Game design: reality simulation and the Spirals of doom

A lot of game designers (including me) make and obvious and understandable mistake on their first real projects. One of the common assumptions is that if some game mechanism will simulate the behaviour of a real life situation, it will be intuitive and easily understandable.

This assumption is of course far from truth. Real life is not exactly intuitive and understandable in the first place. If you create in a complex economic war game a value of happiness that will affect a key elements and make it a variable with several different inputs you can guarantee it is going to be a lot of trouble. I know because I did exactly that.
It was designed as a mechanism to contain and limit players expansion in a limited multiplayer world.
The simulation was so believable that just like in the real world, no-one had really any idea why their people hate them and refuse to multiply. So remember:

If you have to make a guidebook to explain an in-game mechanics, than it probably won't work

You can use a complicated game ecosystems of course but if something is complex - it should be the core gameplay element and everything should wrap around it. Having multiple complex structures having effect on each other tends to create what I begun to call the "Spirals of doom". It is an intimately known problem to anyone who played the early Settlers or the original Ufo defense. If a mechanics is designed to be a weak point that can hinder the goals of your player, than it shouldn't affect the ways to solve the problem. For example:

In the old UFO: defense (enemy unknown) - when mission went bad, your soldiers died, their equipment was lost and the anger of your supporters had risen. That meant you had for the next mission worse soldiers, with worse equipment and your funding could drop lower which left you in a situation where your next mission would be much more difficult and failing at it would only make your troubles go worse, while your only solution - money - were getting depleted because you failed in the mission...

This spirals make the difficulty of the game unbalanced because failure at a basic task made the difficulty gradually harder, up to the extreme where the game became unplayable. While the game may be, to that point, fairly ballanced, one mishandling could make the player's experience a hell ride. So beware, the solution of any problem shouldn't be dependent on the source of the problem itself.

And here we come back to the simulations of reality. They are great, they tend to generate an interesting gameplay and increase difficulty in a good way. However, you should be wary on how and when to use them. If you want it, use it for the key element of the game. In a war game - make combat vibrant, punishing and rewarding by simulating the real combat units with their weaknesses and strong points. But keep it off the supply lines. My first officially published game had such a weakness. It was a complete simulation of war of nations. Perfect and lifelike so much it should be used for schools to make kids understand how you can't really win a war only loose less than your opponents and hate everything about it in the end. Wars were short, brutal and left the one side scarred and the other one destroyed without chance to recover. A lot like you know it from the multiplayer sessions of the Heroes of Might and Magic.

Which leads me to an another mistake fairly common among the game designers of the online strategy and survival games. The offline gameplay. A friend of mine working on a new project came to me with the concept of game, where in rpg multiplayer survival game, their characters would be permanently present in the world without ultimate protection - with the death having strong impact on the game. I was truly alarmed because I understood that there is one really important problem.

The important and game changing actions should be made, when player is present to see and is able to affect them.

If player may leave for the moment just to find out his character died or his empire had been burned to ashes it should be because he failed at some fundamental and easy steps to prevent it. Not because he was unlucky enough to be attacked when he wasn't looking. Any "game over" moment should never be outside players control. Why? Simply because it is extremely frustrating for him, while not creating any fun challenge for the opposing side. This is where most turn based mmo web strategies have advantage as what happens in the night is the result of the whole day's preparations - so if player got destroyed by his neighbor, he underestimated his power or simply wasn't as good. The real time ones have it a lot harder as you have to find balance between offline protection and meaningful impact on the enemy - simply because player can't be online for the most of the time no matter how big "no-lifer" he is.

Some game designers and companies simply doesn't allow the players to really affect each other. Games like that are a fake multiplayer and suffer with one specific problem - people usually find out pretty quickly that there is no real goal within the game and that they can't touch their opponents... and leave the game. This is one of the reasons why can you see a myriad of identical games just with different names and pictures on the Facebook. While game play is the reason people start to play the game, the end goal is the reason why many of them will stay.

How to solve it than? Oh well that is a difficult question. The base rule for strategy games should be that to undo what someone else built, should take at least half the time he needed to set it up. It is fun to lose a game if it is an epic battle where at the end, I as a player, have the feeling that I didn't go without a fight. It is also a much more fun if I feel like I actually had to fight for my victory. If it can be a few minutes walkover than it is not fun for either side. It is o.k. for a player to be a completely eliminated from a game, all his cities burned or taken and he actually kicked off - if he felt like fighting. That is the moment, where "challenge accepted" attitude tends to kick in and he might be all fired up for another round.

How do you ensure the epic last stand moment? Limit the range of power. Unlimited fighting units tends to hold the game in a stage where everyone is just amassing the mega armies and wait for the moment when they can easily wipe out the enemy target without considerable losses and swipe their empires in one swift strike. If you limit the maximum fighting power than you can guarantee that even very strong player will not be able to just crush the new ones like an unlucky bugs. The strength of players empire should be the ability to replenish his losses, and how hard it will be to take everything he has.
In a real-time system without any army power limit, it is possible to easily one shot anything. All you need is army big enough. It is basically impossible to make an epic lose moment when you can go with an army of 10.000 against 10. The fight is resolved instantly. The 100 against 10 means the small ones will most likely lose, but fight will take some time. The real difference between "power = army size" and "power = ability to replenish army" is that in the first case the bug splatting scenario is very likely to happen, while in the second one... the feeling of fighting off wave after wave and loosing a bit of ground every time is something entirely different. Not to mention that help can actually come in time.

A prime example of this? EVE online. Every player can pilot one ship at maximum. The ship can only by so big and strong and the empires are wast. In this game, the war rages on for weeks or months as to defeat the enemy you have to actually deplete his money accounts because he will be just coming back over and over again with new ships until he has no ships to use and no money to buy new ones. And the result? Watch this to see how the ones who lost their empire felt:

Those guys were beaten. Their empire was taken from them, their ships destroyed, planets occupied... but they didn't immediately left the game as it would most likely be if they were simply squashed. The fight was epic and the experience awesome. They stayed and several years(!) later they actually came back and reclaimed what was once theirs.

So now you know why power limit is the better way to go from the view of player war experience. And now we are getting back to the simulation and complexity problem. What we tried to do, is to create a power limit through the upkeep costs. It was complex, it was hard, it created a spiral of doom and it ultimately failed in its purpose. The worst of all, it was unnecessary.
The limit of power is here to amplify and affect the other gameplay mechanics. If you make it an interactive mechanism, than there will be players who are good at managing it and players who are bad at it, widening the effective difference between the weak and the strong player - which is the exact opposite of why you included this mechanism in the first place.
While need to feed your soldiers and machines and manage the happiness of workers might seem like a good idea, it is not. Especially if you have a complex battle system and a complex economic system. More mechanisms in the game means bigger possible differences between the players and higher chance of bug squashing in opposition to an epic last stand. If we simply added a stable max. limit like it was in the Star Craft, people would less focus on the economic side and more on the battles - which are important in an environment where you can actually hurt each other - and battles themselves would be much more fun as it would be much more balanced.

I am not a fan of dumbification which is a common way that is pushed by the big developers, but it is as important to not go overcomplicated. The multiplayer game should be challenging and offer some depth, but players should fight the other players not the game itself.