Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
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Post by Water Dumple on Jul 7, 2008 12:09:00 GMT -5
Okay, it's not just heroes...it's some of that, but not all. Now, I'm not trying to do what a lot of folks have done (Myself included, in the past) and write up one of the usual "THIS GAEM NEEDS CHANGE B3CAUSE ITS DIEIGN" topics. It's mostly just what I think about a few issues in the game...or, at least, to me they're issues. And, yes, I put a tl;dr in for you, layze.
Alright, basically, most of what I see around the place in battles is...troops being stupid. Sucking. Dying in massive swarms because they're too incompetent to do anything competent. The way it seems to work is, troops are only good in a few fighting situations. 1) On other troops. Here, it generally comes out in a numbers game, where 100 troops will beat 80. 2) A massive number of troops clustering around a central target, trying to rip it apart, in some kind of strange hive-mind.
Well, I once heard about a man in, I think, World War II who killed an enemy tank's drivers, hijacked it, and saved a bunch of other soldiers who would have been killed by it. He was given the Medal of Honor. So--Why can't our troops do things like that? Why do they always have to suck and be little pawns you just throw clusters of at whatever you want dead? Sure, they're so stupid that you'll lose a bunch, but you might be able to win if you sacrifice enough. It's like each one had no training, they were just given weapons and told "Fight."
So what causes this? For the most part, Heroes. I know that in Deluxe or maybe crappy version 2 we decided that Heroes were worth about 10,000 troops. In SMKW 64 DS, that'll come out to 2,500. The problem: It hardly ever seems to work that way. It's always the same in a Hero invasion; Hero shows up. Troops appear to stop it. Hero uses some super big evil scary attack of doom and kills them all. "...But then he just did a Shockwave Blade and destroy edthem all. He moved on, stabbed the guards before they could resist, and..." Then the Hero will just go on and slaughter more and more troops until it either gets blown apart by a 22,000-ton battleship in a nearby lake or meets another Hero.
Oh, and I've never seen the battleship one (aka uber war machine) happen, so the way it seems to work is, you need a Hero to kill a Hero. The only time I can remember it going much differently would be in the Invasion of Peach's Castle IV when about 200 of my Kooper Troopers held down a hero with their grenades. But, most of the rest of the time, the Hero just marches in and does whatever he wants...usually it takes a bunch of artifacts, another Hero, or somesuch to deal with one. It's like a friggin' Anti-Tank in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I swear, those things need a crack team of ace WWII intelligence generals to take out. And when you do finally kill a Hero, the owner will just do some project to revive him! Pretty annoying, considering that one class is based on Heroes and another one is headed by a Super Hero (I'm not even going to start on that one).
tl;dr \/
So, to wrap this up, I think that troops should be generally more intelligent and less like Stormtroopers. Heroes should be a little bit more able to be killed, and a little bit less like some kind of huge unbeatable asset everybody but Mechanics get. Anyhow, I'm not trying to be some kind of iconoclast and smash what we've been doing, declaring it as wrong and unjust--This is mostly just a note I'm making in terms of how I think battles should be written, and hopefully enough reason to make some kind of a difference.
...And if this all sounds really stupid, I would add that the first time I tried to write this all up, the browser suddenly closed right before I was going to post it, so I had to rewrite it and it's not really as good as the first one.
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Post by bulbmin on Jul 7, 2008 12:18:38 GMT -5
Heroes take 100 days to make, they're meant to be strong. And epic. I think that's maybe one point you're missing. Heroes are meant to be, well, Heroes. They're meant to carve a bloody swathe through ordinary enemy troops. This game isn't just about numbers and statistics and winning, it's about having fun, and having some epic battles. Heroes, many people feel, contribute towards that.
Troops thinking for themselves, on the other hand, is a matter of fairness. Somebody would (rightfully) feel cheated if his enemy's troops did something they hadn't been told to, but did of their own accord because the Mod felt like it. Troops thinking for themselves takes some of the strategy and fairness out of the game. They don't have to be idiots, but a troop having the initiative to hijack a war machines and turn it on his enemies without appropriate planning on the troops' owner's side is just unfair.
