Another nice feature of a completely new cap system means the tactical freedom of what to cap. As boundaries of maps can be completely changed.
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New Capture system.
- Thread starter Zetsumei
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This looks pretty interesting. I think the RO cap system could use some improvement/overhauling. EPIC BUMPAGE!Here's what I would like to see;
- Objective areas are large with a sphere of influence that gets stronger towards the central area.
- As players get closer to the center of the objective their worth in the capzone increases. This prevents players from stacking on the edges because it will take 4 of them to offset 1 enemy in the center. It also can be used to concentrate the fighting on a certain location while still allowing players on the outskirts to know the status of the objective.
- Longer capture times. Each objective is an intense tug of war as players actually have the time to call for help or try to locate the enemy.
- Capture meter does not visually change when individuals enter the cap zone. The meter simply shows the colour of the current side that has the objective.
- Capture meter only changes when one side has advantage and is actually capping.
- To tell the players how they are influencing the capping process a simple opacity change in the capture meter could be used. When the player first enters the zone the meter appears and slowly becomes more opaque as he nears the central area.
I think a system like this would allow for players to sneak into an objective without the defenders noticing while still showing them all the necessary information once one side starts to actually start the capture.
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The issue with that exact system is that even though the edges become less instantaneous. To really cap everybody will still need to be in the high rated cap zone. Especially if there is a small section that is easy to defend people will all cluster in the high rated part of the capzone.
Which is why I personally think that an area based cap system is the best solution. Here a TL;DR picture summary what i mean with an area based cap system. Guppy's idea of making some capzone sections worth more than others could still be applied.
So basically this is the map.
There are now some soldiers in the map.
The rooms closest to red soldiers becomes red property the rooms closest to blue soldiers becomes blue property. You can see that even though blue and red have an equal amount of soldiers red controls more of the area.
If say 80% of the capzone is controlled by a team then the capzone becomes capped by that team. Some rooms could made worth more than other rooms still as by guppy's suggestion.
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Advantages of said system:
Passages that connect to a lot of rooms become important (think hallways or staircases, crossroads and bridges). As if you control the passageway you automatically control all locations closest to the passageway. Just like in real life
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The entirety of the cap zone becomes important to try and hold, its no longer just about having more people in the cap zone but actually about conquering the most ground.
Which is why I personally think that an area based cap system is the best solution. Here a TL;DR picture summary what i mean with an area based cap system. Guppy's idea of making some capzone sections worth more than others could still be applied.
So basically this is the map.
There are now some soldiers in the map.
The rooms closest to red soldiers becomes red property the rooms closest to blue soldiers becomes blue property. You can see that even though blue and red have an equal amount of soldiers red controls more of the area.
If say 80% of the capzone is controlled by a team then the capzone becomes capped by that team. Some rooms could made worth more than other rooms still as by guppy's suggestion.
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Advantages of said system:
Passages that connect to a lot of rooms become important (think hallways or staircases, crossroads and bridges). As if you control the passageway you automatically control all locations closest to the passageway. Just like in real life
.The entirety of the cap zone becomes important to try and hold, its no longer just about having more people in the cap zone but actually about conquering the most ground.
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All these ideas are nice and I agree, it's annoying with the current system to see that there's someone in the cap zone, you comb the entire house inside coming up with nothing, and at the last second before the enemy reinforcements storm the building you notice this one guy, prone, in a corner, inside a bush, outside the building, with his pinky on the cap-area.. heck, I can imagine him having the trollface on when he sees that you notice him and goes "problems, comrade?" arrrh.. the idea of having multiple areas inside the cap-area that have different boosts when it comes to capping (1x, 0.75x, 0.5x and so on) is interesting, but could end up with 3 germans sitting in the 1x area, effectively mowing down the guys trying to get in from the 0.35x area with 8 guys or so in order to cap it.. a dynamic battleline sort of thing that Zetsu does have it's problems, but seems rather interesting.. on bigger maps, seeing something like a dynamic frontline that shifts depending on the actions taken by the players and effecting your area of spawn could be amazing if implemented correctly. Because I'm a moron with no imagination I can't come up with a suggestion of my own, but I give thumbs up for both main ideas that have been brought up in this discussion.
