SPEED UP OR SLOW IT DOWN

[DingerX]

Part of it comes from the training system. You start out playing against a computer, and you start by dropping to 1x whenever you need to do something. In a group, really, there are very few times when you need to drop to 1x. Still, I like playing with that option, and that is the way I prefer to play.

It frustrates some people, and I have no problem playing at 5x, EXCEPT: if you "Force" the option, there's not enough time to place the units in DEFCON 4-5. Those "speed whiners" don't have a viable game they can play -- you either allow 1x, or your force 5x, and lose the initial deployment flexibility.

[Mas Tnega]

Launch (nuclear, naval, avionic) management: 1x
Unit placement: 1x or 5x.
Anything but those: Anything but 1x, seriously.
Nothing whatsoever: 10x/20x, damn it!
Nothing whatsoever and out of worthwhile actions: 20x, for fuck's sake!

[mobius]

So with the players that play at x5 speed , how would you play if the world has its size increased like to 130 or 150, sort of half way between default and bigworld. is playing at 5 speed still justified as it takes longer to move those units. increasing the size makes for a more entertaining game as those enemy subs need to get close to your coast and not launch from the middle of the pasific or atlantic ocean like they do in default mode.

[dawnchorus]

Perhaps it would be nice if there was an option in the advanced setup that allowed every player x minutes at x1 speed, based on whether you're voting for that speed or not. If someone else has it on x1, you can flick yours up to 5 and save a bit of your credit. There are some people who do slow it down to x1 just because they are losing, and this would solve that little annoyance, but when you're co-ordinating an attck it's sometimes useful to let go slower for a bit.

[mobius]

An idea for speed control is that when a player requests a slower speed and let’s says the other players are all sitting at x10, the game should slow down for a preset time and over a short period it would slowly increase back up to x10.
Or let’s say 1 person want x1, two players want x5, and 3 players want x10 then the game would find a happy medium of x6.5.
also in a six player game if three want x5 and three want x1, I would think that the length of time sitting at the slowest speed would be a little longer for the speed to even itself out between the two requested speeds . Does this make any sense to you guys and if so does this sound fair
In every single game that I have been in there are always people requesting others to speed it up to x5 or above. this isn’t people asking to play the game super high speeds, these are people who are getting bored of a player sitting at x1 and not doing anything, so though a single person can dictate the slowest speed I think the game should cater for the majority of the players who want to play at a set speed. I think this idea has potential

with the voting so far it seems that for every player that want to play at a faster setting there are two that are happy at x5. though most are happy with x5 it cant be denied that there are those who like it just that little bit faster. and we should at least them have some influence on a speed,

[Ares106]

this isn’t people asking to play the game super high speeds, these are people who are getting bored of a player sitting at x1 and not doing anything, so though a single person can dictate the slowest speed I think the game should cater for the majority of the players who want to play at a set speed.

As I said before (here: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/defcon ... php?t=3187)
99% of the time players at 1x are not doing "nothing", just because 5 (out of 6) players don't need 1x at a certain time does not mean that the 6th player does not need 1x either.

Not everyone plans/executes their attack at the same time!!!

If every player influences the speed of the game this will mean that Every Player will have a specific set window of slower time (lets say 3-4x averaged) when most of the people in the game want to run it slow (defcon2 or after defcon1 etc..).
So once, certain players, don't need anymore 1-5x they will got to 20x. Therefore the "speed average" will significantly jump up and it will rush the players that desire a lower speed.

One can easily see how this will influence the game, so that everyone is going to Have to launch Early and at the Same Time (in order to take advantage of the slow speed and so that they don't have to do it in a rush later on).
This will dramatically decrease the time required to play a game. But it will also make it quite un-fun and predictable!

[mobius]

i see what your saying but if 1 player was to set it x20 and the other 5 like it at x5 then the increase in speed will me very small and when a player was to set it to x1 the game would enter realtime for a set limit. so the marjority of players at say x5 would dictate the speed of the game only allowing 1 player who want it at x20 a small increase. this i think would be the only way to let everyone have a say in what speed they want the game to play.
and by looking at the poll the majority are happy at x5.

[DueAccident]

Look, the game is perfect as it is, leave it be.

[MoonHill]

An idea for speed control is that when a player requests a slower speed and let’s says the other players are all sitting at x10, the game should slow down for a preset time and over a short period it would slowly increase back up to x10.

While I like this idea, it'd just change the argument from what it is now to one of "There should be LESS PRESET TIME/MORE PRESET TIME".

There wouldn't be much of a functional difference, and slightly different groups of people would be annoyed for much the same reason.


Overall, the current method (just set the flippin' server minimum to 5x) works better than that system would.

[Ares106]

and by looking at the poll the majority are happy at x5.

First off, the poll is flawed, since no one uses only 1x or only 5x or only 10x or only 20x

Also MoonHill is correct! Let’s, for example, take the Ideal time distribution, so that at one point in a game the desired speeds are:

2players=1x 1player=5x 1player=10x 2players=20x

The resulting average is 9.5x !!
Therefore this compromise will neither please the two 1x, one5x or two20x players. In total 5 out of 6!!

(creating something along the lines of Bush’s Stem cell research compromise )

[bert_the_turtle]

I'm perfectly fine with the current system as it stands now, except for the lack of proper time to set up your units in a game with higher minimal speed. An option to set different minimal speeds for different defcon levels would be nice.

