From my coding blog, this post also deals with games.
http://kwstannard.blogspot.com/2012/02/tower-defense.html
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Spider Solitaire
Since TF2 went off the deep end and made the Heavy completely unstoppable I have decided to post about my other love, spider solitaire.
A little while ago I decided to sit down and figure out the best way to play the game in order to win while at the same time not spending 5 years playing each game.
The first and only step to winning every game is to abuse undo like your life depends on it. It is a part of the game so don't be afraid to hold down ctrl-z until you are back at the start if you really want to maintain your win streak so you can randomly message your friends about how good you are at spider solitaire.
But, using too much undo is very detrimental to your score and you will be spending hours per game, so here are a few more tips I discerned.
Tip 1 - The game is about maintaining fluidity: When you are losing it feels like everything is locked up, so what you need to do is try to keep your junk piles of multiple suit cards to a minimum. Always keep your eyes open for ways to sort your junk piles and don't be afraid to just not put that eight of clubs on the nine of diamonds.
Tip 2 - Keep aces to a minimum and kings are secretly good: When I first started playing I didn't like kings because it felt like they were blocking me from getting to lower cards. In reality the higher the card, the better the odds of it being a good choice to move forwards with. This is because aces are the end of a card column and kill fluidity because you can't place anything on them.
Of course, in general you want cards that will allow you to move other cards since that will increase fluidity, so if you have no face cards showing you might want to wait a bit before turning up any kings.
Tip 3 - Know what cards are coming up by abusing undo: If you know what cards are coming then your brain will start forming a solution and you will know what cards you will need in the immediate term.
Good luck.
A little while ago I decided to sit down and figure out the best way to play the game in order to win while at the same time not spending 5 years playing each game.
The first and only step to winning every game is to abuse undo like your life depends on it. It is a part of the game so don't be afraid to hold down ctrl-z until you are back at the start if you really want to maintain your win streak so you can randomly message your friends about how good you are at spider solitaire.
But, using too much undo is very detrimental to your score and you will be spending hours per game, so here are a few more tips I discerned.
Tip 1 - The game is about maintaining fluidity: When you are losing it feels like everything is locked up, so what you need to do is try to keep your junk piles of multiple suit cards to a minimum. Always keep your eyes open for ways to sort your junk piles and don't be afraid to just not put that eight of clubs on the nine of diamonds.
Tip 2 - Keep aces to a minimum and kings are secretly good: When I first started playing I didn't like kings because it felt like they were blocking me from getting to lower cards. In reality the higher the card, the better the odds of it being a good choice to move forwards with. This is because aces are the end of a card column and kill fluidity because you can't place anything on them.
Of course, in general you want cards that will allow you to move other cards since that will increase fluidity, so if you have no face cards showing you might want to wait a bit before turning up any kings.
Tip 3 - Know what cards are coming up by abusing undo: If you know what cards are coming then your brain will start forming a solution and you will know what cards you will need in the immediate term.
Good luck.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Health and Agility. Heavy part 3
Gonna take a break from finals week to write another blog post.
The combat class line is the balancing act between mobility and range that you must trod upon in order maintain distinction between classes, so where does that leave health in class balance relations? The answer is health should be balanced against a class' agility at that class's ideal combat range.
The vertices of the graph are in order Heavy, Soldier, Demo, Scout, and Sniper. I assigned numbers to difficulty to hit just based off of my 4 years playing TF2. Sniper is hard to quantify because he doesn't really have a maximum to his ideal range, so his difficulty to damage is more of an average.
This line doesn't involve class specialization like the the combat class line. What this line does is to ensure that no class is either too tedious or too frustrating to play against by trying to ensure that it takes a certain amount of time to kill someone fighting at their ideal range assuming they can dodge at the same skill level that the other player can aim.
When you have classes that take too many shots to kill, by either having too much health or being too mobile, it makes the game slow down. With medics and health packs everywhere, every extra second someone stays alive is a second they can get healed or escape to come back a few seconds later with full health. While the exact speed that you want the game to be played at is another design decision entirely, you want the game to have a fairly consistent pace or people can become frustrated by joining a server expecting to have a quick game of cp_badlands only to find out that there are 6 heavies on the server and it is now a slogfest, or the opposite situation wanting a nice slow game of dustbowl only to find that the offensive team is all soldiers and demos and quickly moves through the whole map.
This means that there should theoretically be a maximum limit to the health of classes as at a certain point classes can't become easier to hit. According to my graph, and in reference to the three core combat classes, that maximum is going to be at approximately 250 health. So in relation to the heavy, the first thing that would need to be done in order to make him more balanced is to lower his health. Then once you do that you can adjust him in other places.
The combat class line is the balancing act between mobility and range that you must trod upon in order maintain distinction between classes, so where does that leave health in class balance relations? The answer is health should be balanced against a class' agility at that class's ideal combat range.
Another Graph
The vertices of the graph are in order Heavy, Soldier, Demo, Scout, and Sniper. I assigned numbers to difficulty to hit just based off of my 4 years playing TF2. Sniper is hard to quantify because he doesn't really have a maximum to his ideal range, so his difficulty to damage is more of an average.
This line doesn't involve class specialization like the the combat class line. What this line does is to ensure that no class is either too tedious or too frustrating to play against by trying to ensure that it takes a certain amount of time to kill someone fighting at their ideal range assuming they can dodge at the same skill level that the other player can aim.
