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Strategy ideas

Hey, just throwing together and collating a few ideas I have had over the last few days. Sorry for the wall of text.

1) Super easy - Pre-trained YA players.

In response to this thread from MaZweg https://www.mobamanager.gg/community/forum/topic/show/3250

Pre-trained YA players instantly available next day. The limit would be 18 and the price would be high to account for the convenience, however, the time taken to replace players would be reduced, leading to less frustration. Another advantage would be to reduce inflation by providing a money sink for players.

Here is how I propose the prices go.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/235878708492107787/300771431577550860/unknown.png


2) player roaming in strategy.
This is currently a bug that can randomly happen with laners, where they can gank other lanes. For example, mid could roam and join in ganking with the jungler. If this was an actual strategy option it could help increase the variety of strategies and it plays into my next point.


3) Player knowledge
An unused stat which I think I may have found a use for. Players will judge their opponents and check their relative stat level. If they have good knowledge they accurate judge their own strength and the strength of their opponents and decide if a particular fight is worth taking or not.
Players with low knowledge will just follow pre-defined orders and not take opportunities in-game or just keep inting when behind.

4) An actual vision system in game strategy.
This would actually make vision a game mechanic rather than a simple stat check. There will be pre-determined ward spots around the map and players who purchase vision will be able to randomly place wards in any one of these spots. The more invested the more frequently and deeper the wards are placed.

Each player will be given a safe / cautious / danger behavior modifier that exists beyond laning. When they have full vision of all players with no player imbalance or immediate threat, they go to safe, where they play more aggressively, increasing the chances of fighting and harassing.

When the status of an enemy is unknown (such as jungler has not been seen) then the players play as cautious. They would react more to the enemy rather than make aggressive moves and react randomly.

When the enemy is seen close by, the players go into danger mode, they retreat and avoid damage as much as they can. The sooner they see the opponent the sooner they can react.

Vision would also play a part in objectives. Each objective would need 1 player + 1 x number of unseen opponents to start. If the entire team is seen then a single player can take the objective whilst if the enemies are all unseen then all 5 will be needed.

Players will also use the safe / cautious / danger mechanic when moving around the map, they will be less willing to roam if they are in cautious mode and take safer routes to do so. Enemy player recalls would also need to be factored in, so a player seen recalling is counted as seen until they can reach an opponent's area.


5) Jungle Invades
Currently not working, the game sim does not consider the variety of invades that actually exist. There's 5 man invades, sneaky invades, late invades, buff steals, 2nd camp invades, counter jungling and jungle camping. All have their own unique way to attack the enemy jungler.

This could combine with vision and roaming, so vision can be used to spot the enemy jungler and take appropriate action, as well as roaming players can support the jungler in protecting or attacking the enemy jungler

6) Adaptive strategy
For any football manager fans out there, remember corner setups where you could select where your players go for attacking and defending? Well this is the same idea. You have 3 setups you can run. When your team is ahead / even / behind.
You can set up split push strategies such as 4 - 1, 3 - 2 or 1 - 3 – 1 for different stages in the game after laning phase, deciding which players attack each lane. There could also be a jungle role too where you have players floating in between 2 lanes to help out which ever needs help.
This could make each players strategy even more unique.

7) Unique champion abilities
Each champion would be provided one ability they can use as a sort of ultimate. This would make each champion more unique and not simply just a number of stats. These ultimate’s can have cooldowns to balance strength.
An example of this could be Sad mummy being able to stop the enemy team attacking for 5s, or Weather girl preventing X amount of damage landing on a nearby player. Starlight healer for example could provide a global heal or Master card could TP to lanes when roaming. Each ability would need to be carefully balanced to keep in check and need lots of testing, but it would make picks and bans a lot more interesting when certain comps come out.


There are just a few ideas I have been thinking off over the last few days, since the Indigo campaign is up and running those are just some of the ways I think the game engine can be improved to be more competitive and offer more unique strategies.
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Editing in a TL;DR:
- Each team has the option to have 1 of a special class of player that's generated further along in their developmental curve who are likely restricted from being put on the market, through a seasonal draft.
- Meant to help newer players, and make rebuilding your aging roster more flexible without cheapening the process of building a top tier team too much. Details need to be fleshed out if the idea doesn't suck.

