***Community Design: God Powers in combat--DEV THREAD***

My point exactly. PtB was well balanced.

The big question is this:  Are god powers supporting follower actions or are follower actions supporting our god powers? 

Within the context of combat, unless follower combatants fulfill a unique need, they are little more than support for our god powers.  If they're there to just help kill off the enemy, then there's always going to be trouble balancing god power effectiveness vs follower effectiveness in wiping out the enemy.  There needs to be something that followers can accomplish that none of the god powers can do.  Without it, followers are just another destructive power that has a ton of negatives in comparison to just using god powers.  Unless follower combatant numbers get really big, there's always going to be a god power that's faster to use, more accurate, and more effective at wiping out the enemy.  Plus, there's the added problem that followers have to be managed so they aren't killed, making them even less effective.

Followers are going to have to be directed by the player to be effective enough to do what you're saying.  It's not a matter of making followers and expecting them to just handle the problems you don't want to deal with.  What you're describing could be handled by implementing a "guard tower" that can be placed and forgotten to handle raiding parties.  Combatant followers have to provide a unique benefit in order to have tactical worth.  Otherwise, there's little value in bothering to muck with them. In the case of play balance, it's always a bad idea to add a new feature that's just "giving the player more of what they're already doing."  Players will gravitate to the option that is more effective (no matter how slightly) and the other is wasted effort.  Every feature needs to have enough of a uniqueness to justify its existence.

I've seen plenty of games where opposing factions/powers were based around things like the elements but the mechanics were identical once you got past the fluff. 

If the cool down on meteor is 30 mins and there are two fights in that time that both have similar outcomes if you win then where is the strategy? It matters not what fight you use the meteor in? If one fight yields key territory/resources then there is a strategic decision to be made and perhaps a challenge to not lose the other fight where meteor is not available. Hence for meteor to be interesting then the number of fights needs to be greater than meteor charges and winning fights needs to have different strategic consequences.

Agree completely. I'm assuming that a conflict involves a number of skirmishes not just an attacking horde. So the strategy would lie, in part, in do I save my allotted power for ten FoG or use it all in one meteor? With limitations such as this follower soldiers could be useful if not necessary. This kind of limitation of power within a given span of time can easily be explained in that a "war zone" is not considered part of the players "realm," where powers would remain undiminished.

My thinking is FoG wouldn't have friendly fire (not sure why it would). The stun would be far more limited and precise, similar in nature to how it currently operates (which is about, two or three at best, I think?). Its duration would have to be worked out as you try it out to see what might be best compared to the other abilities given similar properties. I'd think it'd be best as operating for a shorter time than say, meteor or swamp, with those abilities having their secondary effects lasting slightly longer and over a wider area than FoG.

What would make you use one over the other would be costs or, if shifted to a limited use number/recharge time as some here have suggested, would be whichever one seems best for the situation. Many enemies bunched together coming at you: swamp/meteor, smaller groups/weeding them out: probably FoG or swamp.

In general, I was looking at modifying FoG to drop the damaging characteristics, as it seems to me to have a sort of awkward overlap with meteor and follower troops, so by removing the damage, using it as a guide and stun for troops, it creates a sort of cursor/power complement to your follower troops, as FuriousMoo seemed to be looking for. In that way, you feel like you still have a limited degree of the god angle compared to other RTS games where'd you just click and wait for troops to engage, you'd be aiding them by clicking, stunning, waiting for engagement, and possibly helping more where needed.

As you progress, you'd gain more powerful abilities like meteor and swamp for larger engagements, building on the feeling of divine intervention where you're really able to punch into the world and have more enduring effects (e.g. via meteor terrain deformation and swamp terrain modification).

However, as I noted, I think that in the case of a power like swamp (and possibly even meteor) the secondary effects could apply to your own followers, but I think for less potent powers like leashing/FoG, it makes more sense to limit them to one side. After all, extending leashing to the enemy would defeat the point of combat rather easily, once cost becomes a non-issue. Although, the base leash functionality could be extended to some interesting ideas for other powers (e.g. arc lightning), but as I also mentioned, I think it's probably best to sort out the existing abilities before moving on too quickly to entirely new ones.

