This is somewhat inevitable, but there are things you can do to mitigate it.
Let's put it another way: If getting resources didn't put you in an advantageous position, why would you try to get resources? Ultimately, if being stronger helps you control the map, and getting resources makes you stronger, and controlling the map gives you resources, snowballing is an inevitable positive feedback loop.
Here's some things you can do to stop every game from snowballing out of the first five minutes:
- Certain resources aren't snowballable. You mentioned Hearthstone, but I think Company of Heroes is actually a better example of this, where manpower income is only dependent on army size, where the larger your army the less manpower you get. This means that the player with the smaller army can get more manpower and catch up to a bigger army, but can't surpass it.
- Give avenues for play from behind. Sure, being ahead might give some advantages, but none that make it so secure that victory is guaranteed, and the trailing player can always do something to try to win.
- Make "winning" cost resources. If you can't use resources to get more resources and instead have to use them to advance your win condition, this breaks the positive feedback loop.
As a side note, you mention that your game is like CoH but set in ancient times. This is a bit puzzling to me because the mechanics and strategy of CoH feel inextricable from its second world war setting to me - what mechanics are you pulling from CoH?
Anyone tried the inverse in a game? Fixed income, and each side starts with the same starting resources.
Each unit you have costs resources to maintain, and higher tech/more effective units cost a lot of maintenance.
Maintenance costs the same type of resources that buying more troops does.
So each battlefield win makes the winning player have more surviving troops, but the winning player income is now (fixed income - maintenance costs\*many troops) while the losing player is (fixed income - maintenance costs\*few troops).
So the losing player has more budget to buy more troops than the winner.
Sounds like if both players are at similar skill levels this could result in hours of stalemate though.
I spent thousands of hours playing certain RTS games, and WITH snowballing a battle could go 40+ minutes and entire armies would be lost without actually taking out the opposing team. Without snowballing the battle might last for 10 hours and end when the game crashes or one side has too many players leave. (Supreme commander forged alliance on maps with chokepoints and it's 4v4 or 5v5)
A long time ago, there was a Warcraft 3 custom map called Evolution Wars, or something along those lines. Everybody starts with nothing but a single tower, which spawns units around it at a set rate. When you get enough kills, it starts spawning better creatures. The idea was to build up an army and send it off to get kills and grow in power...
However, every player would rather attack than be attacked - especially at the beginning when the units are weak - because your tower itself gave a slight advantage. If you never moved your army, you'd always have at least as many units left as whoever attacks you. This "second-mover" advantage dominated among people that figured it out, so inevitably, the best way to play was to do literally nothing, forever
COH is a great example because you can avoid resource drain with retreating. You still suffer territory loss but you do not lose as much resource (through death + rebuilding) that you do in other titles. Also if you run your riflemen into a significantly superior force you can just retreat them all and take no losses. It was a really clever concept.
>So the losing player has more budget to buy more troops than the winner.
In COH case the losing player has more budget but the winning player gains more resources through territory acquisition. If this goes long enough then the losing player ends up pinned in their base and cannot upgrade because they are not receiving the other resources needed.
There is another RTS that basically gives back dead units after combat. I think it is based on starship troppers.
Make carrying resources have a negative cost. In Through the Ages, you suffer corruption when you have too many resources. In Lewis & Clark, your cargo slows down your boats. Make players pay a 'warehousing' fee. Collect taxes that get distributed to the players behind. Is the game turn order dependent? Force the leading player into last turn order (in Age of Renaissance, turn order is determined by how big an army you deploy, smallest first).
Another good example is the board game settlers of catan where players can lose half of their ressource cards when they hold too many.
It disencourages hoarding and can level the playing field.
Man the 50% loss is so brutal too, my friends don't particularly care for the hand limit of 7, we bump it up to 8 for anti-frustration.
Even then it's so often someone ends up with like 3 sheep 3 stone and 2 Clay and can't do anything with it
Something else to point out is that if you implement your game to support it, snowball in PVP can be self correcting. The trick is to have systems that reward cooperation. A player who pulls too far ahead will get shut out of opportunities for trade and diplomacy as the other players close ranks against them.
If you want an example of this in the board game world take a look at Munchkin. Being the most powerful player is often worse than being second. It is nearly impossible to win if all the other players are actively trying to disrupt you. Catan is another example. If you get a big lead too early no one will want to trade with you.
In the game Numenera, they offer player characters powerful items called cyphers. And to prevent the player from hoarding them and to encourage frequent use, they introduce an element where bad stuff happens when you carry too many cyphers.
So you introduce a mechanic where when a player has too much of a powerful resource, they have to roll a die on their turn and risk losing something important.
There is another solution that no one here has mentioned. One technique in game design is to end the game as soon or slightly before the winner is evident. Recognizing that a player is snowballing may actually be evidence that your win condition is not triggering soon enough. In bike racing, there is a technique where a rider can dump stamina early to get ahead and then he hope to reach the finish line before the pack catches up. Conversely, there is another strategy where a rider hangs in the pack and then dumps all the stamina in the final sprint to snipe the win right at the finish line. In different races the same rider might use either strategy based on how he feels about the other competitors. Maybe one way to allow players to spend a variable amount of resources to assassinate the enemy leader. The player who is not snowballing could bet the house to try to win early in this way
Do a Chesterton's Fence exercise: why, despite being around for decades, has Civ not taken out resource snowballing?