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Post by soulofhachi on Jul 7, 2008 12:18:56 GMT -5
I know what you mean ... about the bowser closing! It happened just as I was submiting all of Lash's tech. That takes a long time to type up.
The biggest problem is the Merc. No one wants to kill them off, because that spells the end for a Mercenary group. So, a Merc. will alway escape incredible odds, such as Mr. L singlehandedly took on Peach and 10,000 Ubers with no harm to himself. I know Maka probably had a great plan, but I'm sure my own plans with greater force could've done something.
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Post by vidguysteve on Jul 7, 2008 12:25:22 GMT -5
To WD: what bulbmin said.
To hachi: The thing with a Merc is, it's not that people don't want to kill Mercs, it's partly that they're the most powerful individual in the game. It says right in the Rules, "a Merc has the strength of a Super Hero, which is the equivalent to three Heroes (which is HUGE)." However, a Merc is still killable, and because of that Merc users will usually establish some type of getaway plan, which is why they can escape otherwise deadly situations. I'd have no problem if Fawful died, but I'm going to make sure that he will be able to avoid death as much as he can.
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Merloo
SMKW God of the Wars
Posts: 5,486
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Post by Merloo on Jul 7, 2008 12:51:49 GMT -5
I have the agreement with bulbmin. Heroes, Artifacts, and UWM help make these battles more epic, and less numbers.
Oh, and agreement with vidguy.
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Post by tinfoilman on Jul 7, 2008 13:36:14 GMT -5
Was I the only one who saw the topic title and author, and thought to myself, "I'm in for a WD rant." Not that they're bad, its just... anyways, I'm kind of fence-sitting right now: on the one hand, I side with WD; troops aren't monkeys with armour and machine guns (unless your talking about really smart monkeys, the ones who can do sign language: those are smarter than I am) who pick a target and fire at it until a) it dies, or b) they die. But I also side with bulbmin: without heroes at the strength they are given in battles now, the battles wouldn't be, well, as epic. Sure, maybe the troops having an IQ over 50 might add some cool situations to the battle, but having over-powered heroes does add a certain element to battles that I don't want to go away.
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Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
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Post by Water Dumple on Jul 7, 2008 14:55:24 GMT -5
Heroes take 100 days to make, they're meant to be strong. And epic. I think that's maybe one point you're missing. Heroes are meant to be, well, Heroes. They're meant to carve a bloody swathe through ordinary enemy troops. This game isn't just about numbers and statistics and winning, it's about having fun, and having some epic battles. Heroes, many people feel, contribute towards that. Then I've probably been thinking a misconception the whole time, because ever since I joined I always thought it was about numbers and statistics and winning. To me, that equals fun; I guess "Epic" is what composes fun for everybody else. I'm honestly just sick of reading "Epic," at least in the form this game uses. And if the point is to have fun, and to have fun is to have what is epic, I don't see why we should even call god-mod on things because the more overpowered it is, the more epic it is, or at least from what I've seen in battles and what members want to read in battles. Heck, if I ever completely destroyed another group, I'd rather it be through planning, intelligent moves, and versatility in making my equipment beforehand rather than "MAI HERO, IT KILLZ UR PPL". What you're kind of saying is, troops are only there so that heroes can kill them so the game can be epic. The tank thing was just an example; I don't expect that to happen here, but what I'm referring to is, the troops simply don't do enough by themselves. Several times before I've written out plans for each one of my troop types; just a few sentences, but plans nonetheless. Instead, they get maybe a one-sentence mention or wind up getting the hero, or the 22,000-ton battleship. If there was appropriate planning for troops, and it seems to be that frequently there is, it should play a bigger part in the battle unless the enemy had something just as good to stop it from happening. It feels to me as if the focus of the game isn't on soldiers anymore, it's on heroes, machines, and special items/abilities, among those being artifacts. I've been trying to reverse that in my army what with giving a bunch of equipment to my troops instead of the Champions, so we'll see how it works...but I really feel like I'm going the opposite way, and nothing else is going with me. It's sort of like, you have the option of doing one out of two things, but one makes it easy and the other, while it is different, just makes the game tougher. Naturally, most folks pick the first option. I'm going to try to participate in a few more battles and see how it works, but overall, when I write my logs and see my factories making a bunch of war machines and me troop total steadily rising, it all just seems sort of hopeless because ten to one, in the next battle I use it all in, some cheap one-shot item or a hero is just going to will it all to be dead, and it'll be dead.
