ROW Vets: Deliberately Unbalanced Scenarios

[Treeburst155]

Do you enjoy playing the underdog side in such scenarios?

Do you enjoy beginning a game without knowing whether you face a superior force, an inferior one, or a close matchup?

Inquiring tourney managers want to know.

Treeburst155 out.

[Ali]

Hi!

I don't mind being underdog and I like the fact that you can't be sure what you are up against.

If you know the strenght (points used) of your enemy, IMHO you can calculate too much. Risks aren't really risks anymore, coz you have some clue how many points your enemy has 'left'.

I like the current system

I don't like 'wet' ground conditions and night fights. Too much random involved...hmm..wait a minute...maybe that's why I always do well in those scenarios

Cheers,

Ali

[The_Capt]

Absolutely!!

I enjoy getting what is there and making the most of it.

I find underdog scenarios the most challenging and make me play better in fact. These are the real point grabbers in tourneys, I find that if you can break even on most and grab one or two wins where you weren't suppose to you do well.

I find them frustrating at time but still fun. They also force one to decide when it is time to throw in the towel. If you are doing an unbalanced attack, rather that throwing your troops into action when they have little chance, you have to decide whether the point you've got are enough.

I vote to keep em coming in future tourneys.

[Holien]

Hmmm A tough question...

I think unbalanced games might encourage players to play safe.

This will then have a negative effect.

Lets take "Another Day". Once I realised I was up against Tigers I should have pulled my horns in.

This would have resulted in quite an boring game.

I play games to have an equal chance and to have fun.

I don't play games to have my hide spanked (through no fault of mine) or to spank some one elses hide because the designer made it that way.

I hear all the arguments for, but given the choice I would hope the designer tries and makes it as balanced as they can.

Imbalance will happen naturally, so strive for balance knowing that it will never be achieved.

To strive for imbalance will make the game not fun for one side.

IMO.

H

[Enoch]

I wasn't in the last version of RoW but I can say that the imbalanced scenerios in the first RoW were a lot of fun. I agree with The_Capt that this is a place where players can pick up a lot of points. I know Wreck did a number on us all in RoW I and picked some big points in scenerios where he had the underdog side.

I enjoy being given a desperate situation and trying to make do. Even if I lose, if I did better than expected I feel a sense of accomplishment. It is also quite interesting when you don't know you are up against it. Things may be going along swimmingly and then the s**t hits the fan.

[CombinedArms]

This is an interesting question. The Nabla system works really well to remove the onus on a tourney director to create scenarios that are perfectly balanced. A scenario can be constructed to be deliberately slightly imbalanced (cf. "Fire on the Mountain") and still be playable w/in a tourney. And if a scenario just happens to turn out imbalanced, that's OK, too, because the Nabla system corrects for that.

I think all of the above is OK. But the question then becomes: should we encourage scenarios in a tourney that are deliberately designed to be extremely imbalanced--one's where one side can't possibly win and can at best struggle to a achieve a less severe loss. There were a few scenarios of this type in the Nordic (and Nordic Wannabes) Tourney. I have to say that I find these possibly a bit less fun--maybe at most one of these in a tourney is enough (for example, the one where the Allies had to try to escape from an overwhelming attack with a large a force as possible was interesting, but that one might have been enough.)

To put it another way, the scenarios in ROW I and ROW II were all within a good range of balance. I thought there was a bit too much imbalance built into some of the Nordic scenarios and would prefer to maintain the ROW I & II frame of reference in the future.

Just my opinion.

[ October 28, 2002, 04:51 PM: Message edited by: CombinedArms ]

[Vadr]

Do you enjoy playing the underdog side in such scenarios?

Yes

Do you enjoy beginning a game without knowing whether you face a superior force, an inferior one, or a close matchup?

Yes, very much so.

With this cool and innovative scoring system, it really doesn't matter that the scenarios are unbalanced, and it certainly adds a lot of spice to the matchups. I haven't had to withdraw off of the map in a tourney game yet, but I sure have thought about it once or twice. This mirrors Real Life a whole lot better than the "fight to the last man" outcome.

This is my first RoW, but I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the scenarios except one(which I sent you an AAR about). That's true no matter what the force balance was/is.

