Guide on designing standard factions/eras
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Guide on designing standard factions/eras
I think it is long past time I got around to trying to write this. I've seen so many people attempt to make factions that are unaware of basic principles and it is becoming frustrating to me. The objective of this guide is to explain some of the basic principles of faction and era design for new faction designers who are creating typical factions aimed to be balanced for multiplayer on standard maps using the same general stat scale as mainline. This last bit is bolded because there are many uses/purposes for eras to which non of this will apply. It is my hope that this guide will become stickied and that people will read it and either do a better job of designing their eras or that they will realize that they don't want to before dumping hours of effort into them.
If anyone feels the need to ask about my credentials I believe I have done more design work on standard eras than any other person on the forum currently. I was a playtester then maintainer of Era of Myths for several years, created and designed the gunpowder age (which isn't a standard era but is based on many of the same principles) and Era of Four Moons, and have contributed and tested many other eras. That said I'll admit to being failable, these are merely my observations and advice.
First: Know Your Objective
I’m going to summarize a post I made in a previous topic and then link you to the topic (the post I am referring to is the second one in the thread) for if you want to read more.
It is important to know why you are doing things. Making factions or eras takes a lot of time and effort and can easily result in something you never do anything with once you have it. Before investing all this time be sure you know what you are aiming for and consider how that ought to influence the decisions you make on how to work on it.
http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34035
The Relationship Between Faction Design and Maps
One of the problems with balance is that when one is attempting to balance for a variety of situations a number of things become circular as how balanced various things are is dependent on other things and how balanced those things are is dependent on the first thing. The prime example of this is the relationship between factions, eras, and maps. A balanced faction is one who has equal odds of winning against an 'equally skilled opponent' with any other faction in the era on a balanced map. A balanced map is one on which all balanced factions in an era have equal odds against other. The thing is that in one era, a 'balanced map' might be a map with only open ground a few scattered villages and castles and nothing else, and in another era a map won't be balanced unless there is almost every terrain imaginable applied liberally on every important battleground. In response to this issue at a certain point you just have to simply say 'this thing is considered balanced, now lets balance everything else relative to it'. Unfortunately, it seems like a large number of faction designers want to say that their faction is balanced and try to work from there (after all they can create special maps for their era). This is however very awkward for the vast majority of players as it forces them to learn even more, even quicker. I would generally consider it wise, if you want to make your era easy to pick up, that you conform it to mainline maps.
Designing your factions
Faction design is an art and as such there are very few right ways to do it. The more things I tell you you must do, the more limited the faction possibilities become (assuming you listen to me). Honestly there are so many things that could work and would be interesting that I wouldn't care to hinder what you have to work with. That said, I will advise you on some things that you should think about when designing and things which I have seen cause trouble. As a note on anything balance related, play testing is the best and most final method of determining balance. However it takes time, it requires people to update to keep up with the revisions, it takes a lot of interest on the part of other people(which is frankly, not easy to generate). It really helps people stick around and keep interested if you come into something with a project that is already mostly balanced and interesting. By doing much of your design ahead of time and thinking through balance considerations before releasing you can eliminate many problems and make your project more appealing to your early play-testers.
Design of Individual Units:
Units should be designed as part of a faction and with the rest of their faction in mind as it should never be a unit that will be holding the battlefield alone (see combined arms notes). This said there are a few notes on the quirks of designing a unit.
Special Abilities Are Not Toys
Do not add them unless you are very certain you want that faction to have access to them as part of their fundamental design. This restriction applies less heavily to non-recruitables but every ability and weapon special has a very strong potential to be overpowering especially in combination with others. Units with special abilities generally ought to have a distinct weakness to make up for it (trolls are a front line melee unit and have low damage to make up for regen, mages/shaman types have low hp and high cost, ect.) unless it is one of the rare specials which is it's own weakness(but even those should not be given out lightly). Below are a few I find particularly worth commenting on.
