Player Bonus Settings Revamp

Cernel

Ok, either ways, I see your point and I'm not really against it, if you really feel this option may enjoy a popularity as a bid substitute, we (meaning @redrum) can follow this path, but I think we (meaning @redrum) should decide now if this is going to be an AI bonus or a not-AI bonus, yet likely to be used mostly for AI, already.

I also see a good point in the fact that if we go AI only, then having per player bonuses, instead of a single bonus to all AI, becomes some harder to justify, as I think that most time you would just want the AI all having the same bonus.

If it is going to be a not-AI bonus, which might be the best choice (I'm not really sure), my suggestion would be rather to totally avoid it being customisable in the xml, then, except only for the good item of allowing the mapmakers to choose which resources are excluded, as I think it would be confusing using such bonuses for strict map dynamics (making some players more productive than others, as a game design, to represent different economic abilities or whatever), when, then, you would want to use it as a proper bonus on top of the game; thus keeping it fully and exclusively as an option that the players apply themselves on a finished game, that it is not using / setting it itself.

It would be also possible having an option, in Engine Preferences, for choosing the behaviour of those bonuses appearing only for AI players (as per my previous suggestion) or being always there. Anyways, also in this case, I would not allow mapmakers to set their value in the xml, so just having 100% as mandatory default, to cut down confusion, by restricting their usage away from any games' dynamics.

Surely not just "Options", for me, as you have a bunch of other things that are options, like the "Sound Options", but calling it "Map Options" is almost the same matter, since we have a bunch of options that are options for the map too (the zoom etc.), and the map is definitely the original skin (and the others are called mapskins), not the games, where these options are, that can exist as multiple xml for a single map.

Black_Elk

Just to reiterate, I think whether a game option is marginal or popular, has everything to do with giving players a chance to see this option in action. A couple enthusiastic playgroups adopting the same standard improves the chances of it becoming popular more generally among the broader player base. TripleA started out as a clone of the table top experience, but it has since developed a life of its own, with a regular following and pretty strong community. I think if we give it the nod and make it acceptable, there's a good chance that many players may start to see this income bonus idea as a more attractive method of balancing the game or determining "who plays who" than bidding. Or even if it doesnt replace bidding as the most popular method, players would have at least have one established alternative to bidding that doesn't mess with the normal phases of play.

We've done something similar before with Low Luck. Even if I don't really enjoy the LL playstyle myself, it certainly became a lot more popular once it was included as a standard option in tripleA. What used to be a pretty marginal thing in tournament or house rules play, became common.

I guess I'm already a convert, since I have used income bonuses for years in my own HRs, so none of this seems out of place for the human player. Just a lot more convenient than constantly editing to make it work.

Income to me is just the simplest way to modify the game. Whether one chooses to have a single large bonus only to starting income, or a smaller recurring bonus to regular income per round, I think these can create the desired balance while still staying somewhat true to the opening play pattern as designed. Either method seems easier to implement than a pre-placement bid, so maybe I'm biased. But honestly I can see how some players might even like to do both at the same time, using bonuses and pre-placement bids together.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to go in and mess with the Map Options (whatever it ends up being called) to access these features, but I definitely wouldn't make them exclusive to the AI simply as an expedient for a more streamlined launch UI. If the option exists I'd like to be able to use it for Human players too.

To me the whole idea of a basic income bonus, just provides an easy/intuitive way to scale the difficulty of play for a given player or team. Whether that player is human or AI doesn't really matter. It's just the idea of having a quick and ready way to make the gameplay more challenging. The issue with having the same bonus assigned to all AI players at once only comes up if you plan to assign players on your own team to AI control. Because then it is no longer an effective way to increase the difficulty of the challenge (since you're basically giving your team a bonus too) so it just seemed a lot more flexible to offer this option by player/nation.

Cernel

Basically, a main issue that I can see is that mapmakers may want to be able to define, in the xml, defaults different from 100% per players, mainly to make AI-Challenge tuned games. This is not much of a problem for AI options that (like the old ones) are AI only, but if they are not AI only, then these bonuses become not AI bonuses, but "productivity" bonuses, and a mapmaker may make not-AI maps in which different players have different "productivity" (like Americans more productive than Chinese), that would, then, become confusing to re-use all the same for, either, AI challenge or rebalance or somesuch, of those same maps that already use them for other reasons, by the players, as those bonuses are primarily meant for.
I guess you can just put a very clear warning in pact of steel to never set in the xml these bonuses for anything else but to unbalance maps for AI challenge?
My suggestion to limit to AI only was mainly just to limit this confusion, about what these bonuses are supposed to be, but I can see the merits of keeping them open to PvP rebalancing, as an alternative or supplement to bid, as per what @Black_Elk advocates.