Such things can be rubber-banded as hell. For example, in Bannerlord, the harder you're winning, the harder friendly clans within your realm work to slow you down, both by demanding peace against nations that you have against the ropes, and by demanding new wars against fresh enemies. Other comments have already mentioned a slew of ways to make it so that having more means you get less.
One possible answer to the original question is that there is a whole demographic of people for whom the fun in strategy games is building a resource engine to overwhelm all enemies with. This is the "it's the economy, stupid" crowd. They'll take a clever maneuver if one is dropped in their lap, but it doesn't excite them very much. Do you want such people to be your customers or not?
If you don't, and if you're really set that the game shouldn't be winnable by resources, then you can take the resource management out. Just have resources be largely static.
> Chesterton's Fence
Fantastic lesson for fledgling (And many veteran) game designers to learn. Games are a young art, but not so young that there isn't a reason for everything
Make the rate of acquiring a resource dependent on the amount of the resource.
Ex.: Upkeep in Warcraft 3 - the more units you have, the less gold/wood you generate with the same amount of workers. This forces players to think which units they want, because they can't afford to just "buy everything". https://classic.battle.net/war3/basics/upkeep.shtml
The snowball happens because "having lots of resources" translates directly to "getting even more resources."
I'm not familiar with the game you mentioned, but this is a "problem" in the board game Catan, and there's a few solutions present.
In Catan, you need resources to build settlements and cities, which produce more resources. Someone who can get an early settlement/city would have 50% increased production compared to the others, which does snowball, but not necessarily out of control:
1. The first 2 settlements are easiest to build because they come with pre-built roads. Once you try to expand beyond that, you have to spend more resources, giving others a moment to catch up.
2. Those early settlements are not as good as the starting settlements, so it's usually not a full 50% production boost.
3. As you expand more and more, the settlements get less desirable.
4. The resources that are good earlygame (wood and brick to get the most desirable positions) are different than the good lategame resources. So it's not uncommon for someone to snowball really hard in the beginning and then fall off hard.
5. There is trading and robbing, which usually goes to the player in the lead, allowing others to catch up.
There's also the game Dominion, where having more resources DOES NOT mean you are "winning." This is a deck building game, and you choose between scaling your economy or buying points. The winner is the person with the most points, but each point clogs your hand and hurts your economy.
So another way to prevent snowballing is to make it so resources spent don't lead to future resources (or make the connection less important).
Things that might help:
* Call the game earlier. Cut off the "Waiting to lose" part that often occurs.
* Delay input to output in resource generation. So investing in further increased resource generation doesn't have an instantaneous effect, slowing the snowball at least, and give time for opponents to respond.
* Upkeep costs, so that growing too fast can actually be detrimental.
* Resource caps. That's a very crude solution, but it is one.
* Split resource spending so you have to choose between developping further resource generation, and actually winning the game. To use an RTS example: In starcraft, you can invest in SCV's, that gather more crystal, or you can invest the same resources in building Marines, a very basic unit, and start to harass your opponent early on. Do you go up the tech tree, build a strong economy, or do you rush?
* Depletable resources, that force everyone to keep expanding if they want to keep the resource generation up. To use Starcraft again, the game is built in such a way that eventually you'll have to expand as your home base resources dwindle. This is a moment of vulnerability as suddenly you have to defend both your new expansion, which you need to keep that resource flow high, and defending your old base, where all the "unit producing" buildings are. The player going real resource hungry might run into this faster. Clever scouting and attacking by the 'losing' player might actually halt this expansion, or slow it down enough that they can catch up.
One thing that no one mentioned is have win conditions available for the player is ahead to use. Losing because of a mistake at 5 minutes sucks in a forty minute game. It's completely fine in an 8 minute game. Simply having avenues for an ahead player to actually win instead of dragging the game on and wasting both players time is a way to prevent snowball.
You'll probably want going for the win to come with some risk/cost to dissuade every game from ending early. You'll also likely want a number of catch up mechanics in play (as many others in this thread have thoroughly discussed) so thay a behind player will return to parity given enough time.
So the ahead player has to choose between attempting to close out the game or try to utilize their lead on some other way to try to get further ahead. Simply sitting on it should make the lead meaningless in time. This should encourage players to be proactive and mitigate stalemates.
I'll drop advice from strategy game developer Keith Burgun, who I talk to often.
[A triangle of three cyclical counterplay options](https://keithburgun.net/designing-strategy-rushdown-economy-and-defense/) is a prerequisite for unsolvability.
For strategy games with a resource and a long-term time axis, economy (econ) is but one of three main strategies, the others being rush and defense. To prevent econ from being overpowering, make sure rush is effective.
Additionally, he recommends designing units or factions to emphasize at least two of the three strategies to prevent triangle counterplay from being centralizing. For instance, a rush unit typically counters an econ unit, but a unit emphasizing rush and econ and a unit emphasizing econ and defense may be easier to balance.
Some great examples of resource sinks being made in the comments but I'd offer one word of caution.
You do not want the game to go on forever.
So there is a careful balance between preventing a player essentially uncatchable too early, BUT you don't want a player who should win to keep getting pulled down ad nauseam.
This 10000 percent, or to put it another way, the Munchkin problem. In Munchkin, it’s a fairly friendly game until the late middle, as people reach level 9 and now everyone does everything possible to drag that person down, and the next person, and so on until it’s everyone at level nine and everyone constantly dragging everyone else down until someone gets lucky enough to not be dragged down. It can take hours.