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Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
Posts: 4,123
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Post by Water Dumple on Jul 7, 2008 14:57:37 GMT -5
Was I the only one who saw the topic title and author, and thought to myself, "I'm in for a WD rant." Not that they're bad, its just... anyways, I'm kind of fence-sitting right now: on the one hand, I side with WD; troops aren't monkeys with armour and machine guns (unless your talking about really smart monkeys, the ones who can do sign language: those are smarter than I am) who pick a target and fire at it until a) it dies, or b) they die. But I also side with bulbmin: without heroes at the strength they are given in battles now, the battles wouldn't be, well, as epic. Sure, maybe the troops having an IQ over 50 might add some cool situations to the battle, but having over-powered heroes does add a certain element to battles that I don't want to go away. Well, I'm certainly not asking for heroes to go away; however, I'm asking for some of the focus on heroes to move to focus on soldiers. (That is, if that emphasis was included in battle plans. I'm not saying that mods should make troops be awesome and do things if it wasn't even included in the player's battle plans that the troops would do anything.) See, whenever folks bring up "The wars should be like this," they usually use examples with small armies of 1,000 troops each. Take, for example, Maka's idea of turn-based battles. They'll give off commands like, "Attack the Goombas from underground with the Piranha Plants, and..." Well, it's all very picturesque or idealistic, so to speak. Rather, that kind of thing hardly ever happens in battles, and a lot of the time it's more of just reading about the heroes did. A good battle that actually wasn't that way and was more in the direction of what I'm aiming for was the one bulbmin wrote for when Yoshisoul attacked me at the beginning of SMKW Deluxe. Anybody remember that one? I would post it, but the good ol' purge knocked it out like every other frickin' thing we wanted to keep on this forum.
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Makajawan
SMKW God of the Wars
The Fourth Forgoer
He's a Pirate
Posts: 5,285
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Post by Makajawan on Jul 7, 2008 15:09:01 GMT -5
Dumple, I'm totally with you on this. Except the for the Finale, 'cause I don't even know how many troops some of the factions have, and that is in place to be epic. On the other hand, I agree with Dumple. This is a game, not a giant fan-fiction. Is it fun to read about heroes? Yes. Is it fun to have an epic battle? Yes. But this is, first and foremost, a game, unless that changed between when I joined and now.
Next battle I write that isn't the Finale, for reasons explained above, I will make sure to take troops into account!
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Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
Posts: 4,123
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Post by Water Dumple on Jul 7, 2008 15:11:27 GMT -5
Here's some stuff I read in the latest Black Hole battle that generally embodies what I'm talking about.
All the troops backed slowly away from the monster that slowly oozed its way towards them. The gigantic gelatinous monster had come out of nowhere and appeared right in front of the Mecha-Sonics and Lawn Gnomes, digesting them.
Knuckles began to sweat as the soldiers all cocked and aimed their guns at the still-oblivious Irken and helpless echidna. Knuckles had just about given up all hope when a thick darkness covered the area. ‘What the… Did it get darker all of a sudden?’ Knuckles decided to take the opportunity and threw Zim into the air, and quickly began to slam the ground, his fists aflame, causing a Fire Quake and quickly incinerating all of the attacking troops.
The guard’s life was cut short by his trachea being crushed by Silver’s telekinetic abilities, before Sonic did a Spin Dash into the other one, cutting him in half.
