Currently numbers in the game suffer from two problems:
1) Unintuitive
2) No access to all numbers so whole picture cannot be seen.
Let me elaborate.
1) The numbers don't immediately make sence. Armor is the perfect example. What is armor? If I have 2000 armor does that mean its really 200 damage reduction? Or is it 20 damage reduction? There is no way to know, but more importantly even if given a 1 paragraph example with exact formulas I will still say armor numbers suck because if its 200 damage reduction, just make the armor exactly 200 so its easier to interperete.
Why should players:
a) Have to read the manual to understand what the numbers mean (at least a tooltip)
Have to do calculations in their head to even understand the significance of the number shown?
So if armor 2000 = 200 damage reduction make armor 200. If you want decimals use decimals.
2) We don't have access to all the numbers. What damage do towers do? What damage does the rook towers do? Do towers get "link" bonuses? We don't know, we don't have access to that info. More than that what about creeps? We can't rely on anything strategically if we don't know it's value.
3) Accessing numbers is a pain. Why does my health and mana bar not always show the numbers? They do matter especially if making decisions on what ability to use and you don't want to remember approximately how much of your bar is how much mana. Why are the stats of my demigod not immediately shown all the time (and possibly on a better interface). Those numbers are important to know every once in a while. I should not have to go to special screens to see them which block my view.
To summarize:
1) Please make all numbers meaningful. I am not saying revamp armor, this is a different discussion, but I am saying make them intuitive and meaningful.
2) Give us access to all numbers. At least on our team. Better yet on both teams.
3) Numbers need to be more accessible.
I agree!
/signed.
I agree. This would make things better/more accessible.
/signed
1) Armor isn't a straight reduction - it's mitigation percentage. Armor does tell you the precise mitigation value in the tooltip.
2) Just try it out. A creep can take x number of hits from your demigod. You don't need more info than that. The fact that you don't know if your snipe will finish off the enemy now or if you should wait is what's so thrilling about Demigod combat - it's up to you to decide. It's experience that allows you to make the right decision in that situation. Telling players precise numbers eliminates that. You might as well just make the button flash when it's going to be a kill.
3) Mana and Health bars - yes, but only your own. Armor and other values are not shown because they usually only change when you're in the shop - which is when you have time to look at the character screen. Optimally, the interface would be variable so you could simple drag the value you want to observe out of it's window and arrange it on the screen - but that'd require a complete interface rewrite.
1) Tooltip for the real armor bonus is fine. Just a thought: Why use a percentage based damage reduction with some complicated formula? A flat damage reduction can also work great, as shown in StarCraft. 5 armor can take 5 damage off each shot. That makes high armor really mean something and it can make some heroes be awesome tanks against creeps and only really vulnerable to other heroes.
2. No. Nonono. It just sucks. I want to see every number. Just look at DotA - the WarCraft interface is great. I see exact damage and I see exact hitpoints. I know what will happen when I shoot. The only thing that I find bad about the WarCraft interface is that damage is random. StarCraft does it better: Fixed damage values for every unit. Randomness sucks in strategic games.
3. No again. All HP should be visible. Enemy HP of cause only when I select the enemy, but then I want to have numbers. And when not selected I should simply see all health bars (all the time). At least there should be some toggle key for it (like the ALT key in WarCraft / DotA).
In short: MOAR numbers. The more the better. Nobody is hurt by giving the option to display ALL numbers. Make it a toggle if you think it's not essecial but don't take it out completely please.
/agreed
I prefer to use a formula when dealing with armor. The reason is that a person with 95% armor reduction will take half the damage as a person with 90%. So you have to becareful with the damage reduction.
Zorph
1. Because percentages allow for equal effeciveness against high and low damage attacks. 30% armor reduction is quite different than 30 flat reduction when your demigod is hit by both a creep doing 50 and a demigod doing 500 damage.
2. Holy shit no. Your examples are precisely what you need to avoid not copy. Starcraft comes down to math - you can tell who'll win a fight before it even starts by looking at the completely fixed damage/health/armor values. If you know 100% what damage you'll deal and exactly how much health and armor the enemy has you might as well let the AI play. You completely remove the human element. Because you create a situation in which there's a mathematically perfect time for every action - with no room for players to actually show skill.
3. You can see all health bars already. Tilde key. Numbers would ruin it.
I had a big post I wanted to put up but the response is really simple:
1) WTF is 2000 mitigation %? If you know I don't care. It is not immediately obvious and therefore does not belong in the game.
2) Don't have time for this crap. Other than you and a small handful of hardcores nobody will have time either. I play to have fun, I don't play to learn and become a greater person, nor do I play to "work" for information.
