Grey Goo: Faction Design
I actually was kind of worried about Grey Goo's degree of differentation when the website went up back in the day and I was trying to devour everything. The website described all the units, and they sounded both surprisingly bland in general and in particular I noticed a pattern of all three factions having very similar sets of units. The website gave little attention to the other aspects of the faction design, with the exception of being reasonably detailed of how the Goo faction operated on a whole different economy model, didn't build bases, morphed units in packs, etc.
Having played the game myself, I see this is a mistake of a whole different sort, most likely based on conventional RTS design. In most RTSes, there's a very heavy focus on distinguishing factions by giving them different unit lists, with the infrastructure, resource dynamic, and all the other things that go into an RTS faction being de-emphasized or outright identical across factions. (eg in Warcraft II the factions are mechanically identical outside of three specific units, which are still less divergent than one might hope) As such, it's fairly typical for eg websites about an RTS to focus much more attention on the units and their capabilities than on the infrastructure, researches, and so forth.
Grey Goo takes a different, fairly interesting tack in faction design: each faction is a 'sandwich' of three layers. The 'middle' layer is the units themselves, and it is indeed relatively bland by RTS standards, particularly if you ignore the Shroud, who were introduced later and are all kinds of weird by Grey Goo's standards.
The 'bottom' layer is the faction's foundational mechanics regarding infrastructural rules, unit production, tech tree mechanics, etc. For example, even though the Beta and Human forces are fairly similar overall, their construction rules radically alter their playstyles because Humans have to literally extend power conduits out from their HQ, making it expensive (Not to mention vulnerable) to try to build outward and place defenses locally. (With the exception that they can place walls anywhere they can see, and Extractors on any resource patch currently visible to them) Meanwhile the Beta can drop a Hub anywhere on the map they currently have line of sight on, making it easy to move production closer to the front lines, set up forward airpads to improve turnaround on your air units reloading, etc... but they entirely lack properly passive defenses, having to invest fairly notable pop cap into any base defense because their base defense mechanic is that the tower segments of their walls can have units hop into them, at which point the unit is untouchable until the tower is destroyed. (Human turrets and Shroud turrets both use pop cap, but only 1 per turret. While Commandos can be wall-mounted and are 1 pop cap, they're fairly poor as pseudo-turrets, and if you use Guardians, which are the dedicated turret equivalent for the Beta, you're blowing three pop cap per 'turret' as the Beta) Thus, the Beta are effectively a more aggressive faction in a strategic sense, regardless of the unit list mechanics.
The 'top' layer is the research options. There's five research groupings, each of which has three researches, and you can only be running one research from a given grouping at a time, though you can cancel out of even a completed research if you feel a different option better suits your current circumstances. This ends up being where a fair amount of the unit divergence occurs, particularly when comparing the Beta and Human factions against each other: there's a certain amount of roughly-standardized options, such as how all three base factions have a research that allows their dedicated anti-air unit to fire on ground units, but there's also a fair amount of researches that offer a faction a unique capability with a unit, like the Beta having a research option that allows one of their most basic combat units to fire on air units. The Goo also have a research option that makes a low-tech unit anti-air capable, but it's not their cheapest and swarmiest combat unit, but rather their scout unit, and no non-Beta faction gets intrinsic access to a basic unit that fires on both ground and air units.
The overall result is an interesting contrast to what I'm used to seeing in RTSes, and I quite like it. I've always been a bit leery of the unit-list-focus approach to RTS design, as you basically have to ensure any units meant to distinguish a faction from its fellows are more or less mandatory in some sense or another or else you risk a faction's supposed unique advantages being irrelevant and thus the faction is uninteresting if not outright inferior. There's certainly also RTSes that have the 'bottom' layer radically different across factions, such as Starcraft, but Grey Goo playing around with having fairly similar unit lists is an interesting design experiment, if a bit of an odd one to be performing in a game where your factions are super-high-tech humans making first contact with early space age aliens and also there's a grey goo faction trying to devour everything, none of whom have ever fought each other before to thus have a reason to converge toward similar principles.
I don't know how well this experiment works, but I do like seeing Petroglyph exploring the design space. It's actually amusing to me that I routinely see people describing Petroglyph's RTSes as being like classic RTSes, given that both Grey Goo and Universe at War play around with a lot of design assumptions in this sort of way.
