About the veterancy system

@jip said in About the veterancy system:

Note that this is a topic from more than a year ago , the original debate is no longer of concern. Just found it interesting to post that there was a few things off with the veterancy-based system after all.

good to know, seems forum was starting to re-design it again

i wonder if a small, visual battlefield indicator of units vetting would be worth adding? (yes ex-dota player here)

I'm open to this. Do you have a suggestion on an effect to use?

well originally I was thinking of a brief glisten effect, similar to

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ui-text-shine-effect.467346/

but - this has been done a lot and would require new graphics

a much better faf option would be to use the visuals from units being built, so on vet cybran would display the semi-transparent frame, aeon the metallic form, uef the 3d blueprint, and sera the ghostly shape, for 1 in-game render (should need code only and no new graphics, beyond my skill though!)

I'm not so snappy on changing shaders (temporarily). I was more thinking in lines of an emitter / effect

@jip said in About the veterancy system:

Note that this is a topic from more than a year ago , the original debate is no longer of concern. Just found it interesting to post that there was a few things off with the veterancy-based system after all.

i wonder if a small, visual battlefield indicator of units vetting would be worth adding? (yes ex-dota player here)

I'm open to this. Do you have a suggestion on an effect to use?

How about having veternacy symbols appear next to units like some other games do? Maybe something similar to

0 vet: no marks
1 vet: 1 gold mark
2 vet: 2 stacked gold marks
3 vet: 3 stacked gold marks
4 vet: 4 stacked gold marks
5 vet: gold star

There is another option: Remove veterancy.

What we need is less incentive to micro anything in this game, it's too heavy on it as it is

@penguin_

These look too contemporary, plus any symbols flashing in a big battle on top of projectiles, explosions, and other visual effects might make it too visually cluttered. Maybe at 5 vet a gold star would be ok since its a rare achievement.

@melanol said in About the veterancy system:

There is another option: Remove veterancy.

Remove veterancy bonuses completely.

Remove tracking of damage/veterancy from live games. Track only the number of kills, because that's easy to keep track of.

Keep track of veterancy only in non-live replays.

That way regular games run fast with less memory, and the game becomes less complicated/more streamlined.

But people can still see how much "work" a unit got done when they are watching a replay. The concept of a "5 vet tank" would exist only in replays, not in live games. Nothing of value would be lost. It would be easy enough to rebalance ACU health to make up for the missing veterancy bonuses (e.g. make it easier to repair an ACU or just give them all an extra 20% base health).

Perhaps it makes sense to track "mass killed" on certain units during live games, but only count up the mass value of whatever that unit killed (defined as: delivering the killing blow). that way, you can still see during a match how much damage your nuke launcher did or how much mass your T3 Heavy Arty has killed. But this would only be for a tiny number units (perhaps: nuke launchers, TML structures, T3 heavy artillery, and all T4s except paragon and the novax building)

Do we really need to know that a t1 bomber killed 223 mass worth of units? Isn't it more useful to know that it killed 6 units?

No, it is more useful to know how much mass something killed. You compare how much mass a unit kills to how much mass it costs to see how effective it is and if it was used properly. I doubt it is possible to only track that stuff in replays, but I don't know anything.

Rebalancing ACU hp would require work, so I'd just remove veterancy for everything else. Your reward for microing units is that they are more effective and survive to deal more damage. Giving them random HP boosts and regen is just doubly annoying for the person on the receiving end.

They don’t survive as often and you ruin one of the common ways to punish super bad micro from the enemy. You’re doing nothing but harming a part of the game that is already on life support as it stands. And for what? There isn’t even a gameplay benefit it’s just some weird philosophical hatred of a machine improving.

Like you even punish aggression more than defense with this.

If veterency were removed, then an alternative is needed, e.g. cheaper repairing. Regen is OP IMO, especially regen from vet. An alternative might be regen-on-what-you-kill (remember the "vampire" mod in some shooters like UT2004?).

Anyway the current vet system is fine, though I do dislike the way vet lets an ACU get back to full HP quite quickly at no cost.

Veterancy rewards skill both on the attacker and defender's side. For the attacker its fairly obvious but for the defender they need to make a decision on how to engage a dangerous unit without giving it too much free mass to kill, i.e Ctrl+k your low tech spam or insufficient defenses before an experimental reaches them.

@Penguin_ I had thoughts of making this one, but I won’t because it will simply cause tons of lags…

Vet should be removed, how is a robot better able to repair itself because it killed things? Why does it have more HP? There is a few things to explain why it has more HP.
I like ta's vet system, just says it's a veteran and has a bonus to accuracy.

@veteranashe said in About the veterancy system:

Vet should be removed, how is a robot better able to repair itself because it killed things? Why does it have more HP? There is a few things to explain why it has more HP.
I like ta's vet system, just says it's a veteran and has a bonus to accuracy.

