Free Allegiance Forums

As we all know, SgtBaker has discovered he can predict the outcome of 85% of the games by merely looking at who's playing against who -- without even factoring who's commanding.

Basically, 85% of the time, we can merely have the game tell us the outcome in advance and spare everybody 50 minutes of pain. The other 15% of the time, it's probably the commander making the difference in most cases

Can Allegiance be made more unpredictable, maybe more unfair but also more interesting to play?

I believe this is a core-level design problem - you can't autobalance everything - hence I'm bringing this up here.

I tried to keep the previous post opinion-free as I make no mistery I suck at this balancing thing. Still, I think the recipe is shorter games.

In a shorter game, every decision counts more, every mistake counts more, every doer counts more.
With shorter games, you can play more of them in the same amount of time, thus bringing players a better overall time (losing a 20m game is less of a big deal than losing a 3h game).

So how can shorter games be attained at core design level? (hence disregarding settings/map/skills/commanders/voobs/pooks/etc.)

By making the transition to the next tech level more expensive, more lengthy, but also more ruthlessly powerful (so that you are forced to kill the enemy economy or face certain destruction); or by making miner defense/offense more critical (less payday? slower miners that carry more resources?); or by levelling the field on the dogfighting action so that it becomes less interesting, encouraging people in taking on actual teamplay.

I don't have a recipe, just sharing what I've been thinking about with you. I'm probably wrong, but at least it's food for thought for you all.

To be honest I (personally) think shorter (at least slightly shorter) games in general might be good for Allegiance. One of the frequent reasons many people don't play is they don't unless they have a couple of hours free.

In the time it takes to play a bit of Alleg. you could play several games of most things.

Allegiance is unpredictable. Its players are not.

games are only unpredictable when you have teams of highly skilled pilots and commanders on both sides who are locked in an epic battle to outmaneuver one another in any conceivable way. unfortunately as these individuals are in the minority, these games are incredibly rare

Substitute KB damage bonus for speed bonus.

badp is weylins hider?

Make a sun supernova every so often which takes out like half the map and jams radar completely for ten minutes in the effected sectors.

Boom.

Changing the costs will just result in people jacking up the money settings even higher.

If you want shorter and more unpredictable games, just make the team automatically lose if they lose a con or full miner in the first few minutes. Saves everyone the bother of having to wait twenty more minutes for the other team's inevitable victory.

Jimen wrote:QUOTE (Jimen @ Dec 21 2010, 01:33 PM) just make the team automatically lose if they lose a con

That's how the "push first op to enemy home" used to work. It may be a lost art now, though --alltogether with the mighty "mines-and-drones".