Note that the above is basically ignoring the Shroud faction. They were added into the game later, and they're weird by Grey Goo's standards, I'd argue they're actually even weirder than the Goo faction, but most notably they return to the more RTS-typical model of having a fairly heavy focus on distinguishing a faction through its unit list. Not that the Shroud doesn't have divergent foundations and distinctive research options, but A: their units don't really conform to the pattern the Beta, Humans, and to a lesser extent Goo hold to, which changes the design context in and of itself and in particular makes the research layer less important for distinguishing them from other factions, and B: the primary aspect of their foundations that really feels substantially different from the Beta in particular is that their unit production lines are inherently specialized, where the Beta and Human forces can build a Large Factory and get it benefiting from all four Tech Attachments to thus unlock the entire set of units. The Goo take a different angle, but they're also realistically comparable to the Beta and Human in diversity in that a Mother Goo can produce literally any Goo unit so long as it's got the resources/HP; the fact that Small Proteans and Large Proteans have fixed morphing sets (And you can't eg combine three Small Proteans to form a Large Protean or split a Large Protean into three Small Proteans) can be viewed as a kind of production specialization is a highly misleading framework.
Tangenting a bit there, but my point is that the Shroud break from the pattern, when said pattern is what I find to be one of the more interesting elements of Grey Goo on a design level. The Shroud certainly has a lot of interesting concepts it's playing around with, but it's just fundamentally a different framework. The only point I really want to comment on is that I'm disappointed at how the Shroud have to pay full cost up front and also can't automate unit production like you can on the Beta and Human factions. A big part of the appeal of Grey Goo is how it has more of a focus on macromanagement over micromanagement, and being able to automate unit production streams and not have to carefully time your unit production orders so that you never have money sitting in the back of a factory, waiting to start building is a huge part of that, so seeing the Shroud push more toward that particular RTS convention is genuinely disappointing. It's not like it's even necessary to strip out the automation: the Warlords Battlecry games also let you automate unit production and have a unit's costs paid in full up front, which it resolves by making you only pay that cost once a unit actually starts building. (Though it has the somewhat wonky dynamic that you can't tell the game to put something in the que unless you currently have enough money you would be able to build it right now) I don't see why Grey Goo couldn't have done something similar with the Shroud, thus dodging the whole 'only start building a Marine just before the previous Marine finishes' absurdity found in Starcraft and many other RTSes.
Anyway.
Next time, I'll be covering the Goo faction itself in a bit more detail, as there's both interesting elements and some strange/disappointing design decisions.
Having played the game myself, I see this is a mistake of a whole different sort, most likely based on conventional RTS design. In most RTSes, there's a very heavy focus on distinguishing factions by giving them different unit lists, with the infrastructure, resource dynamic, and all the other things that go into an RTS faction being de-emphasized or outright identical across factions. (eg in Warcraft II the factions are mechanically identical outside of three specific units, which are still less divergent than one might hope) As such, it's fairly typical for eg websites about an RTS to focus much more attention on the units and their capabilities than on the infrastructure, researches, and so forth.
Grey Goo takes a different, fairly interesting tack in faction design: each faction is a 'sandwich' of three layers. The 'middle' layer is the units themselves, and it is indeed relatively bland by RTS standards, particularly if you ignore the Shroud, who were introduced later and are all kinds of weird by Grey Goo's standards.
The 'bottom' layer is the faction's foundational mechanics regarding infrastructural rules, unit production, tech tree mechanics, etc. For example, even though the Beta and Human forces are fairly similar overall, their construction rules radically alter their playstyles because Humans have to literally extend power conduits out from their HQ, making it expensive (Not to mention vulnerable) to try to build outward and place defenses locally. (With the exception that they can place walls anywhere they can see, and Extractors on any resource patch currently visible to them) Meanwhile the Beta can drop a Hub anywhere on the map they currently have line of sight on, making it easy to move production closer to the front lines, set up forward airpads to improve turnaround on your air units reloading, etc... but they entirely lack properly passive defenses, having to invest fairly notable pop cap into any base defense because their base defense mechanic is that the tower segments of their walls can have units hop into them, at which point the unit is untouchable until the tower is destroyed. (Human turrets and Shroud turrets both use pop cap, but only 1 per turret. While Commandos can be wall-mounted and are 1 pop cap, they're fairly poor as pseudo-turrets, and if you use Guardians, which are the dedicated turret equivalent for the Beta, you're blowing three pop cap per 'turret' as the Beta) Thus, the Beta are effectively a more aggressive faction in a strategic sense, regardless of the unit list mechanics.