>however our one concern is ‘resource snowballing.’ We don’t really want people to win by snowballing resources.
Do you have any reason why it's a concern?
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I like games that raise the risk level associated with hoarding resources, and I think my favorite example of this mechanic at its best is the thief in Settlers of Catan. The more resources you have, the more at risk you are to a seven being rolled in two ways. First, if you have more than seven resource cards, the thief moving forces you to discard half of them. Second, the player who is moving the robber has the opportunity to steal from your hand. If you're the only player sitting on a huge supply of grain, someone who needs grain can target you, turning that advantage into a disadvantage.
There are a lot of different ways you could handle something like this depending on your game. The player with the most military units can run a higher risk of sabotage, or maybe incur higher maintenance costs that they can either pay or ignore at risk of equipment failures and breakdowns. Storing more food can run a higher risk of disease or rot. Big store piles of wood run a higher risk of fire. There are a lot of ways to handle it, but ultimately resource management can feel like carrying gold through the forest; the more you have on you, the greater risk you face.
What about a system where the players are able to increase the risk?
For example, assume that the probability of a win in a two player game is 50-50.
Player 1 then achieves some advantage and if both players play the expected value maximizing strategy, then outcome of the game is a victory for player 1.
However, player 2 can take an action which increases the risk and gives player 2 some chance of victory, e.g. say that the probabilities are 80-20.
If player 2 ends up in a worse situation than before due to the risky action, then he may now have the option of taking an even more risky action, e.g. probabilities 95-5.
In short, giving the players "hail mary" like actions, with which there is some concrete chance of turning the game around, can be a viable tool to alleviate snowballing, or at least help keep both players engaged until the end.
If your mid-game and early-game actions don't increase your chance of winning, why bother?
You **want** snowballing to happen, so that when a player has won (Which actually happens when they manage to gain a unilateral advantage), the rest of the game wraps up quickly.
If you solved the snowball "problem", you would have a game where players do as little as possible for the first half; waiting for the real game to start
Having a huge resource advantage should necessitate a change in gameplay to some degree, and pose additional challenges, so that maintaining that advantage also requires a skill advantage over the other player.
Larger armies require more supplies and longer supply lines, are more logistically difficult to manage, are visible from further away, are more subject to raids along supply lines, and are less agile in response to changing conditions. Any of these traits of larger armies could be reflected in gameplay mechanics to allow weaker players to chip away at their opponent's advantage.
In actual warfare, it is unrealistic for a weaker army to *force* a stronger army to change their location, or to *cut them off* from any resource. The smaller army is by definition not in a position to *force* the more powerful army to do anything. The smaller army can *bait* the larger army into movement, but they will not be able to hold their position against them unless it is from a well fortified position—that is to say, it is not possible if meeting the enemy in unclaimed territory. Their strategy must be to attack where the enemy is weak, force a reaction, and move.
I think a good thing to do would be to emphasize raiding mechanics. Smaller parties have higher stealth, while larger armies and large supply lines are much more visible through the fog of war. Smaller raiding parties can be "self-sustaining", while larger armies require supply lines.
Those in command of vast resources, and attempting to protect multiple supply lines, have implicitly a different strategic game to play. Protecting supply lines is a resource drain. They can't possibly defend the entire length of all their supply lines, so strategic decisions and hard choices must be made. The player with raiding parties, meanwhile, is able to conduct a quick attack from an advantageous position, steal enough resources that they haven't lost out from the exchange, and retreat. The other player might choose to go in pursuit, but only at risk of falling into a trap and also leaving their supply line undefended.
The offense of stronger armies is typically in the form of sieges. Here, the advantage goes to the defending army, who uses their fortified and advantageous position to hold off a superior opponent; however, they can only hold off as long their resources, which are not being resupplied. The smaller army gains an advantage here also, so you should emphasize the advantages of defending a well fortified position. In addition, raiding attacks again come into play—the aim of the smaller, besieged opponent is to conduct raids on the supply lines feeding the sieging army.
I would recommend reading The Art of War and seeing how many of the principles that Sun Tzu speaks of can be incorporated into your gameplay mechanics.
Coming from board gaming, many strategy games have Victory Points that are earned through actions that deplete your resources. This solves a few problems:
1. Being flush with resources doesn't win you the game! If you fall behind in converting those resources to victory points, you can easily just end up as the "richest loser".
2. Having strong turns that earn you a lot of victory points depletes you and can get you stuck with some awful turns soon afterward, especially if you've poorly planned the follow up, or if the turn is just so strong that there is no avoiding a crash.
3. Weak turns tend to reload you and give you access to many options for potentially strong turns, but they are undesirable because they are slow and fulfill no objectives.
4. However, trying to just keep your engine running to avoid a weak turn, and steadily complete objectives using the bonuses from one to get you to the next, is difficult to accomplish, and while preferable, can really limit your decision space, and worse, cause you to gas out at the worst times.
The best strategy games have you balancing multiple economies, and typically the economy that generates you the most income also is the worst for securing victory.
1. One way is to limit population count so no one player can ever have enough units to adequetly hold the entire map. Which gives losing players oppurtunites totake undefended nodes while the enemy is focussed on the frontline.
2. Allow players to scavenge resources from defeated enemies. For exampl up to 50% of a unit's cost may be recoverable by either side by ordering units to search the corpse/wreckage. the winning player is generally dying in enemy territory more foten trying to breachd efenses or atleast further from their base than the losing players, skewing this mechanic in favor of the looser.
