FAF for Casual Players

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

It should really be default on medium tbh if you expect it to be an onboarding system

@blackyps said in FAF for Casual Players:

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.

Okay ill give it a try. WIP

Why did you include matchmaker and custom games as well? I would just leave them as is

I think a consistent design has to include the entire play tab. However, this is really just a playground for my ideas, and i expect it to change substantially over time, so i would like to discuss it later, after i have iterated on it a bit.

@katharsas said in FAF for Casual Players:

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

Let's put aside the problem how to integrate the multiple AIs we have.

Create a standalone PvsAI queue with standalone rating system. We predermine the ratings of several AIs (e.g. by having them fight it out themselves in a truskilly-environment).
These AIs will never learn and never change, thus their rating is fixed forever.
All other players start with a default rating just as today.

Now people can play and grow against them. Not sure if this only works for Player team vs AI team or mixed as well.

@Brutus5000
I don't think having a skill rating in a PvsAI is helping anybody much. The only reason why rating even exists, is so we can create fair matches. But the entire point of PvsAI is that matches don't need to be fair. If i wanted fair matches, i would play PvP.

If i am a PvsAI player, and i want to assess my own skill, i just need to play two or three matches against different difficulty AIs (assuming we have good knowledge of AI rating) and then i know what i can beat, i don't really need anything more finegrained.

So while a PvsAI queue would certainly not hurt anybody, that would be a very low priority feature from my point of view.