Where IS Your FUN/REALISM Slider Set?

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    • Where IS Your FUN/REALISM Slider Set?

      What is your Fun vs Realism Slider set to? If you had a Slider, that represented what you most want out of the Game of CoN, what % would you want devoted to FUN and what % to realism out of a total of 100% - What is your preferred focus and by how much?

      ME: 90% FUN/10% Realism


      EDIT: Just to be clear, Opulon's definition below is what I meant

      If FUN = Gameplay vs Realism = Simulation
      *** The Creator of Zombie Farming ***
      The KING of CoN News!!!
      The "Get off my lawn!" cranky CoN Forums Poster - not affiliated with Dorado in any way


      "Death comes to us all. Shall I deal you in?" - DoD

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Dealer of Death ().

    • See I couldn't care less if (for example) the Strike Fighters were labelled Strike 1, Strike 2, Strike 3 etc and had pictures of WWI bi-planes representing them, just as long as I knew the stats and the function was the same. Hell you could replace the infantry icons with smiley faces, maybe giving gear eyes to the mech inf for example, and it wouldn't lower my enjoyment one bit.
      *** The Creator of Zombie Farming ***
      The KING of CoN News!!!
      The "Get off my lawn!" cranky CoN Forums Poster - not affiliated with Dorado in any way


      "Death comes to us all. Shall I deal you in?" - DoD
    • If FUN = Gameplay vs Realism = Simulation

      Then 80% FUN / 20% Realism, for me.


      I would like to insist that for me, what we call realism is not actually realistic. We want something that looks like "plausible" to our own incorrect understanding of reality. Hence why, playing a game, i want to have a good game under the hands, that feel "plausible" for the situation it depicts, so that i can maintain my suspension of disbelief.

      I also play "Command", that is more like 10% Fun and 90% Realism (Plausible).


      Want to send a ASF on patrol ?

      SURE.

      1°) Select Your Planes OOB menu
      2°) Select the Airbase in the menu list
      3°) Check what airplanes are currently in the hangars, by asking the technical team a updated report.
      4°) Check the report, and consider what plane is currently fit to fly.
      5°) Select a loadout, depending on what is actually at hand in the base. Some loadouts may not be available because of logistics and may require time to bring to the said base if they are sensitive (MOAB)
      6°) Assign the loadout to a plane, but make sure that the plane actually has enough hardpoints or is of a design that is compatible (Don't hope, if you're playing India, to attach your NATO standard Sidewinder to a SU that wasn't retrofitted to NATO standards !). Please notice that technical crew may be a bit slower to prepare to flight equipment that they are not used to work on (Technical crew that usually handles 12 F16 will struggle heavily if you have landed a F35 on their base and you ask them to prepare it)
      7°) Determine Fuel requirements for the mission at hand (no pansy fancy calculator, you get your fingers out of your ass and you do the maths), and assign it to the plane. Too much fuel has defaults. If the mission is too far, consider a Fuel Drop Tank, but make sure that it's compatible with the Loadout (heavy loadouts don't work well with Fuel Drop Tanks)
      8°) Select the Air Strip for the plane to position itself. You may select "auto" which will make the plane go in the air as soon as it received navigational command, or "manual", which is handy in case of planes you want to "keep ready to take off" but don't want in the air (quick defense, for example)
      9°) Go to general map, draw a "patrol" order, which must have a minimum of 3 points in order to establish a flight route. It can have more than 3. For each points, set Navigational Rules and Rules of Engagement. They define a large array of things like "how and who you engage". If your plane has been loaded with Light Air to Ground Ordinance, you probably want to ensure that this plane will flee if it is pursued by Air Superiority Fighters, and will engage light vehicles, not heavy vehicles that it can't really hope to destroy efficiently. Once it's done (You can refine the setting detailed as much as you want. Technically, you can order the plane to not bomb Toyota pick ups, and only Ford Pick ups, if such is your desire, and you can also define the behaviour of the plane if it doesn't manage to identify what kind of pick up it is)
      10°) Confirm Patrol Orders
      11°) Return to Planes OOB, assign the Patrol Mission to the plane.
      12°) Greenlight Patrol Mission, Greenlight Rules of Engagement.

      Wooosh, the plane takes off, and follows its mission. It successfully finds en engage a SAM that didn't had the time (or maybe the plane evaded identification) to acknowledge the threat. The SAM is confirmed hit (destroyed ? no idea), and the plane is strafing to check. At that moment, radar identification confirms that what looks like an interceptor is approaching your plane at high speed. According to its rules of engagement, your plane immediatly retreats toward his airbase and to the safety of your own air defense system.

      Then, you don't understand why, but the interceptor simply goes through your anti-air system, and conveniently light one missile at your plane, that despite flares, is damaged and fails to land on the airstrip. The pilot has ejected safely.

      What happened ? Did i forgot to mention that beyond Unit Rules of Engagements, Base Rules of Engagement, you also had a theater and General rules of engagement panel, and that in the scenario, as it was depicting the tense situation of a cease fire, the SAM were ordered to not automatically engage bogeys, as they may very well be the planes of a super power, and we don't want to infuriate them at that time ?

