Farbor? I hardly knew'er!
Due to some malignant space-time flux and/or my mostly voluntary exile from the community, I failed to see an interesting article about Knuckle Cracker which contained a wrong opinion.
The wrong opinion in question is that Farbor was, conceptually, a mistake because people don't like timed levels. This is kind of ridiculous in a few different ways that I'm surprised Virgil didn't see. If you want the no-nonsense quick version it's that the campaign levels didn't properly introduce ways to move quickly, so when it's suddenly required it feels unprecedented. But people don't read this blog for no-nonsense quick versions of things, so I'll elaborate at perhaps too much length. (You could have stopped after "blog.")
Do understand what I'm trying to accomplish here: I'm not saying that people do in fact like Farbor just because I like Farbor. I've seen the outcries. What I'm saying is that each level in a game is contextualized by the rest of the levels, and that informs how people approach a given level on their first playthrough, and that Creeper World 3's campaign does a poor job of preparing people for either Farbor or difficult custom maps.
This comes down, I think, to "what makes a strategy game strategic." While I don't think the "games are just a series of interesting decisions" line of thinking is completely watertight when it comes to understanding why a game's mechanics are compelling, it does provide a good starting place for talking about strategy. Strategy means having a plan and being able to adapt that plan, and that means making decisions, and that means for any given plan some options won't be chosen. At the barest level, it means your brain is turned on and is processing inputs.
There's a bit of an odd anti-strategic streak that runs through CW3 in the form of the Reactor. Reactors are, to a large extent, gameplay poison. Turtle food. Being space-magic reactors, they don't require, say, uranium found on the map that becomes a strategic objective. That would actually be quite fun mechanically - the energy-from-territory-and-specific-points thing is one of the few things I rather like about Particle Fleet. [edit: I wrote this a while ago and forgot to publish it, before the CW4 video showcasing the mines and reso-terrain mechanic, which are basically this, so points for that.]
Incidentally, Virgil, since I know you're reading this because I'm going to send it to you, can we have the ability for mapmakers to define new resources, to let custom units add energy production to the network without having to spawn vanilla reactors under them, and to test whether a unit is linked back to the command center? Hint, hint. Why am I hint-hinting when I'm banned from the forums and in all likelihood wouldn't be comfortable interacting with some of the regulars even if I was allowed back? Bah. GM will find a way to make use of it.
The thing that's anti-strategic about reactors is the "some options won't be chosen" thing loses all its teeth when you can just hide in a corner and build infinite energy production, then walk across the map with 800 mortars. CW1 waits to let the player build reactors until the third act, after which point the game becomes markedly easier, but nevertheless the player has already been trained not to turtle excessively. CW2 has reactors from the start, but they're the only source of power and they're much better balanced overall. CW3 introduces them in the third mission of twenty-three and the game as a whole suffers for it.
I'm not going to go super-in-depth about how reactors encourage turtling and turtling encourages mindless brute force unbecoming of a brain-thinky game, because I don't think Virgil is stupid, but an interesting exercise is to look at various levels and see how much more difficult they would be without reactors. Difficult is of course not synonymous with good, except to the extent that it forces the player to think through the situation and, you know, strategize. Lemal's a fairly straightforward example.
I don't think the idea of reactors is bad or that they need to be scrapped from the game, and they aren't the only problem that leads to people wanting to turtle through Farbor so I should be moving on soon, but the way they're used in the campaign could use a rethinking, and letting mapmakers have some control over their power output couldn't hurt. The tension between keeping the gameplay interesting by always having to advance, and having a more drawn-out game where long-term planning is key, is a real one. Not to toot my own horn but I think I found a good solution to this with the Corrupted Forge found in many of my custom maps. The map was allowed to be slowish because normal turtle rules didn't apply: you don't upgrade to get ahead, you upgrade to not fall behind. This still did have a lot of flaws, and many of the maps were not particularly good, but it did solve the problem of turtling.
Creeper World 2 has timed missions, but you wouldn't know this based on the article or outrage alone. Sure, it's not hard to find people complaining about Horror, but it's not Farbor-level complaining. It's the sort of complaining that is guaranteed to come along with any sort of difficulty spike, with the accompanying "that was satisfying to win." Why is this?
Here comes the part where I have incomplete information, so I'm going to take some stabs at unknown quantities and hope they are somewhat accurate.
The first and most obvious answer is that CW3 was the first Knuckle Cracker game on Steam, and therefore had a large influx of people who hadn't played the first two games. This is not to dismiss their concerns as the invalid wailing of "fake fans" or whatever other silliness, but rather to illustrate the game's failure to teach lessons that the previous games got right.
The nature of the timer, psychologically, probably plays a part. The time limit in the timed levels of CW2 is built with established mechanics. There is creeper bearing down on you, or people you need to save. Decaying walls, creeper physics, etc. are all things the player should have a decent grasp of by the time the player gets to Horror. There are also plenty of levels before this that have been quietly training the player to deal with impending threats, which for some reason don't count as a time limit in the minds of players when they're threatening your command ship rather than points you need to defend. But, nevertheless, an old threat is attacking a new target. Your existing tools and strategies are still effective, you just need to deploy them in a slightly different way.
