(OT) Do you prefer to know game formulas?

[Chazar]

The hidden mechanics of the morale system is fine to me, since it is suffciently complicated to make it impractical to be learned from repeated experiments:

I think that the question should rather be what is a desireable factor for "successful" play: It seems proper to me that an experienced player has an advantage, but I do not like it if this "experience" can be obtained by simply assiduous experiments, e.g. I do not like the "wish" spell: "Wish" is certainly funny for SP, but would anyone use it blindly in MP? Certainly not! But acquiring the knowledge how "wish" functions requires no genuine insights, but just a large enough amount of time for solo play against a weak AI (or map modding expertise).

On the other hand, learning the morale system also needs time, but it still requires some thought, for the number of possible battle setups (troop compositions, placements & scriptings) is just too numerous. Thus there is no obvious way of experimenting. The only way to learn more about it is to gain some intuition by conducting a great variety of battles.

So I would want that all simple things are made easily available to save me the hassle to conduct boring experiments instead of playing the game. I do not want to tediously study the game before being able to play in MP! Or in more aggressive words: Anything that can easily learned from playing against a simple AI should also be easily accessible right from the start!

[jeffr]

I'd prefer to have all game information available in-game via icons, right clicking, turn by turn battle summaries with detailed results [i.e. attack 15 (base 13 + 2 for exp) vs def 13: chance to hit = 70%: HIT for 5 damage (spear 3 + strength 15 - 13 protection)].

The battle summary might be a bit much considering the number of units that participate in a battle. But having the etheral unit icon say somtheing like "75% of non-magic strikes ignored" or having a spell say the type of damage it does (and hence you could figure out what resistances reduce that damage) would be good.

The detailed information could be made available only by explicitly clicking on an icon, battle report, etc. Only people who were interested in the detail would have to look at it.

Or you could have a Preferences option that gives greater detail for help text.

[PvK]

Kris O, that is what I was trying to ask with my second question. It appears that many players do enjoy complex formulas that may be difficult to predict outcomes from, particularly as long as they aren't broken, which of course can be trickier to establish than if they are simple.

Chazar I think also just made a very good point about simple tricks and things which can be found out with dull work being good candidates for things to be explained up front, while more complex mechanics which defy basic analysis and prediction may be more the sort of thing that can be left for discovery by experience.

PvK

[silhouette]

I would like to know the exact values (items, spells, abilities) and formulas, but I expect the formulas will be complex enough that you can never predict the exact numbers in the next turn. So, if I want I should be able to plan and build a commander with all the maximum morale boosting items and spells available, but still know that I cannot predict the exact value when combat happens due to dominion, heat, and other factors in the formula.

It is important to be able to learn from trial and error, and unless everyone is expected to put in lots o' hours with a combat simulator, the effects and formulas should be available to limit the number of variables in the 'trial' part.

Even after using Ember and the Sword of Many Colors, I can't quantify the damage/effect of the two. Thats annoying.

Sill

[Chazar]

Kristoffer O said:
Would anyone prefer formulas that are complex enough not to be deciphered and broken down into statistics?

The current morale system for example. [...] Is this good or is it just fustrating?

I guess that I have not really answered this question in my previous post as I liked to, so please let me elaborate my view on this topic a little further by telling a little example story:

In an MP game on Karan, around turn 6?, almost all my forces had been annhilated by a vicious global alliance of my enemies, but all I was needing for ascension where two more victory points. My own victory points where secured by currently unsieged wizard towers, with no adjacent enemy forces and my enemies did not possess any substantial flying armies (thus giving me three turns time). I had just a few scattered provinces, no money, but plenty of gems, some items, two air queens, that astral ice devil (three IDs total), almost no ordinary troops and only about seven seraphs left (Yep, I just had won a couple of pyrrhic victories). I had scrying spells active on all victory points (which were all defended by fortresses) and thus knew exactly what awaited me there. There were indeed two easy ones left (Fools!). Thus I pulled out my calculater and determined the total sieging strength of my remaining teleportable forces. Thanks to that I could divide them up accordingly, distribute the gate cleavers, sieging horns, strength increasing items and set them all to cloud-trapeze/teleport to the other end of Karan. Thanks to the exact arcane reconnaissance, I knew that instead of cloud trapezing I had to cast "call of the winds" to gain enough sieging strength (the hawks are weak, but they are flying (siege+1) and I knew exactly how many would appear). It was close, but both sieges immediately broke down the walls of the defenders (Why couldnt they teleport right inside the castle anyway?).

So the points of my little story are:

• It is good that the exact sieging mechanics are available, since otherwise I would just have run boring time-consuming tests to determine it - after all, my ascension depended on it! Hence all mechanics should be revealed!
• It is bad that this information is not easily available within the game itself: My friends do not read this forum, so I was using knowledge not available to them (like the exact sieging power of a "call of the winds" spell), so I felt a bit like cheating. Hence all information on game mechanics should be readily available from the game or its manual! It should not tell me to use "Call of the Winds" for sieging, but once I have that quite simple idea, the game should provide the necessary information (i.e. average number of summoned units and their strength). (Of course I had sent my friends Zen's quick references beforehand to address such issues.)
• I did not like it that I used a calculator (pen and paper) and that I knew in advance that I was automatically going to succeed. However, making the sieging mechanism complex somehow and adding random elements (e.g. like adding an unscoutable, terrain-biased +2d6(oe) to defense-point at castle creation time) does not solve this problem in my view, since the outcome of a siege is still a simple yes/no answer and I can still be on the safe side by preparing for the worst case. Hence I can again run repeated tests to obtain some simple percentage values. Thus things that are simple should be kept simple, after all it was me had prepared this tactical move (by item forging, arcane scrying, thinink of long distance summons, etc.)
  
  (Nevertheless, adding a small random element like that random bonus depicted above might add some nice tension in those cases where availables resource are between min and max. Its usually nice if one is sometimes forced to take a small gamble.)

So my simple answer to Kristoffer's questions is yes, but it is only good since moral is naturally a complex thing without an easy yes/no answer, unlike sieging for example.




(BTW, in the end my victory has not been as easy as one might guess, thanks to an enemy pretender being able to teleport a whole army of sacred marignonian knights... )

[PvK]

Thanks for the detailed example, Chazar. I think it is a good example of a broader design principle

If something is effective but not fun or interesting, then either make it more fun or interesting, or try to minimize its tediousness and time/effort required to do it. Otherwise, players end up with good reasons to spend time and effort on things that are tedious.

PvK

[FarAway Pretender]

I think a little uncertainty is a good thing, and makes games more exciting to learn as well as to play.

HOWEVER, it bogs a game down when there are so many unknowns that you can never isolate all the variables without tedious, trial-and-error empirical sampling. I don't need exact numbers for every formula, but I need to know enough to compare different courses of action. It really comes down to how hard it is to experiment, and learn by trial.

I like formulae that are complex enough that I can figure out what's more important and what's less important, but I don't need to do all the math every time to develop a sound strategy.

If the cost of experimentation is low (e.g., "I set my cavalary to 'Attack Rearmost Enemies' and see how close they have to come to an enemy unit before breaking off to attack a nearby target"), that's good and improves the gameplay. I get it wrong a few times, but the price of those mistakes isn't catastrophic.

The "Wish" spell is a good, frustrating example at the other end. I love the idea of an open-ended spell like that, but it's too expensive for easy trial-and-error. 360 Astral Pearls later, I'm still wondering why I didn't just summon 7 Angelic Hosts.