Good day.
Good day.
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It does have its difficulties as for instance if you need 100% of the zone before capturing as realistically nobody would ever get the cap zone. But the base suggestion is have cap based on controlling a bigger area than the enemy rather than pushing more enemies in.
There are loads of small additions and tweaks that can be added to a system such as that.
There are loads of small additions and tweaks that can be added to a system such as that.
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I really like this idea, the best part is, that in theory mappers could do this using any arbitrary map they wanted.
Lets say you had a capzone brush (or set of brushes) that covered the whole zone in question, then you could let the mapper add sub brushes to that capzone that had different weights, that way if a team has players in critical positions the cap will not go unless the other team is able to get an absurd amount of players in the less important areas. Similarly on maps where one team attacks and another defends (ie not back and forth) the weights could be completely different for the same space, eg a mg position for one team would have a strong defensive cap bonus but no offensive cap bonus.
Working out the best way to model this a bit more tricky, but it amounts to converting a continuous "importance" map to the capzone and then adjusting the contribution of each player based on the "weight" of their position. So for example if there are 5 guys behind a wall that is getting hammered by a machinegunner their contribution should be just about zero whereas the machinegunner should have a contriution of 5 or something like that. Of course you wouldnt want it to work that way because it would massively constrain level design and you couldnt account for all the situations that might crop up.
Zets idea seems a bit easier to model since all you have to do is compute the relative density of the players on opposing teams. The easiest way to compute something like that would probably be to have a table of the distances between teammates in the same capzone (so if you had 5 players you would have (5-1)! distances) and then you just take their average. Unfortunately if you had 32 players in the same capzone you would have 31! distances :x. I think a minimum distance graph might work, so if you have 5 players in a capzone you pick one of them and you find the distance to the closest teammate, and then you find the next closest to that player among the remaining three, etc. Even if you compute a minimum distance graph starting at each player you would still only have (n-1)^2 distances to worry about instead of (n-1)!, you could then take the mean of all the graphs and divide by the number of players and in theory you should get a number that can be used to calculate the relative density of the two teams. If you're lazy you could compute just one graph per team and only need to worry about measuring 64 distances worst case. Of course the time resolution over which you computed that density would also be important, but if you have a very slow cap timer then even once a second or every two seconds plus a recompute whenever someone entered or left (aka died) the capzone it probably wouldnt be too too taxing.
TLDR: I agree. The sum of the minimum distances between teammates divided by the number of teammates could give you a pretty good estimate of how spread out players were in a capzone and could be computed rather quickly.
Lets say you had a capzone brush (or set of brushes) that covered the whole zone in question, then you could let the mapper add sub brushes to that capzone that had different weights, that way if a team has players in critical positions the cap will not go unless the other team is able to get an absurd amount of players in the less important areas. Similarly on maps where one team attacks and another defends (ie not back and forth) the weights could be completely different for the same space, eg a mg position for one team would have a strong defensive cap bonus but no offensive cap bonus.
Working out the best way to model this a bit more tricky, but it amounts to converting a continuous "importance" map to the capzone and then adjusting the contribution of each player based on the "weight" of their position. So for example if there are 5 guys behind a wall that is getting hammered by a machinegunner their contribution should be just about zero whereas the machinegunner should have a contriution of 5 or something like that. Of course you wouldnt want it to work that way because it would massively constrain level design and you couldnt account for all the situations that might crop up.