3) All stats change on level up. I don't want to memorize everything! Who does? Sure the uber elites will remember every level up base value, but I don't want to obsess over DG to just enjoy it.
Please stay on-topic. If you want to change armor types/debate please start a new thread. This thread is:
1) Make all numbers easier to understand. Less math in your head and immediately obvious what the effects of each number are. Armor is one of those poorly defined numbers.
2) Make numbers easier to access. As in make them easier to get to, at the very least for your character.
3) Make numbers a known factor. If I don't know 1/2 the numbers the other half are useless to me other than "more is good". A more is good is a very hard to control and understand approach.
Also please do not state "but there are workarounds". Workarounds to figure out game mechanics do not belong in a game.
agreed
You didn't even adress a single point. You just wrote the same thing you did before with barely different wording. If you can't grasp the difference between a flat and a percentage armor system "simpler numbers" is the least of your worries. They're two different systems. They are not interchangeable.
One button is too hard to get to for you? You can't display them on the main screen - it would needlessly clutter it up.
Then you mustn't have had much fun with game so far - very few games give the player precise straight up information on their enemy. DnD doesn't just tell you "your enemy has x hp left, saves of y and armor class of z". Shooters don't display the precise amount of armor and health your enemy has over your crosshairs. Many RTSes don't tell you preceisly how much damage your troops will do (nor can they, the damage is usually a range not a fixed value).
Status Bars, Color coding - that's the standard indicator for status in most games. It gives you an overview, but doesn't allow you to just math it out.
I hate to break it to you, but you are obsessing. Quite thouroughly so. If you weren't you wouldn't obsess over what the numbers mean.
Once again think about this a few times over.
1) I never said change armor. I said simplify the numbers. If you want 20% reduction then write 20% reduction not 2000 armor.
2) I never said display everything at once all the time in an obtrusive way. Creativity here. I can see why you are not a game developer, lets keep it that way.
3) I am not obsessing. I am pointing out a flaw in the game. Obviously you do not feel that this is a flaw. Please explain why it is not a flaw and is easily accessible/understood. What does having 2000 armor mean EXACTLY? Please clarify and practically speaking. Also please tell me how much damage a minataur does and how much hp he has if he has 2 levels of armor and weapon upgrades. Also please tell me how much hp is gained by the unclean beast per level, or at least levels 1-5.
If you answer everything from point 3 PLEASE record how much time you spent getting the information, because if it was more than the time it takes to start a new game, look up a few tooltips, write things down, and do a TAD bit of math (calculate how much damage/hp is gained per upgrade vs base specs for minotaurs) then the current system does not work.
1) 2000 Armor has far more levels of gradients than 20%. That's why you can't just make it "+20% armor".
2) Okay, then let's hear your solution. I'm really wondering what wonderful dimension you'll put it at that is inbetween "on the main screen" and "one click away". Because right now it is one click away.
3) Wanting to know those precise numbers is obsessing. They're not necessary to win or even enjoy the game. How much hp is gained by the unclean beast? If you're playing as it, all you need to do is press one button to see it. How much damage does a mintaur do? It doesn't matter - you can't control him anyway, nor does one have any value. What does 2000 armor mean exactly? The answer is one click away.
The current system works fine.
1) 2000 armor = 20% damage reduction means that you can use 2 decimal places if necessary. People deal better with 20.00% or 20.50% than 2050 armor. 20.50% is immediately understood and easily interpereted. Actually what am I thinking... Why the hell do you need percision beyond 1%? You armor is 5% or 10%, who the hell cares about fractions of a percentage in damage reduction. It is all useless information anyways. Hide it, if you dont want to lose it then hide it, its all worthless. .50% is not going to make or break anything. Just make it 20% armor instead of 2000 armor with no decimal places.
2) My solution is perhapse a slide-out non obtrusive way to get stats. Or when you click on a unit to stats about it appear in a designated area on the screen. Do not block the entire screen. I am not designing this game so I will not give it much more thought. When GPG starts paying me for designing then I will really think of wonderful solutions, for now I will stick to writing observations and hoping the developers will improve based on that.
3) If you want an FPS game where approximations are enough, fine. This is more of a game with RTS and Strategy mixed in. They can always leave it as an approximation since you don't control but the fact is YOU DO CARE ABOUT THE NUMBERS. Sure level 1 vs level 5 damage has a difference, but what sort of difference? Is level 5 damage actually going to matter in the long run or is it generally a waste of cash? There is lots of cash to spend on this stuff. If I knew what the actual numbers were: +50% damage to a 1-20 damage unit makes it a 1.5-30 damage unit, and in current DG terms that is completely useless. Where +50% damage to a 200 damage unit makes it 300 damage, same ratio but the usefulness is actually there now. In DG 20 or 30 damage is like choosing between shit and crap.
