Mass Queens and the Clarity of Game Mechanics

Posting on behalf of former TN guest author Mark Wallace

 

One question I've been pondering as I go about designing a strategy game is that of clarity in game mechanics, and in combat systems in particular. Committed players of strategy games (and many other genres, for that matter) have long taken joy in pulling apart the math behind the combat resolution systems that drive the games they play, in part to seek an advantage or upper hand and in part out of simple fascination. This description of the mass queen experiment from the StarCraft2 Hacks blog is a great example. It runs through a bunch of math, based on things like minerals, gas, queens, hatcheries, food, game time, energy, "transfuses," injections and more, and comes to the colorful but perhaps surprising conclusion that "Queens are better cost effective healers than Medivacs." Food for thought.

What's interesting to me is the question of where a combat system might lie on the spectrum from transparency to obfuscation (through complexity or by other means), how that stacks up against the combat results you as a designer want to produce, and whether a game is any the better or worse for your equations and calculations being deeply buried, or riding on the surface of play.

The Battle for Wesnoth, for instance, which is a really impressive (and free!) turn-based strategy game, is exceedingly clear about the math behind its combat mechanic. At any given moment, you know exactly what your chances are of winning any given encounter between two units, and you can discern, with hardly any poking around, why your chances are what they are (because Undead are highly resistant (60%) to most Physical attacks, for instance).

 

Others, like the Total War combat system analyzed in this 2006 forum post, take pages to explicate and are difficult to understand even with extensive documentation provided by the developers.

 

The system I've been working on lies somewhere between the two, though certainly closer to the transparent/Wesnoth end of the spectrum. If it survives in anything like its current form, it will be relatively easy to understand with perhaps a bit of calculation on the player's part, though in many cases not so simple that you can do the math in your head. Note that the choices I'm making definitely do not grow out of a desire to make the system more or less transparent; they are driven by the kind of gameplay I want to produce, and the immediate and tangible questions it raises. E.g., how do you resolve combat between two stacks of units with various advantages and vulnerabilities, without requiring the player to make any additional decisions after sending his or her units into the fray? There are more answers to questions like this than at first meet the eye.

 

The questions I have about questions like those are these: What does it mean for a game to have a transparent mechanic, versus one that's more obscure? Do players (those who are paying attention, at any rate) feel better knowing how they'll fare before they go into battle? Does having a mechanic that's too obscure to figure out (if there is such a thing) mean players will be less engaged? Does it take away some of the challenge if you know beforehand whether you'll win or lose? Do transparent mechanics provide clearer paths through the content? Or do they lead players to reduce the number of alternatives they explore, since much of the exploration has already been done for them?

 

Or... do these questions apply to such a small portion of the player population that they're not even worth considering? I'd argue that even if it is only a few who are so engaged as to do the math, this is still worth thinking about, for a host of reasons I won't get into here. In any case, it's interesting stuff to ponder. What do you think of it all?

 

Comments

[fgds]

1.

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[Richard]

2.

>What does it mean for a game to have a transparent mechanic, versus one that's more obscure?

It's all obscure at some level, otherwise where's the fun? Chess has a transparent mechanic, but gets its obscuration from the branching factor of the decision tree. Computers let us put the obscuration at the "does my piece take your piece?" level if we want. As with chess, those who do analysis of the obscured part will have a better chance of winning than those who don't. It's up to you as a player whether or not you want to play against someone who has analysed a game more or less than you have.

>Do players (those who are paying attention, at any rate) feel better knowing how they'll fare before they go into battle?

Some will, some won't. People don't all get their fun from the same things in games.

>Does having a mechanic that's too obscure to figure out (if there is such a thing) mean players will be less engaged?

They'll treat it as random (which from their point of view it is) and decide whether or not they want to play a game of chance. Some will, some won't.

Also, not figuring out a mechanic doesn't mean you can't nevertheless find a local maximum. The AI program Eurisko won the Traveler national championship in 1981 and 1982 without figuring out any rules - it just used heuristic-based search (or Expert Systems, as it was called back then).

>Does it take away some of the challenge if you know beforehand whether you'll win or lose?