Ultimately, I'm leaning towards suggesting to have them as AI-only default (and showing only besides players assigned to AI), as my initial suggestion, but also having in Engine Preference a general setting (always applying, after you put it on) for having them always showing, and usable for Humans too.

redrum

Lots of good feedback and @Frostion really like the updated screenshot which helps visualize your suggestions. For now, I think I'll keep the income percentage available for both human and AI players.

Here are the latest changes: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/1815

Changes

Update player selection UI to be more intuitive and look cleaner
Update bonus income to have starting point at 100% instead of 0%

Frostion

@redrum
I have not tested the newest build, but anything that compresses the amount of info on screen would be nice. I can't remember all that @Cernel wrote in the above posts, so maybe I will repeat something already mentioned. Sorry

I would say that this new percentage feature is very welcome. But altering the income of specific players on the map does seems to be just as much outside the standard intentions of a map as any of the other current "Map Options" players may control. And I would say that noob players would/should not fiddle with adjusting the income of players before at least playing a few games with the normal balance.

The extra information that this feature brings to the start screen / launch screen seems a bit out of place. As it is an advanced rule-altering play option, and not a basic mandatory option like choosing player-slots, it would be better placed in the current "Map Options". But as I have said before, the settings flood the options screen and destroys the possibility of getting a quick overview of these options.

May I suggest that this be moved back to Map Options, but be displayed in a simpler way. Would it not be possible to have a button inside the Map Options screen that opened up a new window with all these settings. This window could contain any settings that might be implemented in regards to resources options, including flat rate or whatever?

I think this would keep it simple, not confuse noobs, keep it away from the main launch window, not flood the options window and in the future we don't have to be impaired by how much visual space these resource settings take up.

Cernel

@Frostion
This is one of the 2 main reasons why I suggested to have it restricted to the AI players, and magically appearing only in the moment in which any AI is selected for any players.
But I can see the PvP uses underlined by @Black_Elk (tho I'm still dubious that many will).
I'd rather now suggest a button in players selection in which you show / hide Income Modifiers, with the default being hidden, but with also a setting in Engine Preferences to set the default as shown.
To sum it up, I totally agree with @Frostion that it is bad having all that stuff in player selection as default, especially since I've little doubt it will be rarely used outside AI games, and AI games are not the main target of TripleA, but I also think that having it in selection screen makes it much more user friendly than somewhere in options, thus my suggestion of not having it until you just click on a button to make it appear, plus a way to define to have it default, if you prefer so.
Practically, instead of "a button inside the Map Options screen that opened up a new window with all these settings" I suggest a button in players selection to show all that stuff, there.

Black_Elk

I don't have a huge opinion for the UI layout, whether it goes in the player selection screen or game menu screen. I can see advantages or disadvantages for either. I'm just really more interested in the functionality. A separate screen accessed out of the game options menu seems fine for me. As long as the option exists somewhere I'm happy.

I rather wish it wasn't such a persistent issue that A&A games would require rebalancing by the players. Would be nice if more could be built into the standard rules with some kind of randomization to prevent the first round game scripts from becoming static or stale overtime. But Larry has been trying for like 30 years, and I've yet to see a game that didn't require some form of bid or income adjustment or unit set up change at some point to restore interest or balance by sides once the game is cracked.

To me it seems kind of unreasonable (just based on past experience) to expect a perfectly balanced game design. A good balance between two players of equal skill is hard enough to achieve, but one that can also accommodate balance between players with a disparity in skill at the same time, that's a pretty tall order.

Even if a game is constantly updated by the designer with new revisions based on player feedback and such, invariably a point is reached where the map maker takes a bow (the game goes out of print say) and then it's basically up to players to take the reigns if they want to give it an afterlife. When a map is brand new, these issues are a lot less pronounced. It's only after it's been out for a year or two, and experts have played the scenario to death, that you start to really see players pushing for changes. And in those cases they are always looking for some standard to follow. You'll hear questions on the forums like "what side has the advantage for this game?" Or "how do we fix such and such a move from being so broken and overpowered" or "why does this one side always lose, and what should I do about it?"

