Great calculation, and your are right numerically speaking no there is no return on this lose, but the end game can be averted if you have the missle frigates available. Stopping an enemies cap ship when you don't have one it important, plus after seeing his cap ship go up in a ball of fire he will reconsider attacking you for a while. I played a 5 star system game yesterday where I wisely researched interstellar travels and was able to take the middle and largest star in the system. I conlinized 5 of these planets before the other 3 factions were able to reach that star, but once they did , they all attacked me - on both fronts, lucky for me i had the missle frigates and I had researched missle strength and range, so even though I was seriosuly outmanned for the first 30 minutes of the game, having my cap ship supported by a durov cap ship and missle and flak frigates made the difference. I had to micormanage the assaults but even in my other system where I hap no cap ship, making all my frigates attack the same target made quick work of them. We took loses but they lost most of their cap ships in the first hour and I was able to hold the system.

I was wondering when someone was going to point to that "slippery slope" article on sirlin. I think those are excellent reads.

I think Sins suffers greatly from the "slippery slope" paradigm; once you start losing, it is difficult to come back. Even if you don't lose your flagship or any capital ships in the initial battle, the fact that you have to retreat and give up a contested planet is very costly. This is because Sins puts A LOT of value on geographic control. How many ships you can support, how quickly you generate resources and how far (and how fast) you can tech up are based on how many planets you have. I think this is in essence Sin's largest failing.

There are other games which have done a fairly good job of lessing the effect of slippery slope. In Supreme Commander, if you assault your opponent's base and it is not reasonably successful, you may have actually HELPED your opponent. This is because units in Supreme Commander leave a wreckage behind which are extractable. You have just given your opponent an additional source of income. Picking at your opponent with small attacks is not as effective as a smaller number of overwhelming attacks.

There are other aspects of a game which can help alleviate the slippery slope paradigm. Being able to generate resources without having geographic control is one. Not having a unit cap based on how much of the map you control is another.

All of these aspects need very careful consideration to keep things balanced of course. You also don't want a game in which the easiest way to win is to turtle up in your home system.

I am hopeful that Sins is not so far into development that slippery slope can't be addressed. I do get the feeling, however, that many of the game play mechanics are very "core" in nature and may not be changed easily.

well, in the early phase it may not be that dramatic, because via planet upgrading you still have an alternative to actual expansion. of course you need to expand at some point otherwise you get stuck in a dead with nothing left to upgrade and your opponent just overpowering you. in fact, giving players more planet upgrades, maybe via research would be a good option, because having smaller well developed empire should be an alternative to a vast empire which is not that advanced on average. but then, as regards ressources, you could only really upgrade for credits and slots, both fleet and logistics, but you would always lack in metal/ crystal and I think higher extraction rates and more refineries just wouldnt equalise it.

so while a softening of the slip wouldn't be bad, doing it too much takes an important aspect of the game out: the strategic importance of certain planets, nodes and so on. some actions should have a profound impact in the game, but while changing it, an opponent should still have more means to cope with it other than just taking back a certain planet at any cost to avoid long term defeat.

maybe you could make planet upgrades depend on overall empire size. I mean, the first lvl 1 pop upgrade could cost the usual 750, the next 850, then follwing 1.000 and equally for the lvl 2 upgrades, the more upgrades of a certain type you have the more expensive it gets, maybe tune down the start a bit. this way it will be easier for a smaller empire to develop an economic base versus a larger player, but the larger one will still have the long term advantage and the higher ressource income.

I definitely disagree with the statement that SupCom is a "traditional" RTS. I have seen many discussions about games taking too long. In fact, I believe Chris Taylor originally envisioned a large game of SupCom taking a weekend to play .

In fact, the way Sins is evolving is following SupCom's evolution fairly closely. With the release of SupCom's stand alone expansion, Forged Alliance, the designers have taken much of the communities feed back to heart and made the average game take a bit less time.

The neat thing about SupCom is that games can take 10 minutes or they can take 6 hours.

