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So here's a random thing I've been musing recently - with the way HMW is currently set up, the aim is to get all 10s in every stat to be able to reach L10 (or, yes, L11 for dual tactics, but that's more by oversight than by plan!).

But to me, "all 10s" is pretty boring because every bot ends up with the same stats. Really the only variability is which tactics to use (for alts/flavour; we understand that they're not equal), and a little bit by weapons.

If you look at actual TF Tech Specs, back when they were a thing, you'd hardly ever see a bot with all 10s outside of faction leaders (even G1 Optimus had 76 of 80 points, G1 Megs had 71 of 80). This obviously goes for nearly any game too - you don't max out every stat on one character, you specialise in a couple of key areas.

So here's my (open-ended) question - assuming the stats all actually did something useful and you could still get to max level, what do you think be a good balance might be? 60 points + tactics at max? 70? How much would make different builds feel distinct?

It is hard to say since this isn’t the case but I think 70 could be reasonable. Would be interesting if build A beats B 70-30, but B beats C 70-30 and C beats A all 70-30. Obviously with a lot more than 3 options but could be neat to design against certain builds.

The other option is really scaling things better to make later upgrades prohibitively expensive. Since upping 1 level doubles xp and each upgrade is double the last going from level 1-2 is about as hard as 9-10. If these were scaled you could solve the problem of everyone maxing out without an artificial limit. Early upgrades should’ve been way easier and later ones way harder imo.

The only builds that have felt different on my team are the repair builds to be honest. Before I rebuilt the whole team I was mostly single function bots and they didn't do a whole lot. The dual mechanic added a lot but even with Ram and Avoid and strafe they still feel very samey.

If you wanna go by old G1 standards, most characters averaged in the 40's-50's in the stat totals.
"team Leaders" were a bit more (50's-70's) and of course Leaders were just OP.

Perhaps decreasing the XP cost of low upgrades and increasing the cost of higher ones as previously suggested would help but also limiting the total number of upgrades available at each level or maybe even Rank (to make that stat more usefull)

Something I proposed... I dunno.. a long ass time ago (6 years, just checked my notes) was to add a "Size" stat that would effect the other stats with positives & negatives. I wrote up a whole thing on the old RDD FB page but since FB got rid of Notes its probably a dead link (yep just checked)

Went into the old files and found some of what I worked out. I was mostly concerned about weapon damage at the time and the chart reflects that.


I think it would have been a fun way to differentiate builds and be another XP sink.

Doesn't matter though. Ryan is never going to do anything more with this place.

I don't suppose you could be convinced to make a whole new game Glyph? I think I might be able to get the old RDD crew back together for that

Ooh, that's some interesting stuff there Bun-Bun! *saves for perusal*
Size classes is something I thought about a few times, would be good to let players e.g. advance through Scout, Warrior, Voyager, Leader, Commander, with each bringing some bonuses. Always good to have more reasons to level up rather than hoarding XP to stay at the top of the bracket (obviously this isn't a thing at L10/11 in the same way as the early game).

But yeah, this is all assuming that different builds actually had meaningfully different strengths, of course. That the game becomes incredibly grindy and repetitive once you hit L2-3, especially if you don't play at (relatively) busy times, is its own separate problem that I think turns off a lot of potential new players, but not really what I meant here. I guess I was mostly seeing where people fell on the "I want to max everything!" versus "I want lots of different build types!" axis.

Bun-Bun wrote:I don't suppose you could be convinced to make a whole new game Glyph? I think I might be able to get the old RDD crew back together for that

Ha, I'd sooner try to get something to happen with the game that already exists!

Glyph wrote:Ha, I'd sooner try to get something to happen with the game that already exists!

Right. Well good luck with that.

Stroll through some of the post from 4+ years ago and see how well that went for us back when we still had something approaching a decent player base AND Admins that gave a damn.

*edit* There was a point around that time the the RDD were praying ( or would be if we were a praying lot) that you would come back to light our darkest hour.

Would have loved to, was sorta banned at the time (thanks OS). Apparently the ban stopped working for a bit, but then came back. Had to ask Ryan to lift it in the end.

There was an implicit "if possible" on that last comment. I appreciate the vote of confidence, mind.