No move take back & no saves?

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willgamer
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby willgamer » Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:31 am

Spooner wrote:I think the requirement for brilliant victory in the campaign is quite unreasonable, since even the best players can't always guarantee a BV for a mission. It should be possible to finish the campaign, albeit without so many medals, even if you are just an adequate player.


+1...

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Tomislav Uzelac
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby Tomislav Uzelac » Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:51 pm

Spooner wrote:I think the requirement for brilliant victory in the campaign is quite unreasonable, since even the best players can't always guarantee a BV for a mission.


On the other hand, in exchange for a BV we are letting you ride all the way into Kuibyshev in 1942 already :!: Please note that this is pretty outrageous by any historical measure... even more so than Baku (which only requires DVs to reach).

Also, isn't it about the same even in good old PG? I don't recall precisely but doesn't it require "Major Victories" to reach all scenarios there too?

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Spooner
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby Spooner » Mon Nov 28, 2011 2:47 pm

The problem with that argument is that many players will still feel robbed if they can't actually finish the campaign, and get quite frustrated - I have plenty of games that I've abandoned because the campaign put up a wall to me (I was never able to even complete the first mission in Men of War: Red Tide, so that was money well spent :D)! I just accepted I wouldn't win with a sufficient margin, knowing that I could play the scenarios individually at a later date, but lots of people seem intent to bang their head against that mission until they win. I see the problem being one of difficulty management; generally games have a difficulty system (easy, medium, hard) but UoC uses a degree-of-victory system (standard victory, DV, BV) which equates to the same thing (If I want an easy game, I aim for a standard victory; if I want a hard game, I aim for a brilliant victory). When playing separate UoC scenarios, the player has full control over the difficulty, but in the campaign everyone is forced to play on easy/medium/hard depending on the scenario, if they wish to progress. This approach is a bit punishing to those who wish to play an easy or medium game, because they can only feel that they have failed in the campaign as it is set up, when they have actually probably done pretty well.

The argument that aspects of the campaign are non-historical doesn't really give the excuse for making it prohibitively difficult at particular points. It would have made more sense to have the campaign be historical and add some non-historical scenarios to be played separately or just to say that there is a longer gap between steps in the campaign so that the timeline made sense.

id3945
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby id3945 » Mon Nov 28, 2011 3:37 pm

I think in UoC doing things the campaign way is less important than in something like P*nzer C*rps where you create your own army to your own preference, take it through the campaign and choose how it is deployed in each scenario. In UoC the campaign aspect is much simpler in that it just seems to concern how many prestige points one takes to the next scenario (as well as which scenario one plays next). Incidentally, in P*nzer C*rps campaign I use a cheat code to advance to the next scenario with a basic victory if I can't stomach repeating the scenario.

So I've decided to play through the individual scenarios rather than the campaign in UoC as it doesn't seem as though I'm missing much doing things that way. This isn't a criticism of the game, by the way, just a reflection of how I personally like to play a game. I'm sure there are others that would find it rewarding to replay a scenario multiple times until they beat it before moving on to the next one.

Also, I noticed that one could exit the game without auto-saving when doing the individual scenarios, which one couldn't do in campaign mode and what I was originally grumbling about in this thread.

willgamer
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby willgamer » Mon Nov 28, 2011 5:14 pm

Tomislav Uzelac wrote:
Spooner wrote:I think the requirement for brilliant victory in the campaign is quite unreasonable, since even the best players can't always guarantee a BV for a mission.


On the other hand, in exchange for a BV we are letting you ride all the way into Kuibyshev in 1942 already :!: Please note that this is pretty outrageous by any historical measure... even more so than Baku (which only requires DVs to reach).

Also, isn't it about the same even in good old PG? I don't recall precisely but doesn't it require "Major Victories" to reach all scenarios there too?


Just brainstorming here... :idea:

Add difficulty levels that are set at the beginning of the campaign: Hard, Normal, and Easy.

Hard is defined as unchanged from the present.

Normal is defined as the (new) ability to buy a brilliant victory with prestige points if and only if a decisive victory has been achieved.

Easy is defined as the (new) ability to buy a decisive victory with prestige points if and only if a victory has been achieved.

Thus Easy campaigns can be completed, but scoring few points to show for it (and some paths may be unreachable).

Normal campaigns can almost always play every path albeit at a penalty to the final score.

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

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Tomislav Uzelac
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby Tomislav Uzelac » Mon Nov 28, 2011 10:53 pm

These are all interesting perspectives, please keep them coming. I invite other players to weigh in, especially the testers seeing as they have most experience with the game.

Here's what I'd like to keep about the campaign:

  • keep and improve the campaign as the main mode of play (it seems most people play the campaign)
  • keep the incentive to play the scenarios many times over to improve your skills
  • keep "what-if" scenarios more difficult to reach, and more difficult to play

I'm actively looking for ideas to make the campaign more dynamic so I'm reading all of this carefully. Note that there's no saying when and how many changes we'll make. We'll do our best but no promises. Right now our best bet seems to be an incremental change or two for the next campaign, if we can find something nice and simple that adds to the campaign experience.

logan5
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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby logan5 » Mon Nov 28, 2011 11:53 pm

The motivation to play the campaign falls apart when you don't get a brilliant victory at stalingrad, maybe if you were allowed to come back and replay a scenario without deleting the progress you made in the campaign it might not be that big of a deal, but knowing that you will lose your progress you feel obligated to grind stalingrad or else you will not "win" the game.

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Re: No move take back & no saves?

Unread postby Fradiddle » Wed Nov 28, 2012 4:37 pm

id3945 wrote:Thanks for the info, but I'm well into the 24-turn Stalingrad scenario so I don't want to start again. I don't see any reason for such a rigid auto-save system - I can't see how it benefits the end-user in any way. With a campaign-based game in which many hours are invested, one unintentional clerical error with absolutely zero chance to put it right can ruin a player's immersive experience in a game.


Yes. I don't understand the thinking here at all; do you want to punish your users? If I want to be able to return to action 35 of 379 I don't see why I shouldn't be able to.

I would like to see auto-save making backups each time I make a move, and I'd like to be able to configure the number of previous game states backed up. I can script some sort of awful copy-the-game-folder backup and run it before each move, but that really seems like something that could be added to the game without much work. I'll even volunteer to do it if you'll let me at the source... ;)