For the entire game, yes: if you know the result, then how can you describe it as "challenge"? That doesn't mean that it can't be fun, though. I had a friend who played Gary Kasparov at chess (one of 40 people Kasparov was playing simultaneously in a big hall); he knew Kasparov he was going to beat him, but it was still fun seeing how he did it.

>Do transparent mechanics provide clearer paths through the content?

Yes until you reach the obscuration part. If there's no obscuration part (eg. Snakes/Chutes and Ladders) then you get a clear path right to the end and it's up to you to decide whether playing is pointless or not.

>Or do they lead players to reduce the number of alternatives they explore, since much of the exploration has already been done for them?

They just move the point at which the exploration takes place.

Richard

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

3.

You generally want to go between the two extremes. As Richard points out, too little obscurity and the game degenerates. Too much and people don't get good feedback on what went right or wrong with their strategy. The exact mix depends on the players your game is targetted toward.

In strategy games, the typical audience likes fairly meaty rules with some level of obscurity. It's always fun to try to bluff an enemy into thinking that scout group is actually a heavy group and get them to react appropriately, opening up other opportunities for you. But, you have to consider if that audience is already well-served and thus you want to go with a different level of obscurity in the rules in order to appeal to an underserved audience.

[Mark Wallace]

4.

> It's always fun to try to bluff an enemy

re that: have you played Ruse at all, in which bluffs and other tactics are built into the mechanic? I haven't, but it seems interesting. I'm wondering whether it actually worked.

[Jim Self]

5.

Every strategy game has something obscured, even if it is like chess and the only hidden thing is the opponent's moves. The question is, what about the game is obscured? If you want the game to be about something, hide some of it from them and give them the opportunity to discover it.

Richard's example of Chess is a good one. The outcome of the game is not clear from the beginning; the future decisions are not clear. Depending on your ability you can predict the next several turns. There is nothing hiding the abilities of the pieces, their locations, the timing of events, or what the outcome of an encounter will be. What is left is for each player to make meaningful decisions.

"how do you resolve combat between two stacks of units with various advantages and vulnerabilities, without requiring the player to make any additional decisions after sending his or her units into the fray?"

I see your paradox. You don't want the player to actively manage the mechanics that decide an engagement but also don't want it to be resolved so clearly that the outcome is decided beforehand. You have two choices. Make the outcome completely predictable based on units, terrain, whatever factors are present; this makes the game a game of prediction, information, placement. Or, make the outcome random, with probabilities and factors that allow a degree of planning; this makes the game a game of considering probabilities, contingencies, reaction, grand strategy.

"Do players (those who are paying attention, at any rate) feel better knowing how they'll fare before they go into battle? Does having a mechanic that's too obscure to figure out (if there is such a thing) mean players will be less engaged?"

The less control you have over an outcome, the less satisfying/disappointing it will be. Adding a degree of randomness forces a player to concentrate on a larger scale, increasingly so with increasing randomness. If I have a 50% chance of winning each engagement, I have to be sure to keep my production going full blast and seize every opportunity.

"Does it take away some of the challenge if you know beforehand whether you'll win or lose?"

Is there any value to winning when no one knows how it came about? Conversely, don't you admire victories most when you know exactly how they happened, even if only after the fact? This is a question of scale again. Unit A kills unit B might be insignificant, or it might be major.

"Do transparent mechanics provide clearer paths through the content? "

Yes. But are all the paths clear? For a well-programmed supercomputer all possible paths may be evident, but for we mere humans there is a world of unrealized paths through any body of content which allows a large number of meaningful choices.

"Or do they lead players to reduce the number of alternatives they explore, since much of the exploration has already been done for them?"

What you hide becomes a goal of the game. What a player can hide becomes a capability. Capabilities lead to further options. Let them understand the mechanics, and figure out how the mechanics of the pieces interact with each other. If you design your units as straightforwardly as "cavalry get flank attack on artillery" then yes you will get a poorer set of choices for players.

[Mark Wallace]

6.

Very good thoughts, Jim, thanks for that. You've articulated some of the sweet spots I've been aiming for.

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7.

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