FAF for Casual Players

@Zeldafanboy

You did not point out any contradiction, but ok. There are plenty of games that don't have campaigns or survival and those games are liked just fine by the casual audience. And you are correct, something like Starcraft Coop would be even better than skirmish, but we don't have that. And at its core, Starcraft Coop are skirmish matches with more interesting victory conditions than just domination, just like Civilisation 6 or Stellaris. If we could have something like that in FAF, I would be excited! But designing something like that is not going to be easy.

But even for FA, if you read Steam forums, Steam reviews and reddit (which i do very often), you will notice that people play a lot of skirmish, and if they play skirmish on FAF they almost exclusively play against Sorian. None of them install any AI mods, which is just a sad state of affairs.

Btw. i am not against making campaigns and survival better! In fact i post campaign guide videos on my Youtube channel (which are pretty bad, but hey i am not a professional content creator). But i think skirmish has the biggest potential for improvement. Campaigns just need people creating more campaigns, so that seems to be quite straight forward. Survival is fine i would say.

@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:

If we could have something like that in FAF, I would be excited! But designing something like that is not going to be easy.

FAF does have coop missions though? There are also some mini-game type maps like zone control. All the tools already exist to create more coop missions or more mini-game type maps. I don't know if anyone that makes these things still exists on FAF or is interested in continuing though.

Obviously it would be good to integrate these other AI and give them a difficulty rating though, that seems fairly straightforward as well.

I was a casual player, although I wouldn't fall into that category anymore for FAF given I play a fair bit of TMM, but going back to when I was more of a casual player the thing I would play the most would be the SC and FA campaign, and before I even considered trying to play custom games I'd play a number of vs AI games (I had no idea custom AI existed so these would have been vs the standard AI).

Some if the things I think FAF could improve to appeal more to casual players who play PvE would be:

• Improved interface/client for the campaign side of the game - it's not obvious/intuitive that you can play solo games through the SC campaign (but with FAF balance and UI), or that there are a bunch of custom missions/campaigns, or the order to play these in.
• Improved visibility/prominence of AIs, including AI selection - many players won't know custom AI exist and will assume there's only the default AI available. Even if you know custom AI exist, unless you happen to go looking for it on the forums you won't easily find them, or know how difficult each of them is.
• Some sort of 'challenge mode' and/or tutorial - e.g. C&C Zero Hour had the general challenge which I found great fun and kept me going back to the game time and time again.

Of these the last is probably not worth considering since it'd require lots of time and such ideas have already been suggested in the past. The first two probably wouldn't require as much work, but would still need someone with experience of the client and a fair bit of time.

In terms of your suggestion for easy to very hard groupings for the AI, I think this could work as a good idea; giving a rating number to the AI would be an alternative (and is discussed in the AI matchmaker thread), but they both have the same aim, and for someone new to FAF easy/medium/hard is probably more understandable than 200 / 400 / 600. However, I think this should be coupled with a complete rework of the UI relating to AI in the lobby.

I'm not sure quite what the UI would look like/the best approach, but ideally it would be something that would allow you to easily select an AI of the appropriate challenge, while also making you aware of all the possible AI.

For example, one approach might be a single 'Add AI' option. You select it, and you then get a box/grid that lists all available AI (i.e. including AI for which you dont have the mod for). Selecting an AI that you dont have the mod for yet will download that mod automatically. This at a stroke would massively increase awareness of the different AI that FAF has for newer players.

A box/grid/some other solution would also give potential for AI to be grouped/sorted. E.g. you could have them grouped by difficulty; you could us a tag system; you could have them grouped by type of AI (rush; tech; adaptive).

Meanwhile with the AiX modifier, instead of needing to select the AiX version of the AI (which doubles the list of AI available), and then know to go into game settings to change it from the default (now of 1.5), if you select an AI then there could be a drop-down box where it shows the AI/player name in the lobby that is at 1.0, and allows you to select any AiX value (for that AI), including values less than 1.0 (to cater for players that want an even easier time).

If the achievement system was working, this could also be used to encourage people to explore some of the FAF content (e.g. an achievement for beating an AiX 1.5 Adaptive AI, or for completing a custom campaign).

Another potentially simpler approach (although it would have less benefit) would be adding a section in the mods part of the client just for AI mods (i.e. the same way things are grouped by highest rated, most popular, etc., if there's a grouping for AI mods)

@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:

There are plenty of games that don't have campaigns or survival and those games are liked just fine by the casual audience.

I'm not trying to be rude, I'm genuinely curious here. Can you name five RTS games where the player controls at least five units[fn1] AND don't have campaigns AND they don't have survival AND they have more than a tiny casual audience (let's say, at least 200 unique casual players every month)?

[fn1] I want to exclude games where you control only one character, e.g. MOBA games, LazerGrrl, Natural Selection, Orcs Must Die. I see those as very different from FAF, StarCraft, C&C, etc. I would allow you to include games like BannerLord where you mostly move one character around but you do give orders to squads. Of course, BannerLord has a campaign so it can't be one of the 5.