[Treeburst155]

Very interesting....the degree of imbalance may be the real issue here. Thanks guys!

I want to hear from more of you on this, please.

Treeburst155 out.

[White4]

I personally love being out-numbered and on the defense- however, I dislike attack scenarios where the defender outnumbers the attacker, that just seems to me to be a waste of time.

[Scott B]

Believe it or not, most of the scenarios submitted for RoWII were designed with the intent of being at least loosely balanced. One great irony of the tournament was that in correcting my deliberately unbalanced "Head for the Hills," I inadvertantly ended up submitting the scenario that actually had the most balanced results, at least based on the numbers.

The designers are given something of a free hand in their RoW battles because we know that while we want people to enjoy their scenarios (and admittedly, different designers have different perceptions of what people enjoy), we have a chance to be daring and create interesting battles for these tournaments. Fire on the Mountain comes to mind as a good example. I'm not sure it's possible to know how balanced a scenario like that is, given the many different ways it can be played out.

Anyway, the idea on our side is we'd like them to be close, but we don't stress about getting them too close; to some extent the uncertainty about playing a scenario that *could* be deliberately unbalanced should play in every battle. Instead of focusing on whether that one extra infantry platoon tips the balance, we can concentrate on making scenarios that will be unique and memorable for the tournament.

Anyway, I guess I'd make the (probably artificial) distinction between unbalanced and lopsided. I agree that scenarios should not be submitted that would be not fun for one player or the other due to balance (or any other reason for that matter). Player feedback can help the designers learn from when this sort of thing does happen, so that it can be avoided in future tournaments - although I certainly hope it has been kept at a minimal level thus far anyway.

Again, RoW players' feedback is hugely useful to us, and I have certainly learned a lot myself about designing scenarios specifically for this crowd. I think that CMBB has a lot to offer us in the future, and specifically in this area at that.

Scott

[kevinkins]

I have to say the AARs were very useful to me and

made the time spent designing the my battle even more enjoyable. In fact, when faced with a design decision for the upcoming CMBB - Stalingrad, I thought back to those AARs posted in the Scenario Talk forum. They are that valuable.

I think the scoring system is the way to go.

It has many benefits as listed above.

- Kevin

[Treeburst155]

Originally posted by White4:

I personally love being out-numbered and on the defense- however, I dislike attack scenarios where the defender outnumbers the attacker, that just seems to me to be a waste of time.

I take this as another way of saying that too much imbalance is not a good thing.

_________________________________________

I brought up this balance issue because none of the ROW II scenarios were way out of balance. Even the 40-60 "Fire On The Mountain" isn't what I would call extremely unbalanced. The Nordic Championship vets and the Nordic Wannabee vets know about extremely lopsided scenarios.

From this small sampling of ROW vets it appears that most like things the way they are now, with no EXTREMELY unbalanced scenarios. The problem is, players may begin to take for granted that the scenarios will not be way out of balance. I'm going to throw in some uncertainty.

Boots & Tracks have my blessing if they decide to throw in a WILDLY unbalanced scenario in any future tourney. This fact will be added to the tourney manual for ROW III. If they choose not to, that's fine too. They're the designers, and the ROW tourneys belong to Boots & Tracks now anyway. I work for them.

This way you guys will never really know what you're up against. Nothing can be taken for granted. Chances are that any given scenario will be reasonably balanced in the interest of fun for both players; BUT, you can never be sure. Your company may be assaulting a dug in battalion someday. Would Boots & Tracks do that to you? I really don't know. I just know I won't discourage them from doing it, nor will I encourage them. You just never know about some things, eh?

Treeburst155 out.

[Juha Ahoniemi]

Current format is fine. It gives You a touch of reality, You cannot usually know in real life combat exactly what You are up against. I vote for the current system. I've had fun with it.

-Juha

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Originally posted by Holien:

Hmmm A tough question...

I think unbalanced games might encourage players to play safe.

This will then have a negative effect.

Lets take "Another Day". Once I realised I was up against Tigers I should have pulled my horns in.

This would have resulted in quite an boring game.

I play games to have an equal chance and to have fun.

...SNIP...

