Unbalanced Warfare

[TheCheese]

While everyone is worrying about Lagg vs 109, I've been reminded of the game Rising Storm, an historical WWII FPS (essentially an expansion to Red Orchestra 2).

 

If you haven't played Rising Storm, it was built entirely on the concept of going for authentic historical imbalance rather than even balance for gameplay's sake. The Japanese team is largely people with bolt-action rifles, with a few players wielding clumsy type 100 smgs and a couple lucky players with Type 99 machine guns. On the American team, the majority of players are using the semi-automatic Garrand, with other players using .30 cal machine guns, the BAR full-auto rifle, Thomsons, trench guns, and even flamethrowers. Not only this, but the teams are generally required to have roughly the same numbers of people, and the Japanese don't always get to defend.

 

Victory is generally decided by holding objectives, rather than kill counts, however it is possible for one team to completely deplete the other team's ability to respawn (which is actually fairly common, for either team).

 

Basically, the American team has a pretty huge advantage in firepower most of the time. And often times this results in the American team repeatedly obliterating the Japanese. But, it's actually not that uncommon to see the Japanese team coming together, working under the leadership of whoever bothers to yell at them over voice chat, and defeat the Americans, sometimes resoundingly and repeatedly.

 

So as far as unbalanced warfare goes, it's certainly not totally implausible. Probably just an  in-game voice chat feature would go a long ways as to giving the Russians a good chance at victory.

 

I don't know how many people here have played Rising Storm or know about it, but I thought I'd put this here, as evidence that making an imbalanced game isn't necessarily going to destroy its playability.

 

Any thoughts?

[ParaB]

Any thoughts?

 

IMO People vastly exagerate the importance of "balanced sides", usually because they are used to rather simple scenarios on dogfight servers where everyone just spawns at the nearest airfield to the front to takeoff and head for the giant furball in the middle.

 

Fly somewhat realistic missions and game balance can easily be achieved by various means.

[71st_AH_Hooves]

I think game play objectives that closely as possible match real world missions will kind of negate the "game play balance" issue all together. The only things that need to be concrete are win states.  Like The Russians are going to attack a German Airfield and the Germans must defend (purely notional btw)  WE know that there are potentially going to be a large number of German losses vs Russian, so the win state for the Germans is to get X amount of Russian planes down and the Russian obj to get get X amount of objects destroyed on the ground + air.  Two completely different goals, but yet one can reach the win state to take the match. 

 

   Balance need not rear its ugly head, if there are objectives that can cater to the aircraft types in play in that round.

[Sparrer]

S!

IMO People vastly exagerate the importance of "balanced sides", usually because they are used to rather simple scenarios on dogfight servers where everyone just spawns at the nearest airfield to the front to takeoff and head for the giant furball in the middle.

 

Fly somewhat realistic missions and game balance can easily be achieved by various means.

 

100% agreed.

By the way......why fighters exist?

Just to protect/attack bombers.

And Pe-02 it's a pretty nice bomber....and T-34 it's pretty nice tank as well. Ground target's were major objectives of 2WW.

If players just kills each other, the overall warfare becomes very simplist, and the very natural unbalances becomes a major issue.

But if players input several variables in the match to reach some goal... as ground war/re-supply/AAA/complex navigation/payloads/damage city levels/team work/tactics/fuel restrictions......etc the natural unbalances get dissolved


Actually.....this "Aircraft Market's" proposed by the devs may increase the unbalances

[ImPeRaToR]

Winning also has to have a meaning attached to it though, people have to be motivated somehow to actually care about it. Otherwise we will see a lot of people just flying around at 5km only caring about their own kill streak and nothing else.

And even IF you have some mechanisms in place that promoted gameplay and winning people might still ignore it. Many times in Warthunder full real I've seen people just fly around without even attempting to prevent the enemy from obliterating all their ground units. And you actually get more XP for winning so you can unlock your next plane more quickly, which ought to motivate somewhat more than nothing at all.

In ROF the winning team gets a fixed score multiplier for winning the game but I am not sure victory can actually be triggered by objectives, and meeting these objectives does not award personal scored itself afaik.

Now, imo, what would be cool picking up the example hooves provided, people spawning at german airfield X have the task of covering a certain area and preventing enemy interdiction missions carried out by IL2s from airfield Y. The IL2s are supposed to be escorted by Yak1 from airfield Z.
There could be two other objectives. If 2 of 3 are met, one side wins. The winner gets 200% (2/1) points, the loser 50% (1/2). Then you could add another score multiplier for the objectives. If your objective was sucessful, you get another multiplier of say 1.5 (3/2), if your objective failed you get 2/3.

