My proposal for the turret problem.

[murlocdummy]

You act like my idea simply COULD NOT work, which isn't true.

You are being a pessimist without even entertaining the idea, and you are assuming the absolute worst of all possibilities.

Now, now.  We shouldn't be resorting to namecalling in here.  Let's not have this conversation devolve into a modern political debate, lol.

Really, I think that adding new gameplay elements that can more or less defeat turrets in a rock-paper-scissors fashion would add alot to gameplay.  Maybe stealth bandits or demo units armed with nothing more than a bullet resistant riot shield and a single explosive charge.  It would definitely be nice to be forced to send search parties to look for hidden enemies moving past your defensive line or to send out heavily armored melee knights to attack bullet-resistant enemies.  The game may be Firefly-themed, but I always grin at the idea of fending off guys with guns using ninjas, spear-wielding skirmishers, or even villagers armed with farm tools.

An entire series of alternative methods could be implemented to defeat turrets without having to modify the turret itself.  Having an EMP gun that only disables electronic devices and doesn't cause damage would work.  A deployable wall would also work, since it would block the turret's line of sight and would require colonists to go around the wall in order to get at the enemy. 
An even more involved, but far more useful method would be to modify the enemy AI to count how many enemy units died, where they died, and have subsequent raiding parties not use the same tactics or weapon loadout as those unsuccessful raiding attempts.  Right now, sending waves of snipers or kamikaze grenadiers would defeat many turret killzone layouts.

Tweaking gameplay elements might be good for a beta, but in the alpha stages of game development, it's about having the new gameplay elements, and having them work, rather than having them balanced just right.  The majority of players are going to abuse the turrets and make the game all about turret defense before proper balancing happens.  With the use of missiles and cannon shells, there's little doubt that turrets are going to be here to stay.  The real question at this point isn't how to change the turrets, but how to change the gameplay to most effectively add to the game and open up more gameplay options, rather than finding ways to limit them.  As much as I like the tactical combat that Tynan wants to aim for, I also appreciate the need to fulfill the needs of players that play with different playstyles.

[Galileus]

mumblemumble - I've addressed the issues I see with your solution in - I believe - understandable manner. If you have questions or suggestions on how to fix them - you can just ask/write. If you don't understand what I mean - you can ask. You try to censor my input once again, because I take everything with a grain of salt - I'm sorry, but this is what I do and this will not change. I look for possibly best scenario to settle down with the closest thing to it I can find.

Now, I've already told you why I don't see your idea as solid - it's a problem with depth per complexity (situation where you add new rules that don't impact the depth and amount of options too much or even negatively) and hard cap per se. Hard caps (pre-determined "max of") are a low depth element that naturally limits game's potential - of course they are necessary every now and then - ok, a lot of the time - but in design one should struggle to remove as many of them as possible with elegant soft caps. Soft caps are caps that come out of mechanics and rulesets naturally - for example, if turrets would be in need of support teams (manned turrets as suppression fire instead of damage dealer - powerful, but not by themselves) it would actively limit the amount of turrets you can effectively use at once, while giving you the choice to overdo it anyway. You can go low on turrets, big on turrets, mix and match - but system cannot be abused and there is no hard cap telling the player "ok, that's enough now!".

I'm afraid your "solutions to solution" don't help - adding CPU power just to balance turrets is a great strain on complexity. It's and interesting idea to explore no less - I'll give you that. If you could refine that idea to bring a lot of depth for the complexity it eats (we add a whole new resource to manage!) - it can be even worth it. But instead of throwing it out there like it's enough - take your time to try and come up with a way to make it integral part of the game instead of a band-aid. If you manage to do that, you have yourself a very viable and interesting approach to the solution. But that's the catch - it's not enough to fix the problem for something to be a solution. Game design is a complex and intricate process, where simple approaches like band-aid patches and numbers balancing can doom the game by increasing complexity with no depth to add or binding developers hands.

murlocdummy -  rock-paper-scissors balancing? You mean perfect imbalance? Holy shit, boy, tell me you understand concepts of depth-per-complexity-per-buck and negative possibility space and I'll jump into your bed like a 20yo virgin on cok...a cola.

And seeing on how you catch on these things - would you mind terribly if I would ask you for a quick look at my sabotage idea?

[Nocebo]

At this point i feel if i read all pages of this thread i would actually get more confused. What is the "turret problem" exactly?

I see a bunch of things all over the thread.

• Is it that Tynan wants to remove the turrets and we have to come up with a substitute worthy of replacing it for the gameplay's sake?
• Is it the fact they seem to be a little easy to use for defense at the moment?
• Or is it about some people that can not/don't want to play without them?

[Galileus]

First two - Tynan wants the game to be harsh and losses to be unavoidable. As it is now all losses you can have with turrets are turrets. And yes, some people actually want easy mode for everyone, not just for themselves.