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I know when I plan out re-building/cycling player development for my team over a 10-12 season period I can train 4 players while keeping my starters at or near the diminishing return point for # of training sessions, but squeezing in the 5th one would require swapping in the new players at a pretty young age before they're finished developing, leaving my team with 1 or 2 weaker players at times. My best plan has either been to try to develop 4 players and buy 1 each cycle, which depends on people actually selling competitive players at the right time, or just ride out low stat starters during times when the seasonal tournaments aren't coming up.

What if the pre-trained YA player idea was a foreign import (or whatever you want to call the special snowflake players) system that happened at the end of each season? Each team would have a maximum of 1 of these players on their roster at a time. Between each season they choose which role they want to scout in the draft/import, and then they're given a few generated players at that role to choose from. The draft could be 17 or 18yr olds, so they'd take a couple seasons of training to reach their peak, but wouldn't require 5+ seasons of resources like 13yr olds. Not sure whether you'd want them to be any further along the curve than an academy trained player of the same age, though making the peak of drafted players higher than normal players would open up tactical decisions since each team would have 1 and you'd have to decide which position you want your superstar to play.

Something like that would keep the system accessible to new teams in getting their 1st viable team rolling and help older teams be flexible in rebuilding, without opening it up to the older teams being able to buy half of their roster overnight, keeping team building from becoming too shallow or easy. I can think of a bunch of stuff that would need to be discussed (Cost to enter draft at all? If so, how much? Also selling drafted players would probably lead to flooding the market, so maybe you make up a reason to justify not being allowed to sell these players on the market.) but I'll throw it out there and see if you think it's a decent idea.
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I think all the other ideas you came up with are potentially interesting too, especially roaming/split push options. Champion ults sounds fun, but the balance would be a headache to get right if you wanted to avoid having to buff/nerf stuff every 2 weeks as broken abilities become meta.
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Adaptive strategy sounds like it would add so much to the game, but I could imagine that being a programming nightmare lol
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Adaptive strategy may not be as difficult as predicted, it would require solid logic, the difficulty would be testing for potential exploits and bugs.

Unique champion abillities would certainly be hard to balance. I would presume it may involve a lot of test server iterations, but the cooldown / abillity power / range and such would highly effect the balance. It could promote unique comps focused around certian roles.
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1) is a good step into the right direction against the problems of the rebuild, but won´t be enough since you will still be too far behind because of side stats/masteries - maybe a solution with foreign import/scouting like chaosfunk proposed could help. Scout pre-trained YA players BUT with random side strats (half of main strat and 0.8 of main + a combined stat cap as limits so that it still is slightly worse than a full rebuild but not as much that you can´t compete with them. (A random factor like this could also help the market)

2 - 6) sound solid, while I see the highest potential in 3+4. Ofc it is highly dependent on the programming and logic behind and need to be done correctly, otherwise we will just get a best strat without counters again and games will be decided by stats.

7) Unique champion abilities is not necessary - I think it should be enough that stats have different impact on special strats. Unique abilities are just an overkill and are too hard to balance + it will be much harder to add new champions to the game.
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I just want tank scaling xd
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On the vision topic, I think a good mechanic would be adding a "Contest objective" option to strategy. This would force players to fight for the objective even if they aren't set to make it on their own, but only if they have enough vision.
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1) Super easy - Pre-trained YA players

If devs decide to add this feature would be awesome if other than money , we also need to spend up to 150 user points to buy these pre-trained players
this way it would be harder to abuse the system with smurfs
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Here's my more thorough response

1) Super easy - Pre-trained YA players.
It seems like a decent idea for a money sink, but maybe we could make it a bit more difficult. Instead of insta-buy option perhaps there could be some kind of bidding system for those instant youth players as well. Then it could potentially make it more interesting and dynamic. Although this could create potential situations when it's possible to take too much advantage by just deciding to bid on a new youth players due to good timing. I have thought that timing, patience and estimating when something good would pop up should be part of this game, but would it be too much? Say there are 5 top teams competing for good youth players and say there's one popping up every day. Then 4 teams will war for the first 4 however the patient 5th one will get a good player for a lot cheaper.
But as far as rebuilding issues go, perhaps we could wait until this rotation is done and see how things seem to adapt after then.