Zets idea seems a bit easier to model since all you have to do is compute the relative density of the players on opposing teams. The easiest way to compute something like that would probably be to have a table of the distances between teammates in the same capzone (so if you had 5 players you would have (5-1)! distances) and then you just take their average. Unfortunately if you had 32 players in the same capzone you would have 31! distances :x. I think a minimum distance graph might work, so if you have 5 players in a capzone you pick one of them and you find the distance to the closest teammate, and then you find the next closest to that player among the remaining three, etc. Even if you compute a minimum distance graph starting at each player you would still only have (n-1)^2 distances to worry about instead of (n-1)!, you could then take the mean of all the graphs and divide by the number of players and in theory you should get a number that can be used to calculate the relative density of the two teams. If you're lazy you could compute just one graph per team and only need to worry about measuring 64 distances worst case. Of course the time resolution over which you computed that density would also be important, but if you have a very slow cap timer then even once a second or every two seconds plus a recompute whenever someone entered or left (aka died) the capzone it probably wouldnt be too too taxing.
TLDR: I agree. The sum of the minimum distances between teammates divided by the number of teammates could give you a pretty good estimate of how spread out players were in a capzone and could be computed rather quickly.
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The easiest way to compute it is probably using lookup tables i think.
Imagine there is a capzone with 4 sections defined by the mapper.
The lookup table contains the shortest walking distance from walking from one room to the other . So the shortest distance to walk from room 2 to room 4 is for instance 35 meters. This lookup table would be created during the mapping procedure, preferably automatic.
Now you have 2 soldiers, Soldier A stands in room 1 and soldier B stands in room 4.
By looking in the lookup table you can quickly see that player A is the closest to room 1,2,3 and player B is the closest to room 4. As the server will only need to compare distances rather than actually calculate them this would make it less stressful on the server. This check-up wouldn't need to be done that often either.
Say room 1,2,3 are all worth 1.5 points. so player A got 4.5 points.
room 4 was a bigger zone with an ammo supply in it and is worth 4 points so player B got 4 points.
Imagine there is a capzone with 4 sections defined by the mapper.
The lookup table contains the shortest walking distance from walking from one room to the other . So the shortest distance to walk from room 2 to room 4 is for instance 35 meters. This lookup table would be created during the mapping procedure, preferably automatic.
Now you have 2 soldiers, Soldier A stands in room 1 and soldier B stands in room 4.
By looking in the lookup table you can quickly see that player A is the closest to room 1,2,3 and player B is the closest to room 4. As the server will only need to compare distances rather than actually calculate them this would make it less stressful on the server. This check-up wouldn't need to be done that often either.
Say room 1,2,3 are all worth 1.5 points. so player A got 4.5 points.
room 4 was a bigger zone with an ammo supply in it and is worth 4 points so player B got 4 points.
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I wonder how it would work (using Guppy's picture as an example) that if both sides have diffrent mutlipliers? For example defender would have 0.5 at the edge while 0.75 'at most' in the middle, while the attacker has greater penalty at the edge but have the full 1x multiplier on certain area(s). This would make "stack into the 1x room corner" defensive tactic less abusable in typical cornerwhoring way, but it would also prevent the attacker from finding the furthest edge of the capzone to stack up.
Putting it in more practical sense, defenders would have beter relative control of the area while the attackers could easily secure the area if they actually storm the place and start taking positions. Defenders would have some sort of reason to counterattack while the attackers would have a reason to attack and hold certain areas. Of course once the area is captured it would work both ways, I.E. if the map's original defenders want to take it back after the attacker took the objective. Sure this would require more or less thinking on the mapper's side about how to adjust the relative zones, but it could be quite huge improvement over the old system.
Putting it in more practical sense, defenders would have beter relative control of the area while the attackers could easily secure the area if they actually storm the place and start taking positions. Defenders would have some sort of reason to counterattack while the attackers would have a reason to attack and hold certain areas. Of course once the area is captured it would work both ways, I.E. if the map's original defenders want to take it back after the attacker took the objective. Sure this would require more or less thinking on the mapper's side about how to adjust the relative zones, but it could be quite huge improvement over the old system.
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Well I'm not much for pregame release talk, or for suggestions because they're never introduced into the game unless legions of people demand something be changed. But I think this is a pretty good idea, but you just need to be careful not to make the game TOO hard - some of the least exciting gameplay in RO was being completely unable to take a point because of excellent defender advantage. Better for a point to go back and forth than for one side to control and another try over and over to get into a place and be beated back each time.