[Kender]

What is the "turret problem" exactly?

IMO, the problem is how people abuse raider's AI, by using well place turrets and carefully designed threshold/chock point to lead raider party into a disadvantaged location. Turrets work as both additional firepower and targets to redirect enemy fire from colonist to turret itself, fodders in some case.

The advantage of doing this is to lower the risk of losing essentially irreplaceable colonists in never ending gun-fights.

Remove turrets as you like, the core problem is the AI. It is so predictable, the only unknown is when and where they will land, after that we know exactly how the fight gonna be, as long as that does not change, player will find another way to abuse it soon enough.

[Imca]

What is the "turret problem" exactly?

IMO, the problem is how people abuse raider's AI, by using well place turrets and carefully designed threshold/chock point to lead raider party into a disadvantaged location. Turrets work as both additional firepower and targets to redirect enemy fire from colonist to turret itself, fodders in some case.

The advantage of doing this is to lower the risk of losing essentially irreplaceable colonists in never ending gun-fights.

Remove turrets as you like, the core problem is the AI. It is so predictable, the only unknown is when and where they will land, after that we know exactly how the fight gonna be, as long as that does not change, player will find another way to abuse it soon enough.

This exactly, removing them wont help if the AI remains predictable, another stratagy will form soon enough.

[Nocebo]

So then a new topic should be started "The AI Problem". And this should be closed so there isn't anymore pointless pro-turret anti-turret arguing since it was just established the turrets aren't really the problem of "the turret problem"   

[Galileus]

They are.

There's a law in game design that states that if there is one solution to a problem that is always available to the player that is clearly superior to the rest (i.e. not limited by rare resources), the player will always choose that solution to solve the problem. If your game falls into this category, chances are it's a bad game, because most games that fall into this category are games in which not much thought was put in. Rimworld is an exception - it is still a good game despite this, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed somehow.

Written about the underground bases, but applies to turrets even more than to caves.

[Nocebo]

But our solution to the problem in this case is the predictability of the AI. Which is being abused. I feel the turrets are just a lazy man's way to deal with the crappy AI at this point.

[Produno]

But our solution to the problem in this case is the predictability of the AI. Which is being abused. I feel the turrets are just a lazy man's way to deal with the crappy AI at this point.

How? Are you saying Tynan is wrong about his own game? He stated he wants the turrets removed because they aid in a playstyle that the game design is not aimed towards. If you read the opening post of this thread you would know that. Hence the discussion, so AI or anything else has nothing to do with it because the discussion is about the turrets. If you want to talk about the AI then start a new thread about the AI, but we are still in alpha and the AI will still be worked upon to its a mute point.

Besides, giving the player an infinite amount of turrets that fire in a 360degrees radius is only ever going to be a problem for this type of game. Your answer is make the AI smarter? The more complicated you make something the more their is to go wrong. Just stating make the AI smarter is not a solution to the problem outlined. You also offer no explanations as to why keeping the turrets how they are but making the AI smarter would solve anything.

[Nocebo]

I don't really see a problem with the turrets at all to be honest. I just find the arguing pointless if the creator o the game already said turrets might be removed. So I did ask what "the turret problem" is according to the current talking inside the thread. I did not derail it. I merely wished to be updated because I don't expect you to keep the first post up to date and I hope you don't expect me to read X pages to share my opinion.

But AI has very much to do with turrets, because that is what the turrets are shooting at. Right?

From your reply I can't really figure out where your stand point is either. Do you want to keep the turrets? Do you want to get rid of them? Can you tell me exactly what the problem is? Because all I see is "Tynan want's to remove turrets." that is not a problem in my eyes. I am really really confused about the point of this thread. I asked what the problem was and from what I saw the problem isn't with the turrets being OP. But with the AI being weak.

[Morrigi]

...So, why exactly is it that a few random, ragtag bands of raiders feel like it's a good idea to attack a base bristling with fortifications and automated turrets, when all they have is a few rusty rifles and a grenade or two?

Yes, there's an AI problem. However, there's also a tech problem. I hope that sometime in the future, we will not be able to build high-tech automated turrets, comically explosive walls, and solar panels right off the bat. Instead you might have to use basic materials such as wood, stone, scrap, and homemade, improvised firearms in the early game. Where exactly are these colonists pulling schematics for remotely detonated mines and electric lights out of? In a survival situation, wouldn't you start with pitfall traps and campfires?

Sure, the escape pods and what bits and pieces of the ship you may be able to find would help, as well as offer a limited amount of advanced technologies and items. That said, not a whole lot is able to survive being blown up, re-entering the atmosphere, and hitting the ground at terminal velocity.... Especially in a society where they have something resembling nano-assemblers but can't make OSHA-certified wiring with that very same handwavium. Maybe the ship the colonists were on blew up because of an electrical fault, it's not all that much worse than Star Trek wiring. Maybe circuit breakers and fuses were never invented in this universe...