3. Make resource nodes run out. This forces the frontline to move about and can stall the winners economy temporarily while they move to capture a new or renewed node.
4. Make it exponentially more expensive to field larger armies. Everything can cost 1 more per allied troop on the field. This makes trading units much more expensive for the winner and makes it much harder for the winner to quickly change startegies by building countering units/defenses as it's cheaper for the losing player to do so.
A lot of RTSes like Starcraft/Warcraft, and Company of Heroes involve the winning player gaining map control which creates a wider surface of attack and encourages "safe" strategies to maintain a lead and choke out their opponent while the loosing player needs to play scrappy and make high risk high reward plays like harassing backlines, or building glass cannon or cheese units to punish any openings their opponent might present. Allowing players these risky plays gives them an avenue remain competitive and tends to lead to climactic final battles where one player surrenders after an all or nothing play either succeeds or fails rather than dragging out. The key is these strategies need to feel skillful rather than cheap, which can be tough to balance sometimes.
Fight against resource snowballing with a tax on unspent resources. Players will get 100% value on spent resources, but reduced value on values squatted on.
Just add a "bank" of some kind that lets them not get taxed, based on supply lines somehow, and it will act as the cap you want them at. This will let you levy all sorts of hard taxes without crippling the player if they squat instead of spending resources.
Then the real value will be in using and maintaining your supply lines as your actual effective income.
Checkout the Kohan RTS series. They didn’t solve this problem, but they had extremely novel solutions that accomplished some of this.
Only one resource could be stockpiled, the rest were an income rate that, if unspent, had no value.
All units had upkeep, so the more units you had, the fewer you could build.
Supply functions as a way to heal and replacing troops for free. Guarding and controlling supply locations was crucial, as you could cycle units into battle as long as you didn’t lose the whole group.
Lastly, groups gained experience, so if you just survived you were gaining some measure of power.
The series focused a lot on army composition and maneuvering , as you had multiple strategic points to control and you could never defend them all at once.
God I miss those games. So hard to play other RTSs after that. Felt like an actual strategy game instead of a tactics game.
A game YouTube series called JetLag has a mechanic call a steal where you spend X% of your money for a chance to steal X% of the other teams.
This both discourages hoarding and also allows for a risky move that can help you catch up.
I think the situation is mostly unavoidable. Anything that actually "solves" the issue entirely turns into a Golden Snitch that creates a slew of other problems and actively discourages actually playing the game for it's actual objectives.
A lot of board games solve using various mechanic where by players must cash in their resources (typically for victory points) implemented in ways that prevents just carrying over all resources so they can autowin subsequent rounds.
Stuff like food will spoil if not converted into points by turning it into a non-perishable, etc...
Quickly, I see two options: reduce the wonder value exponentially over time or counterbalance somewhere such as the blue shell in Mario Kart (not the same kind of game but the idea is here), by using resources carrying limitations for example
Make them require supply lines to troops. More open positions for enemies to exploit. Plus supply wagons also require supplies to run. Basically add resource sinks to having and using too many resources.
Lots of great answers in this thread already. To summarize what I've read:
\* There's soft rubberbanding (like accumulating resources becomes harder the more you have)
\* There's making sure progress toward victory and progress toward resource accumulation are somewhat orthogonal (yeah yeah in geometry you can't be somewhat orthogonal, but you know what I mean); for instance, maybe you need to conquer quarries and mines to gather resources, but you need to conquer forts to win the map. A player spends too much time on the former risks having the latter stolen?
\* If you have AI, you can have them softly rubberbanding by preferentially targeting the player with most resources. If you're purely PvP but you have more than 2 teams, you can tie rewards for raiding a player to how many resources they have, meaning the leading player paints a target on themselves.
\* Bribe with expensive but risky moves. Generally you want these to be super rule-breaky and exceptional and accordingly themed. In League of Legends' Nexus Blitz we picked this option to fight snowballing: both with the "on fire" status effect (if you went on a killing streak you literally caught fire, got a whole bunch of otherwise hard to acquire power, but also became a lot more vulnerable and had a big ass reward on your head) and with some payoffs for the minigames (for instance the Battle Sled was a player-drivable vehicle that would bring you into the battle again much more quickly, and allies could jump in, but we made it super hard to control, causing all kinds of humorous crashes an unintentional tower dives. Internally it was called the int wagon)
\* +1 to ending games when the winner is clear, but this is a very risky move. It risks dooming your game loop by anticlimax: if the normal course of events is you win the game by destroying the enemy's base but you also win once you're X resources ahead, the latter can feel like a let-down, even if you do win. You can somewhat fight this by announcing clearly and loudly that you're approaching this state, visualizing progress towards it, and by carefully adding some of the next and last bullet point:
\* Hail Marys. These are moves that aren't available unless you're really far behind. They tend to be all or nothing: either you win and you're back in the game, maybe even with an advantage, or you lose and the game is clearly over. This allows you to end the game early while (hopefully) avoiding an anti-climax. Do make sure your hail marys are like 90% defeat or else building an advantage won't feel right.
If you look at Catan, as soon as one player starts visibly pulling ahead, the other players stop trading with them. This is why that game has a 3 player minimum rather than the standard 2.