Jeez H. You didn't need a bleedin' PhD to work out there were going to be Tigers in that scenario... it was originally called "Tiger Woods" you know.

Onto the balancing thing. I also quite enjoy unbalanced scenarios, especially if you're the defender trying to hold out against all odds as there is a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that you achieved good results in that situation when compared against your peers.

What I'm not a big fan of is where scenario's have very limited visibility with relatively few units because luck can play such an important part in such circumstances. A lucky break can put your guys in an ideal position to execute an ambush by simply guessing right and virtually win the game there and then whereas conversely, the opponent may just get the drop on your guys for whatever reason & once again, the game is pretty much decided more by luck than skill necessarily. I felt that was particularly the case in the Nordic Wannabee tournament game Meeting of Devils where it seemed my troops would pop up at opportune times to gun down my opponents more through good luck of initial placement rather than good game play.

On top of this, with severely restricted visibility, strange things often happen like devastating friendly fire from your own troops due to some enemy bozo rushing into confined cover when fired at & thereby causing an almighty conflagration between friendly troops in the same restricted cover where all thats left at the end of the turn is 1 or 2 guys from your previously full strength squads. That can be extremely annoying and tends to only occur in very restricted visibilty style night games.

Apart from the above quibble I really enjoy these ROW scenarios and certainly am not adverse to lopsided contests (provided they are lopsided against the defender IMHO).

Regards

Jim R.

[Nabla]

Hello everyone!

The initial motivation for the development of the scoring system was to add another level of suspense into the game. I love the game, even with balanced scenarios, but I felt that knowing that you faced a balanced situation made it a bit boring. You knew too much about what to expect. Especially after knocking out a couple of really important enemy assets, you knew that you could rule the battlefield.

With (possibly) unbalanced scenarios this is not the case. First of all, you can have a lot of those 60-40 games, where the balance is "slightly" (difficult to define) in favor of one side. Therefore, at the beginning of a game the default can be that the situation is unbalanced. Second, if you know that there is a real chance that the scenario designers have made an extremely unbalanced game, you have to be constantly on your toes. There's a real chance that you might be hit by a ton of bricks, at any point in a scenario.

It is also true that the scoring system facilitates the work of scenario designers. No longer do they have to worship the god of balance, which in a tournament would strike upon them with fury in the form of feedback whenever balance had not been achieved. And hopefully this can be experienced by the players by having more and better scenarios, because time can be invested in other things than achieving a perfect balance. This is of course a very nice thing.

However, after some recent discussions with TB155 I was a bit worried that the initial motivation, my mission , might be lost in the process. This is why I urged TB155 to start a discussion with the B&T team about how the suspense would be retained.

The solution is here:

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

From this small sampling of ROW vets it appears that most like things the way they are now, with no EXTREMELY unbalanced scenarios. The problem is, players may begin to take for granted that the scenarios will not be way out of balance. I'm going to throw in some uncertainty.

Boots & Tracks have my blessing if they decide to throw in a WILDLY unbalanced scenario in any future tourney. This fact will be added to the tourney manual for ROW III.

[snip]

This way you guys will never really know what you're up against. Nothing can be taken for granted. Chances are that any given scenario will be reasonably balanced in the interest of fun for both players; BUT, you can never be sure. Your company may be assaulting a dug in battalion someday.

This is basically all that is needed at this point. The B&T team do not have to state any probabilities, the don't even have to reply to TB155's message. All that is needed is that the players know there is a real chance of a lopsided scenario.

There is one more detail. Now the suspense is there, but to keep the threat real, every once in a while that ton of bricks, or half a ton, has to be dropped. This can not be avoided.

I'm sure you'll have some nail-biting tournaments in the near future.

[ October 29, 2002, 03:53 AM: Message edited by: Nabla ]

[Holien]

KR, Yep you have me on that one.

If you ignore the fact of my typo and take my meaning, what I am trying to communicate is that this could make for more boring games.

In two games where I have been stung I should have taken a more reserved approach. Now will I have learnt my lesson for the next tourney?

I doubt it.

But if I do it will make for boring game play. IMO.

Anyway, I think the approach being taken in trying for balance but leaving the door open for something special is absolutely fine.