Game Simulator Discussion:
So I have thought some about the game simulator. The limiting issues of the current simulator is that it 'TRIES' too hard to pretend it's the real game.
What i mean by that is that there are objects running around the map, but it takes a lot of calculating resources as well as it is really hard to control it and make it take all the strategy options in realistically. It's very difficult to test this as well. There might always be unexpected bugs and unexpected strategies that could work, but are very counter intuitive. It's extremely difficult to make the players in those scenarios to behave exactly as human players would behave and so that it also would simulate the games in a reasonable time.

The other option would be to create a more 'EVENT' based system where if a gank happened it wouldn't actually visibly show the midlaner go to the top lane, but it would just be an event which will either succeed or fail. The whole simulation would consists of events rather than players nearing and closing on each other and making decisions based on that.

The pros and cons of the EVENT option:

Pros:
1. It would be easier to control it and make strategies work as they should work.
2. There would be less bugs and unexpected situations.
3. It would be easier to make more accurate statistics of what is happening in the game. K/D/A, creep score and so on.

Cons:
1. You wouldn't see how things exactly happen as players wouldn't be running around the map as they are currently. It would be
more turn based than it is now.
2. The replay system wouldn't be as detailed. You wouldn't see minions and actual movement. We could visually represent them, but ganks would happen like MID just appearing in top lane or we can still animate it somewhat, but players still wouldn't be moving around the minimap on coordinates.

In general I have thought the second option to be better, although I'd be a bit sad on giving up the old system which was meant to play through the game as if all the objects were really moving and making decisions depending on their distance from other objects and so on. But I feel like for now this could be a bit too much of a bite for me to take, to make it work so that strategy could be as versatile as possible and would work intuitively correct. And that the end results would be rewarding.

On the other hand if the first option was done correctly it could be a lot better as then you could see exactly how everything happens. It's a big decision to make for the next version of the simulator. Proceeding with the current one I think is riskier if our goal was to achieve a good representation of putting in the strategy and getting consistent and realistic results. Although I can see how it could eventually work out very well, I think it would probably take a lot of time to get it to a state where it would be truly satisfying.

So this is something for me to think about and for you as well, which type of simulator you would prefer.
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imo making changes like pre trained players seem too unfair for a lot of players. Some people as me and others had to give up on team quality at given time frames in order to benefit in the future. By changing things like this, people like Ed and others who didnt go through this yet, would now have a solution that was created that didnt exist before, and they are able to create a solution out of the blue for getting the reward, without having to trade off for anything else pretty much, and specially this option was non existent before. So i think it is unfair to create it at this point.

With this being said I dont mind those kind of changes, although, i think if such changes that affect long term planning and play of the game, should be announced with a lot of advance, Imo a even better alternative would be to plan thoroughly all this kind of changes. And then announce a moment in a future long enough that the decisions which affect the next cycle would be consequent, such as 5 seasons at least, and then announce a reset of the game, and introduce all kind of deep long term changes to the game as you would like to. That seems the most fair and ideal to me. Otherwise the changes will benefit/prejudice given people on a too big level to be disregarded
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It might be simpler to tweak the length of player's careers if you're trying to tweak the rebuild cycle. If you left the time to develop a player (125-150 days or whatever) the same but either made in-game years longer, or made players decline/retire at an older age, the rebuild cycle would shift more towards replacing players one or two at a time instead of trashing your roster for 5 seasons.

I've had fun figuring everything out and going through the newbie progression of building a roster so far for the few months I've been playing, so I'm not sure if the early game for new teams needs to be changed too much, but I know if the optimal strategy for building a top end team is completely rebuilding every 12 seasons or whatever, I'd probably be weighing quitting vs. 5 seasons of rebuilding if I got that far.

Of course a mix of both tweaking career length and adding the option to buy older pre-trained academy players could work to incentivize whatever gameplay you want for rebuilds.
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I like the event-based simulator idea, sounds like it could have a lot more depth and interaction with less calculation/variables. You could still represent most of it visually I imagine since things like ganking/roaming/objectives take time to go from point A to point B, and you could visualize the difference between farming/harassing/all-in postures for lane positioning.

