@Black_Elk:
Lately I’ve been thinking more and more of an evolutionary/selection approach rather than an engineering/design approach, ever since Barney figured out a way to include several different standardized HR options into a single package. The thought being that with so many variables, it would require a different balance corrective depending on which house rules are in play anyway. So more ways to introduce cash might be helpful depending on for example whether one chooses to use a C5 bomber or a C12 bomber. Or whether one introduces a VC cash grab, or just wants to play using the OOB VCs. Whether one uses standard capital rules or China rules for everyone post capital collapse. Playing with a new NAP or not etc.
I suppose that is maybe a bit of a cop out for a thread with “redesign” in the title. But I think the a la carte HR concept as the first step basically requires a high degree of flexibility and adaptability in the near term. Once the tools are in the tool chest, with the standard options outlined, it becomes a lot easier to build a particular modification out of those materials. As opposed to pre-planning everything to the Nth degree. And it’s easy enough to edit as we go along, for things that need adjustment. So for NOs I would just try to ballpark it right now, get some working values out, with the understanding that they may need to change as the result of feedback.
Perhaps this methodology may seem rather backwards compared to the approach used to develop OOB game, but “grand design” type mod projects have been tried several times with several boards and often still seem to fall rather short, even when the playgroup is pretty large and the testing periods are pretty extensive, with multiple Alphas etc.
I still think by far the easiest method to balance the board under any conditions, is either by adjusting the starting cash or through a standard bid. So I don’t know if the OOB balance is really best place to start. I’m more interested in other things. Fine tuning the balance by sides seems easier to me than most of this other stuff, since it can almost certainly be achieved by just adding a number to the starting cash of individual nations, or else adding combat units via a bid mechanism.
I suppose at this point I am trying to see which of the many ideas/options under consideration will actually stick, since the brainstorming threw a lot of stuff at the wall. There are currently a couple dozen HR tech adds in the tripleA gamefile. Some of which may work as stand alones, others more in conjunction with a series of HRs. Some may prove less popular, hard to say at this point.
“Backward” may not be quite the right word. Along the lines of what I discussed a few posts ago, when I was talking about design methodologies, I think it’s more a case of what the logical outcome is for a particular design approach.
In one approach (call it the goal-driven approach), Step A is to set the specific objectives of the project, as clearly and in as much detail as possible, so that one knows what to aim for. In such an approach, the Step B which logically follows is to generate ideas and to check them against the objectives set in Step A to see if these ideas fit the desired goal.
In the reverse approach (call it the option-driven approach), Step A is to generate lots of ideas, without imposing on them any restrictions that pertain to whether or not they fit a precise, detailed goal. In such an approach, the Step B which logically follows is to figure out what can be done with all of these ideas…in other words, to see how they can be integrated into (to use an automotive analogy) a functional four-wheeled vehicle rather remaining a collection of separate components. This building-up-from-the-components approach, in its pure form (and I’ll say more about that in a moment), basically creates a situation in which you look at your collection of separate components and say, “Okay, if we put together components A, B and C, we can create a game that does this; if we put together components C, D and E, we can create a game that does that…” and so forth.
That analogy isn’t perfect in the case of an A&A redesign, of course, because we’re not dealing with a pure form of the building-up-from-the-components approach. We’re dealing with a game that already exists, and there’s an aspiration to improve it in various ways. This discussion thread has, by and large, been following the option-driven approach rather than the goal-driven approach, so Step A / Step B as described under the goal-driven approach don’t apply. However, because we’re dealing with a pre-existing game, Step A / Step B as described under the option-driven approach don’t necessarily have to apply either because there’s another option…and I think it’s perhaps what Black Elk was driving at in the part of his post that I’ve quoted.
To go back to my automotive analogy, I think that at this point Black Elk isn’t aiming for a single finished product, but rather is aiming to create a “car customization kit” that would present a whole bunch of options to the individual car buyer and which would leave it up to each individual buyer to decide what features he wishes to use in the customized car he orders. The basic car would always be the same, but it could be customized in all kinds of ways: Do you want a moderately conservative blue paint job, a very conservative black one, or a flashy red one? Whitewall tires or black? An upgraded music / sound system? Manual transmission or automatic? Retractable hood or fixed? Do you want leather-covered seats? Do you want armoured doors and bullet-proof windows, if you’re a VIP type of person? And so forth. And it would be up to the buyer to be sensible about what options he would combine, because some combinations would be less optimal than others. (Example: the previously-mentioned safety-conscious VIP who wants to keep a low profile would be poorly served by a car that combined armour plating and bullet-proof glass with a retactable roof and a flashy red paint job.)
Black Elk said at one point that “I suppose that is maybe a bit of a cop out for a thread with “redesign” in the title.” That’s possibly one way of looking at it, but an alternate way of looking at it would be in purely practical terms. Since any A&A redesign process involving more than one person is almost guaranteed to generate various degrees of disagreement, and since even a single person may be at a loss to decide which among many options he wants to use to solve a given problem (because choosing option X means rejecting option Y), the whole “problem” of reaching a decision can be avoided entirely by offloading the problem to the end user (the car buyer, in my analogy) by saying: “Here are the options we’ve devised for you; now go ahead and choose which ones you want to use.” It’s pragmatic. And in a sense, it also solves another old problem: replayability. Any “finalized” redesign of A&A is likely to meet with the same fate as the OOB game: it will get decoded and “solved” to the extent that experienced players will eventually figure out the optimal set-piece moves for each power…and, ironically, will also figure out the redesign’s flaws, which in turn will make them want to redesign the game again, which will bring us right back to the starting point for all of this. The car-customization-kit approach, by contrast, creates the possibility that players will never play twice under the same set of rules, which automatically creates variety. In such a scenario, the “testing different combinations” phase would not be a means to achieve the end-result of the redesign process; the practice of playing with different combinations would instead be the actual end result of the redesign process.