By the way, FuriousMoo, in regards to Spiderweb's blight idea, see my friendly fire idea for swamps' secondary effect. You could make it apply both ways to prevent it from all being in favor of one side that way, I think.

Edit: Almost forgot Meteor signal for collision location: I think the easiest(?) way to do this might be to provide an actual glowing highlight on the ground when the ability is equipped/active wherever your cursor is that, once you begin the swipe, remains there so you know where it will impact. A better intensity indicator, since swipe length influences that, would be for this highlight to grow in size in relation to the swipe giving you an idea ahead of time how much the ground will be deformed as well.

I think the general idea, originally, was for your swipe direction/terminating point to provide you this indicator anyway, but embedding it on-screen in a clearer manner via the terminating point being highlighted (less cursor, now that I think about it, since that may not give reliable indication) and modifying that highlight through size change related to swipe length, would very much improve the feel by letting you learn how to get more consistent results from your usage of it. Hopefully that makes some sense. The basic idea is to just give the player better feedback in some way so that they can better learn how to use the abilities at their disposal (without necessarily relying on little text popups).

Doing it this way would, while not allowing for change in target/intensity mid-usage, at least give you the feedback to rearm and try again with some idea of how to improve, something the game currently fails to do very well.

Edit2:

Upon further inspection, 13thGeneral essentially covers what I was considering with FoG, but with additional pizazz.

FoG being a stun only effect is easy enough to implement, it's already how it works on champions in the voyages mode. Kill or stun it would still need a cooldown as currently you can spam it super quickly and could easily disable an entire army.

My general philosophy in terms of using powers vs followers in combat (the straightforward direct damage ones anyway) is that each should have it's own advantage and disadvantage, neither ever being the the clear 'best' way to handle a combat scenario.

In an idea world I could use cost and economy to balance a lot of this, but in the way Godus is structured that may be very difficult. In discrete combat scenario (like a starcraft match for example) the economy flow can be calculated and fairly accurately predicted and the cost of units and powers set accordingly. In Godus this will be practically very difficult, I can never predict how much belief a player will have at their disposal in a combat encounter so I pretty much need to assume the player will have enough belief to cast as many powers as they want.

If powers have cool-downs, then the whole point of them having belief cost becomes moot. For example, with FoG, if there's a 20 second cool-down, then why bother having it draw from a global belief pool? Either there's enough belief to carry it through combat or else the player will run out of belief and be incapable of "spamming" the ability to win. If implemented, I think the whole concept of belief generation borders on being moot. Why bother having belief costs? Just make everything have a cool-down to prevent overuse of the ability.

All this points to the major issue at the heart of power usage: pacing. If belief generation was established sufficient to limit the usage of powers, but not to the point where they are completely unusable, there's really no reason to try to balance combat with timers. Populous allowed you to spam lightning and zap to your hearts' content. Its only limitation was belief and belief generation. The difference between Godus and Populous is that belief regeneration is in multi-minute bursts.

This all goes back to the lack of overhaul of base mechanics and how it affects any additional mechanics that are to be implemented. Belief generation and retention are defining factors in how god powers can be used in combat. All the timers in the world won't make a bit of difference if FoG can only be used a few times because it takes longer to generate enough belief to use it than it takes the timer to expire. The current assumptions are that there is an infinite (or sufficient to make it seem that way) amount of belief to fire off a power as often as we'd like. If that's the way we're to treat it, then why bother with the mechanic at all? Either belief usage is important or it's irrelevant and unnecessary.

I still believe having consequences to using powers has merits, if you keep spamming with meteors your going to make very big holes (even now) but simple to fix with sculpting. There is also little consequence to spamming with FoG (Bar small belief cost and unhappiness), cool down and use counters aren't a bad suggestion per se but are just more restrictions (more timers) at the end of the day which we've all moaned about from the start and we're discussing adding more!

Can anyone else think for better consequences of using powers (for example than meteor depositing something like granite) or why this is not better than (Cool down) timers?

Edit: Already made tonnes of edits to this post but other consequences could be hot earth/change to desert spamming FoG or too many hits could cause earth to collapse/quake (it is a god hitting the ground after all)