So if the mission is won but your objective failed you still get a multiplier of 1.33 or 4/3 (objective score * mission score, in this case 2/3 * 2/1)

 

 

Keep in mind these numbers are just examples to explain my suggestion

The objective and mission multiplier is then applied to the sortie scores of each pilot, which is a sum of all air and ground kills, air assists (maybe ground assists too for larger stationary targets like depots and factories etc), general points for activity and of course the sortie multiplier based on the outcome of the sortie, that is landed/crashed/dead.

 

 

Now what I don't agree with is a dynamic score for each air plane or even pilot based on a sort of ladder system because it is impossible to balance something like this - also, air combat is not a 1on1 situation where you can apply such ladder circumstances. This will only lead to people trying to finish off wounded aircraft without taking any risks themsevles so they don't lose any points to a victor while taking advantage of other peoples work. We had something like this in ROF server stats for a while and it didn't really work well so Vaal changed it.

 

Actually, attaching individual values to planes (lets say 100 points as a base score for the LaGG3, maybe 110 for the 109F-4 and so on) would be nice, but it will take a lot of time to figure out the real "value" of these planes. If this was to be done now it should be started soon while the number of different planes is still easy to keep track of.

 

 

Perhaps even better than just points, maybe some of the aircraft unlocks could also be achieved in MP by meeting objectives and/or winning missions...

Edited December 13, 2013 by ImPeRaToR

[Bearcat]

I think that "game balance" is something that is almost impossible to achieve because you cannot always dictate who decides to do what. In the case of flight sims I say let the machines.. be they aircraft, sea vessels, artillery or whatever be as accurate to their historic model as possible and let the game play go where it will.

 

 

[migmadmarine]

As part of the QA team for Rising Storm, it's always nice to see someone write positively of it. 

[OBT-Psycho]

I totally agree with all of you, especially OP. There was almost a heist when the RS team gave us the weapon set of the upcoming game. Everybody was whining because of the lack of semi-auto rifle on japanese side, blah blah blah.

 

And then we got our hands on the game and saw the reality : it is way more complex than just datas about your gear. Teamwork preveil in all the situations you can encounter.

 

And even if you plan to make a game realistic and plan to respect the historical imbalance scenario, there will always be a bunch of dudes that will find a way to go around this unfair playground and try to play by THEIR rules.

 

So yes it will be hard to get a 109 down, really hard, but once you will have your buddy on TS with you, this will be a totally different scenario.

[Rigsby]

All this has already been discuss here. I think you will find an answer in there.

 

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/2804-will-there-be-some-type-balancing-when-multiplayer-arrives/

[mondog]

I don't care about balance. I'd like accuracy. Balance should have no place in a sim, other than one exception: say you're playing an online map, you may want to bring in balance by limiting certain aircraft - once destroyed they're gone for the rest of the session. There was a server application for IL2 that could limit certain plane types which worked perfectly to achieve balance without resorting to balancing the actual aircraft.

 

I remember there was 1 map on Warclouds where the Axis team had at best 109 F4s and G6s and 190 A6s, against later war allied aircraft. Was it a problem? Not really, just had to think a little differently and work together. 

[6S.Manu]

IMO the main issue here is that people want to win. There is not other way to have fun for them. So they'll always choose the most powerful side.

Even in IL2 online campaigns you can witness this, for example playing a late PTO's mission as the japanese forces are too much inferior (except for the KI-84 that's still slower than the american planes).

While this can be solved on games like RO2 by forcing the player to switch side (something like in the old AA), I think it's really difficult on CFS. Many years ago my squad went through a competitive tournament between Italian squads and infact the missions were to be played rightfully on both sides.

But in public dogfight servers I think there will always be the guys flying the best performing plane and those like myself who's usually going to join the outnumbered side.

Edited December 13, 2013 by 6S.Manu

[=LD=Hethwill]

In all fairness what does this "Balance" means is the "Ace in a day" syndrome getting brought to the table once more.

 

Yes we all know the Lagg-3 is a hog regarding air superiority, but that's it. If you want to play air superiority role then you don't go on a Lagg-3. There, balance is achieved by something as simple as choosing the right aeroplane for the right task.

 

Of course you might be going on a Interdiction assignment with your Lagg-3 - bomber hunting or light ground columns straffing . and still be jumped on by Bf109's or even 190's... tough luck, make a run for your lines, ask for any nearby pursuit squadron to help or... fly like your life depended on it... for your digital pilot life depends on it.

 

Salute !

Edited December 13, 2013 by =LD=Hethwill_Khan