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The issue with that remains that the boarders do not mean anything to defend or attack well you simply must all be in the high rated area or the enemy will win. So I think it would primarily shift the issue to the core of the cap zone then.
And above all it might make the entire system too difficult as a player would need to know somewhat when they are getting the full cap strength or not. Even though an area based cap system is difficult to implement, in the end all the player needs to know is that they need to control 80% of the cap zone.
I think that's more of an issue of balance than anything else. And that remains important for every capture system.
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Provocative ideas
Provocative ideas
I'm inclined to agree that the current cap system suffers under edge cases. Many are the times when a perfectly good cap has been frustrated by an enemy camping in the latrines or something to that effect.
Zetsumei's proposal is interesting, elegant even, but I'm wondering how practical it is. I don't really have experience with mapping, can anyone chime in? How much work would this require, not just in implementing but in planning how it would affect the gameflow of any individual map? I could see it working really well in massive, multi-story buildings like factories, where the mapper has tight control over the flow of action.
I thought Guppy also made an interesting suggestion. It seems like a simple, neat solution that would surely work fine 95% of the time, especially if the cap area is clearly delineated, like a building. I could see a few guys holding a building for ages, but eventually losing because the enemy manages to maneuver close enough to cover all the windows and entrances.
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Finally, I'm throwing this in the air for what it's worth, but I've always toyed with the idea of making the most important/contested areas require that they be completely cleared.
Let's say that the Soviets have two guys in the cap zone/building, and the Germans have one. The Soviets are slowly capping. Then two more Soviets join in, and the rate of capping doubles. But even if the meter reaches full, the objective doesn't change hands until the last German is eradicated/chased away.
This has the effect of the winning side still retaining a clear advantage - being a hair's breadth away from capping - but allows a tenacious underdog to frustrate and delay them until reinforcements hopefully arrive to tip the scales. This would work even better if it's an objective that can be isolated, cut off from reinforcements, with careful teamwork.
I'm not suggesting that every objective has such a cap system, but it could work well with the most crucial ones - such as those that advance the spawn area, once captured.
Provocative ideas
I'm inclined to agree that the current cap system suffers under edge cases. Many are the times when a perfectly good cap has been frustrated by an enemy camping in the latrines or something to that effect.
Zetsumei's proposal is interesting, elegant even, but I'm wondering how practical it is. I don't really have experience with mapping, can anyone chime in? How much work would this require, not just in implementing but in planning how it would affect the gameflow of any individual map? I could see it working really well in massive, multi-story buildings like factories, where the mapper has tight control over the flow of action.
I thought Guppy also made an interesting suggestion. It seems like a simple, neat solution that would surely work fine 95% of the time, especially if the cap area is clearly delineated, like a building. I could see a few guys holding a building for ages, but eventually losing because the enemy manages to maneuver close enough to cover all the windows and entrances.
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Finally, I'm throwing this in the air for what it's worth, but I've always toyed with the idea of making the most important/contested areas require that they be completely cleared.
Let's say that the Soviets have two guys in the cap zone/building, and the Germans have one. The Soviets are slowly capping. Then two more Soviets join in, and the rate of capping doubles. But even if the meter reaches full, the objective doesn't change hands until the last German is eradicated/chased away.
This has the effect of the winning side still retaining a clear advantage - being a hair's breadth away from capping - but allows a tenacious underdog to frustrate and delay them until reinforcements hopefully arrive to tip the scales. This would work even better if it's an objective that can be isolated, cut off from reinforcements, with careful teamwork.
I'm not suggesting that every objective has such a cap system, but it could work well with the most crucial ones - such as those that advance the spawn area, once captured.
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The key is allowing the mapper to decide the winning conditions. For instance even if a map is only 30% capped by the attackers the mapper could say that at that point they will have captured the objective. I think the biggest issue would be on the side of implementing said system If implemented in a good and easy to use way it shouldn't really be much more time intensive for mappers than the current system. When utilized it could allow a mapper a lot more power in their creative process.
