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Imagine a real-time strategy game where there are three kinds of resources: tree, iron and stone, used to create paper units, scissors units and stone units respectively. They are significantly advantageous to each other following the usual RPS pattern.

The twist: the resources aren't evenly occurring. Say, there's 3x stone, 2x iron and x tree.

This should have a certain impact on the game, and I'm curious to know in what way, and that's what I want to discuss. It doesn't seem obvious to me how it'd turn out, despite me being a maths kind of person. Some key questions:

• Will it affect the distribution of units? If so, how will it be related to the occurrences of the resources?
• Will there be significantly different tactics, or will all games evolve similarly?
• What will be most important in order to win?
• How will gameplay differ from a game with even resource occurrence?
• What would happen if the most occurring resource won against the least occurring instead? (e.g. 3x stone and x metal)
  

I'm eager to hear your thoughts. :)

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/rock-paper-scissors-in-strategy-games.html

rps with unequal payoff

There's an anime that explores unbalanced RPS, though it was even more complicated. But I can't remember its name nor have a coherent thought about the subject, so a what great contribution I brought into this discussion. ::)

hunter x hunter is riddle with this (naruto have some passage about it too)

I think the game would only be balanced if all players are equal in their access to resources. If one player has access to lots of stone, and another player has access to lots of paper, then it's obvious who would be the bigger threat to who.

How would the gameplay be? I think it would be similar to having different weapons in an FPS game...


Paper units would be like rocket launchers, because you don't get many of them. Their damage rate is high compared to the most common thing in the game, the Stones... Good, eh?  ;)

But then the balance breaks down...

Stone units would be like Pistols, because you gets lots of rounds. But damage rate is medium against the most common unit (stones), high against the next most common unit (scissors), and low against the rarest units (papers).

Scissor units would be like Shotguns, because you get a medium number of them. Their damage rate is low compared to the most common thing in the game (stones). They're only effective vs Paper, which is rare.

So the FPS analogy really looks like this:


If I were playing that game, I'd want pistols (stone units) because they're overpowered. I'd steer clear of Shotguns (scissor units) because they are underpowered. Rocket launchers (paper units) are balanced.

Here we go. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiji_%28manga%29)

Add some business/frontier elements with influence from some 4X titles & you got a hook.

Making them companies would be sweet (Paper company, Scissor manufacture, Mining facility)
where you choose one & operate, competing with the others would be cool.

The game itself was balanced. Everyone had the same number of rocks, papers, and scissors, and I'm pretty sure they all had 3 of each. The fixed number of each card added a predator/prey, target the weak sort of thing. The lack of rules combined with the naivety of the protagonist for the sake of plot progression made it seem more complex than it really is.

throughly entertaining show tho

Ah yes, you are correct.

Initialy we can see the luck as a major point in the game. If the possibility to scout is added, them the game will turn out as a "Counter-Counter-Counter" game, where you just need to know what your oponent is doing to counter it.

At this point we cannot forget that macro and micro management counts towards winning and with that the RPS will loose its spotlight, unless it would be so vital to the game that player skill cannot make Paper have a victory over Scissors.

It's kinda hard to imagine it without further info.

I don't know if its clear, but i can resume with one question.

Will the game focus on the RPS or on the RTS?

Probably has no bearing on the topic at hand but relates to Rock-Paper-Scissors

How To Win In Rock Paper Scissors Every Time (http://flowingdata.com/2010/07/30/how-to-win-rock-paper-scissors-every-time/)

Its not at all equal!

This thread reminds me of this battle-dice game I concieved one time.

You have 3 kinds of dice, 20-siders (Captains), 12-siders (Generals), and standard 6-siders (Grunts). Each came prefabricated with one "star" side (Captains had two), and had 3 HP, 2 HP, and 1 HP respectively. The remaining faces could be customized with swords, shields, and shots however the player saw fit. In truth, they could cover their "star" space with one as well, but that's not tactically recommended.

Each side rolls their army. Any Star rolls go first - they're totally invincible for the turn, and can one-hit kill any other die on the field. After that, whoever had the fewest remaining dice would go first, attacking the other side:

Shields > Shots > Swords > Shields (ala RPS)

...and then the other side could retaliate with whatever dice they had remaining. Caps and Gens had to be taken out within the turn however, or their HP was auto-recovered. To keep things fair, the players began with basically the same +/- 1 HP amount of dice on their sides. It tips a little by the luck of rolling stars, but a good RPS strategy could make at least one of your dice nearly unstoppable to some certain forces!

For instance, you could have one grunt with 1 star, 1 shield, and 4 shots. Stars aside, strategic imbalance COULD triumph over pure luck! ;)

While I've always thought the idea of 'weighting' RPS games is interesting, I think in an RTS or general strategy context it'll be hard to do so without one side becoming little more than a force-of-numbers unit-spam - in this case, stone, because it's the most abundant. Could an extra layer (which could potentially remove this problem) be added whereby certain tools from certain types are needed to extract the resources, but always a different resource to the kind of tool? So you need to balance both the units you are creating from each of the three, but also the resources you are keeping back to acquire different resources in the future, say:

You need iron to chop down trees; wood to build struts in mines to extract stone; and stone to heat to smelt iron. That's just a one-second suggestion (and doesn't TOTALLY make sense), but something along those lines.

That's fascinating.

- You need to have iron BEFORE you can make axes and saws with which to chop down trees,

- You need wood BEFORE you can make mineshafts and minecarts with which to extract stones and ores.

- You need stones and ores BEFORE you can build the stone furnaces with which to smelt the iron ore into iron metal.

It's like the chicken and the egg!

This reminds me that in Age of Empires 3 you had to rely on treasures and shipments from hometown to get resource gathering going. And in Dwarf Fortress it would be practically impossible to survive if you didn't have the starting supplies.

Perhaps players could select how much of which resource to start with.