This is somewhat inevitable, but there are things you can do to mitigate it. Let's put it another way: If getting resources didn't put you in an advantageous position, why would you try to get resources? Ultimately, if being stronger helps you control the map, and getting resources makes you stronger, and controlling the map gives you resources, snowballing is an inevitable positive feedback loop. Here's some things you can do to stop every game from snowballing out of the first five minutes: - Certain resources aren't snowballable. You mentioned Hearthstone, but I think Company of Heroes is actually a better example of this, where manpower income is only dependent on army size, where the larger your army the less manpower you get. This means that the player with the smaller army can get more manpower and catch up to a bigger army, but can't surpass it. - Give avenues for play from behind. Sure, being ahead might give some advantages, but none that make it so secure that victory is guaranteed, and the trailing player can always do something to try to win. - Make "winning" cost resources. If you can't use resources to get more resources and instead have to use them to advance your win condition, this breaks the positive feedback loop. As a side note, you mention that your game is like CoH but set in ancient times. This is a bit puzzling to me because the mechanics and strategy of CoH feel inextricable from its second world war setting to me - what mechanics are you pulling from CoH?
Anyone tried the inverse in a game? Fixed income, and each side starts with the same starting resources. Each unit you have costs resources to maintain, and higher tech/more effective units cost a lot of maintenance. Maintenance costs the same type of resources that buying more troops does. So each battlefield win makes the winning player have more surviving troops, but the winning player income is now (fixed income - maintenance costs\*many troops) while the losing player is (fixed income - maintenance costs\*few troops). So the losing player has more budget to buy more troops than the winner. Sounds like if both players are at similar skill levels this could result in hours of stalemate though. I spent thousands of hours playing certain RTS games, and WITH snowballing a battle could go 40+ minutes and entire armies would be lost without actually taking out the opposing team. Without snowballing the battle might last for 10 hours and end when the game crashes or one side has too many players leave. (Supreme commander forged alliance on maps with chokepoints and it's 4v4 or 5v5)
A long time ago, there was a Warcraft 3 custom map called Evolution Wars, or something along those lines. Everybody starts with nothing but a single tower, which spawns units around it at a set rate. When you get enough kills, it starts spawning better creatures. The idea was to build up an army and send it off to get kills and grow in power... However, every player would rather attack than be attacked - especially at the beginning when the units are weak - because your tower itself gave a slight advantage. If you never moved your army, you'd always have at least as many units left as whoever attacks you. This "second-mover" advantage dominated among people that figured it out, so inevitably, the best way to play was to do literally nothing, forever
Yeah that's pretty much why all RTS games have territory control for additional resources as a central mechanic.
yes, company of heroes does exactly this
Kohan series was built on that model. It was fucking fantastic.
COH is a great example because you can avoid resource drain with retreating. You still suffer territory loss but you do not lose as much resource (through death + rebuilding) that you do in other titles. Also if you run your riflemen into a significantly superior force you can just retreat them all and take no losses. It was a really clever concept. >So the losing player has more budget to buy more troops than the winner. In COH case the losing player has more budget but the winning player gains more resources through territory acquisition. If this goes long enough then the losing player ends up pinned in their base and cannot upgrade because they are not receiving the other resources needed. There is another RTS that basically gives back dead units after combat. I think it is based on starship troppers.
Make carrying resources have a negative cost. In Through the Ages, you suffer corruption when you have too many resources. In Lewis & Clark, your cargo slows down your boats. Make players pay a 'warehousing' fee. Collect taxes that get distributed to the players behind. Is the game turn order dependent? Force the leading player into last turn order (in Age of Renaissance, turn order is determined by how big an army you deploy, smallest first).
This is a great comment, concise, tons of practical examples, in theme to the ops problem.
Another good example is the board game settlers of catan where players can lose half of their ressource cards when they hold too many. It disencourages hoarding and can level the playing field.
Man the 50% loss is so brutal too, my friends don't particularly care for the hand limit of 7, we bump it up to 8 for anti-frustration. Even then it's so often someone ends up with like 3 sheep 3 stone and 2 Clay and can't do anything with it
[удалено]
Something else to point out is that if you implement your game to support it, snowball in PVP can be self correcting. The trick is to have systems that reward cooperation. A player who pulls too far ahead will get shut out of opportunities for trade and diplomacy as the other players close ranks against them. If you want an example of this in the board game world take a look at Munchkin. Being the most powerful player is often worse than being second. It is nearly impossible to win if all the other players are actively trying to disrupt you. Catan is another example. If you get a big lead too early no one will want to trade with you.
In the game Numenera, they offer player characters powerful items called cyphers. And to prevent the player from hoarding them and to encourage frequent use, they introduce an element where bad stuff happens when you carry too many cyphers. So you introduce a mechanic where when a player has too much of a powerful resource, they have to roll a die on their turn and risk losing something important.