The key of this system is that it would work with any size of cap zone, be it a cap zone of one room or a cap zone the size of the entire map. And allows for many different scenarios. While controlling key points that offer access to other key points automatically become the most important parts.
So for instance if you make an entire map the cap zone people trying to exploit the system will automatically end up defending places that lead to many different paths like crossroads and bridges, or when inside buildings staircases and hallways. Exploitative behaviour automatically leads to behaviour similar to real life, rather than gamey behaviour.
The basic principle in that thought is similar to mine. The issue is that at some point the defenders could resort to hiding in the cap zone or locking themselves into one individual room that is easy to defend or hard to find. Having to completely clear out an entire building and making sure that the enemy reinforcements do not take back control of the area. Would make capturing a cap zone take simply too long and become too hard for the attackers.
It is realistic but I think in general most people want a map to last 30 minutes max, rather than capturing a single cap zone taking up to perhaps a few hours. Especially as every player will act as if they are super patriotic soldiers, that will never retreat.
Which is why I went with basically saying you need to cover say 80% of the cap zone or any other percentage, so that a small amount of people hiding won't affect the capturing a zone so the game can continue. So you can actually see multiple cap zones within that 30 minute time frame.
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Yeah, I see what you mean about such an arrangement potentially dragging on for ages. Really the issue I'm trying to address in my mind is that once one side gains an upper hand by even one player and the meter starts ticking, the other side has no recourse but to suck it up or start taking big risks, which ends the situation too quickly in my experience, often in mere seconds.
I could imagine a quicker variant of my suggestion where the idea is that if both sides have more or less the same amount of guys in the cap zone - give or take a few - the situation will remain hanging in the balance even if the meter is already full, but if one side does something clever and nails a few guys in quick succession, enough to get the opponents' numbers under some threshold, it's BAM! Cap changes hands.
But I'm just musing, I haven't given it nearly as much thought as you've given to your proposal.
I could imagine a quicker variant of my suggestion where the idea is that if both sides have more or less the same amount of guys in the cap zone - give or take a few - the situation will remain hanging in the balance even if the meter is already full, but if one side does something clever and nails a few guys in quick succession, enough to get the opponents' numbers under some threshold, it's BAM! Cap changes hands.
But I'm just musing, I haven't given it nearly as much thought as you've given to your proposal.
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The thing is with an area based cap system, one player more or not won't matter. As its no longer about how many people are in the cap zone, it about what team holds what ground.
Often when you're about to loose a cap zone you will try to run for a lucky nade throw, because you know that a lot of the enemy team is simply hiding somewhere like in the office in krasnyi.
If you have to control a big area of the cap zone to cap it then nothing will happen if you just hide in a corner. You either move forward to kill enemies or try to set-up defences in strategical positions such as staircases.
Then people really need to push forward spreading the battle more out over the entirety of the cap zone. Making the fighting more dynamic.
Often when you're about to loose a cap zone you will try to run for a lucky nade throw, because you know that a lot of the enemy team is simply hiding somewhere like in the office in krasnyi.
If you have to control a big area of the cap zone to cap it then nothing will happen if you just hide in a corner. You either move forward to kill enemies or try to set-up defences in strategical positions such as staircases.
Then people really need to push forward spreading the battle more out over the entirety of the cap zone. Making the fighting more dynamic.
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Sounds like a more advance/"intelligent" similar/alike what has been suggested could be really important for competitive gaming?
In my ears at least, but then again I am not a very experienced RO player =(.
In my ears at least, but then again I am not a very experienced RO player =(.
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I think it could really make the game play more diverse and fun primarily. Regardless of it being used with public gaming or competitive gaming.
Having played RO for over 6 years simply made me feel of wanting some change in the capturing system. As people begin exploiting the weaknesses of the current system a bit too much for my taste.
Having played RO for over 6 years simply made me feel of wanting some change in the capturing system. As people begin exploiting the weaknesses of the current system a bit too much for my taste.
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