Calling the Shots Part 4 – Taking Rounds

We've talked victory conditions and knowing your limits, and even a bit on when it's okay to just go crazy. Today, I'm going to talk about how to allocate resources.

In some team environments, one player determines who gets what resource over the course of a game. In others, it's simply first come, first serve. Maybe it depends on the situation. Maybe it depends on the victory conditions. But regardless, knowing what qualifies as a resource and how to determine who gets it is an important aspect of shot-calling.

Since the majority of my audience are Halo players, I'll address the context of resources in Halo first.

What are the resources in Halo?

If you're playing along at home, your first reaction was probably “POWER WEAPONS!” And congratulations, you got the #1 answer on the board. But power weapons aren't the only resource in Halo.

Map objectives are another obvious resource. Whether it's Oddball, Hill time, the Flag, the Bomb. Someone says “Hey, take hill.” He's allocating a resource.

But from there, what qualifies as a resource becomes a lot more subtle. I'll make a bulleted list.

• Power Weapons
• Objectives
• Power Positions
  • What? How can a position be a resource!? Power positions are important areas of the map which offer escape routes, sightlines, and combat advantages. But you don't want everyone to be in the power positions. Some players have to keep moving, pushing for objective, cutting off pushes, flushing out players, et cetera. Determining who gets to stay in the power position is allocating a resource.
• Help
  • Other players responding to your call-outs, pushing behind you, or watching your sightlines are a resource. Your teammates are a resource. Who they decide to work with on a moment-to-moment basis determines who receives that resource.
  • As an example of a team that uses this, listen to Towey coach Evil Geniuses. Often, he will tell a player who has just spawned to “Go help x” – he's allocating the resource for the team and ensuring a player isn't left stranded on the enemy side.
• Communication
  • Even call-outs are a resource. Because it's hard to hear when players talk over one another, it's important to make sure communication is streamlined. A player on the opposite side of the map from teammates should not be trying to talk over those who need to communicate their plans to work together (unless it is pertinent information to those three.) An isolated player making callouts of players his teammates have no possible way to see is flooding a resource, giving information that isn't valuable or useful.
• Ammo
  • Apart from literally being a resource for your guns, ammo is a resource that sometimes has to be discussed among the team. In stalemate situations (especially H2A's Lockdown TS), a player with a Sniper may not need their Battle Rifle ammo, while his teammates need it for trading or creating shield advantages to set up a push. Allocating weapon ammo among teammates to ensure everyone is combat capable can be the difference between winning or losing a stalemate situation's resolution.

As you can see, there are actually several resources in Halo that need to be split up among the team. Knowing who needs to receive what resource at what time, or who should forego a resource to do something else (such as pushing up and letting the next player to spawn grab a power weapon on your side), are key to shot-calling toward victory.

What are the resources in LoL?

In League of Legends, there are even more resources to track. Many are less nuanced than in Halo, so I'll keep my bulleted list a bit more concise:

• Gold (minion waves, tower gold, assists)
• Experience (minion waves)
• Farm (jungle)
• Ganks (or pressure from a teammate's presence in general)
• Vision (where your wards are)
• Vision denial (where you clear enemy wards, who gets the ward kill)
• Summoner spells (how many do you expend for a kill)
• Abilities (especially ults, how many do you expend for a kill / to save someone / who do you use them on in a team fight)
• Buffs (red/blue/abilities)
• Globals (TP pressure, global range ultimate pressure)
• Wave control (what waves you set up to slow push, what waves you just flash farm)

Much of LoL strategy revolves around power spikes and funneling farm into specific players. Whether it's to get them to their power spike sooner, or to get them into a state to counter an enemy power spike, you want to make sure farm goes where it's needed. Experience comes with farm. Who do you try to make sure stays ahead in levels? Do you sacrifice EXP on your support/jungler and rely on team fights / skirmishes to catapult them back with the catch-up mechanics of the game?