[Kender]

How? Are you saying Tynan is wrong about his own game?

Quite the opposite actually, I believe Tynan understands his game and the problem perfectly.

If you read his reply carefully and thoroughly, you will find that he clearly presented a temporary solution. This is what he said:

I actually don't want to add more turret stuff because turrets aren't really helping the game. I'm even on the verge of cutting them. They take the fight away from the characters and make it a tower defense optimization game, which isn't what RW is supposed to be.

The issue at hand is degenerate defensive strategies, and my planned solution basically involves siege tactics that require players to send colonists out to take down camping groups of raiders who are bombarding them with artillery and somesuch. Take it from a defensive game to an offensive one.

Vehicles are also a problem, I'm afraid, just because handling them in a tile-based engine like RW's would be extremely difficult.

Hope this makes sense!

Notice the 2nd paragraph. It is clever. The solution in his mind is that, since the attackers can't adopt to players defense, then switch side, since players are surely more adaptive than AI. We are going to try to break AI's defense.

Since we can't bring turret in offense, it does not matter whether remove it or not. If it is useless, there is no need to have them at all.

[Galileus]

Well, this does solve the problem, but I find it reeeeal hard to believe Tynan would completely resign from defensive battles.

[murlocdummy]

murlocdummy -  rock-paper-scissors balancing? You mean perfect imbalance? Holy shit, boy, tell me you understand concepts of depth-per-complexity-per-buck and negative possibility space and I'll jump into your bed like a 20yo virgin on cok...a cola.

And seeing on how you catch on these things - would you mind terribly if I would ask you for a quick look at my sabotage idea?

The perfect imbalance of your saboteur idea isn't quite there, since it relies on having to teleport the unit into the base.  I think that having a Stealth skill for Assassins would be more useful in terms of adding complexity to the game, but allowing for sufficient depth that doesn't rely on coding deus ex machinas.  Putting too much effort into simply creating events, rather than creating a new gameplay mechanic that naturally creates those events is a recipe for a design disaster, since it requires the development team to continuously have to create new events from scratch every time they want to make something new.  The whole success of Dwarf Fortress stems from the fact that it uses an intense number of calculations that the game processes at each time click in order to create events and situations without the creator having to individually code the event, its time, and its placement.  This, of course, requires several GB of RAM just to run a game with byte-sized text graphics.

Adding new gameplay mechanics throw entirely new cogs into the machine.  This not only causes newer, and more complex gaming strategies to emerge from players, but also destroys any previous strategies that they came up with.  Charcoal destroyed the need for torch hoarding methods in Minecraft, but added the ability to farm your own light source.  The spy decimated the stranglehold that engies held in creating impenetrable no-man's lands in Team Fortress 2, but added an entirely new character to use.  Despite being newer, more complex gameplay mechanics, they added greatly to the depth of the game by allowing the player to play around with and discover new methods of gameplay.  On the flip side, a great failure in adding complexity without adding proper depth for the player would be Dwarf Fortress, which is so ridiculously convoluted that new facets of play are totally and completely lost to players.  The fact that, to this day, only the most dedicated players could figure out, and only barely use and mitigate the Dwarf plague and infection mechanics is one of the many testaments to this kind of failure.

In order to think about adding elements to a game, it's important to think about what kind of effects can be predicted will happen, as well as adding a level of unpredictability that allows players to discover new playstyles on their own and reinvent the game on their own terms.  It's the success story of Minecraft, and giving Western players freedom, or at least the perception of it is exactly what Western customers want.  As for South Asians and Orientals, their psychology is completely different, and that warrants a discussion on a completely different thread.

Minecraft's method of giving players a perpetual perception of freedom was actually quite ingenious.  Notch essentially took the Infiniminer idea of infinitely generating worlds and made it into an actual world.  Players in most cultures would be able to play any given Minecraft game and get a sense that they're on an actual world.  Not a game world.  Not a world in the confines of a narrative.  And actual world that they can explore and there will always be something around each corner that the player hasn't seen, felt, touched, or lit on fire and exploded.  Especially the latter.

Again, I point to the benchmark game, Dwarf Fortress, with its Adventure Mode.  Despite the gameworld being limited, the sheer vastness of it allows for a feeling of exploring a great expanse of endless possibility.  The ultimate answer to negative possibility space is to create an algorithm that fills that negative possibility space with...more space.  Raiding parties that constantly change tactics, automatic equipment generation systems, a tech tree generation algorithm that generates incremental upgrades using the base upgrades implemented into the game, and being able to dig into different levels of ground and/or expanding outward with scouting parties.  The only thing that I haven't seen already implemented in a game is the tech tree generation algorithm, but for everything else, it supports the creation of a whole new world/world of play experience for the player to explore every time they are done exploring the current one.