Budget Losses

"Fuck catchin' lightning he struck it, screamed "shut up" at thunder
Then flipped the world upside down and made it rain upward"

 

Eminem - Cinderella Man

 

 

Rogue Trader's next expansion's supposedly "springing" in 2025, and I'd rather not finish my campaign without that extra content. May as well shelve it to give them a few months to iron out the inevitable slew of bugs to come with that. (Seriously, it's an Owlcat game. Months may not suffice.)

Most companies don't need a keyboard shortcut...

But I won't deny the warhammerin' itself remains enjoyable enough, and I've been mixing it up with snipers, swords, strategems, shotguns and 'sychic stuff sufficiently satisfyingly. For one, I was intrigued at characters' "ultimate" abilities being castable both when you've built a bit of momentum in a fight and as "desperate measures" when you've fallen behind, say by a squadmate getting dropped. It's made for a couple of snap recoveries, and you've gotta love those opportunities to turn a liability into an asset.* Turn the tables. Saying "No, you!" sounds lame. Playing it out? Badass.

If you don't recognize that scene, you should first of all watch Corpse Bride. While it's been done elsewhere and a corpse has nothing to lose by parrying a saber with her ribs (though it is symbolically re-enacting her own worst moment) the unflinching conviction with which she then turns the captured blade against the aggressor yields an exemplary such heroic resurgence. Durn fine animatin'. The effect could easily have been watered down by belaboring the point, a routine to which mass media has treated us far more often with each inspirational tale of disabled athletes set to stirring string music. As one example you could try an old episode of ST:TNG called Loud As A Whisper, where even saying the phrase "turn disadvantage into advantage" deflates the hero of the week's comeback finale by sheer motivational poster corniness.

 

The interactive equivalent is instituting a sacrifice mechanic for its own sake, simply because making the player give something up or take a dive goes against the grain, sounds original on its face. In Warframe's rescue missions for instance your NPC will ask for your sidearm so he can help you fight. Except it wasn't thought through and is more likely to get the idiot killed for drawing aggro or standing instead of running, something anyone! ever! having played any! video game escort quest could tell you would happen.

 

More common in strategy genres, which make a selling point of cost/benefit estimates. Contrast Iratus, which forces you to sacrifice a unit for certain buildings but where putting that unit to any other use would be a pointless waste of XP -versus- Northgard's Nidhogg worshippers or Gladius' Chaos cultists sacrificing workers or bottom-tier soldiers to keep their economies running. Iratus' version is just a pointless extra step, whereas the other two balance the sacrifice against work or combat utility.

 

Age of Wonders 4 provides an even better example. The rush-focused Chaos tree rarely works for me as I play slow games on large maps. It took me several runs to even figure out how you're expected to compensate for hyperaggressive demonic units' relative squishiness and lack of sustaining spells. Simply put: fuck 'em.

The "fight for power" spell would seem wasteful at face value. In most situations one slightly better unit is still weaker than two lower ones... unless they're wounded, and their ensuing hatefuck produces a full-health hate-baby. Which makes fiends quite adept at maintaining a headlong push before your enemy has a chance to retreat and heal. Churn those inferno puppies!** Like zombie or sacrifice decks in MtG. The more you filled your own graveyard, the deadlier you'd get.

 

But of course it's most satisfying when such situations emerge from other game mechanics. In Rimworld, for instance, a space-bug infestation is usually terrible news. They spawn plentifully, reproduce quickly if not immediately extirpated, run fast and hit hard and worst of all burrow in at the back of your base far beyond any defenses, destroying walls as they go.

... except in this case they initially broke into tunnels I was using to expand my base, largely free of sensitive objects, far enough from my colonists not to aggro on them. Their burrowing itself actually did a lot of mining work for me, a little messy but nonetheless a time-saver. So I let them breed for a couple of generations, then finally set up a defensive line at the batteries and ended up farming up a massive quantity of edible insect meat and jelly.

Score.

My more recent colonies attempt to move my primitive tribe up to the tundra. Some details:

- Less than one full growing season per year. Almost no vegetation.

- 20% research speed. It takes a year and half to get refrigeration going. But you can keep food fresh by leaving it outside under a rock overhang.

- The grazing herds inhabiting the biome still need to eat. Result?

Rudolph's raidin' the rarebit!

I was angry at first and rushed to complete indoor storage, but then realized how much time this saves on hunting. Even if a cariboob does manage to eat a meal before I shoot it, that's 10 food lost for a payoff of 90, prep time notwithstanding. And they're usually so fixated on the food they'll stand still and keep eating even as they'll being peppered with shortbow fire. Half the time they'll do this even if they enrage! (Before you say it, I don't have the resources for constantly triggered snap-traps.) Wuddentchooknowit, I've reinvented bait!

 

Now, there is of course a proper context for all this and it's loot. Risk and reward, cost-to-benefit, the primordial sweet tooth suckling on non-zero sums. Loot fundamentally turns loss into gain, expending some arrows and healing potions (and, more broadly speaking, your time as a player) to get your enemy's more valuable gear. Problems arise when either the cost or benefit drop out of the equation.

Games in which failure=permadeath or where you're knocked back to the start of a level fifteen minutes ago (i.e. old '80s/'90s fare or anything "retro" to that effect) punish risk-taking and creative solutions too heavily, devolving to mindless repetition of one winning move. Remember that mentality largely stemmed from arcade games whose profit came from eating the player's quarter to make you pay for more lives.

Conversely, games which dangle loot as an operant conditioning reward stimulus in front of the player at every step, where there are always ten more rats to kill for yet more magic shoulderpads (i.e. where the industry has been stuck for the past couple of decades) eliminate too much of the risk or loss coefficient. There's no point in doing anything new if doing anything at all still gets you rewarded.

WHICH IS WHY GIVING KIDS PARTICIPATION TROPHIES WAS ALWAYS JUST AS  DAMAGING AS FLUNKING THEM GRATUITOUSLY ON A SADISTIC TEACHER'S WHIM, IT GOES BOTH WAYS YOU UTTER IMBECILES!!!

Sorry, I seem to have gotten distracted there for a second BY THE END OF CIVILIZATION but the point is: sometimes taking a hit gets you a shiny new sword, and a loss can be turned into a gain. But don't try to force such opportunities to arise. Don't try to fake it. You can code a good game but you can't code good gaming.

 

 

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* Like getting free publicity from people bitching your company out about its buggy code.

** Actual unit name. Inferno puppy.