The games designed must above all be fun and interesting and provide a challange to skill and ability.

Give players an interesting situation, which allows the players to make informed decisions (well as informed as possible) and the ability to use their skill in battle.

Night games are difficult as it can be down to luck. The previous night game in ROW I was on the right side of the design line as it had enough units and possibility to allow for small errors to be rectified.

However, if there had been say a platoon or smaller numbers then luck can play a bigger part.

Lets say you design a game where a platoon attacks a battalion. That would be about as fun as watching paint dry as you are walking into a situation where you will be wiped out so quickly that you will lose the will to play.

Or if you realise that it is a set-up you will sit back and defend. Now if the briefing is such that the pesudo defender is told to defend the game could be pretty boring.

Defender "Why are you not attacking"

Attacker "Sod off this is a set-up"

Defender "How do I know that it is not a set-up against me?"

Attacker "Honest, trust me it is a set-up against me"

The remit should be interesting situations where both sides have chance to use their skill to control the situation. Balance should be aimed for knowing that, that will provide better game play.

H

[Nabla]

Originally posted by Holien:

Anyway, I think the approach being taken in trying for balance but leaving the door open for something special is absolutely fine.

The games designed must above all be fun and interesting and provide a challange to skill and ability.

Give players an interesting situation, which allows the players to make informed decisions (well as informed as possible) and the ability to use their skill in battle.

Holien,

The design of wildly unbalanced games is very difficult, especially because there are some features in the current game engine which fit balanced games perfectly, but complicate successful design of unbalanced games. In the Nordic Championships (and Nordic Wannabe) tournament I had to triple check the logic behind the more unbalanced scenarios. This is because in most real situations, you would be expected to take a hike if your forces are greatly inferior to those of your opponent.

The current engine makes the situation worse because exit of a unit off the map can only be bad (normal scenarios) or good (exit conditions), never neutral. Therefore you can't leave it to the player to decide whether he should retreat from the map. This is a really big problem. I've tried to discuss this with BTS, but wasn't able to convince them to add a flag for neutral exit in scenarios. I'll try this again for the engine rewrite. However, I was able to convince them to not show the exit zone to the opponent. This helps things a bit.

(BTW, could someone confirm that in the final version the exit zones are no longer visible to the opponent. I still haven't got the final version - my first copy disappeared, and a repost is on its way.)

[ October 29, 2002, 05:56 AM: Message edited by: Nabla ]

[Holien]

Hi Nabla,

I guess that kinda of answers the question in that unbalanced games will happen naturally and trying to design them balanced should ensure that there is enough imbalance to satisfy the player.

Yep create interesting situations and interesting force balances. As a designer you will be trying to create a playable situation and that will move the scenario in a certain direction which while not perfectly balanced will allow each side some scope of action to achieve their aims.

The recent Gumball Rally scenario does a great job of posing the players with some interesting choices. I am not sure if it is balanced, but even if it was not, it offered enough choices to the players to use their game skills.

I hope they (BTS) listen to your requests as this is where the playability of the game can be greatly enhanced. The more interesting scenarios that can be designed, the more replay you get from the game.

I would never have believed that I would still be playing consistently the same bit of software for well over two years.

I have only bought one other game during this period and it was CMBB. I am also lucky that I have two CD's so I don't have to swap discs.

H

[Ari Maenpaa]

Well I'm all for the deliberately unbalanced scenarios. Those really breathe new life and realism into the matches. Playing the underdog side can be enjoyable as long as even some choices are left to the player. I hope the mentioned change concerning unit exiting in CMBB's game mechanics doesn't thrash that.

Frankly speaking I wasn't too happy to read that Boots & Tracks scenarios were ultimately intended for balanced two player play. In balanced scanerios too much can be concluded from too little. It's too easy to know when the game is over. Not realistic and boring.

Keep the deliberately unbalanced "Nabla-scenarios" in the tournaments. Thank You.

Ari

[Scott B]

Originally posted by Ari Maenpaa:

Frankly speaking I wasn't too happy to read that Boots & Tracks scenarios were ultimately intended for balanced two player play. In balanced scanerios too much can be concluded from too little. It's too easy to know when the game is over. Not realistic and boring.

