Comments on: More DoW2 Multiplayer Wordthinks

By: MD

MD — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:51:07 +0000

*competitive

:-[

By: MD

MD — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:49:50 +0000

Crispy covered the case of competetive sport, but I’d like to add that poker works as a gambling game; it would be terrible as a competition-for-competition’s-sake game. (Terrible may be a bit strong, given that it’s possible to play for ‘pride’ and have a bit of fun, but in that sense it’s probably at a similar level to monopoly.) It’s not a coincidence that the deepest and, in a competetive sense, ‘best’ games (e.g. chess) are all deterministic. That last sentence leaves me rather open to counter-examples, but I can all but guarantee that any randomness present in a high-level competitive game will be fair, and either naturally or by human intervention will almost always leave both players equally ‘lucky’ within one unit of competition (i.e. one round of tournament play: this may be a single match, or a series of matches). Poker does not work this way, and an entire tournament can easily be won or lost due to luck alone. It’s very possible to run lucky or unlucky over what might seem like the long term, to the point of handing a profit to someone who ‘should’ be a losing player, and vice-versa.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:12:10 +0000

It really depends how the random element affects the game. If the game is designed to compensate for or to actually utilise the random element, it becomes an acceptable feature. If the design does not support it well enough, it becomes a bane in competitive circles.

In Sports:
Please give examples. In most cases the ‘chance’ will be affecting both sides equally (e.g. weather), and there are mechanics in the game that minimalise these effects (e.g. swapping sides halfway through the game).

In Poker
The random element is initial and is not exposed immediately. It is only exposed to one player privately and therefore the player can decide to play his own game irregardless of the hand he has. In fact, a lot of the time you play poker not according to the cards you have, but to the cards you think your opponant has. Depending on how good you are at reading the other player and how good you are at giving misleading signals, the cards you have in your hand don’t mean very much at all.

By: DK213

DK213 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:56:01 +0000

“Random chance = poor for competitive play.”
Tell that to Poker. Or Sports.
You know, those competitive things that were around long before the random-is-bad-bandwagon?

By: Chunky Waffles

Chunky Waffles — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:05:39 +0000

AWESOME GAME!
Easy to find a game, great that it runs on Windows Live, and finally we get Nids!
I must say this is a great game….if you have a gaming computer….regular comps just don’t do the game justice, oh and you need a close to perfect internet connection because from what i’ve experienced it gets really laggy

By: jigglybean

jigglybean — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:15:40 +0000

I was so looking forward to this one. I loved the original but Relic have dramatically changed the game. Its simply not Dawn of war any more, but Company of Heroes in a DoW frock.

Trying to get a ranked game is simply a joke. Once all the hype has gone, it will take ages just to find one game. It takes forever already!

Despite claiming base building – there isnt any (apart from turrets and tunnels – wow!). Thanks to the beta, I have cancelled my pre-order

By: Stromko

Stromko — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:11:35 +0000

Just host a game and after picking your race, on the next screen change all the player slots to AI (click on each of them and choose).

By: Paul Emil

Paul Emil — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:38:44 +0000

@Erlam:
How did you get to play against the CPU? I only got to play against the AI when others were kicked due to lagging the game too much.

By: Erlam

Erlam — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:24:59 +0000

I’ve been playing for a bit now, but only against the CPU because, well, it’s an RTS, and I will get annihilated by someone who hasn’t stopped playing since the beta came out.

Some comments:

1) The A.I. is so awful it will lose you games. I don’t mean the CPU player, I mean the A.I. for your units. For example: my Devastator Squad is firing over a wall, comes under attack from behind. I have another unit melee the attacker, and tell my unit to shoot the enemy it was firing at over the wall. It un-sets up, and then moves around the wall. Dying, because it was in cover for a fucking reason.

2) I managed to destroy a heavy bolter squad by having my one-man scout squad dance around a rock. Yes, a rock. Because they couldn’t ‘setup’ due to him moving, they just kept pivoting, and the scouts shotgun would knock down the non-bolter guy, making him useless. It took a minute or so, but 1 scout > heavy bolter? Uh, no.

3) I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve had a unit (usually the Dreadnought) become stuck in an animation, and get picked off. It’s a huge problem.it will sit there, spinning, and never touch an enemy.

There are more things but I think my rant will end here.

By: Dan Harris

Dan Harris — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:26:50 +0000

I love it.

I’m not very good at it yet, but I had the ‘pleasure’ of playing against someone who’d clearly been putting the Techmarine hours in (i.e. was at Rank 22 after about two days) who just dominated me tactically. All about garrisoning buildings near requisition points and setting up turrets, in his case. Was enlightening.

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:05:31 +0000

“RTS’es have never been about macro. As long as you have to watch the fights and order your units to move or attack, it’s micro. And show me a RTS where not doing those things was a viable strategy.

Urgh. Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation being the obvious ones. ”

Try playing those games competitively without micro then. :) SupCom is nowhere near the game of dots some people make it out to be and TA units need constant caretaking with such rompy terrain.

DoW II is ace, playing it more and more and discovering every race feature and every hero tweak is a great thing. It offers enough micro to be as rewarding as any traditional RTS and it’s easily more atmospheric than the ‘Craft games, just play with some Orkz and try to deny that statement, hilarious in some kind of TF2-way even. There are lots of issues still but they’re mostly not game-related, it’s mainly Live that is to blame or what Relic has done with it.

By: Logo

Logo — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:59:10 +0000

“It never feels unfair, it feels right.”

It ‘feels’ fair and is great for casual play. Any person who wants to play RTS games casually should pick up CoH, like you recommended earlier. I completely agree with you and find CoH fantastic as a casual RTS.

But in reality randomness is never fair. By definition it’s random. Sure over infinite plays the randomness is fair but you never play the same person infinite times. So while random helps make games fun for casual play (see L4D, TF2, and CoH) it is a big hinderance to making the game fun for hardcore audience.

If DoW2 falls under the ‘random/casual’ umbrella so be it. I’m sure many people will enjoy the game as it seems to build a lot on CoH but it won’t be the game for me (or many competitive people I think). The more I read up the more Dow2 though it seems to be somewhere in the middle which could be a nice mix. If they can nail that middle ground right they’d have a game that’s viable for competitive play while being very accessible to casual players. When you do that and combine it with fast match times (which DoW2 has) a good spectator game is born. Easy casual play means it’s simple for people to learn the basics and get into the game and its MP scene. Good competitive play means that there’s depth and strategy to make tournaments feasible and interesting. Get the casuals watching the competitive people play and an e-sport is born.

I guess I’ll find out tonight/tomorrow how well DoW2 delivers. I can’t wait :P.