Ganks and jungle pressure can determine the outcome of a lane. Determining who gets said ganks may depend on champion match-up, skill match-up, or the opponent's priorities. As a shotcaller, you have to know who needs pressure when.

Expending too many summoner spells (or long cooldown ultimates) for a gank can leave you vulnerable for a long period of time. If you're planning a gank 90 seconds before Dragon, do you all flash to finish the kill and the moderate gold spike? Or, do you let him live, knowing you'll need those flashes for the potential team fight at Dragon? Those flashes could mean a tower kill. Or, if you're out of sync with the team, one flash could mean the play gets turned around. Before the play is made, the shotcaller should make it clear if you're burning summoners and ultimates or not.

Vision needs to be rotated depending on your current focus on the map. Pink wards are not meant to stay in the same place all game. They need to be moved to ensure zones of denial or longer lasting vision. Deep wards need to be placed to know what's coming in a situation. Sometimes, placing deep wards can be risky and requires the escort of your jungler as a support to get the wards down. (Note KT Rolster, or last season's Samsung White often having Score+Piccaboo or Dandy+Mata respectively synchronizing their backs and duo-invading early on to ensure they can get wards down together.)

In both games, it's important to be able to identify your resources and determine where they need to go. A good shotcaller must gauge who needs what when.

If you're struggling to determine how to allocate resources, ask yourself some questions when faced with a decision:

• What are the victory conditions right now?
• Who is important to fuel our path to victory?
• Who is closest to the resource?
  • Do they need it?
• Will we lose anything if x goes for this resource?
  • Is it worth it?
  • Who else could take it instead?
• Are we transparent in our resource allocation?
  • Can/Will our opponents try to counter it?
• Can we deny our opponents' resources?
• X doesn't have the resources they should, do we sacrifice them and put resources elsewhere?
  • Or do we sacrifice elsewhere to put resources on them?
  • Which path is safer?

Obviously you can't ask yourself these questions each and every time a decision arrives. These are just an exercise to improve. As you improve, you'll find yourself giving better valuation and distribution naturally. As you begin to efficiently distribute resources in a game, you will find yourself with more advantages and leads to press in a game.

That's all for this relatively short bit. Part 5 will be a bit delayed, but I'll discuss how to identify less apparent advantages in order to determine when you have a lead or the ability to create a lead out of a mismatch.

Designing Tensai, Part 3: Hate PP? Urine Luck!

Okay, I'll admit that's an awful title. The real subject of today's blog is the resource systems of Pokémon and Tensai. I haven't mentioned it in the last two blogs, but Tensai wasn't designed to have a single player experience; I was creating JUST the Battler, and because of that, Pokémon's PP system, which was designed to be a sort of dungeon attrition system like a D&D “casts per day” or Final Fantasy 1's system simply wouldn't make sense.

Apart from the moves in Pokémon that only have 5 base PP, it's very rare to actually run out of uses of a move in a battle between trainers unless you're up against a Stall team, or you're playing 6v6 Rocky Helmet Magikarps. The only other exception came if you had a Pokémon with the Pressure ability, but even then, it wasn't that impactful in actually making the casting resource feel like a worthwhile part of the battle to worry about.

Because of this, I wanted a resource system in Tensai that would actually have an effect on the battle. And so, “Essence” was born. Essence basically works like mana systems in today's card games; you gain a little bit of essence every turn (however, essence spent is gone once it's spent, rather than you gaining even more the next turn.)

You would start and cap out at 50 Essence and most basic moves would cost around 10-25 Essence, depending on their base power and their effects, while the more powerful moves would cost 35-50. You gained 20 Essence per turn, and could elect not to attack and instead use the “Rest” command to recharge an additional 10 Essence for a total of 30, which would put you at the cap on the ensuing turn.

Draw a Card, Play Your Opponent

This system fed directly into the Action-Type system (see parts 1 and 2) as well, once you learned your opponent's team. For example, if your opponent only had 30 Essence, and you knew his strongest move was a 35 or 50, he couldn't use it this turn. That's one Action-Type you can eliminate from the realm of possible uses this turn. He can play Rock or Paper, but he can't play Scissors. Better play Paper yourself for the best odds!