If anyone feels the need to ask about my credentials I believe I have done more design work on standard eras than any other person on the forum currently. I was a playtester then maintainer of Era of Myths for several years, created and designed the gunpowder age (which isn't a standard era but is based on many of the same principles) and Era of Four Moons, and have contributed and tested many other eras. That said I'll admit to being failable, these are merely my observations and advice.
First: Know Your Objective
I’m going to summarize a post I made in a previous topic and then link you to the topic (the post I am referring to is the second one in the thread) for if you want to read more.
It is important to know why you are doing things. Making factions or eras takes a lot of time and effort and can easily result in something you never do anything with once you have it. Before investing all this time be sure you know what you are aiming for and consider how that ought to influence the decisions you make on how to work on it.
Different Reasons One Might Make an Era and the Implications on Design
The Relationship Between Faction Design and Maps
One of the problems with balance is that when one is attempting to balance for a variety of situations a number of things become circular as how balanced various things are is dependent on other things and how balanced those things are is dependent on the first thing. The prime example of this is the relationship between factions, eras, and maps. A balanced faction is one who has equal odds of winning against an 'equally skilled opponent' with any other faction in the era on a balanced map. A balanced map is one on which all balanced factions in an era have equal odds against other. The thing is that in one era, a 'balanced map' might be a map with only open ground a few scattered villages and castles and nothing else, and in another era a map won't be balanced unless there is almost every terrain imaginable applied liberally on every important battleground. In response to this issue at a certain point you just have to simply say 'this thing is considered balanced, now lets balance everything else relative to it'. Unfortunately, it seems like a large number of faction designers want to say that their faction is balanced and try to work from there (after all they can create special maps for their era). This is however very awkward for the vast majority of players as it forces them to learn even more, even quicker. I would generally consider it wise, if you want to make your era easy to pick up, that you conform it to mainline maps.
Conforming Eras to Mainline Maps
Faction design is an art and as such there are very few right ways to do it. The more things I tell you you must do, the more limited the faction possibilities become (assuming you listen to me). Honestly there are so many things that could work and would be interesting that I wouldn't care to hinder what you have to work with. That said, I will advise you on some things that you should think about when designing and things which I have seen cause trouble. As a note on anything balance related, play testing is the best and most final method of determining balance. However it takes time, it requires people to update to keep up with the revisions, it takes a lot of interest on the part of other people(which is frankly, not easy to generate). It really helps people stick around and keep interested if you come into something with a project that is already mostly balanced and interesting. By doing much of your design ahead of time and thinking through balance considerations before releasing you can eliminate many problems and make your project more appealing to your early play-testers.
Useing Baselines
Defining and Filling out Factions
Offensive Counters vs Defensive Counters
Units should be designed as part of a faction and with the rest of their faction in mind as it should never be a unit that will be holding the battlefield alone (see combined arms notes). This said there are a few notes on the quirks of designing a unit.
designing units as part of a team
Measuring Toughness
Damage Distributions
Using Multiple Attacks Per Unit
Other Notes
Do not add them unless you are very certain you want that faction to have access to them as part of their fundamental design. This restriction applies less heavily to non-recruitables but every ability and weapon special has a very strong potential to be overpowering especially in combination with others. Units with special abilities generally ought to have a distinct weakness to make up for it (trolls are a front line melee unit and have low damage to make up for regen, mages/shaman types have low hp and high cost, ect.) unless it is one of the rare specials which is it's own weakness(but even those should not be given out lightly). Below are a few I find particularly worth commenting on.
Special Abilities
Last edited by Velensk on October 4th, 2011, 5:21 pm, edited 20 times in total.
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
It's enjoyable and easy to read. I'm sure to refer back to it if I ever try creating an era/faction.
Unfortunately, one of your sentences lost its ending: In the second paragraph of common mistakes, the paragraph just ends with "The true way to determine i". I'm assuming it's a cut and paste error and hope to see the missing bit soon.
Unfortunately, one of your sentences lost its ending: In the second paragraph of common mistakes, the paragraph just ends with "The true way to determine i". I'm assuming it's a cut and paste error and hope to see the missing bit soon.