Also, you will very often have more than "one" base in SupCom. Even on medium sized maps players often make forward "firebases". I definitely agree that Sins is a unique game but making comparisons to other aspects of existing RTSs does have value.

Games taking so long in Sins' is definitely a problem but I think it is essentially separate from the slippery slope problem. A game that takes 2 hours from the very start to the very finish is likely decided much much sooner where the last 45 minutes are simply filler. The main problem here, I think, it that it takes a very long time to bomb down a planet. A player can decisively win a battle, which make the odds of that player winning very high, yet it will still take 45 minutes, even if the loser doesn't even try to rebuild his fleet .

I think the trick is, is to make the actual defining moment very late in the game. If a game only takes 45 minutes an observer watching the replay should not be able to tell who is going to win at the 23 minute mark. Just because a player wins the initial first battle, it should not mean they win the war. It should give them an advantage yes but not so much so that the other player(s) can't make a come back.

I think Shadow said it well:

"some actions should have a profound impact in the game, but while changing it, an opponent should still have more means to cope with it other than just taking back a certain planet at any cost to avoid long term defeat."

Expansion in sins is relatively one dimensional. You need more planets, and it's always good to have them. Upgrading them isn't exactly an alternative path. It's either prohibitively expensive before you get trade up, or easy after you do. Population grows fast, caps quickly, expansion slots cost about the same as buildings, expanding to other planets is free of any cost at all.

This is a serious break from a standard 4x, where expansion slows growth by reducing the population to send it elsewhere. Even if you need to buy more colony ships, they are cheap and easy, not a relatively expensive project. It's a 4x with hard caps, minimal expansion costs and options.

In civ, 4 cities instead of 5 means less upkeep, less places to defend, less territory to protect. You might actually be better off for a while. In sins, if you control a choke point, the number of planets behind it can only be a boost. If the enemy has access to every planet you're in deep hooey. Without easy chokepoints, expansion could be a detriment along with a bonus and losing a single planet wouldn't neccessarily be doom. Unfortunately, one or two connections to each planet isn't very helpful on this front. I'd hate to be playing wack-a-mole, but the rmg does tend to leave even medium maps with 4 and 5-1 planet ratios if you can bag certain ones as choke points, the included maps aren't much better, often having even better placement for defensive front lines.

I think its mainly due to an extremly poor lack of defensive systems on cap ships overall. Cap ships should by their very nature have ALOT more anti-fighter and anti-missle defense systems than they do currently right. Right now they mainly function as fodder. Players quite smartly are going to group bombers and LRM frigs and direct attck cap ships. I have seen a lvl 6 Kol go down in a little under 6 seconds. Plus when you compare tactical abilities of carriers vs main support cap ships it becomes instantly clear who the winner is (the one that can rebuild its fleet on the spot and doesnt have to get in range of enemy ships). There definetly needs to be some rebalancing of cap ship types mainly carriers need to be weak ships that rely almost completly on its fighter wings and "ship of the line" type of cap ships need to drastically have its hull shield and other defensive systems bumped up considerably.

If the enemy fleet was big enough to kill a level 6 kol in 6 seconds, you probably should have had a couple dunov's in your fleet, not to mention hoshinko's and cielo's and enough supporting frigates to kill the enemy frigates inside the time it takes for them to run out of antimatter.

I'd hate to try and keep them alive if there weren't shield restoration and repair abilities in the game, but keeping capital ships around after you've gotten going is simplicity. Just don't get worked by a more powerful force and you probably wont lose any.

Schod, it doesn't have to be slower just because planet development is more complex. If you kept taking planets now, beyond your means to improve them, it would do absolutely nothing bad. You could just set up your defenses where you wanted them, benefit from the marginal income, the experience from killing the pirates, and have a nice pokey meatshield for the enemy to bomb through before attacking what mattered. Expanding outward or upward isn't a choice, expanding outward is free, and income goes from squat to substantial pretty fast, so expanding upward really isn't that hard. There's not very far to go, you just can't do that much to three or four planets. Balancing expansion with advancement is what keeps 4x games from being he who has the most territory wins. Sins is often just that. Not much to advance in, and no real cost to expansion.