If you made an event-based simulator, a counter-gank system might be a good use for the vision stat. CGs could give a small advantage in the fight if the opposing jungler is within range and has vision to react in time. Maybe we could dictate our jungler's first clear path/1st gank option before the simulator takes over and autopilots, that would add a ton of tactical depth if it isn't a nightmare to code.
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One point I made on the other thread about the pre-trained players. You can put a cooldown on it so you can only hire 1 player per season or so.
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@Blank
You have to look at the big picture, this games is still at it´s start and some changes are very important, stopping or delaying imrpovment because a couple of ppl could benefit from it is the wrong thinking imo. We also weren´t told that player wages would get lifted when we did our rebuild, but here we are and idc about it, it was necessary and a move into the right direction. I prefer having some "unfair" things for the staring phase than having a bad endproduct. The main objective should be to create a good/fair game in the long run.
Seems like some ppl think that Ed and also me are trying to change the game in our favour. But I just try to help improving this game to make it an amazing player experience and I am pretty sure Ed thinks the same way.
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What if, you had a reoccurring progression.
Like New Game+ if you will.

When you retire a player, their stats are used and noted when training a new player in the academy.
The idea behind it being, your retired players assist in the training of your youth players, making them progress quicker up to the stats of your previous player, but back to normal progression once they hit the amount.

This would create an additional problem of player stats gradually climbing, as well as increasing the gap between the veterans and newer players.
But would at least create incentive to stick with it when replenishing your team.
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I think that the best idea that I saw was to make the stats of players CAP at a certain point and make it impossible to actually have a perfect player. (ex. any player can actually only have a maximum of 100 skill points and any training in one area after reaching that cap just moves the points around.) I think some variation of this would allow for a lot of diversity.

This would mean that it would be important to create a team of players that works with your strategy. It would also create a meta game of creating strategies that use different players in your roster that may surprise opponents.

This would highly reduce the need for rebuilding as when your player reaches the cap and they have the ratios you want, then you only need to keep them in some kind of basic training to maintain their skills. This allows you to then put resources into training other players and rotate them as new players come into their prime.

Right now, and I'm new so take this with a grain of salt, I've been hearing that you want to grab a young player, pull them out of the academy, and train them with coaches until they reach insane skills. If you do that with 5 players at a time it drains too many resources to maintain a good team at the same time which is the complaint right? You can't make a permanent competitive team that can shoot for #1. You have to start a team from scratch to aim for #1 and give up on your current team.

I think a player skill cap would fix that problem.
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In the spirit of skill caps, this could play really well in the long run.

Let say we get multiple different viable strats, (spilt push, team grouping, etc)
You can have players have different stat caps to make certain players better at certain strategies. this would add a meta game that forces teams to consider what kind of player they need for their strat, or given a pool of players, what strat would be best to run among them.

@maro
the core issue is that you have 2 options on how to compete with your team.
Trickle build (buy and swap in players as you progress), which will keep you high level competitive, but almost never good enough to get to #1, and potentially never to get you into division 1 level play.

Reset build: wipe your team, get fresh low age players, train them with wicked good coaches until they are some of the best team ever. totally fine, but it takes a long time, and if you screw up, or try it without enough base funds, you will fail hard.

I liked the idea of tweaking the rate players age and train, mostly because this reduces the time component, so that if you commit and fail, it doesnt waste 2-3 months. Skill caps could help in the department too.

@zantony, I actually really like this idea in spirit. Rather than retire players, you can keep them around and add them to a list of academy staff (can only hold x, maybe this is a new facility you can upgrade)
the academy still only trains one role at a time, but the rate it trains other skills are adjusted based on veterans working in your academy. (filling your academy with 5 junglers could produce a student who's a support main with a still decent jungle stat)
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I think the core problem is that most ppl want to be competetive and therefor choosing the rebuild option, but on the same hand the rebuild option is very dangerous for the game since it is easy to lose interest in that phase, which could lead to quitting the game.