Almost every RTS has a campaign if for no other reason than most casual gamers won't buy the game if it doesn't have one. The implied promise is: the campaign is a way to learn the game without constantly getting dunked on by other people, so you will get at least a few hours of enjoyment if you buy the game. So I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find 5 popular campaign-less RTS games unless you're looking at unfinished games (e.g. a game through Steam Early Access).

We could use the Coop tab in the client to improve the PvE experience significantly. It was supposed to get reworked at some point anyway, because the current ui is pretty terrible. Then we could present the campaign missions in a better way, streamline the process of actually starting it and create a new area that you can use to easily set up a versus AI game. At the moment you have to create a multiplayer lobby in both cases and that is very unintuitive when you just want to play solo. Selecting the AI you want to play against in the client would have the benefit that the client can display all available AI mods and then download them on demand instead of having to download all of them first to have them selectable in the lobby.
Now you might say it's pointless to spend time on this without having a developer first to implement it, but I disagree. A well thought out mockup massively increases the chance to attract a dev in implementing it. And even if we do not immediatly find someone to do it, then we at least have a concept that can be picked up at any point. At the moment we have nothing and thus no development work is happening, obviously.

@maudlin27
I pretty much agree with all of that. AI selection should really be its own , user-friendly dialog. Maybe some options should even be selected before the lobby, during creation of the game in the FAF client dialog or with a specific "Create Game" button made for PvE (or maybe even an entire PvE focused page).

@arma473
I don't see a reason why you would exclude turn-based strategy, and Civ 6 alone is played more than whatever 5 smaller games i could come up with. Then we also have Grand strategy and 4X genres that generally tend to not have campaigns. But i don't think listing games will imrprove this discussion.

What is your argument?
Its good for games to have a campaign? I absolutely agree. Players like to play campaigns? I agree. FAF should make playing the campaign a good experience? I agree.

However, in a campaign the players play against a mostly static setup predefined by the campaign authors. Campaigns tend to be not very replayable. "Free play", "Skirmish" etc. is were players are finally given the options to customize their gaming experience, and were games start becoming replayable. It is also were one-time campaign players might be converted into long-time FAF enjoyers. Regardless of the topic of campaigns, which i too very much enjoy, i do think that skirmish vs-AI should not be an overlooked gamemode.

@BlackYps

Yes, i have been thinking about how to make a polished PvE section sometimes, but i have not put the time in to have a really good idea yet for an overall design. I think the biggest question is if we want to separate the custom games list to have a PvE only list.

@ThomasHiatt

FAF does have coop missions though?

Starcraft 2 Coop is not like coop campaign (i think , its a while since i played that). It is much closer to Company or Heroes 2 "Theater of War" mode. Its basically skirmish but with a bit more spice and variety, but there is no story like you would expect in a campaign mission.

And btw we do have a sparate campaign mission Discord server, were people are making very cool Seraphim campaign.

I don't understand why you would want to separate the custom games list and neither why this would be the biggest question. Do you mean because of survival maps? To me this would really be a secondary question. The important part is to have a streamlined way to play PvE. This streamlined way would probably limit your options in some way, so there will always be a use case to create a custom game if you want to have a really uncommon setup, but handling the edge cases should be of secondary relevance.

Mostly because game lists take up a lot of space, so the client layout has to kind of be designed around them. Streamlined game creation dialog can in theory just be behind a button somewhere, so while its more important, it would be easier to layout i think.

I mean, I play multiplayer almost exclusively, but I won't argue that several people in my playgroup love the campaigns and similar 'vs AI' skirmish and survival setups. It's a big draw for some types of gamers, so for the longevity of FAF, Katharsas is probably correct that it would be beneficial if that experience were to improve.

I mean, these guys really do the multiplayer games with us for the social aspect because we use discord. Given the choice, they'd probably do UEF coop campaigns all day erry day otherwise.

@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:

I think that Trusekill is not really a helpfull mechanism to facilitate PvE play. What exactly does Trueskill matchmaking achieve for PvE over players selecting AI opponents themselves, if we assume that it is clear at which skill level each AI plays at?

My suggestion is a way to match players to AIs of different strengths without finding a "correct" global / tmm rating for each AI and without interfering the existing leaderboards.
If people want PvE, we can just keep it out of the competetive leaderboards.

AIs have a lot of variability in them. Markers, competency, type of games they work best in, ability to work with mods, and so on.

The problem is FAF has a ridiculous amount of complexity for getting this stuff set up in a way that provides a decent new user experience. If choice is given to the user, they need to be simplified down to what is pertinent without overloading the user with insane amounts of information.

It doesn't help that a lot of new users play with parts of FAF that there just isn't that much institutional knowledge about (40x40+ maps, gigantic modded games).