Farbor doesn't do that. The time limit is created with custom scripting, using enemies heretofore unseen in the campaign. You *can* use snipers to destroy the ships that are increasing the timer, but inexplicably this isn't mentioned in the mission briefing. Additionally, Farbor has a lot of side enemies that aren't directly in the way between the landing zones and the mission target, which, if handled intelligently, only put a small strain on player infrastructure (though it's also completely possible to take out every enemy on the way to victory, but that's probably beyond first-time players.) Every mission in CW3 has the goal of "defeat all the enemies." Some levels have an inhibitor that takes out the rest of the level when you get it, but these are rare and the side enemies tend to be either worth taking out anyway or not a big enough deal that they require special dealing-with.
The solution to this predicament is twofold: First, introduce the ore ships in a previous mission. Instead of having them build an insta-lose device, have them make something that harasses the player and can ultimately be dealt with, but nevertheless is still worth the trouble of taking out the ships. Second, restructure existing levels to have more direct threats. A simple way to do this might be to have pre-built stationary units in a threatened location, so there is benefit to rushing to defend that location rather than turtling up in a well-defended starting location. This clearly gets across "you can and should be going faster" while not overly punishing players that don't make it.
Overall - and this should be taken with multiple large heaps of salt - the difficulty curve in CW3 felt completely off. Too easy for most of the game, then jumps way up for a few levels. And those levels are never as hard as the hardest CW2 levels, yet attract much more scorn because CW2 had a more-or-less perfectly paced difficulty curve.
Campaign design isn't the only thing that contributes to turtling over advancing, of course, some core mechanical differences do as well. CW2's finite ore deposits, for example, mean that you have to push forward and if you just spin your wheels the ore will run out. But that simply doesn't strike me as so crucial to the design of Farbor, as compared to what players were trained to expect by the preceding levels. This also isn't to say that I think finite ore deposits are strictly superior to infinite ones. Both models have their advantages and disadvantages - ideally, for the most potential mission variety, both should be available. CW3 has this to some extent with resource packs but what I'm looking for is over-time mines that eventually exhaust. Whoops, I'm hint-hinting again.
I really, truly want to stress that CW3 is one of my favorite games of all time and I think it's overall better than its predecessors! I tend to be fairly negative about everything, and perhaps nitpicking a failure just to say "the failure isn't where you think it is" isn't the best way to dispel the idea that I'm just here to hate on things. (Particle Fleet was hot garbage though.)
Here's hoping CW4, with its optimizations of the creeper flow and network pathfinding algorithms, allow those delicious larger "long-term planning with constant, tactical advancement" maps to be more viable.
The wrong opinion in question is that Farbor was, conceptually, a mistake because people don't like timed levels. This is kind of ridiculous in a few different ways that I'm surprised Virgil didn't see. If you want the no-nonsense quick version it's that the campaign levels didn't properly introduce ways to move quickly, so when it's suddenly required it feels unprecedented. But people don't read this blog for no-nonsense quick versions of things, so I'll elaborate at perhaps too much length. (You could have stopped after "blog.")
Do understand what I'm trying to accomplish here: I'm not saying that people do in fact like Farbor just because I like Farbor. I've seen the outcries. What I'm saying is that each level in a game is contextualized by the rest of the levels, and that informs how people approach a given level on their first playthrough, and that Creeper World 3's campaign does a poor job of preparing people for either Farbor or difficult custom maps.
This comes down, I think, to "what makes a strategy game strategic." While I don't think the "games are just a series of interesting decisions" line of thinking is completely watertight when it comes to understanding why a game's mechanics are compelling, it does provide a good starting place for talking about strategy. Strategy means having a plan and being able to adapt that plan, and that means making decisions, and that means for any given plan some options won't be chosen. At the barest level, it means your brain is turned on and is processing inputs.
There's a bit of an odd anti-strategic streak that runs through CW3 in the form of the Reactor. Reactors are, to a large extent, gameplay poison. Turtle food. Being space-magic reactors, they don't require, say, uranium found on the map that becomes a strategic objective. That would actually be quite fun mechanically - the energy-from-territory-and-specific-points thing is one of the few things I rather like about Particle Fleet. [edit: I wrote this a while ago and forgot to publish it, before the CW4 video showcasing the mines and reso-terrain mechanic, which are basically this, so points for that.]
Incidentally, Virgil, since I know you're reading this because I'm going to send it to you, can we have the ability for mapmakers to define new resources, to let custom units add energy production to the network without having to spawn vanilla reactors under them, and to test whether a unit is linked back to the command center? Hint, hint. Why am I hint-hinting when I'm banned from the forums and in all likelihood wouldn't be comfortable interacting with some of the regulars even if I was allowed back? Bah. GM will find a way to make use of it.