I rly like the idea of a combined cap, with this we could make it easy to reach the cap but hard to do the fine tuning, so someone that invests more time/effort into perfectly arranging the points will still have the edge but since everyone can reach the cap it won´t be too significant and everyone could be able to compete pretty fast. (would also help new players and not only rebuilding ones)

The idea of using the retired player´s stats sounds interesting but I think it would lead to too many new problems, and as you said yourself the gap between veterans and newer players will get huge.
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I don't know if you'd want to make it easy to reach the cap.
You'd want to have that new player progression.
1. Start off with a bunch of sub par players, with random stats. You start off and tweak a strategy that works around it. Feels good to do that.
2. From here you grow your team slowly, just continuing to replace players with better ones over time. Your spend time trying to get players that work for a strategy you want to do. You finally get a team that is built around your strategy, instead of before you built your strategy around your team. A satisfying few seasons of slow progression.
3. Milestone you get your first capped player. Feels good. Maybe this happened during step 2.
4. From here you go for a full team of capped players. If you're a good planner you're already trying to build them the way you want. And the skies the limit from here.

That's my idea of how things should go and what we should be aiming for, feel free to disagree and discuss. :)
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There is already a stat cap tho, it's a soft cap because there isn't a fixed amount but show me anyone who reaches over 70 stats and then tell me how it's done.

Honestly I don't care if the feature benifits me or anyone in perticular, infact I have made suggestions in the past that make things harder for me. I make suggestions for the better of the game. The actual cost of $20m+ for anyone is huge and good planning should minimise it's use. The problem is as Maz suggested, player downtime between rebuilding is incredibly boring.
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I take it that cap exists just because you can't get that high in the time it takes to train players?

Also, from what I see all players are just overall good. They have a really high stat in their role, and then everything else is roughly the same. Which means having all those different stats (Technical, mechanics, teamfight, etc) is pointless because they're always roughly the same anyway. You as a manager can't do much to affect which stats get better. (specific coaches, I guess?)
It would add a lot of depth if you could train players to be good at specific things and not have to worry about some other player just being better at everything.
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I have not gotten to the point here I have had to go through a rebuild yet, but from what I have read the most common thing for people to do is buy the younger players from YA then train them with their coaches. That being said, why try to redo the entire system. The academy offers training, why no readjust that to train players a bit faster and give the option to train each individual player in a specific role i.e. instead of having to rotate the training when multiple players are recruited have a selection for each individual player to train one role be able to rotate multiple roles if you want that player better in more than one position. I have not been playing this long at all but I currently have 2 players training in the academy(soon to be 3 due to the income increase from the newly redone economy) and use my coaches as I feel they should, which is to improve/maintain the stats on my current team. If you could select a role for each player in the academy individually instead of having to rotate it every day you could keep each player focused on one role and eventually have the chance of getting a stat capped player for your team since once you pull a player from YA it would automatically refill and start training a new player, giving them more training time to stat up.

After giving this some more thought, if you do as above and make some minor adjustments to the current system to allow for a better flow through the Academy training you can take it one step further. So now we stream lined the training system through the academy so that eventually it is possible to get a very well statted player, but we do not want every player coming out of the academy walking out with max stats as that would provide the longer term players an extreme advantage over newer players until they get X amount of time in to get their players trained properly. So to help balance this out you can put the RNG to work. For every player that gets created in the Academy you can have a multiplier set for each stat. When the primary role is set, that stats gets a larger multiplier set to it(say 1.5x-4x or whatever values) every other stat will have a max possible value of the base of their primary role which is 1.5x. So now the RNG will generate the multipler for every stat from say .5x-1.5x and when the training happens it should represent each new player with their own strengths and weaknesses. This adds more depth to the Academy as well as gives people the desire for very specific coaching preferences to get their players exactly how they want them, and in the rare cases can lead to some phenomenal players coming out of the Academy. This will also give it a more real feel.
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I'd really like to be able to mold strategy according to pick post-ban.

Let's say I try to give Pyrogirl to my support, but if I can't, I go for Weather Girl.

On Pyrogirl, I want to boost that magic damage, probably at the expense of utility/vision.

I don't want the same stats for Weather Girl. But I can't adjust those.
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@Lodok

Another example of what you're saying, is AD and AP top lanes. Currently you can't really swap between them on the same strat as you'll end up with a full AD Singed.
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@Lodok

Another example of what you're saying, is AD and AP top lanes. Currently you can't really swap between them on the same strat as you'll end up with a full AD Singed.