I’d leave it for units such as ACUs/SACUs and Exps as exceptions.

Experimentals are the case where it is most annoying. Say you have 2 opposing experimentals, each with a small number of supporting units, evenly matched. Whichever experimental kills the other one first, through random chaos, gets a veterancy and gains like 10k hp instantly. Your previously even position is now losing because the experimental got the kill first and gained extra HP and regen to clean up the supporting units. Now you have to muster up enough concentrated firepower to stop the experimental, which you probably don't have lying around since it would have been in the fight already. It is about as bad as when killing your opponents ACU gave you a veterancy bonus before the explosion damage was applied and allowed you to win the game.

I suppose this would not really be an issue if experimentals worked the same way every other unit does, but the balance team made it so they vet with only 50% of their own mass killed rather than 200%.

@thomashiatt said in About the veterancy system:

Experimentals are the case where it is most annoying. Say you have 2 opposing experimentals, each with a small number of supporting units, evenly matched. Whichever experimental kills the other one first, through random chaos, gets a veterancy and gains like 10k hp instantly. Your previously even position is now losing because the experimental got the kill first and gained extra HP and regen to clean up the supporting units. Now you have to muster up enough concentrated firepower to stop the experimental, which you probably don't have lying around since it would have been in the fight already. It is about as bad as when killing your opponents ACU gave you a veterancy bonus before the explosion damage was applied and allowed you to win the game.

I suppose this would not really be an issue if experimentals worked the same way every other unit does, but the balance team made it so they vet with only 50% of their own mass killed rather than 200%.

Yeah? Great. Did you forget that if you took this engagement aggressively you risked donating 40k+ mass to enemy? If you had the better micro, that’s your reward for winning. Stop trying to make the game more into t3 arty war.

Can dudes stop with the “heckin realismino” arguments? These only apply when a game is so off base that interactions become counterintuitive to newer players. A unit killing stuff and getting rewarded for it is about as intuitive as bigger number = more gooder. Get a better point.

@ftxcommando said in About the veterancy system:

And for what? There isn’t even a gameplay benefit it’s just some weird philosophical hatred of a machine improving.
Like you even punish aggression more than defense with this.

I care less about realism in games than anyone on Earth. My philosophical hatred is of chaos and complexity. The veterancy system amplifies the advantage gained from winning an even coin-flip fight due to chaos. You get some lab that happens to win a fight and then gets to heal up and win more fights, killing all the engineers you did send protection for. A bomber that gets to make extra passes because it already did a lot of damage. Some experimental coinflip battle as previously mentioned. In any circumstance where the veterancy does something noticeable, it is pretty much always adding insult to injury. I guess it does reward aggression, and is interesting for spectators, but it usually feels random and unfair when it happens to you.

Plus removing the system means there's one less game mechanic you have to learn and keep in your head, tons of code you can delete to improve performance and eliminate complexity, and one less thing to think about when balancing the game. Of course it has already been rebalanced and the code rewritten entirely from scratch, so it would be a shame to remove it now. Should have been removed much sooner.

@ftxcommando said in About the veterancy system:

Yeah? Great. Did you forget that if you took this engagement aggressively you risked donating 40k+ mass to enemy? If you had the better micro, that’s your reward for winning. Stop trying to make the game more into t3 arty war.

So taking the even fight aggressively is the objectively wrong decision and the player who does it should lose the game because they made a major macro error. It is a macro oriented game with a clear defenders advantage bias. If you want to encourage aggressive play, do it through a less chaotic mechanic like reducing the reclaim percentage or something.

@zeldafanboy said in About the veterancy system:

Fuel should be removed, how can an aircraft slowly regenerate fuel by being landed????

Removing fuel seems like a pretty clear cut good idea to me. It doesn't really do anything except make the game more annoying to play. Whatever sort of gameplay was intended with not straying far from carriers/air staging is not how it actually works. You have to keep your air as a blob, and you have to go all over the map to intercept things. Every unit except interceptors have virtually unlimited fuel anyway, so the mechanic has no impact on them. Get rid of fuel and turn all the fuel bars into reload bars so you can micro easier, probably save a little performance as well.

You realize that veterancy is a mechanic you factor into these sort of attacks, right? My point is that it existing is what gives a higher push for aggressive actions to be worth doing as it enables a snowball against poorly micro’d or too few units. The existence of other ways to make aggression less punishing doesn’t change the point that it existing promotes more interactive/proactive gameplay now and so removing it without some coherent plan to make up for the loss in interaction is asinine. That’s a bare minimum by the way, I don’t even see the need to think about removing it unless aggression became TOO strong.

Saying “it’s a wrong move” presumes you don’t take the full system of tools available to you into account when gauging your options, which is the actual skill issue not the aggressive move.