If you saw your opponent rest on the first turn after hitting 0, it means he's rushing back to 50 Essence and probably wants to immediately use his strongest attack. If his strongest attack is a Magical Action-Type, ready up that Melee you have equipped and go to town while you take no damage!

From the attacker's viewpoint, it also made a player be wary on when to choose to use his strongest attacks; if you made it too obvious, you could be countered rather easily and use all that essence for naught. You would have to set up your opponent to unexpect the expected in order to deliver your wrath. Keeping smaller cost moves around so you can stay at max Essence and leave that threat of a high damaging move available was an important strategy.

By making the resource system actually impactful on the battle and give soft limitations on what moves could be used at a given time, it gave me as the designer a lot of control over the flow of a battle and more room for the direct Player-versus-Player Prediction interaction granted by the inclusion of Action-Types.

Mix, Mix, Swirl, Mix!

Furthermore, the Essence bar was split between whether the attacks were Aether (Magical) or Eidos (Physical) – if your move was Aether, you used Aether Essence. If your move was Eidos, you used Eidos Essence. Only one minor move in the game took Essence from both bars.

This meant that if you had Mixed-Damage type Sweeper with a powerful Eidos move AND a powerful Aether move, you could use the moves in succession, whereas if you had a Sweeper of just Eidos moves, using a 50-base power move would leave your bar depleted and force you to rest or use only weak moves until you recharged. While Mixed Sweepers weren't necessarily STRONGER than the more focused ones, but because of having their casting resource split into two bars, they could use more powerful moves more often, which could've give them a larger place in the eventual meta-game had Tensai ever been completed.

The separated Eidos/Aether resource system also encouraged players to potentially invest in one of their three moves as a Defensive or Magical Action-Type move of a different cost type (Clarification, Not all Magical Action-type moves were Aether. The two concepts are separate.) than their primary damage stat, even if they weren't mixed. Defensive-type moves almost all dealt a status effect in addition to a mild amount of damage, so it could come in handy having the ability to inflict Unstable or Stunned to an opponent with a Defensive move at any given time. By making this option on your Creature not cost the same resource as your attack moves, you could use it solely for its utility rather than caring about its inflicted damage.

A Balancing Metric, Should I Ever Need One

Last but not least, the revamped resource system of Tensai gave me an additional slider to use to balance moves, if the game had ever been completed. Say, for instance, a move felt like it did the right amount of damage, but its additional effects just seemed to much. But, if you removed any of those additional effects, the move wouldn't feel worth taking.

If they put that in Pokémon, and attempted to reduce its available PP, it wouldn't really affect the player-versus-player metagame too much. But in Tensai, I could increase the Essence cost and greatly affect its availability over the course of a battle.

I used this pre-emptively on Stun moves (read: Flinch from Pokémon.). Any move with a Stun except for a few exceptions costed AT LEAST 35 Essence. In other words, if you used it at 50 Essence, you could only use it one more turn successively before being out of Essence. This meant that you couldn't go Jirachi Serene Grace Iron Head RNG cheesiness to open up a battle. (Of course, since I gutted RNG, the Action-Type system alone nerfed this strategy, but it's still worth noting.)

I also used it on Increased Priority moves to make the majority of them cost over the 20 essence mark to ensure a player could not follow-up a Coup de Grace 50 Essence move with a high priority move; this may have been a heavy-handed over nerf before such a strategy was even tried, but my gut told me it would be necessary. The world may never know!

All in all, the resource system of Tensai was a mechanism I was very proud of how well it fit into the rest of the design of the game, and excited to see how it would be handled once in players' hands. That's all for today's blog.

Next time (maybe tonight or tomorrow), I'm going to talk about why there were only 3 moves per creature (hint: there is a fourth move), about signature moves (not the fourth move), and about trinkets (read: Pokémon held items.) Hope you've enjoyed the read. Stay tuned for more!
Part 1
Part 2
Part 4