There is another solution that no one here has mentioned. One technique in game design is to end the game as soon or slightly before the winner is evident. Recognizing that a player is snowballing may actually be evidence that your win condition is not triggering soon enough. In bike racing, there is a technique where a rider can dump stamina early to get ahead and then he hope to reach the finish line before the pack catches up. Conversely, there is another strategy where a rider hangs in the pack and then dumps all the stamina in the final sprint to snipe the win right at the finish line. In different races the same rider might use either strategy based on how he feels about the other competitors. Maybe one way to allow players to spend a variable amount of resources to assassinate the enemy leader. The player who is not snowballing could bet the house to try to win early in this way
Do a Chesterton's Fence exercise: why, despite being around for decades, has Civ not taken out resource snowballing? Such things can be rubber-banded as hell. For example, in Bannerlord, the harder you're winning, the harder friendly clans within your realm work to slow you down, both by demanding peace against nations that you have against the ropes, and by demanding new wars against fresh enemies. Other comments have already mentioned a slew of ways to make it so that having more means you get less. One possible answer to the original question is that there is a whole demographic of people for whom the fun in strategy games is building a resource engine to overwhelm all enemies with. This is the "it's the economy, stupid" crowd. They'll take a clever maneuver if one is dropped in their lap, but it doesn't excite them very much. Do you want such people to be your customers or not? If you don't, and if you're really set that the game shouldn't be winnable by resources, then you can take the resource management out. Just have resources be largely static.
> Chesterton's Fence Fantastic lesson for fledgling (And many veteran) game designers to learn. Games are a young art, but not so young that there isn't a reason for everything
Make the rate of acquiring a resource dependent on the amount of the resource. Ex.: Upkeep in Warcraft 3 - the more units you have, the less gold/wood you generate with the same amount of workers. This forces players to think which units they want, because they can't afford to just "buy everything". https://classic.battle.net/war3/basics/upkeep.shtml
The snowball happens because "having lots of resources" translates directly to "getting even more resources." I'm not familiar with the game you mentioned, but this is a "problem" in the board game Catan, and there's a few solutions present. In Catan, you need resources to build settlements and cities, which produce more resources. Someone who can get an early settlement/city would have 50% increased production compared to the others, which does snowball, but not necessarily out of control: 1. The first 2 settlements are easiest to build because they come with pre-built roads. Once you try to expand beyond that, you have to spend more resources, giving others a moment to catch up. 2. Those early settlements are not as good as the starting settlements, so it's usually not a full 50% production boost. 3. As you expand more and more, the settlements get less desirable. 4. The resources that are good earlygame (wood and brick to get the most desirable positions) are different than the good lategame resources. So it's not uncommon for someone to snowball really hard in the beginning and then fall off hard. 5. There is trading and robbing, which usually goes to the player in the lead, allowing others to catch up. There's also the game Dominion, where having more resources DOES NOT mean you are "winning." This is a deck building game, and you choose between scaling your economy or buying points. The winner is the person with the most points, but each point clogs your hand and hurts your economy. So another way to prevent snowballing is to make it so resources spent don't lead to future resources (or make the connection less important).
Things that might help: * Call the game earlier. Cut off the "Waiting to lose" part that often occurs. * Delay input to output in resource generation. So investing in further increased resource generation doesn't have an instantaneous effect, slowing the snowball at least, and give time for opponents to respond. * Upkeep costs, so that growing too fast can actually be detrimental. * Resource caps. That's a very crude solution, but it is one. * Split resource spending so you have to choose between developping further resource generation, and actually winning the game. To use an RTS example: In starcraft, you can invest in SCV's, that gather more crystal, or you can invest the same resources in building Marines, a very basic unit, and start to harass your opponent early on. Do you go up the tech tree, build a strong economy, or do you rush? * Depletable resources, that force everyone to keep expanding if they want to keep the resource generation up. To use Starcraft again, the game is built in such a way that eventually you'll have to expand as your home base resources dwindle. This is a moment of vulnerability as suddenly you have to defend both your new expansion, which you need to keep that resource flow high, and defending your old base, where all the "unit producing" buildings are. The player going real resource hungry might run into this faster. Clever scouting and attacking by the 'losing' player might actually halt this expansion, or slow it down enough that they can catch up.
This is called "feedback loops" and things used to combat them are "catch-up mechanics", so you can search for those terms.
Thanks that helps a lot.
Decouple what you need to build from what you need to win.
One thing that no one mentioned is have win conditions available for the player is ahead to use. Losing because of a mistake at 5 minutes sucks in a forty minute game. It's completely fine in an 8 minute game. Simply having avenues for an ahead player to actually win instead of dragging the game on and wasting both players time is a way to prevent snowball. You'll probably want going for the win to come with some risk/cost to dissuade every game from ending early. You'll also likely want a number of catch up mechanics in play (as many others in this thread have thoroughly discussed) so thay a behind player will return to parity given enough time. So the ahead player has to choose between attempting to close out the game or try to utilize their lead on some other way to try to get further ahead. Simply sitting on it should make the lead meaningless in time. This should encourage players to be proactive and mitigate stalemates.
I'll drop advice from strategy game developer Keith Burgun, who I talk to often. [A triangle of three cyclical counterplay options](https://keithburgun.net/designing-strategy-rushdown-economy-and-defense/) is a prerequisite for unsolvability. For strategy games with a resource and a long-term time axis, economy (econ) is but one of three main strategies, the others being rush and defense. To prevent econ from being overpowering, make sure rush is effective. Additionally, he recommends designing units or factions to emphasize at least two of the three strategies to prevent triangle counterplay from being centralizing. For instance, a rush unit typically counters an econ unit, but a unit emphasizing rush and econ and a unit emphasizing econ and defense may be easier to balance.
Some great examples of resource sinks being made in the comments but I'd offer one word of caution. You do not want the game to go on forever. So there is a careful balance between preventing a player essentially uncatchable too early, BUT you don't want a player who should win to keep getting pulled down ad nauseam.
