Post#87 » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:28 pm
What I'm looking at, from the most basic level, is making the game more true to realistic concepts of renown, experience, acquisition and allocation of resources, and siege. I also want to see dead time eliminated.
By renown (and influence), I mean that you should only receive renown for actions which would be worthy of note by a theoretical commanding officer or top brass of your faction. Someone in another thread mentioned a step back Mythic made in this game from DAoC, in which they said that kills were the only action that granted renown. I don't agree with taking such an extreme approach, but I do agree with eliminating renown that was gained for doing nothing - and by this I mean taking undefended BOs and capping empty keeps.
Similarly with experience - you don't improve by sitting at a battlefield objective waiting for it to cap.
On to acquisition and allocation of resources.
This is why I mentioned Savage, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. All 3 games use the same general concept: by holding locations of value to either your commander (DoW) or yourself (CoH, Savage 2) you generate resources with which you can use to advance your faction and win, which is the underlying driver of the game. Almost every RTS uses the same concept, and why? Because it works. It punishes mass strategies and forces players to split up, or commanders to split their forces. There's no such thing as an insane, arbitrary lock timer which prevents the other faction from threatening the point you've just locked - you have to control it and generally that's accomplished by fortification - an action that occupies players on both sides (one in construction and the other in harassment / attacking the point). This also ensures that the point has hard value - it is meaningful. In the case of CoH, there's even a distinction between types of points, some of which are more valuable than others. Contrast Warhammer's battlefield objectives, which succeed in contributing almost nothing to the campaign outside of free renown and a new destination for the zergs on both sides.
In CoH especially, control of points (and the method of attacking them) creates a natural battlefront through the supply mechanic, which plays into the whole "mass war" concept. I haven't yet decided if this concept is anything I'd want to see included. Another game that made use of this on a larger map scale was UT2004 (in Onslaught mode), where it also helps to split up forces.
As for how resources might be used? S2 maintained separate resource pools - one which could be used by the player and one by the commander. Assigning a global resource pool for the realm, controlled by its leaders (realm captains, or highest renown if they're not present) and used, for example, for major siege units like rams (and in my vision, Orcapults, siege towers and all other kinds of stuff), while allocating lesser resources to other players for individual types of fortification and smaller siege weapons, as well as potentially introducing better mounts with abilities, which would serve as a type of vehicle. The potential for adding content to drive a more strategic experience is there.
Siege and general gameplay direction. At the moment, there's too much emphasis on the keeps. Some people may disagree with me on this (and I'm sure most of them will be supporters of mass AoE) but the game seems basically to resolve to "We're outnumbered, retreat to keep where we can try to farm them" or "We outnumber them, push to their keep". There's no real concept of a middle phase, or indeed any kind of advancement in the engagement. There's no room for any real strategy and the only real tactics I've seen are baiting people from a keep with fake retreats or hiding behind a wall waiting to ambush people who can't see you. As long as the emphasis remains on this type of gameplay, and keeps are kept as enclosed meatgrinders with one attack strategy (the doors), things will remain uninteresting.
The above is why I mentioned siege towers and Orcapults. There should be multiple ways of attacking a keep, and thus defending one should require multiple approaches from the defenders. So there should be slow, vulnerable siege weapons that have to be bought and transported around in order to open up multiple avenues of assault - IF the defenders fail to contest them, either by sending a force to attack the weapon directly or by using their own siege weapons to destroy it.
The other thing about siege weapons is that since they would be requested (requisitioned) from the realm, the leaders of that realm would be able to refuse requests for siege weapons if the engagement was not great enough to demand their use. This would offer a means of keeping empty keeps from being assaulted if there was not enough action in the area to justify progressing to that stage. As more players entered the area, the engagement could advance in a similar way to tiering in RTS games until the point at which siege would be released.
With respect to commanders: in order to implement any kind of reasonable strategy across large battlefields, realistically, someone's got to have a tactical map and the ability to use that to issue orders. That's again something Savage did right. This doesn't need to be extravagant - just give some people the ability to survey the battlefield in more detail and issue orders based on that.
Regarding dead time: Warhammer has a lot of it. No good game should have any period where you are basically sitting and doing nothing, but that's exactly what the current battlefield objective concept promotes - idling around while you wait for it to lock. A player should always have something positive to be doing.
This is just a general overview of the direction in which I'm thinking, from the top of my head. I'm sure there are flaws in it, but the bottom line for me is that WAR suffers badly from directionless RvR, zerging and chokepoints / AoE, even to the point where some classes that are mostly single target are left out in the cold.