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
That's a quick fix I can make now, I'll try to finish this up tomorrow.
That was actually a bit that I moved to a different section and apparently forgot to delete. I was about to indicate that the true test of balance should be playtesting.
That was actually a bit that I moved to a different section and apparently forgot to delete. I was about to indicate that the true test of balance should be playtesting.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
There are some very interesting thoughts in there, good work! You probably are gonna mention these things in yournext edit, but here are some thoughts of mine that are not yet reflected (of course, you could disagree, your pedigree is much more impressive than mine in this field):
1) The feel of the faction. I find this is the single most important point someone ought to think through before commiting any work. How do you want your faction to play and feel? What differenciates it from others? Too often, I have seen some newcomer to faction design come around with his very own genial concept of a faction (tm), and it ends being a very bland faction, because "this faction needs a scout, a melee unit, an archer, a mage, a tank, a healer and a leader". All these units stereotypes can be very interesting and very useful, but a faction doesn't NEED to have all of them to be viable/interesting (quite the opposite, imho!). Likewise, a faction concept doesn't have to affect the -whole- faction to feel like its core concept. If you wanted to create a faction offlying angels, maybe only about 2-3 unit lines need to actually fly: the scout, maybe the trademark(s) unit of the faction, possibly anoher common unit, and the rest can stray a bit while still fitting the theme.
2) I just mentionned it: the trademark unit. I find this is very important in defining your faction. There should usually be one or two unit lines in each faction that are much more cost-efficient/useful to that faction, so that it will generally be seen a lot. Northies' would be the Grunt, knalgans the dwarvish fightyer, rebels the archer, loyalists the spearman, etc. This helps define the faction, although there are other units to complement that trademark one. The elvish archer, for instance, really defines or incarnates the rebel faction's feel: a faction with lots of range and especially good in forests. This might seem very obvious, but it might be less so when you design your faction. Let's re-use that angel faction example. Let's say that faction designer made every unit a lawful flying angel but one which, for some reason, is a neutral nightstalking grunt-like, and happens to be the most cost-efficient unit, and about half of what you see on the field is this unit. Now, most people might know better than doing this, but it would still be a major design flaw, imho.
3) Appart from that (I'll rush this a bit because I have to go), other interesting factors to think of to balance your faction is its "average" price and the amount of available recruits. The average price, in fact, is a very bad indicator. For example, northies are considered cheap, because they have the cheapest lv1s (grunt and troll whelp) and a cheap lv0 unit (goblin). The rest of their units, however, is blatantly over priced (on a flawed unit-to-unit comparison). Because of this, their average recruit price is not much lower than the loyalists', but since the core of their troups are very cheap, they feel like they're cheap. It is still interesting to fiddle with how cheap yor faction will feel, and carefully selecting which unit is gonna be cheap and to what extent.
The amount of recruit is also interesting to toy with. In mainline, IIRC, there is no faction with less than 6 recruits. While a factuion with 5 might be viable, it would be really inflexible. Some factions have 7, and the one with the most is the Loys with 8 (more than 8 might be a tad overwhelming). The average would be somewhere around 6,5. Just something to consider when planning how your faction will feel: are your choice restricted, or do you have a wide, flexible arsenal at your disposal?
1) The feel of the faction. I find this is the single most important point someone ought to think through before commiting any work. How do you want your faction to play and feel? What differenciates it from others? Too often, I have seen some newcomer to faction design come around with his very own genial concept of a faction (tm), and it ends being a very bland faction, because "this faction needs a scout, a melee unit, an archer, a mage, a tank, a healer and a leader". All these units stereotypes can be very interesting and very useful, but a faction doesn't NEED to have all of them to be viable/interesting (quite the opposite, imho!). Likewise, a faction concept doesn't have to affect the -whole- faction to feel like its core concept. If you wanted to create a faction offlying angels, maybe only about 2-3 unit lines need to actually fly: the scout, maybe the trademark(s) unit of the faction, possibly anoher common unit, and the rest can stray a bit while still fitting the theme.