The 'top' layer is the research options. There's five research groupings, each of which has three researches, and you can only be running one research from a given grouping at a time, though you can cancel out of even a completed research if you feel a different option better suits your current circumstances. This ends up being where a fair amount of the unit divergence occurs, particularly when comparing the Beta and Human factions against each other: there's a certain amount of roughly-standardized options, such as how all three base factions have a research that allows their dedicated anti-air unit to fire on ground units, but there's also a fair amount of researches that offer a faction a unique capability with a unit, like the Beta having a research option that allows one of their most basic combat units to fire on air units. The Goo also have a research option that makes a low-tech unit anti-air capable, but it's not their cheapest and swarmiest combat unit, but rather their scout unit, and no non-Beta faction gets intrinsic access to a basic unit that fires on both ground and air units.
The overall result is an interesting contrast to what I'm used to seeing in RTSes, and I quite like it. I've always been a bit leery of the unit-list-focus approach to RTS design, as you basically have to ensure any units meant to distinguish a faction from its fellows are more or less mandatory in some sense or another or else you risk a faction's supposed unique advantages being irrelevant and thus the faction is uninteresting if not outright inferior. There's certainly also RTSes that have the 'bottom' layer radically different across factions, such as Starcraft, but Grey Goo playing around with having fairly similar unit lists is an interesting design experiment, if a bit of an odd one to be performing in a game where your factions are super-high-tech humans making first contact with early space age aliens and also there's a grey goo faction trying to devour everything, none of whom have ever fought each other before to thus have a reason to converge toward similar principles.
I don't know how well this experiment works, but I do like seeing Petroglyph exploring the design space. It's actually amusing to me that I routinely see people describing Petroglyph's RTSes as being like classic RTSes, given that both Grey Goo and Universe at War play around with a lot of design assumptions in this sort of way.
Note that the above is basically ignoring the Shroud faction. They were added into the game later, and they're weird by Grey Goo's standards, I'd argue they're actually even weirder than the Goo faction, but most notably they return to the more RTS-typical model of having a fairly heavy focus on distinguishing a faction through its unit list. Not that the Shroud doesn't have divergent foundations and distinctive research options, but A: their units don't really conform to the pattern the Beta, Humans, and to a lesser extent Goo hold to, which changes the design context in and of itself and in particular makes the research layer less important for distinguishing them from other factions, and B: the primary aspect of their foundations that really feels substantially different from the Beta in particular is that their unit production lines are inherently specialized, where the Beta and Human forces can build a Large Factory and get it benefiting from all four Tech Attachments to thus unlock the entire set of units. The Goo take a different angle, but they're also realistically comparable to the Beta and Human in diversity in that a Mother Goo can produce literally any Goo unit so long as it's got the resources/HP; the fact that Small Proteans and Large Proteans have fixed morphing sets (And you can't eg combine three Small Proteans to form a Large Protean or split a Large Protean into three Small Proteans) can be viewed as a kind of production specialization is a highly misleading framework.
Tangenting a bit there, but my point is that the Shroud break from the pattern, when said pattern is what I find to be one of the more interesting elements of Grey Goo on a design level. The Shroud certainly has a lot of interesting concepts it's playing around with, but it's just fundamentally a different framework. The only point I really want to comment on is that I'm disappointed at how the Shroud have to pay full cost up front and also can't automate unit production like you can on the Beta and Human factions. A big part of the appeal of Grey Goo is how it has more of a focus on macromanagement over micromanagement, and being able to automate unit production streams and not have to carefully time your unit production orders so that you never have money sitting in the back of a factory, waiting to start building is a huge part of that, so seeing the Shroud push more toward that particular RTS convention is genuinely disappointing. It's not like it's even necessary to strip out the automation: the Warlords Battlecry games also let you automate unit production and have a unit's costs paid in full up front, which it resolves by making you only pay that cost once a unit actually starts building. (Though it has the somewhat wonky dynamic that you can't tell the game to put something in the que unless you currently have enough money you would be able to build it right now) I don't see why Grey Goo couldn't have done something similar with the Shroud, thus dodging the whole 'only start building a Marine just before the previous Marine finishes' absurdity found in Starcraft and many other RTSes.
Anyway.
Next time, I'll be covering the Goo faction itself in a bit more detail, as there's both interesting elements and some strange/disappointing design decisions.
Comments
Post a Comment