On the subject of averaging the speed instead of taking the minimum: I'd say it's a bad idea as it stands (but it can be refined, I'll get to that). Suppose five players want to play realtime speed currently and one player wants to go faster, he really wants 5x. Obviously, setting the speed to 5x won't give him what he wants because it gets averaged away, so he sets the speed to 20x, making the average requested speed 25/6, which is a bit more than 4. So in this situation, the highest speed wish has priority; one player who hates realtime can always dominate the poll and enforce a minimum speed of 4x, no matter what everyone else wants.

One possible refinement fixing this problem would be to take the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic mean. That's a bit harder to grasp (the geometric mean of n values is the nth root of the product of all values), but in the above example, it would give a speed of 1.64. But a different problem remains: the player that wants to speed up is encouraged to pretend he wants to play at 20x even if he would prefer something slower. By lying to the system he can get closer to what he actually wants. What you'd get is that all players that want to have the speed reduced will choose realtime, those who want to go faster choose maximal speed. In between choices just don't make sense. Another problem: With the current system, you can get used to playing at the few speed choices the game offers, get used to the flow in each setting, and develop intuition how to time your commands correctly. Making the speed an average of whatever kind would make many more speeds possible, and you can't individually get used to them all, especially since the speed will change every single time one of the players changes his preference. A small problem of the "Yeah? So? Get used to it, n00b!" kind, I admit.

Luckily, the next refinement solves these problems as well: don't take an average of the speeds, pick the median of the selected speeds. The median is a value that half of the requested speeds are above (or equal) and half are below (or equal). It's the speed where neither a vote to speed it up nor to slow the game down would get a majority. In the above example of five players requesting real time speed, the fifth player could request 1000x speed and still the result would be that the game would choose realtime mode, and only when two of the three slowpokes change their mind speed will increase. With an even number of players, the median sometimes sits in between requested speeds and is one of the odd speeds bashed upon in the previous paragraph; this can be avoided with the following

Proposal:
Sort the requested speeds in ascending order. Pick the kth speed from the list and run the game at that speed. Make k configurable, default to 1.

The default would just match the current behavior which many people seem to agree with. Maybe k should scale with the number of human players in the game instead of being a fixed value.

Another possible twist: take a weighted median. Choose the speed so that half the military strenght on the battlefield would not want to make it go faster and half of it would not like it slower. This would have the effect that players with no military left at all are completely ignored in the speed vote and can't grief by choosing realtime. It would also have the side effect that if the majority is annoyed with the speed choices of a player (mind you that the above proposal is designed to avoid this), they can team up and nuke him to get him out of the speed equation.

On the topic of limiting the amout of time in realtime mode or making the player requesting the slowest time somehow pay for it: I don't think this could work. Imposing a global realtime limit has the opposite effect: if limited reatime is available, I'll take it whenever I can, because if I don't take advantage of it right now, some other player will in a minute. Giving each player individually a finite (maybe recovering, does not matter) amount of time to request slower operation is problematic because once it has been requested and paid for by one player, realtime can be of benefit for everyone. So this would add a fourth wall breaking meta game of "realtime chicken": imagine two players engaged in naval combat, each wanting to slow the game down. However, the first to actually request the slowdown has to pay the price. Who will be the chicken? Yeah, the effect that players would be more careful about requesting slower speeds is there, but immersion is broken heavily. And I don't think these problems can be fixed by refining the system, they look like fundamental flaws to me.

Err, anyway, on the topic of the poll: I miss the "I use realtime when available and of advantage in my current situation." I'd replace the first option with it, add an "all of the above" at the bottom and vote for that Every speed has its time.

[mobius]

Its only a suggestion,
I have been in a few game when 5 of us are sitting at x10 but we all have to play at that demo players speed of x5. im not saying there should be a fundametal change to speeds , all im suggesting is that the option to add such features are placed in the advanced options. if people want to play the default game they can and if a host want to have speed options included then he can.

[LordSturm]

Sorry but to me, that poll is a bit of a recount, it lists in order ( almost ) the scenarios where you would change speeds.
So essentially i can't select one.

[mobius]

It does look like that but to put the question another way, what speed do you like playing at when your units are moving to a destination and your not doing anything else.

[bert_the_turtle]

If "not doing anything else" includes "not even interested in watching my brillant plan unfold in all its glory", then the answer everyone would give, I think, clearly is "as fast as possible". That doesn't help us, of course

On moebius' previous post: If you lobby for my proposition, it gets implemented and you set the k to 2 (reminder, that would mean the second slowest speed wish is the one that gets applied), then the speed would be set to 10x. Or, of course, you could have locked the demo player out from the start or set an even higher minimal speed.

But really, the thing you have to face if you love Defcon is that it has different timescales. I don't mean the speeds you can set, I mean the speeds the various game elements operate at. Fighters are replenished very slowly. Ships move much slower than planes and nukes. In realtime mode, it takes some short activity bursts to initiate and orchestrate a massive bomber attack; the execution may take a full hour (including the time it takes to bring your bombers home and rearm them). Fights between two units are over in secons, while it takes many minutes before you could send reinforcements. Other RTS games are tuned differently. In other games, it takes about the same time to produce a unit as it takes to send it over half of the map, and still it will come in time to turn around a fight that had begun as you ordered the unit's production. Of course, we don't want any of that here, right? If I scramble a bomber from an airbase and it gets attacked by an enemy fighter, I want the bomber to be destroyed even before I can switch the airbaise to launch a fighter, because that way, my actions require planning, which is what a strategy game should be about.

The consequence of this difference is that while in other RTS games, one game speed is good for everything you do, in Defcon it is not. Therefore, different players in different situations desire different game speeds. Who should be the judge when a wish for a slower pace should be denied?