When you have classes that take too many shots to kill, by either having too much health or being too mobile, it makes the game slow down. With medics and health packs everywhere, every extra second someone stays alive is a second they can get healed or escape to come back a few seconds later with full health. While the exact speed that you want the game to be played at is another design decision entirely, you want the game to have a fairly consistent pace or people can become frustrated by joining a server expecting to have a quick game of cp_badlands only to find out that there are 6 heavies on the server and it is now a slogfest, or the opposite situation wanting a nice slow game of dustbowl only to find that the offensive team is all soldiers and demos and quickly moves through the whole map.
This means that there should theoretically be a maximum limit to the health of classes as at a certain point classes can't become easier to hit. According to my graph, and in reference to the three core combat classes, that maximum is going to be at approximately 250 health. So in relation to the heavy, the first thing that would need to be done in order to make him more balanced is to lower his health. Then once you do that you can adjust him in other places.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
The Heavy sucks part 2
So, the Heavy is out in left field when it comes to the other combat classes. He is both slow and short ranged, which are huge disadvantages. How does the heavy make up for this apparent lack of combat ability? Lots and lots of health.
Props to Open Office
I am going to posit a hypothesis that giving a class in an fps double health is a terrible idea. Many people out there are going to disagree with me on this and say stuff like "I don't want to play a game with a lot of identical characters." To which I would reply "Having double the health of the average class is not interesting or fun, so lets come up with something better."
Spies, while suffering from the same problem of slow speed and short range have a cool advantage in cloaking. Pyros, another short range and slow class, get the airblast. Engineers can throw down sentries. All cool abilities that add to the depth of a game. Having a lot of health does not add anything to TF2 besides a roadblock.
Having lots of health is the most boring advantage ever. It doesn't take any skill to move around slowly while eating rockets to the face. The majority of the heavy skill set is to find a good place to stand and shoot at people until he dies because the heavy isn't going to be able to retreat or once he spins up.
This is boring for the heavy, because he has no interesting decisions to make, and boring for anyone shooting at the heavy, because it isn't hard at all to shoot a heavy. For most good players the biggest deterrent for engaging a heavy is that it takes so much ammo to kill one the enemy team can come in and kill you while you reload. I used to play on a 6v6 team that would run double heavy on the last point of gravelpit style maps because it was literally impossible for your average team to kill two heavies without wasting time by having someone switch to sniper or spy. While it was funny seeing the other team rage it wasn't actually fun to execute.
I will go more into health and how it affects balancing in part 3.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Why the Heavy is a terrible class - part 1
The Heavy. He typically flies under the radar of most people when it comes to balance. He rarely gets used in 6v6 so some people think he is underpowered. Yet, those who have been playing for a while know that few things can win a 12v12 harder than multiple heavies on the same team.
So you might be asking, who's viewpoint is correct? Is the heavy overpowered or underpowered? Where does the heavy store all those sandviches? The correct answer is none of the above because the Heavy is terrible game design and here's one reason why.
Range is arbitrary from 1 to 4 representing short to long ranges and is basically the range at which a class is best at dealing damage and speed includes stuff like rocket jumping. For example, the scout is fast as heck and deals damage best while he is right next to someone.
The red line is what I call the combat class line, combat classes being classes whose only way to interact with the game being trying to kill people. If you take your two most outlying combat classes and draw a line between them, it should slope downward and every other combat class should be at least somewhere near it. Why? Because the line creates a what I call 'zone based specialization'.
How does zone based specialization work? Imagine you have two classes, the soldier and the scout. The soldier is slower than the scout but deals damage at a mediumish range, so if he is engaging properly he can move himself to an ideal position before the scout can close the distance and kill him. Meanwhile the scout is so fast no other class can catch up to him, so if the scout wants to engage a soldier class he must first make his way through his opponent's ideal range to get into his ideal range, which is done by skillful players by waiting until the soldier is in a disadvantageous position or by waiting until the soldier is preoccupied. This creates a balance between a class having range, and a class being able to choose where the engagement will happen.
The heavy, by being a combat class not on the combat class line, can't choose where to fight and doesn't have range advantage either. So, he must now be balanced in a completely different way, which means that he is going to be a problem for designing anything from new maps to new weapons as he will create large anomalies, such as being the least used combat class in 6v6 and being crazy good in 12v12.
So you might be asking, who's viewpoint is correct? Is the heavy overpowered or underpowered? Where does the heavy store all those sandviches? The correct answer is none of the above because the Heavy is terrible game design and here's one reason why.
A Graph
Range is arbitrary from 1 to 4 representing short to long ranges and is basically the range at which a class is best at dealing damage and speed includes stuff like rocket jumping. For example, the scout is fast as heck and deals damage best while he is right next to someone.
The red line is what I call the combat class line, combat classes being classes whose only way to interact with the game being trying to kill people. If you take your two most outlying combat classes and draw a line between them, it should slope downward and every other combat class should be at least somewhere near it. Why? Because the line creates a what I call 'zone based specialization'.
How does zone based specialization work? Imagine you have two classes, the soldier and the scout. The soldier is slower than the scout but deals damage at a mediumish range, so if he is engaging properly he can move himself to an ideal position before the scout can close the distance and kill him. Meanwhile the scout is so fast no other class can catch up to him, so if the scout wants to engage a soldier class he must first make his way through his opponent's ideal range to get into his ideal range, which is done by skillful players by waiting until the soldier is in a disadvantageous position or by waiting until the soldier is preoccupied. This creates a balance between a class having range, and a class being able to choose where the engagement will happen.
The heavy, by being a combat class not on the combat class line, can't choose where to fight and doesn't have range advantage either. So, he must now be balanced in a completely different way, which means that he is going to be a problem for designing anything from new maps to new weapons as he will create large anomalies, such as being the least used combat class in 6v6 and being crazy good in 12v12.
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