Recently Frost Giant dropped a new discussion topic after a 5 month absence. While they dropped some interesting tidbits on the systems they are developing (see our coverage for more on that), the most controversial topic they touched on was that of Unit Veterancy.
What is Unit Veterancy?
Before we talk about it in earnest, we should briefly define the concept. In some RTS games (Company of Heroes, Command and Conquer, Warcraft III), units or clumps of units are able to gain in power through combat interactions, normally through doing damage or confirming kills. Wayward Strategy has an excellent article that goes into more depth, as well as discusses the pros and cons of the idea.
Veterancy Goals
Given the potential snowballing downsides, why would a modern RTS choose to include a Veterancy system? The answer is a deceptively simple one - it allows the gameplay loop to reward players with a sense of progression within individual games, something that can be lacking within most RTS games.
Contrast this idea with a tactical FPS - killing individual opponents in a round provides that tangible burst of satisfaction that winning an individual fight in an RTS often lacks. Providing some sort of veterancy component rewards individual micro decisions with immediate feedback in a way that a successful macro cycle cannot.
Veterancy Drawbacks
The downside, of course, to veterancy is simple - it significantly reduces unit parity in a rather snowbally way. An army that wins a fight is much more likely to win the next fight, and even more likely to win the following, which reduces comeback opportunities within any individual game. While it is important to reward players for playing well, reducing comeback opportunities because of one interaction probably isn’t the way to go. It also shifts the focus of the gameplay loop from an equal focus on micro and micro to one that rewards micro significantly more.
Veterancy also is a system that tends to work well when there are smaller amounts of units active on the field. On the extreme example, the prospect of tracking the veterancy status of individual zerglings in a game of Starcraft II seems much more daunting than tracking squad-level veterancy in a Command and Conquer game. It also makes it difficult for players to judge the progress of a fight - a bunch of marines that suddenly level up can swing a fight from lost to won with very little visual feedback.
While there is room for that type of RTS in the space, I don’t believe that Frost Giant Studios is attempting to build an RTS that values micro over macro, and it certainly isn’t building an RTS with low unit counts. This then begs the question - are there ways in which veterancy can be implemented without leading to significant snowballs?
Veterancy As Ability Unlocks
One possible implementation would be to lock veterancy to higher-tier units. These units are already more important on the battlefield, and often come with some extra ability to increase their use (at least in games like Starcraft 2). Take the High Templar for example - the average Protoss player will likely have a small amount of them at any given time, and they dominate the game whenever they are in play. The player is already incentivized to maximize their value.
That then begs the question - what if powerful abilities were locked behind veterancy? In the High Templar example, it currently has two spells: feedback and storm. Feedback is a single target ability that does significant damage to spell casters, and storm is an AOE spell that does significant damage to everyone. While the templar is perhaps not the greatest example due to feedback requiring enemy casters, what if storm was gated behind damage done by feedback? This would mean that each high templar would have to do sufficient damage with it’s single-target ability before it could dominate the battlefield with it’s AOE ability, thereby rewarding players for good micro and positioning, giving them a sense of progression, but not necessarily snowballing out of control.
Alternate Veterancy Conditions
The standard system of veterancy involves units killed or damage done - a unit or a squad does some amount of damage or achieves some number of kills, and they level up, gaining some stat improvements along the way. If we follow the assumption that only important units should have veterancy (do you want to track zergling progression?), then there are other interactions that can be tracked, however, that lead to more interesting veterancy progressions. A good majority of these high-impact units have multiple abilities - at least if we follow the Warcraft or Starcraft model. More importantly, it’s not uncommon for these units to have spells of different power levels. Following the High Templar example from above, what if a number of feedbacks unlocked storm?
Again, High Templars are clearly not the best example - feedback is a niche ability and storm is the primary purpose of the unit in most games. However, the successful use of abilities unlocking others is an interesting one - it rewards skillful play while also allowing Frost Giant another balancing tool, as that mechanic leads players into building less units of that type.
Cosmetic Veterancy
While the options above are interesting, they fail to address the true goal of a veterancy system in an RTS - to make players feel good about smaller decisions they have made in the game. To that end, the most interesting approach is to embrace a cosmetic veterancy system instead of a power veterancy system.
All veterancy systems previously discussed are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - how can we develop a veterancy system that rewards skillful play while not leading to excessive power snowballs? Any system that increases the power level of a unit or set of units based on successful combat interactions will snowball by default. But what if we reward veterancy in other ways? If the goal is to make players feel good about how they are playing the game, audible and cosmetic changes do that without changing the power level of the army.
For example, Frost Giant could implement a tiered marine skin that visually upgrades on some damage threshold. Level 1 would be the standard marine, level 2 would improve the look of the gun, etc. This also introduces the opportunity for more interesting skins as well - mix and match your skins as you choose the Level 1, Level 2, etc skins for each unit. Of course, for this to properly work the units would need some form of animation showing that they have hit a new veterancy. It then becomes a marker of prestige to keep your super fancy marine alive for the rest of the game just to show off.
Take the situation of marines target firing a bunch of banelings - at a certain point, the marines would start to visually promote as the player executes some impressive micro. That wouldn’t impact the game at all, but would feel extremely good for the player playing the game. Frost Giant can also do interesting things with how difficult it is to kill units through an XP system. We know that they are working on a system that has more hard counters than SC2 - a marine getting the final kill on a colossus would award enough xp for it to immediately level up to max level, while killing a zergling would bump progression far less.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, any veterancy system that rewards players with power increases will be vulnerable to the snowball effect. This can be mitigated through hard counters (a veteran infantryman still dies just fine to a flame thrower in Company of Heroes), and could perhaps even allow Frost Giant to have tighter control on game win conditions. That being said, if we stick with the Blizzard RTS model, the method that accomplishes the core goals of veterancy without changing the balance of the game is a cosmetic one.
What do you all think? Am I off base here? Tweet at me @BeoMulf_SC2 or join my twitch chat when I’m live. I’d love to hear from you!
Getting Involved
As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!