2) I just mentionned it: the trademark unit. I find this is very important in defining your faction. There should usually be one or two unit lines in each faction that are much more cost-efficient/useful to that faction, so that it will generally be seen a lot. Northies' would be the Grunt, knalgans the dwarvish fightyer, rebels the archer, loyalists the spearman, etc. This helps define the faction, although there are other units to complement that trademark one. The elvish archer, for instance, really defines or incarnates the rebel faction's feel: a faction with lots of range and especially good in forests. This might seem very obvious, but it might be less so when you design your faction. Let's re-use that angel faction example. Let's say that faction designer made every unit a lawful flying angel but one which, for some reason, is a neutral nightstalking grunt-like, and happens to be the most cost-efficient unit, and about half of what you see on the field is this unit. Now, most people might know better than doing this, but it would still be a major design flaw, imho.
3) Appart from that (I'll rush this a bit because I have to go), other interesting factors to think of to balance your faction is its "average" price and the amount of available recruits. The average price, in fact, is a very bad indicator. For example, northies are considered cheap, because they have the cheapest lv1s (grunt and troll whelp) and a cheap lv0 unit (goblin). The rest of their units, however, is blatantly over priced (on a flawed unit-to-unit comparison). Because of this, their average recruit price is not much lower than the loyalists', but since the core of their troups are very cheap, they feel like they're cheap. It is still interesting to fiddle with how cheap yor faction will feel, and carefully selecting which unit is gonna be cheap and to what extent.
The amount of recruit is also interesting to toy with. In mainline, IIRC, there is no faction with less than 6 recruits. While a factuion with 5 might be viable, it would be really inflexible. Some factions have 7, and the one with the most is the Loys with 8 (more than 8 might be a tad overwhelming). The average would be somewhere around 6,5. Just something to consider when planning how your faction will feel: are your choice restricted, or do you have a wide, flexible arsenal at your disposal?
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
The marked sentence is exagerated, and following it litteraly as a moto is certainly bad, but there is some good in it nevertheless. Defining a few key roles for a faction, according to the tactical situations you may encounter in your era-map-gamesetting microcosm, is in my opinion a good step to follow. For instance, a scout is unavoidable, unless no faction in the era has access to them, or at a ridiculous cost. Or for the sake of variety in gameplay, you will also probably need damage dealers on several ranges, and some sort of artillery if the opponent simply won't budge out of his great defense (unless no faction in the era has a mean to stand its ground). But as you said, it is not compulsory to have every possible tactical advantage available, or follow some stereotypical 1 unit/role & 1 role/unit rule.Dixie wrote:Too often, I have seen some newcomer to faction design come around with his very own genial concept of a faction (tm), and it ends being a very bland faction, because "this faction needs a scout, a melee unit, an archer, a mage, a tank, a healer and a leader".
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
Yes, of course, it was a bit of an exageration, you need a bit of every range and you absolutely need some sort of scout (and water control). However, you don't baoslutely need a mage, you don't absolutely need healing or leadership, you don't absolutely need a dodger and a tank. The lack of something can be as good a factor to define your faction as its presence. Finding ways for a faction to go around the lack of a good tank or a high accuracy unit, for instance, can be interesting and make some other facets of gameplay pop out, making your faction much more interesting to play as/against then if it had that feature.
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
I've made some more edits, but there's still much more to say later. Today I aimed to address the topics you presented and a couple others as well.
I will say, I disagree that you need one unit to represent the whole faction. I wouldn't say that the dwarven fighter represents the whole faction not even just the dwarven half. I do think though that you do need to convey to the player what they are playing to help them figure things out. Unfortunately some people do seem to latch onto the thought that knalgans means dwarves because of that effect and such people frequently have trouble learning how to play knalgans against people who know what they're doing. This is something that probably ought to be avoided if possible but you can design a good faction even if it lacks that one unit that links the whole concept up.