I'm imagining something like a campaign screen where you can pick some list of 12-15 curated maps, it has an easy/medium/hard AI curated for that specific map, and you might have the ability to pick between 3-5 variants of game modes that add mods for a specific experience while also not causing desyncs or crashes by being together. A few of these maps can be survival scripts, even. The point is to get people to get a sample of everything pve that is already curated so they can find out what they like.

In terms of campaign, stuff should just give more of a sense of progression. The missions are haphazard and it's impossible to feel any story progression when you go through them. Beyond that, I mostly feel like leaderboards with replays become a way for players that are in it for more than just the first go through to participate in their own thing. The problem currently is desyncs and huge bugs being found in missions, but I would argue this becomes a feedback loop for game/balance/coop team in turn and there just needs to be a way to reset leaderboards after (significant) patches.

Some missions also just need to be reviewed as balance patches happen because things like the Aeon lab change suddenly make them way more insane.

You can have people do things in custom games, but that's just the wild west and not supposed to be the showcase for a new player. Rather it's for experienced people that know they want a specific thing.

@ftxcommando said in FAF for Casual Players:

I'm imagining something like a campaign screen where you can pick some list of 12-15 curated maps, it has an easy/medium/hard AI curated for that specific map, and you might have the ability to pick between 3-5 variants of game modes that add mods for a specific experience while also not causing desyncs or crashes by being together. A few of these maps can be survival scripts, even. The point is to get people to get a sample of everything pve that is already curated so they can find out what they like.

I like the idea of a curated list of experiences/challenges to use as a kind of training. As in: the client tracks your progress in completing the training "missions" and players can get a sampling of different play experiences. The items get progressively more difficult. So it gives new players a sense of progress, and it gives them a chance to learn (if they breeze through it, great; if they struggle, they can get help).

And as time goes on we could add more and more missions, with increased difficulty, so it would not be something only for total noobs. But we would start with noob material only.

Edit: we could also have a coherent narrative for these missions. We don't need to hire George R. R. Martin (which is what FromSoft did for Elden Ring) but we could tell a story set in the SupCom universe where each mission advances the story a bit. Bonus points if we can write a story that does not include "the annoying teammate guy who eventually betrays us so we have to kill him" overused trope.

I don't really want the stuff centered around being training material tbh. PvE is just a different thing, not a breeding ground for future PvP. Survival missions are always going to be different than real game environments and what makes it fun for people is that it specifically isn't that sort of game.

Like if the missions teach good habits great, but it really isn't the point. You're just supposed to saddle people with the best possible experiences the client has to offer in the niche they are interested in.

@brutus5000 said in FAF for Casual Players:

My suggestion is a way to match players to AIs of different strengths without finding a "correct" global / tmm rating for each AI and without interfering the existing leaderboards.
If people want PvE, we can just keep it out of the competetive leaderboards.

Do you want to elaborate? I haven't properly understood your suggestion yet i think.

Missions in this context is a term that could be applied loosely - you dont need to have lots of new content generated, you can just have a handful of maps/AI setups picked for each AI , and those are then ordered based on difficulty and the client has some sort of tracking feature that takes you through each sequentially and (ideally) gives an achievement when you complete them all. The main work for this would be on the client side, but the actual content (AI and maps) already exist.

So for example you could start with a simple 1v1 Easy AI on a 5km map, and work up towards say a 1v4 custom AI on a 20km map. It could be a way of showcasing both custom FAF maps, and the AI at the same time (since PvE players are less likely to have seen the maps that feature in the main matchmaker). It could even be combined with other mods (where they're compatible with the AI), such as the survival mode mod, or mods that add new units.

it sounds like what we need is... galactic war

I tried a few coop missions recently, and the experience is... not great.

• SupCom/FA campaigns: these are decently made. Didn't really test group balance. Not so fun replaying due to long cutscenes.
• FAF additions/player contributions: variable. Usually some effort has been made in the design, at least somewhere, but quality and style varies. Some seem to deliberately be a slog.
• No rating system/feedback for campaigns.
• Coop balance: at least one of the additional campaigns I tried hits you with large amounts of spam early regardless of the number of players in the game. Hard to deal with lots of spam without the extra ACUs.
• Intel: in general, you are reliant on mission commanders briefing you on what is coming when in order to choose between eco and defence. Usually this intel is useless.
• Additions often have a script with commanders talking at you, but without voice-over you either ignore them (potentially missing information) or stop what you are doing to read. Not a great experience. My recommendation if there is no voice-over would be to cut text to the absolute minimum.
• Campaigns have annoying cut-scenes in general.
• Fail conditions may be too strict (e.g. any commander dies), making coop less fun. Sometimes the mission doesn't even say why you failed.
• Arguably the most important sound in the game, Commander under attack, seems to be broken in coop?

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is some sort of community feedback/rating on missions: quality, style, length, special considerations. There's a bunch of them and it isn't obvious where to start.

decrease the difficutly, hard means hard my man, it's supposed to be punishing