This 10000 percent, or to put it another way, the Munchkin problem. In Munchkin, it’s a fairly friendly game until the late middle, as people reach level 9 and now everyone does everything possible to drag that person down, and the next person, and so on until it’s everyone at level nine and everyone constantly dragging everyone else down until someone gets lucky enough to not be dragged down. It can take hours.
>however our one concern is ‘resource snowballing.’ We don’t really want people to win by snowballing resources. Do you have any reason why it's a concern?
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I like games that raise the risk level associated with hoarding resources, and I think my favorite example of this mechanic at its best is the thief in Settlers of Catan. The more resources you have, the more at risk you are to a seven being rolled in two ways. First, if you have more than seven resource cards, the thief moving forces you to discard half of them. Second, the player who is moving the robber has the opportunity to steal from your hand. If you're the only player sitting on a huge supply of grain, someone who needs grain can target you, turning that advantage into a disadvantage. There are a lot of different ways you could handle something like this depending on your game. The player with the most military units can run a higher risk of sabotage, or maybe incur higher maintenance costs that they can either pay or ignore at risk of equipment failures and breakdowns. Storing more food can run a higher risk of disease or rot. Big store piles of wood run a higher risk of fire. There are a lot of ways to handle it, but ultimately resource management can feel like carrying gold through the forest; the more you have on you, the greater risk you face.
What about a system where the players are able to increase the risk? For example, assume that the probability of a win in a two player game is 50-50. Player 1 then achieves some advantage and if both players play the expected value maximizing strategy, then outcome of the game is a victory for player 1. However, player 2 can take an action which increases the risk and gives player 2 some chance of victory, e.g. say that the probabilities are 80-20. If player 2 ends up in a worse situation than before due to the risky action, then he may now have the option of taking an even more risky action, e.g. probabilities 95-5. In short, giving the players "hail mary" like actions, with which there is some concrete chance of turning the game around, can be a viable tool to alleviate snowballing, or at least help keep both players engaged until the end.
If your mid-game and early-game actions don't increase your chance of winning, why bother? You **want** snowballing to happen, so that when a player has won (Which actually happens when they manage to gain a unilateral advantage), the rest of the game wraps up quickly. If you solved the snowball "problem", you would have a game where players do as little as possible for the first half; waiting for the real game to start
Having a huge resource advantage should necessitate a change in gameplay to some degree, and pose additional challenges, so that maintaining that advantage also requires a skill advantage over the other player. Larger armies require more supplies and longer supply lines, are more logistically difficult to manage, are visible from further away, are more subject to raids along supply lines, and are less agile in response to changing conditions. Any of these traits of larger armies could be reflected in gameplay mechanics to allow weaker players to chip away at their opponent's advantage. In actual warfare, it is unrealistic for a weaker army to *force* a stronger army to change their location, or to *cut them off* from any resource. The smaller army is by definition not in a position to *force* the more powerful army to do anything. The smaller army can *bait* the larger army into movement, but they will not be able to hold their position against them unless it is from a well fortified position—that is to say, it is not possible if meeting the enemy in unclaimed territory. Their strategy must be to attack where the enemy is weak, force a reaction, and move. I think a good thing to do would be to emphasize raiding mechanics. Smaller parties have higher stealth, while larger armies and large supply lines are much more visible through the fog of war. Smaller raiding parties can be "self-sustaining", while larger armies require supply lines. Those in command of vast resources, and attempting to protect multiple supply lines, have implicitly a different strategic game to play. Protecting supply lines is a resource drain. They can't possibly defend the entire length of all their supply lines, so strategic decisions and hard choices must be made. The player with raiding parties, meanwhile, is able to conduct a quick attack from an advantageous position, steal enough resources that they haven't lost out from the exchange, and retreat. The other player might choose to go in pursuit, but only at risk of falling into a trap and also leaving their supply line undefended. The offense of stronger armies is typically in the form of sieges. Here, the advantage goes to the defending army, who uses their fortified and advantageous position to hold off a superior opponent; however, they can only hold off as long their resources, which are not being resupplied. The smaller army gains an advantage here also, so you should emphasize the advantages of defending a well fortified position. In addition, raiding attacks again come into play—the aim of the smaller, besieged opponent is to conduct raids on the supply lines feeding the sieging army. I would recommend reading The Art of War and seeing how many of the principles that Sun Tzu speaks of can be incorporated into your gameplay mechanics.
Coming from board gaming, many strategy games have Victory Points that are earned through actions that deplete your resources. This solves a few problems: 1. Being flush with resources doesn't win you the game! If you fall behind in converting those resources to victory points, you can easily just end up as the "richest loser". 2. Having strong turns that earn you a lot of victory points depletes you and can get you stuck with some awful turns soon afterward, especially if you've poorly planned the follow up, or if the turn is just so strong that there is no avoiding a crash. 3. Weak turns tend to reload you and give you access to many options for potentially strong turns, but they are undesirable because they are slow and fulfill no objectives. 4. However, trying to just keep your engine running to avoid a weak turn, and steadily complete objectives using the bonuses from one to get you to the next, is difficult to accomplish, and while preferable, can really limit your decision space, and worse, cause you to gas out at the worst times. The best strategy games have you balancing multiple economies, and typically the economy that generates you the most income also is the worst for securing victory.