The thing that's anti-strategic about reactors is the "some options won't be chosen" thing loses all its teeth when you can just hide in a corner and build infinite energy production, then walk across the map with 800 mortars. CW1 waits to let the player build reactors until the third act, after which point the game becomes markedly easier, but nevertheless the player has already been trained not to turtle excessively. CW2 has reactors from the start, but they're the only source of power and they're much better balanced overall. CW3 introduces them in the third mission of twenty-three and the game as a whole suffers for it.
I'm not going to go super-in-depth about how reactors encourage turtling and turtling encourages mindless brute force unbecoming of a brain-thinky game, because I don't think Virgil is stupid, but an interesting exercise is to look at various levels and see how much more difficult they would be without reactors. Difficult is of course not synonymous with good, except to the extent that it forces the player to think through the situation and, you know, strategize. Lemal's a fairly straightforward example.
 |
| Actually Lemal might be a better candidate for the level to introduce reactors. |
Creeper World 2 has timed missions, but you wouldn't know this based on the article or outrage alone. Sure, it's not hard to find people complaining about Horror, but it's not Farbor-level complaining. It's the sort of complaining that is guaranteed to come along with any sort of difficulty spike, with the accompanying "that was satisfying to win." Why is this?
Here comes the part where I have incomplete information, so I'm going to take some stabs at unknown quantities and hope they are somewhat accurate.
The first and most obvious answer is that CW3 was the first Knuckle Cracker game on Steam, and therefore had a large influx of people who hadn't played the first two games. This is not to dismiss their concerns as the invalid wailing of "fake fans" or whatever other silliness, but rather to illustrate the game's failure to teach lessons that the previous games got right.
The nature of the timer, psychologically, probably plays a part. The time limit in the timed levels of CW2 is built with established mechanics. There is creeper bearing down on you, or people you need to save. Decaying walls, creeper physics, etc. are all things the player should have a decent grasp of by the time the player gets to Horror. There are also plenty of levels before this that have been quietly training the player to deal with impending threats, which for some reason don't count as a time limit in the minds of players when they're threatening your command ship rather than points you need to defend. But, nevertheless, an old threat is attacking a new target. Your existing tools and strategies are still effective, you just need to deploy them in a slightly different way.
Farbor doesn't do that. The time limit is created with custom scripting, using enemies heretofore unseen in the campaign. You *can* use snipers to destroy the ships that are increasing the timer, but inexplicably this isn't mentioned in the mission briefing. Additionally, Farbor has a lot of side enemies that aren't directly in the way between the landing zones and the mission target, which, if handled intelligently, only put a small strain on player infrastructure (though it's also completely possible to take out every enemy on the way to victory, but that's probably beyond first-time players.) Every mission in CW3 has the goal of "defeat all the enemies." Some levels have an inhibitor that takes out the rest of the level when you get it, but these are rare and the side enemies tend to be either worth taking out anyway or not a big enough deal that they require special dealing-with.
The solution to this predicament is twofold: First, introduce the ore ships in a previous mission. Instead of having them build an insta-lose device, have them make something that harasses the player and can ultimately be dealt with, but nevertheless is still worth the trouble of taking out the ships. Second, restructure existing levels to have more direct threats. A simple way to do this might be to have pre-built stationary units in a threatened location, so there is benefit to rushing to defend that location rather than turtling up in a well-defended starting location. This clearly gets across "you can and should be going faster" while not overly punishing players that don't make it.
Overall - and this should be taken with multiple large heaps of salt - the difficulty curve in CW3 felt completely off. Too easy for most of the game, then jumps way up for a few levels. And those levels are never as hard as the hardest CW2 levels, yet attract much more scorn because CW2 had a more-or-less perfectly paced difficulty curve.
Campaign design isn't the only thing that contributes to turtling over advancing, of course, some core mechanical differences do as well. CW2's finite ore deposits, for example, mean that you have to push forward and if you just spin your wheels the ore will run out. But that simply doesn't strike me as so crucial to the design of Farbor, as compared to what players were trained to expect by the preceding levels. This also isn't to say that I think finite ore deposits are strictly superior to infinite ones. Both models have their advantages and disadvantages - ideally, for the most potential mission variety, both should be available. CW3 has this to some extent with resource packs but what I'm looking for is over-time mines that eventually exhaust. Whoops, I'm hint-hinting again.
I really, truly want to stress that CW3 is one of my favorite games of all time and I think it's overall better than its predecessors! I tend to be fairly negative about everything, and perhaps nitpicking a failure just to say "the failure isn't where you think it is" isn't the best way to dispel the idea that I'm just here to hate on things. (Particle Fleet was hot garbage though.)
Here's hoping CW4, with its optimizations of the creeper flow and network pathfinding algorithms, allow those delicious larger "long-term planning with constant, tactical advancement" maps to be more viable.
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