As of late I’ve been trying to teach myself how to use the Official Supreme Commander Map Editor. I spent a few hours messing around with it the other weekend and basically tweaked one of the existing maps that ships with the game.

One thing all this got me thinking about was balance in games today and does symmetry equal balance with regard to actual strategy?

I gave google the two keywords “symmetry” and “balance” and he showed me the following site:
Art 104: Design and Composition class at Palomar College

This mentions the various types of symmetry but the one that interested me most is the Biaxial symmetry. This is the type that occurs in games such as Supreme Commander. It is common that many of the 4+ player maps are using biaxial symmetry.

Biaxial symmetry uses two axes of symmetry — vertical and horizontal. These guarantee balance: top and bottom as well as left and right.

In order to allow all players to start from an unbiased standpoint the maps are mirror on two axes. In other words, the terrain in the upper left quarter is exactly the same as the upper right, lower left and lower right - the only difference is that it has been flipped and mirrored.

Doodles

I’ve been doodling some basic map ideas on loads of scrap pieces of paper. Nothing fancy as you’ll see, just basic geometric shapes with enough detail to define land and water. I cannot believe the small number of maps that exists in the Supreme Commander. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few maps but they do not cater for that many eventualities. You have a handful of maps for the good old 1v1 battles. There are the a ton of maps suited for 4 players (2 on 2 is probably the most common arrangement). There is then 1 map suited for 5 players, a handful of 6 player maps and a good number of 8 player maps. Again this is fine for the most part but in our clan there is usually 5 players on at a time. 2 vs 3 is never a fair battle although me and jof have thrashed the other 3 player on numerous occasions now ;). I just wish there were more 5 player maps out there, as all we have is that starfish-shaped map. I’d like to remake this map without the water. That would be nice for a fre-for-all with 5 players ;)
It’s very easy to come up with some nice looking maps on paper. They look very basic but the problem will lie in making them interesting to play or look at. Building the heightmaps themselves is a long enough process and the you have to build up all the the differing layers (strata). Adding spawn points (teams) and mass points should probably be done as soon as you have a basic heightmap up and textured so you can test the model for any dodgy collision. Once all this is done you can add some more polish by using decals to bring it up to professional standards.

Perhaps if I show jof how to use the editor I can build the heightmaps while he textures them? That will certainly save time…

I wish more developers would build their games using this symmetric map design that Supreme Commander uses. Take DICE for instance. Battlefield 2 is an excellent multiplayer game and has some great maps. It also has some average and down right boring maps too (I’m looking at most of the PLA ones here). Now I’d class BF2 as an arcade/action game. It’s certainly not realistic. If you want realism go and play ArmA (and no Project Reality is a sorry excuse for a mod. I’d rather play any game other than spend half the time in game waiting to spawn.). Anyway, I digress. Of all the maps in BF2 I cannot see any of them having any real symmetry apart from Zatar to some degree. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it means you need to learn the whole map and its little intricacies.

There are some instances where these unique maps make the gameplay seem a little one-sided. Most of these involve one team spawning on an aircraft carrier trying to gain a foothold on the land. I don’t mind some of these maps. In fact Wake is possibly my most played map ever. It’s great fun trying to work as team to capture all of the island. The problem is most people don’t work as a team. They go “John Rambo” or queue for a jet. That’s another flaw in the games design - weapon/unit balance. I don’t care if the J10 is a better machine in real-life than its US counterpart - I want them both to fly the same so that the game is balanced! The fact that the J10 has a smaller collision model or whatever is one of the reasons I don’t fly very often. It’s biased to one side.

I remember the good old days of BF1942. Where both sides would get a fighter & bomber which were roughly equally matched. You had maps such as Battleaxe that were almost symmetric apart from the fact that the Axis had a more raised base unlike the Allies that meant the Brits were constantly spawn camped the keep them from getting airborne.

I’m not saying symmetry makes a good game (although I think this is very true for RTS titles such as Forged Alliance) but what I am saying is that I wish games designers would at least take it into consideration when building their maps.

Okay, so we finally decide we’re going to get another session of Supreme Commander in this Sunday - after all, it’s generally only on a Sunday that we can all get together with enough hours to play a game! The teams were already decided from our last battle - this time it was me and jof against Simon and Ridgway - the only snag was that AmathusUKX decided that he would join us. Great. The more the merrier I say, and I can’t wait until Mr.Unhappy gets his copy as then we’ll finally get to try some 3v3 like we once did back in the BETA.

Anyhow, Chris goes with Simon and Alex - seeing how Alex generally always wins ;0\ This means the sides are as follow: gav (EUF), jof (Aeon) vs Si (UEF), Alex (Cybran) and Chris (Aeon). After looking through the available maps we finally settled on the classic “Sechon’s Clutch” for it’s nice balance of land and water. It’s spawn point placement also allowed both teams to expand in a safe area with most of the action taking place in the narrow bottle neck or the sea/air.

Anyway numerous skirmishes were had between the regular players. I had some major sea battles with Simon while jof went to-to-toe with Alex’s spiders. I used a heavily upgraded SCU to build a heavy torpeedo/SAM firebase in the southern waters while the Atlantis was being constructed. This proved to be quite useful later when the torpeedo bombers came in after my naval fleet.

About 1 hour 30 minutes into the game jof said t me in team chat:

I have a teleportable SCU, should I hit Ridge?

I thought, yeah why not? Alex is always a strong opponent. It’s been our plan to finsh Simon and Alex off first, leaving Chris until last. Chris was not in the BETA and thus missed all of our “play tests” where we would see what worked and what didn’t. For intance - how many T3 Strategic Bombers does it take to fall a Monkey Lord? Anyway, you get the idea.

I think in this game someone had been sending Nukes our way, and we’d tried to spot it using T3 Scout Planes, but had failed. Jof wanted to send in his “telefrag” SCU to do some serious damage to Alex’s economy, but upon setting the SCU going, he went off to queue more stuff up while the clock ticked.

A minute later all we heard was a nuclear explosion and a message popped up on all of our screens:-

The_Ridg has been defeated.

Opps, that was a tad cold. Jof’s SCU had teleported in right next to Alex’s ACU and when it died had obviously taken him with it. I’m not sure if it was really an accident or whether in fact that jof had indeed spotted Alex and went for a quick kill. Either way, with Alex dead we began to concentrate our efforts on Simon. It was already late when we started this game and time was getting on. Chris decided it was time for bed (work in the morning) and promptly disconnected. Simon now had a 2v1 situation. To make things fun me & jof decided to upgrade our ACU’s for combat and to stroll them into Simons base with the intention on finding his ACU and bitch-slapping him.

Remind me never to upgrade me commander for battle ever again. At least not after 1 hour into the game. They are so vulnerable to artillery etc it really is annoying. In total annihilation you could always rely on your big boy to take down any real trouble. In Sup Com the ACU is a real wuss. Sure he’ll kill most units, but he’s best left hidden, somewhere safe with all of his engineering suites used to build more useful units!

Looking forward to next week.