The standard bid process was developed to address these sorts of issues in tournament play, but it still leaves something to be desired. Typically what happens is that the bid will be used to break one of the major round one TUV trades, so you end up with a first round battle that becomes all or nothing. If the battle works then the game is balanced, if the battle fails it's totally unbalanced. That's the constant problem with pre-placement bids.

Regular income adjustment by contrast, pushes things further out and makes it harder to predict. Nobody is flipping the board, or quitting after the first round, because the results of some key turn 1 battle means that a loss for their side is now inevitable.

That might work great for a live tournament with strict time constraints, but it's important to recall that tournament play isn't necessarily the way people game at home or on the computer. In a tournament you want a rapid turn around, with very clear signals to the players like "hey it's obvious now that you're going to lose eventually, so don't drag it out." Or "OK, hurry up and quit so we can get to the next game in the play-offs." Hehe

For the choice of balancing mechanism, it really just comes down to whether you want to front load all the major 'gives and takes' so the game is easier to call early (pre-placement bid), or somehow push these major TUV trades onto the back burner so the game has more time to develop (income adjustment.) Personally I favor the later for a more satisfying play experience over-all, but that may just be my own bias showing through.

On the table top I don't much like the idea of a game that takes an hour to set up, and then 3 minutes to completely unravel, if a particular round one bid battle goes sour. Some people play LL just to control for this stuff, though I find that playstyle largely unsatisfying myself. For me it's better by far to have a moderate ongoing bonus, that allows for a build up of advantage over time, or opportunities for recovery even if the initial losses are catastrophic haha. But that's me. Others may like different solutions, to this ever present and seemingly intractable problem haha.

redrum

So I tend to agree with limiting the amount of information the user initially sees. My thought is to have a button either on the main screen under "Map Options" or on the player selection screen to expand/collapse/popup player settings besides choosing players called something like "Show/Hide Advanced Player Options".

I still think moving bid into the player selection screen makes more sense and makes it easier to display. It could either be displayed by default or be included in the advanced player options.

Cernel

There is a major bug for old savegames reloaded in the .4580. All players are counted at income 0%, thus they can't collect:
0_1496773936602_BUG_20170606_270BC_40%_Rev.tsvg

redrum

@Cernel Good catch and thanks for testing. I forgot to set the new default to 100% for old games. Here is the fix: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/1828

Its merged and in the latest pre-release to test.

LaFayette

@redrum I like Cernel's suggestion/screenshot quite a bit. The PvP consideration is interesting. I think it makes most sense to group a bonus income percentage adjustment together with the bid, keep all that related functionality together in the UI. In that view it may make sense to actually take both routes, and do PvP bonus income in same place as bid options .

Cernel

Yah. For the record, I still think that this feature should be default totally not visible (comprising the columns themselves), for games having no AI-assigned players, and just showing up when, either:

You select any AI for a player; in this case all the column(s) showing up, but only the slots right of the AI assigned players (as you can see in my previous image here: https://forums.triplea-game.org/assets/uploads/files/1496610234214-unavngivet-resized_cernel01.png).
You click on a button called "Resources Modifiers", located right above the "Cancel" button in game's selection, to have all the modifiers for any and all not-hidden players.

Number 1, in particular, would have three positive effects:
1a) Would look cool and professional to new players, that will see the option offered right when they need it, as most of the times you want to give some aid to the AI, and this is true for pretty much whatever not TripleA games too.
1b) In most cases, in which you want to give the same bonus to any AI players, it would make the easiest to get around the annoyance of now having to set the bonus for each player, as, once you have selected all players for the AI, you could just blindly write it in all the slots showing up, not even keeping an eye checking you are giving it to the right ones.
1c) Would keep the main screen clean from options that the common most popular custom maps of TripleA (think of Big World, NWO, etc.) are just not using, as they are almost always meant to be for PvP only and well balanced for it (so that also bids are rarely used, aside from not well balanced maps, and pretty much all popular maps truly created by the community, if you know what I mean, are usually played with no bid).

