explosives and go around the corner. Also, explosives still take down doors much faster than bullets do.

19. I don't see any reason why the ability to build a base should be removed.


You're right about some of the balance and pathfinding issues, but a lot of these are just cynical gripes.


Tue Oct 02, 2012 4:04 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Tarvis wrote:
Also, explosives still take down doors much faster than bullets do.


Not really, a coalition assault rifle takes down a door in less than one clip, which is shorter than the time it takes to select, aim, and get clear of a grenade blast (not to mention you cant always take a door down with a greande. Same goes for planted explosives. Personally, i tripled the durability of doors to actually make them hold off attackers for a short while (since a skeleton with a smg can take one down in less than 20 seconds), and to make explosives slightly more useful (still just takes 2-3 coalition assault rifle mags to shoot one down though).


Tue Oct 02, 2012 4:10 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Depends on how you use them. I always chuck 2 or 3 which takes down the door every time with the added bonus of crushing soldiers standing on the other side. Doing that does take about as long as the assault rifle, but you get more destruction out of it.


Tue Oct 02, 2012 4:16 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
Tarvis wrote:
Depends on how you use them. I always chuck 2 or 3 which takes down the door every time with the added bonus of crushing soldiers standing on the other side. Doing that does take about as long as the assault rifle, but you get more destruction out of it.


At the cost of weight and price. I would really like doors to be harder to destroy in vanilla CC, they are far too easy to destroy.


Tue Oct 02, 2012 4:18 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
"The campaign is the most important part of the game and the rest of the game should be changed for it."
Friendly reminder that the campaign was made in a little over a year compared to the other 10 years of development this game has gone through.
It isn't the central part of the game, nor the most important. Every mission and mode of the game is equally the "center" because, let's face it, CC is a sandbox.


Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:59 pm
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
New players are not going to play lots of Skirmish; they're going to view it as a trainer for the campaign. Read their comments carefully, understand what they're doing, in terms of sequence:

1. Tutorial stuff.
2. Campaign.

That's it. The little missions like Keepie Uppie are just minigames.

When this got added is irrelevant; it's just how players who haven't been here forever and are not used to playing a half-finished product think :-)

Quote:
Bombardment is coming in a later update
We were told it was coming in this one, and I've had working bombardment for months.

Quote:
the "magic missile droids" only get 2 rockets, so they're only useful at the start of a match
Because enemy Brains land in entirely predictable places, just having one means you can expect to knock down their Dropship the next time they invade, either killing the Brain or ensuring that said Brain will be very vulnerable and then you can just spend the rest of the round wasting the AI's gold.

Quote:
You can load multiple bodies in one craft.
Or you can pay 6X less, get them there faster and safer and with zero chance the AI will screw up or a lucky shot will trash your troops.

Quote:
It would be far more frustrating if they started wandering off on their own as soon as they dropped, which is the current case for actors placed in the Build phase.
You obviously didn't try out Reloaded; it works great, not having to micro-manage your guys and send whole armies moving with a few buy commands :-)

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Do "Scan Later" instead. You can land immediately while the map is being scanned.
No, you can't, because you need to see the terrain; it's the whole point of scanning in the first place :-)

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In a later post you complain about them being too good at being a weapon but in the first post they're useless? I don't follow.
They're quite useful... to an experienced human player :-)

They are quite useless wastes of gold if given to an AI. The AI will never use them to crash into your Brain. It will not use them as bombers. It will not use them to block the AI's attempts to land. In short, they're a feature that 100% favors the human player :-)

Quote:
Instead of pitting 3 soldiers with machineguns against an oncoming swarm and likely losing them, you can just drop a few explosives and go around the corner.
You're confusing mines (which are situationally useful, until you realize you don't need them) with explosive packs, which are never worth buying.

Sure, it takes a while to dig an Actor-sized tunnel through a bunker with a AR, but it's free, the Actor's carrying a deadly long-range weapon, etc. whereas the explosives aren't guaranteed to get the job done with one pack and are one-shot items.

If they always got the job done (i.e., they were pretty powerful explosives by Vanilla standards) they'd also wreck balance, because you could just fill a Dropship with them and drop them until they reached a Brain, no matter where it was, on many maps. Either way, they're a balance dead-end, as implemented.

Quote:
explosives still take down doors much faster than bullets do
It's irrelevant; the AI is so slow that time is never an issue unless you're incompetent.

Quote:
I don't see any reason why the ability to build a base should be removed.
How about addressing my arguments, instead of confusing them for "cynical gripes" ;)

A. A human player can easily and very cheaply design mazes that are valid (pathfinder-wise) but that the AI and movement systems of the current game cannot ever successfully navigate. Ever.

B. A human player can easily design "tank-trap" types of obstacles that the AI will not navigate because of issues with the AI's core design and some fairly serious technical problems with how it navigates. For example, build some Ts out of the 32-ish blocks, about 4 blocks high. You'll watch the AI land in the middle of them and jetpack endlessly, and then can just shoot 'em like fish in a barrel.

C. A human player can design pits through the terrain that the current AI will not avoid, and then watch the AI waste all of its Gold falling down the pits. The AI will never, ever, go, "hey, I might need to do a Dropship raid to avoid the giant pit-traps everywhere".

In short, this feature's a nightmare and totally wrecks balance atm, if you have even a modicum of imagination. :-)


Tue Oct 02, 2012 11:43 pm
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Data Realms Elite
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Post Re: Brief Review: 1.0
The game is a goddamn sandbox. It has been since the start and will be now and forever unless a story mode is added.
You can stop talking about balance because it doesn't matter. Why do you think a story mode WASN'T ADDED? Because they wanted new experiences every time! For the game to be, you know, FUN!
If the game was meant to be a superbly balanced, extremely polished, and highly intuitive title it wouldn't add very open-ended modding and it wouldn't be in the state it is now. The game has been a sandbox for YEARS, adding a new mode doesn't change that.
Just like how adding an end-game to Minecraft didn't change that it was still a sandbox game.
Also, removing base-building?
Are you ♥♥♥♥ insane?

I think the problem is your complaints are based on what you want the game to be and not what it is.


Wed Oct 03, 2012 12:16 am
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