I am with psychoak and Shadowhal on this. Developing your planets should have greater rewards to give a player an alternative other than taking planets. Schod does have a point that you can let the other players duke it out and waste resources in there own personal wars while you develop your planets unhindered but of course this is only applicable in FFA type games.

I also really like psycloak's comment that Sins is relatively one dimensional. Not only is it one dimensional in the sense that everything is based on getting more planets, but it is also due to the fact that you are forced to travel in phase lanes. Normally, the player who owns more of the map is also more vulnerable to attack since he has so much more to protect. Not so in Sins. A few well placed fleets, defenses and jump inhibitors at choke points will force your opponent to meet you head head on. You can't attack your opponent where he is weak. This really negates a huge negative of having a large empire and puts a very very large incentive on fast expansion and winning that first battle. Too large in my opinion.

He is also bang on when he says that Sins has implemented hard caps instead of naturally making expansion more difficult the bigger your empire gets. The fact that colony ships are so cheap and they don't dilute your planet's population is a real diversion from the standard 4X model. This is not necessarily a good thing.

And to Annatar's comment that SupCom is a "traditional" RTS, I couldn't disagree more. It, and it's spiritual successor TA, are the only RTSs which are based on the infinite build model (we discussed this one earlier), the infinite unit model (where no artificial cap is imposed at different stages of the game) and the infinite resource model (even when all resource points on a map have been taken, you can still improve your economy). It is my opinion these factors alone completely separate it from anything else, including Sins. In fact I even feel that SupCom is less traditional than a typical RTS than Sins is.

Really? I don't want to derail this conversion too much since I think it is a good one but I can't help but to ask. What other RTS has an infinite resource model?

Arsenal, a small RTS of Canadian design... lets see, what the heck was it called... something with a D, ... it specifically had an option to set the resources to infinite. It was in regards to a war between post apocalyptic factions inside the domed city that they inhabited.

Well at any rate, Dawn of War also is infinite, based off of control points in the map it feeds you at a certain rate.

Not to mention Star Craft could be set to inifinite resources. And there is technically a cap in Supreme Commander, it is just really really really high lol

Company of Heroes does too doesnt it? With the command points you take?

Wrong viewpoint, they are talking about mass fabricators. In TA and supcom(which are really the same game with graphical and UI improvements along with vastly more interesting sides) you not only have your resource that you harvest, you can build the damn stuff to keep increasing your income. Of course, it's not actually unlimited. There is a max object count that caps out at some unfortunately low number on a huge map. Your combined armada and buildings are a finite thing, so there isn't actually infinite income and production, just absurdly large, +800 mass is pretty easy to get.

Infinite resources that don't run out but can only be harvested so fast are a different matter. Starcraft or other worker driven models with infinite resources on are comparable, but like supcom and TA, they have unit caps, significantly lower unit caps. The game changes from a resource usage model to a unit cap usage model. Maximize your income to combat effectiveness ratio and plow the other guy who either has too much money and too small an army to keep it around or too large an army and not enough money to fill it up fast enough. Although they usually come down to microwhoring instead.

To elaborate perhaps a little bit further consider this example.

Consider Sins. You can build a capital ship (top of the line unit) in a few minutes. I don't know the exact number but it isn't all that long.

In SupCom if you tried to build a Mavor (top of the line unit) it would literally take HOURS of real time if you tried to construct it unassisted. Of course SupCom also follows an infinite build model where you can funnel any amount of your economy into building anything so you can assist the building of that Mavor and bring it down to a reasonable amount of time.

Infinite economy and infinite building make for a VERY different game. It isn't a good or bad thing, simply different. This is where I think SupCom is unique and untraditional. Sins is also unique and untraditional but in a different way.