Great advantage, but with a concern regarding multiplayer game

from Elemental Forums

Assuming the next patches will fix the balance issues, Elemental is a very good game that presents a relatively new concept: Post-apocalyptic world.

Of course, as an idea there is nothing new about it, but Elemental also placed this in the game play itself, especially in how resources are treated in the game.

 

Resources are rare. Rare enough to make you want to start a war over a single mine. Rare enough that every temple/mine/field you find is a reason for a celebration.

From a city perspective, it makes every city unique, since each city will upgrade itself with buildings and bonuses according to what resources it has in it's range.

In kingdom/game play perspective, every game will be different from the one before. The tech tree advances as well as the soldiers and general strategy will be mainly decided on the resources located near your cities.

There is no single "winning strategy", simply because a player will decide his strategy based on the land around him (again, all this is true AFTER several patches that are supposed to come).

 

All this is a great advantage in a strategy game, but it also raises a concern regarding multiplayer games.

While there are multiple strategies to pick from, some will still be stronger than others. So doesn't that mean that in a multiplayer game the result of the game will be heavily decided on the start position of the players and the land around them?

elemental
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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

possibly a bigger answer then you want, but I think it applies.  There are common strategies in MP games (more so RTS then TBS) even space games where you have to colonize planets

The Turtle: Focus a base (planet) or two around a resource hub and then build up a patrol/defense path between the two until strong enough to take on more resources. The theory was that if the opposing player sent a lot of forces to break against their base (home area), they would waste resources on a brick wall and leave themselves open afterwards.

The Zerg (blitz): Focusing on a large number of units right off the bat that immediately go out and attack the enemy head on. If done properly you can cripple your opponent by destroying key buildings before they can build an adequate defense (either in building form or unit form) examples include destroying all their food/energy buildings. The key to this strategy is that you MUST continue making units DURING the attack since it's unlikely you will be able to make buildings (not enough resources after making that many units and not enough time to plan the base)

The Expander: Quickly going out and snatching resources and creating multiple bases. This tactic leaves you with little defense or offense early on but utterly destroys the Turtle tactic. Downside is it leaves you completely vulnerable to the blitz. The key here is location. Use bottlenecks or edges (mountains/water or map edge) to slow enemy advance and give warnings to incoming attacks so you can either pull out or reinforce.

- to relate this further to your post - if one player gets a better starting area, they are less likely to "branch out" because what they need is already there, and they will be focusing on trying to defend it.  Though they will be getting more resources more quickly and able to use those resources to build more units to go out and explore, they will also need (or at least think they do) much of those resources to make the buildings that put them to use.  Since that doesn't just use resources, it also uses turns, that means they aren't building other things that a less "lucky" player would be.  Not using 3 turns to on the extra gold mine or farm might give you three turns to build something that gives you an advantage...  that's part of the strategy.  Knowing what order to make things/research things/explore areas... being bold but not overextending yourself...

it would really suck if every game had the same cookie-cutter resources (especially when some factions start with bonus resources)