So you have not answered my number 3 question. Thanks for proving my point. Remember you claimed all that information was obtainable.
To paraphrase you:
When you start paying me for giving you the numbers then I will write them down.
Although I am not a fan of cold-hard numbers as it simply makes the person who has the best memory and ability to quick calculations win, I think it would be beneficial to have some kind of "balance" mode (a execution flag perhaps?) in the beta period where people can activate and see a much larger wealth of information. This would help people figure out what is unbalanced through some number crunching.
PS: I wanted to note that games wich have little randomness and all information available also have the greatest degree of balance (ie starcraft). I guess this is because number crunching players can make solid arguments backed with numbers to prove if any unit is unbalanced.
I like it! In any case my point was how time consuming it is. This should have been a 5 minute task and you would have "stuck it to me" but it is not, it is a time-consuming, annoying task.
I forgot to mention how FLAG information is not accessible. We know experience flag gives us experience bonuses, but how much? 1%? 2%? Because 1% exp bonuses is not worth fighing for (except gaining exp for capturing, at which point I'd rather let the enemy hold it and not have the ability to re-capture).
Please add the number of what flags actually do.
One thing to note about hard numbers is, games are never won by numbers alone. Look at Warcraft 3 or Starcraft. Just because you have 8 archers vs 8 archers except one side has less upgrades does not mean the bigger numbers win. The smaller numbered player can be aware that their micro management can compensate for lower numbers and thus use his skill to allow himself to spend the upgrade money elsewhere and still win. However the lower numbered player can be aware of just how much of a disadvantage he has due to the numbers and know when to upgrade.
Better numbers means we can criticize the game better exactly as db0 pointed out, as well as being able to strategize better.
Something REALLY nice would be a number that is a calculation of a unit's average DPS. Taking attack speed and max/min damage into account.
What I'd like to add is that if you give enough number information with which people who have the best mathematical skill have an advantage you should then make the acting of that information easy for those who don't have this skill. This is the actuall "Red button for the kill" feature. If someone who can do quick calculations in his head can see this "red button" then it should be visible for everyone to make it fair and indipendent of external random abilities.
It's obvious that we can't prevent all player abilities like this but we should minimize them as much as possible so as to make the player balance dependent on skill and experience rather than lucky genetic bonuses
/agree
However not full information. Mix AI & Human element, an in-between of SC and current system. Use of simple tooltips and/or clarification somewhere.
While your sentiment is good, your ideas are bad. A quick access character sheet would be nice, changing the armor system is pointless (and it is this way for a reason.) All you need is the game to work out the percentage for you and make it easy to see. Throwing numbers in the players health bar and mana bar are good and easy. Throw numbers over every creeps health bar would be stupid and just a bunch of flak that gets in the way.
It's true that throwing numbers over every creep health bar would clutter up the screen. However, I think that being able to see the stats on the various creeps would be good for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the existance of the Generals. They command their own squads which they buy with gold - gold that might be better spent elsewhere. Right now all we've got to go on is "Minotaur captains are better than Minotaur Berzerkers". How much better? Worth the extra 500? Do they hit harder? Faster? Do they have more health? :/ I just don't know. In addition - unless there's something I'm missing, being able to gauge what upgrades have been given to your creeps without having to return to your home base, or being able to figure out how enemy creeps have been upgraded, is only a good thing.
In most RTSs you can see at least your enemy unit's stats, and you certainly don't control those. Right now we can't even see the enemy's HP in any form beyond colored bars - which can be fine, if you're going for an organic-feeling game, but which raises the question of why exactly we are told how much damage a demigod does if we have nothing to gauge it by besides whether or not the target is dead. It feels like the game begrudges us the numbers we could use to make sense of it, which makes it almost painfully opaque at points.
Please don't misunderstand - I'm all for a smooth organic game, but not at the expense of playability without having to go through twenty matches of trial-and-error. For example: I'm in the field. I want to know if upgrading my creeps' durability will allow them to survive an extra hit from that Rook player over there who's one-shotting anaything that stepped out of a portal. I know how much damage he does - the large floating numbers told me. I've got a teleport scroll burning a hole in my pocket, and five seconds until he's in my face with that hammer of his. One way or another I'm going back to my base, but I want to be able to know if I need to go now or if it can afford to wait until I get rook'd, and I need to know if I should spend the money on upgrading my team's war effort or getting myself an attack speed boost, or armor or what. Numbers help a lot with that.
Right now I don't think there's even a model difference between a level 1 minotaur and a fully upgraded level 10 - I know you'll never see both on the map at the same time, but being able to see that the opposition has put all its gold into armories would help cover for the fact that you will have no idea what upgrades they have unless you go out and start experimenting on a wave of their minotaurs.
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