Three Moves Ahead 515: Faction Design

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 515:

Faction Design
Rob, Rowan, and Len discuss how faction design in strategy games has changed over the years, and the trend toward more specific and asymmetrical mechanics which started in RTS before spreading to the rest of the wider genre.

Total War, Civilization, StarCraft, a bunch of other stuff

 

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[chanman]

I'm surprised Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri wasn't mentioned - specifically, while the units were generic and no paths to victory were locked off to any faction, the faction agendas (and the associated bonuses/penalties and social engineering choice limitations) made it difficult for some factions to go after certain victory types. Notably, the Civ V civics and World Congress that were added in the later DLC look like clear nods to Alpha Centauri's social engineering and Planetary Council/Planetary Governor mechanics.

 

Regarding Rob's ambivalence towards live games - this is the exact same issue I've had with any kind of MMO (or sports-like activity like competitive gaming or motorsports or professional sports in general). It becomes hard to compare like-to-like for say... hockey player's numbers as the game itself changes over the years (and across different leagues).

 

Mind you, that's not just a gaming issue - any kind of long-lived process (whether you're talking accounting regulations, legal codes, software products, manufacturing processes, etc.) just accumulate more cruft and weird hacks over the course of use and time. I know in software, we use the term technical debt, but it's more like the accumulation and gradual loss of institutional knowledge - for example, with World of Warcraft's re-release, how many designers and developers are still at Activision Blizzard from the initial launch and remember the considerations that went into design choices made with various patches and expansions?

 

One reason why I enjoyed Into The Breach so much was that it didn't assume any prior knowledge - and the boring initial squad paved the way to understanding the mechanics that other more specialized squads exploited in their own ways.

[Khan Khomrad]

I find it quite interesting that when approaching the subject of stereotyping civs the panel agreed that this isn't good and sadly happen too often but then went on to talk about how fantasy races fall into stereotypes and how this is ok and can even help games. And herein lies one of the differences of making a game like,say, Age of Empires versus a Warcraft: historical games have to wrestle with the possibility of misrepresenting people, which can lead to a lot of headache nowadays, while fantasy games can comfortably make use of tropes and stereotypes without fear of people complaining about it -- and, if they do, they will most likely just say that so and so is cliche.

 

 

[ilitarist]

What a great episode!

 

One thing that irritates me about this trend that you didn't mention is opponent faction differences not playing enough into your strategy. A lot of it transforms into solitaire games. In TWWH2 you probably care that high elves use a lot of archers in combat. But High Elves have a lot of other strategic map game mechanics you might never care about or even notice if you're not playing as them. Like in Civ6 I will never care about any special mechanics of AI, period. From what I saw Diety players don't too. I'll only care about their special unit if I fight them in a specific era.

 

But anyway Rowan and Rob touch on an interesting subject about old-school faction differences. It's similar in Age of Empires 2, Heroes 2-3, and even Europa Universalis 4, I'd say. You look at those factions and think they're palette swaps with some minor differences. With Heroes 3 specifically all the creatures are tiered and in a fair fight, a higher tier melee unit will always lose to a lower tier unit. All the magic is available to all factions. Even more so, starting as a faction doesn't mean you're stuck with it, you can use towns you capture, hire heroes from other factions, and so on. I remember when I was a kid it felt not different enough to me, I wanted to play games like Disciples 2 or StarCraft, and WarCraft 3 where factions had proudly presented their differences. Later I realized that Heroes 3 did something very clever by allowing you to play every faction the same way till you notice their strength and weaknesses. Something that looked like a small thing might blow up big. Everybody knows how unique Necromancers are, but then you look at Inferno and realize they have a building allowing teleporting between Inferno towns. Wizard town has a tier-one ranged unit which makes them perfect for rushing low-level neutrals. Human Knights feel vanilla till you realize that their troops benefit from upgrades the most and thus are perfect for the economic game - even if they don't have anything to help with the economy specifically. So really those troop, buildings, and hero differences are all in "cheaper archers" territory but when you're mastering the systems you realize that those differences emphasize different strategies. Everyone can cast Fireball and Armageddon but Inferno benefits from it the most cause they have units with fire invulnerability, that kind of thing.

 

And I understand why is this kind of faction differentiation is dying out. Most players won't go deeper than I did as a kid, they'd think those differences are superfluous. Heroes 5 and later ones tried to add big important features to factions to differentiate them, even if in reality those features weren't any more important than troop/buildings/hero skills differences in previous games. But it gives players a promise of depth. Endless Legend is the best example of this. Every faction has a flagship feature like they don't declare war ever or only have one city. And those are important but just a part of faction identity. Really all the factions in EL are more similar than TWWH factions. They all have the same buildings, have access to a variety of mechanics even if they have some of their own mechanics added on top. When you play Wood Elves in TWWH you listen to a completely new folk-rock album which might be good or not. In Heroes 3 or EL forest factions release a cover album for the base game mechanics. Know what I mean? Very different factions can play similarly in EL if they ignore their special mechanics and just concentrate on some basic strategies affected by their unit roster and hero skills. Just like TWWH2 EL promises you 8 games for the price of one, but it tricks you by selling 1 good game with 8 playstyles, not 8 games that include a freaking Chaos campaign. In EL playing a new faction feels like mastering systems, in TWWH2 and other modern games it's more like playing a tutorial campaign again, probably for just one time without ever returning.

 

(Really, after Rowan speech I'm starting to suspect I don't like TWWH2 because I've only really played Chaos and Fantasy Joan of Arc campaign, both of which were boring)

[The Cull]

While I realize that the Dominions series is the epitome of niche - I was still a bit surprised it wasn't mentioned with its unbalanced and distinct factions. Instead most of the focus was on the big name well known franchises even though Dominions has many lessons that they could and should take to heart.

 

[tboon]

On 2/1/2021 at 1:26 AM, chanman said:

I'm surprised Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri wasn't mentioned - specifically, while the units were generic and no paths to victory were locked off to any faction, the faction agendas (and the associated bonuses/penalties and social engineering choice limitations) made it difficult for some factions to go after certain victory types. Notably, the Civ V civics and World Congress that were added in the later DLC look like clear nods to Alpha Centauri's social engineering and Planetary Council/Planetary Governor mechanics.

Yes I was surprised at this omission as well. Another omission was the Dominions series (where's Dr. Geryk when we need him?). Any discussion of factions should include those games, I think, just for sheer breadth.

I would have liked for them to get into "balanced" vs. "unbalanced" faction design in games as well. MP games, of course, want balanced factions. Should game devs worry about balanced factions in single-player games as well? Personally, in an SP game, I don't think it is important for every faction to have the same path to victory and, when I read a dev blog where the developers are trying to "tune" the factions to be balanced in their SP game, I think "why are you wasting effort on that?". The panel came close to going down the path a couple of times, it seemed to me, but never quite got there. I would love to have heard their thoughts (or anyone else's) on the subject.