“SONIC WIND!” The heroic hedgehog cried as a large blue ball of swirling energy appeared over a few troops, ripping them apart. Silver used his telekinetic abilities and tossed troops into the ball to be ripped apart by the ferocious winds.
“Time to improvise…” Knuckles mumbled as he grabbed Zim and crumpled him up into a ball, before throwing the screaming Irken at top speeds at a crowd of troops, sending them flying into the air.
The troop felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up to see a horrific-looking demon-jester. “Goodbye, loser,” was the last words he ever heard. In no time flat, the squadron had been thoroughly crushed.
...And I only looked at a few updates to get that. I probably missed some in said updates, as well.
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Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
Posts: 4,123
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Post by Water Dumple on Jul 7, 2008 15:14:40 GMT -5
Dumple, I'm totally with you on this. Except the for the Finale, 'cause I don't even know how many troops some of the factions have, and that is in place to be epic. On the other hand, I agree with Dumple. This is a game, not a giant fan-fiction. Is it fun to read about heroes? Yes. Is it fun to have an epic battle? Yes. But this is, first and foremost, a game, unless that changed between when I joined and now. Next battle I write that isn't the Finale, for reasons explained above, I will make sure to take troops into account! Well, the Finale doesn't really matter very much because everybody except one faction dies (Most likely). It's natural to have swarms of doom flying around. But, thank you, I'm glad I've made my point to one person, at least. Oh yeah, and the purge doesn't destroy floated threads (I'm sure you knew that), but I'm just mentioning that we could save things from now on by floating them all in the Archives.
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Post by vidguysteve on Jul 7, 2008 15:18:01 GMT -5
Well, looking at what you're saying and noticing the repeating trend in your posts, this isn't really so much as a "Heroes are too powerful" thing so much as it's a "troops should do more in battle" thing, right?
That sounds perfectly reasonable, to tell the truth. However, as a Mod who just tried to make two updates with only one force's plans, it's really REALLY hard for some Mods to come up with things on their own. If people don't tell mods to do something, then chances are it won't happen. If you want troops trying to take over tanks, tell them! If you want them to do something cool that Mods wouldn't think up themselves, say something in plans!
That said, I think that this may be sorta premature. After all, we just remodeled the game following plenty of the new Rules and ideas to make troops more powerful, and we've had three battles, one of them involving a Bandit Group.
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Post by tinfoilman on Jul 7, 2008 15:19:38 GMT -5
I get your point, and mostly agree with it; however, I think that heroes should still be a clutch factor. So, I kinda see eye-to-eye, but maybe... I don't make full eye-contact (shit metaphor, I know). I think hero's should still have their effect (most of it) that they currently have but agree on not having troops be so stupid/having them play a key(er) role in battles.
Regardless, we seem to talk a lot about toning down a hero's power and how strong they should be, but judging by what I've seen, not much of it gets put into use in battles. I'm not saying I was any better than the other writers, I'm just putting that out there.
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Makajawan
SMKW God of the Wars
The Fourth Forgoer
He's a Pirate
Posts: 5,285
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Post by Makajawan on Jul 7, 2008 15:28:24 GMT -5
HACHI DIDN'T EVEN TELL ME WHAT TROOPS HE HAS!
Sorry, just a little outburst there. I certainly know I'm guilty of the anti-soldier thing. But please, gimme another chance! Next battle, I'll give troops such a big role, it'll be epic!
If we try my battle idea, it should be easier. Of course, everyone was all happy about it and then- nothing, but that's fine.
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Post by soulofhachi on Jul 7, 2008 15:33:18 GMT -5
HACHI DIDN'T EVEN TELL ME WHAT TROOPS HE HAS! Sorry, just a little outburst there. I certainly know I'm guilty of the anti-soldier thing. But please, gimme another chance! Next battle, I'll give troops such a big role, it'll be epic! If we try my battle idea, it should be easier. Of course, everyone was all happy about it and then- nothing, but that's fine. But you didn't write the Black Hole battles, why would you need to know my troops?
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