I also think that the mapmakers should not be able to customise the default value in the xml (for it not being 100%), to avoid, on one hand, this option being confusingly used as part of the game's rules (like making a player more productive than another, to represent a more advanced civilization) and, on the other hand, because I don't think it makes really sense having default suggested AI challenge bonuses, since the AI is or may be continually under development, thus this is just asking for having eventually unbalanced maps in the repository, as it is not feasible all maps being continually updated and rebalanced each time the AI gets changed (when you make an AI challenge, better just assigning the challenging players to the AI default, and let the player choose how much he wants to be challenged; having the bonus slots showing up default for the AI-assigned players only will make it fairly intuitive). Also, this would avoid PvP maps spuriously having or not having AI bonuses assigned, just because the mapmaker preferred or not preferred so, like Pact of Steel 2 having a +20% AI bonus and Napoleonic Empires having a +8 AI PUs bonus, while other purely PvP maps, like Pact of Steel, Big World or New World Order have no default bonuses, while there are no reasons at all for this difference (not like Napoleonic Empires requires an AI bonus while Big World doesn't), and I think AI cheats should not apply unless the game is clearly defined as an AI challenge or the player actively wanted them.

I think the only thing that would be good to be able to customise would be excluding or including resources for multiplication, while the default should be to multiply any resources except the ones meant not to be used to buy units (currently, only "techTokens" and "VPs").

redrum

The plan is to add a button to show/hide the resource modifiers which defaults to being hidden. I'm planning to add "flat PU income" and move bid from options window to the player selection window.

Cernel

@redrum While I'd let the bid stay where it is, not to mess with how the options were already configured in many maps, I'm not against it for any other reasons, and itself it makes sense. Question is, should I go ahead removing all bids from WAW 2.1.1? I would also remove 1 of the options, so to have all options on a single column.

redrum

@Cernel Not until we do the next stable release.

redrum

Latest changes are in this PR: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/1853

Functional Changes

Button added on 'player selection' UI to show/hide resource modifier fields to avoid overwhelming users with too much info. It defaults to hidden.
Added new PU income bonus to go along with the existing income percentage field to provide instead a flat PU bonus income.

Cernel

Instead of "Flat Income", I suggest just "Income Bonus".
In the moment in which you see something like "8 PUs" under "Income Bonus", it is already clear it is flat, as well as it is clear that the other one is a percentage, when you se a "%" beside.
Strictly speaking, beside the fact that I don't like to see "Income" and "Flat Income" one beside the other (it sort of seem like "Flat Income" is a subset of "Income"), "Flat Income", especially coherently with how "Income %" works, would mean that you are giving exactly that income, instead and in substitution of the normal one, not in addition to, otherwise it would need to be called "Flat Income Bonus" (but this would be really too long).
I think I would also prefer "Income %" and "Income Bonus PUs" in the headers, having no writings at all beside each slot; I feel it way too busy having a bunch of % % % ... and PUs PUs PUs ... repeated everywhere.
For the "Resource Modifiers" button, beside that I think it should be called "Resources Modifiers", I would have it lower-right, just above the current "Cancel" button (I just prefer keeping the buttons together, and the current position of that button looks stranded, when the stuff is hidden).
Then, again, these are all my off-the-cuff feelings.
Other things I'm wondering are how the flat will work with other resources. Will the mapmakers be able to set additional columns for each resources they want to, or maybe just able to switch this feature off, in maps in which there are too many resources, that giving only PUs would not really make sense and be too distortive. My suggestion would be to just keep it simple and have no customisation but just the flat being simply always not present in case the map has any custom resources at all (thus only for maps having PUs only, plus eventually other non custom resources like TechTokens).

So, what I suggest is something looking like this (the points are just for spacing; don't look at them):

Income......Income
....%........Bonus PUs

..100..............0
..100..............0
..100..............0
..100..............0
..100..............0
..100..............0

(the points are because this forum doesn't allow me to show multiple spaces (let me know if there is a way I can do it))

Cernel

If it is preferred as it is, my only suggestion would be then to change "Flat Income" to "Income Bonus", for the reasons I explained.
I really don't like "Flat Income".

Zim Xero

@Cernel Income bonus is more universally understood and means the same thing. Personally, i use the income 'flat' bonus all the time in games to make the AI less squishy. To avoid run-away games I tend to avoid the % income bonus.

redrum

The latest changes are merged into the pre-release now. I'll give a few days for feedback then consider changing the name of the 'flat income' column. I think I still prefer having PUs next to each field as it makes it easier to read even if there is duplication.

Functional Changes

Button added on 'player selection' UI to show/hide resource modifier fields to avoid overwhelming users with too much info. It defaults to hidden.
Added new PU income bonus to go along with the existing income percentage field to provide instead a flat PU bonus income.