      Welcome to Command.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • click play CoN
      *text show*
      "Here link for application at your nearest army!"
      100% realism


      Joke aside
      i don't think I can conclude the game into the % you want
      for me it is a gradient of fun & realism with both overlapped each other
      now if you want a realism game, you iron out the fun part that not realism
      if you want a fun arcade game, you iron out the part that not fun
      but if you want Themed game? or for me, any good game
      I kept the middle part where it both fun and realism
      This post was made by Leader of the Church of ROAD
    • Opulon wrote:



      I also play "Command", that is more like 10% Fun and 90% Realism (Plausible).


      Want to send a ASF on patrol ?

      SURE.

      1°) Select Your Planes OOB menu
      2°) Select the Airbase in the menu list
      3°) Check what airplanes are currently in the hangars, by asking the technical team a updated report.
      4°) Check the report, and consider what plane is currently fit to fly.
      5°) Select a loadout, depending on what is actually at hand in the base. Some loadouts may not be available because of logistics and may require time to bring to the said base if they are sensitive (MOAB)


      [Etc...]
      That sounds awesome! I might look that up.

      On the general question of realism Vs fun, I think CoN is pretty good where it is but wouldn't be harmed by a few tweaks.

      I don't think realism and fun are choices that run in opposition to each other, though. Some aspects could be made more fun precisely by making them truer to life, I believe. Some aspects can detract from the fun if they are set too far from reality.

      If the game was reskinned to include, for example, dragons and wizards fighting over a fantasy world, but all the underlying game mechanics remained the same, I would not be interested playing it at all.
    • “If the game was reskinned to include, for example, dragons and wizards fighting over a fantasy world, but all the underlying game mechanics remained the same, I would not be interested playing it at all.“

      Totally agree. CoN is maybe not realistic as Opulon points out, but many aspects are plausible and enough of the units etc are accurate enough, that it feels like playing in our dimension, not some uber-fiction fantasy world that defies the known laws (?) of physics.
    • It depends a lot on the game genre and what kind of realism we are talking about. Having to resupply your troops by producing weapons and other stuff in your factories and keep your front line supplied, so they do not suffer from attrition like in HOI can be fun. Having to mine for diamonds and iron in Minecraft can be fun, though having to spend 200kg of iron to forge a 20 kg chest plate, like I saw in some other game, really misses the fun and the realism check mark. Having to replace your sword every few hits because it breaks like in Breath of the Wild or having your protagonist only being able to sprint for 5 seconds like in many games these days, are neither fun nor realistic.

      Generally speaking maybe 60:40? Realism helps you to immerse yourself into a game, but it should be still a game and not a chore. I do my work because I enjoy it, even though it surely has sometimes chory periods, but overall I enjoy challenges and realism can give you that, if it is implemented well.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Kalrakh ().

    • For me the gameplay is by far the more important end of the gameplay vs simulation-accuracy tension.

      The game skin serves important purposes. For me and for many players, it lets us use our intuition to roughly predict how strategies and tactics will work out. For many folks (not me, but other paying customers) it's also one of the main reasons they would rather use CoN to fight a battle than use a chess board and pieces to fight a battle.

      However, Dorado and their competitors are taking on a good challenge. How can they give CoN the strategy and tactics depth of a chess game? How can they give CoN 10, 20, or 50 viable strategies for grandmasters to employ instead of giving them just 2 or 3 viable ones? In other words, how do they avoid having one "best" meta strategy emerge?

      So, if it would improve gameplay, I wouldn't mind if CoN included something like tunneling units, or other impossible weapons/devices, so long as their capabilities could be described in straight-forward rules.

      That probably puts me at 80/20 in favor of gameplay, with that 20 being focused on making the game's universe internally consistent and predictable, once you know its short list of rules.

      An example of a non-simulation universe that is still understandable and predictable would be one where everything is built out fire, earth, air, and water. instead of being built from supplies, components, fuel, etc.

      KFG
    • I‘d say like 80-85 fun and 20ish realism?

      really not a fan of realism adding a metric fuckton of tedious game mechanics but do not really mind realistic stuff when it’s implemented in easily comprehensible and unobtrusive ways (example that comes to mind is men of war assault squad; troops require ammo and fuel and also have inventory and stuff, but you don’t need to scroll through 500 different types of ammo and pick the right one and manually put then into the right inventory, instead you pull a supply truck next to the unit and it happens automatically)

      imo units having the right pictures/names etc doesn’t really fit into realism in the manner we’re discussing but rather into gameplay/ general coherency of game elements?

      units not being labelled „tomato-ketchup-sauce“ with pictures of [idk insert random thing here] seems pretty standard to me
      I am The Baseline for opinions
    • mostly fun....couldn't tell you the actual military name of any of my units without looking. Only thing is the look of RCV as one docterine RCV looks like a badass sports car and other looks like a Toyota Prius...lol. But I dont use then outside of ones given at start of game.