Oops - sorry to give that impression in my above post. Some of them were, and some of them were not; the ones that were "ultimately intended for balanced two player play" were the ones that I was referring to; that is to say that they weren't precisely balanced for two players, even though they would eventually be released for that purpose.

Again, as an example, I can say that Head for the Hills was intended for release after the tournament originally as vs AI only. Since the results were much closer than I expected, I made a few tweaks and will be releasing a two player version as well as a single player version as originally intended. I'm sure there's a similar story behind the other scenarios as well. If I'm not mistaken (guys, correct me here if I'm wrong), Another Day was designed for Allied vs AI play; Fire on the Mountain, Polish Push, and Ste Mere Eglise were designed for eventual release as two player "balanced" scenarios, but only after being tweaked after viewing tourney results.

Anyway, the point of my post is to say that we like making unbalanced scenarios for the tournaments, so we would certainly prefer that they remain in.

Does that make more sense? I'm sorry I was unclear above.

Scott

[Ari Maenpaa]

Thanks for your reply, Scott B.

I must also explain some things.

Firstly I'm not exactly a ROW vet. I participated in the Nordic Tourney and became familiar with the deliberately unbalanced scenario concept. I liked it very much. Naturally I have played lots of balanced scenarios too and read the ROWII AARs in scenario forum.

Secondly, originally I got the idea of balanced B&T scenarios from some pre-RoWII thread. After playing the Nordic scenarios it sounded a bit sad. I always considered the unbalanced scenario concept (with the Nabla scoring system) as one of the best innovations in CM tournament play.

Thirdly, because this is some kind of a straw poll, which will probably affect the scenario concept for the next RoW, my loud vote goes to scenarios which may potentially be even radically unbalanced. That gives some realistic uncertainty to the players.

I have no disrespect for B&T's great work, but a little hope that it could evolve even more to the unbalanced direction in the future

regards,

Ari

[WineCape]

All RoW participants and future RoW tourney players, please note the following:

ALL WINES SEND AS RoW PRIZES WILL BE BALANCED as per SUN, SOIL AND MAN!

Sincerely,

Charl Theron

[Scott B]

Originally posted by Ari Maenpaa:

Thanks for your reply, Scott B.

I must also explain some things.

Now I understand - thanks!

We'll see what we can do.

Scott

[Ari Maenpaa]

Originally posted by WineCape:

ALL WINES SEND AS RoW PRIZES WILL BE BALANCED as per SUN, SOIL AND MAN!

Yes, luckily I can attest that

Great stuff!

Better to play well.

Ari

[Treeburst155]

Holien,

"Another Day" really wasn't very out of balance. Medians were 47.5 and 52.5 after 36 games.

_______________________________________________

I would never discuss my thoughts on a scenario's balance midgame with my opponent. Take, for example, an assault against a superior defender. The most I would do is let him know I've called for a ceasefire, and I'd think long and hard before informing him of even that fact. This gives him three choices: come get me, ceasefire himself, or rapidly exchange files. There is no boredom here because he either goes on the offensive (action), or my time investment in the game is miniscule from that point on. It takes nothing to hit Go and send a file, and if he hits ceasefire himself, the game is over.

Does the lack of violent, chaotic firefights in one scenario really constitute boredom in the context of a five game tourney? The one hopelessly outnumbered assault may be uneventful, but the very fact it was in the tourney adds to the uncertainty and tension of the other four games.

The lopsided assault is quickly dispatched with minimum time investment, once the underdog attacker realizes his situation; UNLESS the defender determines he has overwhelming odds, and comes out of his foxholes to get more points. That's why I would never inform my opponent that I thought he had a much superior force. Let him figure that out for himself if he can.

The defender may think himself bored with a non-attacking attacker; but he would be wrong to be bored. He should be thinking, "Wow, the game's half over and he's only probed a little. Maybe he doesn't have much to work with. Maybe I should go out there and hunt him down. I wonder if he already hit Ceasefire? If I don't try for more points, and others in my situation do, I could end up below median. Hmmmm."

In the above scenario there is little action; but the mind is still engaged.

Treeburst155 out.

[ October 29, 2002, 03:49 PM: Message edited by: Treeburst155 ]