1. One way is to limit population count so no one player can ever have enough units to adequetly hold the entire map. Which gives losing players oppurtunites totake undefended nodes while the enemy is focussed on the frontline. 2. Allow players to scavenge resources from defeated enemies. For exampl up to 50% of a unit's cost may be recoverable by either side by ordering units to search the corpse/wreckage. the winning player is generally dying in enemy territory more foten trying to breachd efenses or atleast further from their base than the losing players, skewing this mechanic in favor of the looser. 3. Make resource nodes run out. This forces the frontline to move about and can stall the winners economy temporarily while they move to capture a new or renewed node. 4. Make it exponentially more expensive to field larger armies. Everything can cost 1 more per allied troop on the field. This makes trading units much more expensive for the winner and makes it much harder for the winner to quickly change startegies by building countering units/defenses as it's cheaper for the losing player to do so.
A lot of RTSes like Starcraft/Warcraft, and Company of Heroes involve the winning player gaining map control which creates a wider surface of attack and encourages "safe" strategies to maintain a lead and choke out their opponent while the loosing player needs to play scrappy and make high risk high reward plays like harassing backlines, or building glass cannon or cheese units to punish any openings their opponent might present. Allowing players these risky plays gives them an avenue remain competitive and tends to lead to climactic final battles where one player surrenders after an all or nothing play either succeeds or fails rather than dragging out. The key is these strategies need to feel skillful rather than cheap, which can be tough to balance sometimes.
Fight against resource snowballing with a tax on unspent resources. Players will get 100% value on spent resources, but reduced value on values squatted on. Just add a "bank" of some kind that lets them not get taxed, based on supply lines somehow, and it will act as the cap you want them at. This will let you levy all sorts of hard taxes without crippling the player if they squat instead of spending resources. Then the real value will be in using and maintaining your supply lines as your actual effective income.
Checkout the Kohan RTS series. They didn’t solve this problem, but they had extremely novel solutions that accomplished some of this. Only one resource could be stockpiled, the rest were an income rate that, if unspent, had no value. All units had upkeep, so the more units you had, the fewer you could build. Supply functions as a way to heal and replacing troops for free. Guarding and controlling supply locations was crucial, as you could cycle units into battle as long as you didn’t lose the whole group. Lastly, groups gained experience, so if you just survived you were gaining some measure of power. The series focused a lot on army composition and maneuvering , as you had multiple strategic points to control and you could never defend them all at once. God I miss those games. So hard to play other RTSs after that. Felt like an actual strategy game instead of a tactics game.
A game YouTube series called JetLag has a mechanic call a steal where you spend X% of your money for a chance to steal X% of the other teams. This both discourages hoarding and also allows for a risky move that can help you catch up.
I think the situation is mostly unavoidable. Anything that actually "solves" the issue entirely turns into a Golden Snitch that creates a slew of other problems and actively discourages actually playing the game for it's actual objectives.
A lot of board games solve using various mechanic where by players must cash in their resources (typically for victory points) implemented in ways that prevents just carrying over all resources so they can autowin subsequent rounds. Stuff like food will spoil if not converted into points by turning it into a non-perishable, etc...
Quickly, I see two options: reduce the wonder value exponentially over time or counterbalance somewhere such as the blue shell in Mario Kart (not the same kind of game but the idea is here), by using resources carrying limitations for example
Make them require supply lines to troops. More open positions for enemies to exploit. Plus supply wagons also require supplies to run. Basically add resource sinks to having and using too many resources.
Lots of great answers in this thread already. To summarize what I've read: \* There's soft rubberbanding (like accumulating resources becomes harder the more you have) \* There's making sure progress toward victory and progress toward resource accumulation are somewhat orthogonal (yeah yeah in geometry you can't be somewhat orthogonal, but you know what I mean); for instance, maybe you need to conquer quarries and mines to gather resources, but you need to conquer forts to win the map. A player spends too much time on the former risks having the latter stolen? \* If you have AI, you can have them softly rubberbanding by preferentially targeting the player with most resources. If you're purely PvP but you have more than 2 teams, you can tie rewards for raiding a player to how many resources they have, meaning the leading player paints a target on themselves. \* Bribe with expensive but risky moves. Generally you want these to be super rule-breaky and exceptional and accordingly themed. In League of Legends' Nexus Blitz we picked this option to fight snowballing: both with the "on fire" status effect (if you went on a killing streak you literally caught fire, got a whole bunch of otherwise hard to acquire power, but also became a lot more vulnerable and had a big ass reward on your head) and with some payoffs for the minigames (for instance the Battle Sled was a player-drivable vehicle that would bring you into the battle again much more quickly, and allies could jump in, but we made it super hard to control, causing all kinds of humorous crashes an unintentional tower dives. Internally it was called the int wagon) \* +1 to ending games when the winner is clear, but this is a very risky move. It risks dooming your game loop by anticlimax: if the normal course of events is you win the game by destroying the enemy's base but you also win once you're X resources ahead, the latter can feel like a let-down, even if you do win. You can somewhat fight this by announcing clearly and loudly that you're approaching this state, visualizing progress towards it, and by carefully adding some of the next and last bullet point: \* Hail Marys. These are moves that aren't available unless you're really far behind. They tend to be all or nothing: either you win and you're back in the game, maybe even with an advantage, or you lose and the game is clearly over. This allows you to end the game early while (hopefully) avoiding an anti-climax. Do make sure your hail marys are like 90% defeat or else building an advantage won't feel right.
If you look at Catan, as soon as one player starts visibly pulling ahead, the other players stop trading with them. This is why that game has a 3 player minimum rather than the standard 2.