      It drives me nuts when get some whack job trying to recreate a historical battle /war. Like had one partner who would only attack certain countries as he was defending the ottoman empire ... gtfo of my coalition ;)
      "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him "

      aka ...The killer formerly known as BuckeyeChamp
    • I think there's a crucial difference between realism and intricacy/detail.

      CoN uses a real-world setting and real-world military units. It is a representation of the real world, so players will rightly expect their units to behave in generally the same way that their real-world counterparts do, within plausible margins. That doesn't mean the game has to simulate every aspect of those behaviours or capabilities, or their requirements for mobilization, maintenance and deployment. All of that is heavily abstracted and simplified, rightly so.

      Things can be abstracted and simplified in a realistic or unrealistic way, though. Things can be heavily simplified, but still realistic; or they can be extremely detailed and intricate, but very unrealistic. The balance is somewhere in deciding which layers of detail and intricacy to leave out, or how far to abstract them, while maintaining an appropriate level of plausibility that's in keeping with the real-world setting.

      For example, when you mobilize an ASF it isn't representing one plane and one pilot: it's a squadron, with all the associated crew, equipment and supplies assumed within the abstraction. Refuelling and rearming is abstracted into the "upkeep" cost, while repair and maintenance is abstracted into "unit healing" in cities or provinces with hospitals. You could argue that using a hospital to repair an aircraft is unrealistic, and I think there's a debate to had there, but it's a game mechanic that serves a purpose. When you send your ASF on patrol, the abstraction assumes that the squadron (or group) has a constant presence at the location you select - not with the same actual planes, but with a rotation of flights going out and returning to refuel and rearm. Again, there are holes in this abstraction that can be exposed or exploited in an unrealistic or implausible way, but it serves its purpose reasonably well, I think.

      In my opinion, CoN gets the balance right most of the time. I generally think that improvements should be focussed on areas where exploits or 'meta-tactics' (or whatever the correct terminology is) expose glaringly unrealistic/counter-intuitive unit or player behaviours. These should be kept to a minimum or ironed out where possible, I think. There are some areas where I think more detail would add fun to the gameplay by giving the player more choices or adding layers of strategy to the game. There are other areas where I think that the way the abstraction is set up could be altered in order to make it more plausible, without necessarily making it more complicated or detailed.

      I don't think there should be a conflict between realism and fun, or realism and gameplay. Given that the point of the game is to let players pretend to be a military commander in a real-world setting, the closer the gameplay is to how the real world military operates, the more fun it should be. Hopefully, you abstract and simplify the boring chore-like aspects of it without making them feel too unrealistic or implausible to the average target player (who probably isn't a die-hard military expert, in most cases).
    • Your wish about meta is pious but even Chess have a meta.


      Even THROWING A COIN has a meta to ensure you get "the most" of the 50/50 .


      Where there is a game, there is a human retroengineering the system to use it as its fullest.


      People have a vast array of units to build : no country would just equip people with guns and call it a army. And yet, they spam infantry. So of course, people spam Strike Fighters, it's meta in its own perspective.

      Ultimately, humans make the perfect game balance fail ^^.


      (of course, this is mostly just to tickle, i agree with your point)

      "average target player (who probably isn't a die-hard military expert, in most cases)."

      He isn't a die-hard military expert by any means, but considers himself as such. It's the trick :D
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • Yep. And it's actually incredibly relatable to CoN.

      Those "quick checkmates" can only work against clueless opponents. If they are attemped (even in how you deploy your assets) against someone that knows a bit how chess work, you actually end in a bad position.

      I remember a quote from a grand master that went something like

      "Those openings are a russian roulette : either he is a fool, or you are"
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • KFGauss wrote:

      . . .
      How can they give CoN 10, 20, or 50 viable strategies for grandmasters to employ instead of giving them just 2 or 3 viable ones?

      . . .
      Rookies vs experts isn't a legitimate comparison, at least not for the point I was making.

      When two equally-skilled chess players sit down to play there are many strategies and tactics they might employ successfully, and the outcome generally remains uncertain for many moves.

      CoN and chess are different in many important ways, but to the extent Dorado (or any company) can create a CoN that resembles those aspects of chess matches (many viable strategies at all skill levels, and the outcomes (when equally skilled players are involved) remain uncertain for a long time); I think they will have a money-maker.

      I'm not saying that CoN has only one or two viable strategies once you become a CoN expert fighting other experts. I am stating the rather obvious point that enabling more viable strategies is better than enabling fewer.

      I think this is worth saying occasionally, because I have run into people who think a game is great (and that they are superior intellects) because they've mastered the game's one best strategy, and enjoy using it over-and-over-and-over... to defeat newer players. For me that is boring.

      For this discussion (agreeing with other posts), the Gameplay part of an 80/20 split between Gameplay and Simulation, needs to be the right sort of gameplay.

      KFG

      PS: It's going to hard to get an image of Opulon's avatar tickling people, out of my head. X/