I will say, I disagree that you need one unit to represent the whole faction. I wouldn't say that the dwarven fighter represents the whole faction not even just the dwarven half. I do think though that you do need to convey to the player what they are playing to help them figure things out. Unfortunately some people do seem to latch onto the thought that knalgans means dwarves because of that effect and such people frequently have trouble learning how to play knalgans against people who know what they're doing. This is something that probably ought to be avoided if possible but you can design a good faction even if it lacks that one unit that links the whole concept up.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
Oh god! so much to read! curse my dyslexia!
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
Alright question for any interested parties. After taking a couple days to cool down and looking back over what I've written, I agree that it is a daunting wall of text (and whats more I'm sure I could still come up with quite a bit to say).
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could organize it in such a way that would divide it into more easily digestible bits in such a fashion as would be convenient for readers?
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could organize it in such a way that would divide it into more easily digestible bits in such a fashion as would be convenient for readers?
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
Well I haven't given a lot of thought on what sections might be, if you're meaning you want to seperate your text differently, but an idea might be separating the whole thing in spoilers. Each section sould have its spoiler, so it's easy to scroll to where you were at/the part that interests you/etc. That, and you could make use of section conclusions and a big conclusion at the end. Which would be somewhat of a summary of what the above section/entire wall of text said, more or less (screw the opening some conclusions require you to make). Just so a lazy person can go to the end of a section/text and get the spirit of what you were saying, without te examples and arguments etc. Or as a refresher or something. Eventually, you can lenghten your intro a bit to include a brief presentation of each section. What they are and what you'll be wanting to say more or less in there. And each section could have it's own little intro, to more or less say what said section is gonna talk about, what points (ideally one paragraph per point or something) are gonna be aboarded, etc. It doesn't have to be long, but split the thing up intelligently and coherently. Continually having intros and conclusions might feel like needless repetition and kicking the dead horse, but it really helps give a sense of continuity to your text. It's also great for those who might read the text over multiple sessions or read just a single section at all.
PS: this post is a pretty good example of what not to do
PS: this post is a pretty good example of what not to do
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Current projects: Internet meme Era, The Settlers of Wesnoth
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
All of the scary blocks of text in this thread would be helped by Bold or Large section headers. Scientific journals can be pretty verbose and badly written, but still readable because you know where you are and where to find info you care about because of such formatting. That might be all you need. I don't know if spoilers are necessary. Changing font attributes might be better pasted into HTML or whatever you plan on migrating this to.Velensk wrote:Does anyone have any ideas on how I could organize it in such a way that would divide it into more easily digestible bits in such a fashion as would be convenient for readers?
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
What I've decided to do for now is to use the [section] tag for the obvious and the
Spoiler:
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
It does seem to be a common indulgence to create a faction with extremely overpowered attacks (and possibly abilities) then trying to balance it out with slight hitpoint reduction. I see that Velensk noticed this trend as well. I won't name any factions, but you can probably think of a few.
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Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
I've added another section and a few things to old sections.
I actually hit the character limit before I got around to adding the last section (I remembered that I'd forgotten to include teleport in the abilities to be careful with section). I didn't even know there was a character limit.
I think I need to get around to editing this for clarity/organization soon. Perhaps I can cut out enough characters to fit in that section. I think that after I get around to that I'll have said all I should or more than I reasonably should have.
Can anyone think of sections I am missing or point out sections they think I ought to remove before I get around to that?
I actually hit the character limit before I got around to adding the last section (I remembered that I'd forgotten to include teleport in the abilities to be careful with section). I didn't even know there was a character limit.
I think I need to get around to editing this for clarity/organization soon. Perhaps I can cut out enough characters to fit in that section. I think that after I get around to that I'll have said all I should or more than I reasonably should have.
Can anyone think of sections I am missing or point out sections they think I ought to remove before I get around to that?
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Re: Guide on designing standard factions/eras
I really enjoyed reading this,great work!
P.S. You said nothing about steadfast in special abilities section.
P.S. You said nothing about steadfast in special abilities section.
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Philip II of Macedon:"If I win this war, you will be slaves forever."
The Spartan ephors:"If."
Subsequently, both Philip and Alexander would avoid Sparta entirely.