Choosing not to Parachain

This is a repost about the game Warlocks, and the spell paralysis in general, which I've posted about before.

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I was talking to a friend of mine recently about Warlocks and he asked me an interesting question: Do I think that the fact that I won the annual championship in spite of my decision to restrict my own use of paralysis is evidence that it's not a broken spell?

I think a lot of warlocks are aware of my feelings on paralysis, and some probably noticed that on my profile I declare my "personal rules", which include the fact that I won't gesture F more than 5 times consecutively (meaning 3 paras). Not only does this prevent me from abusing paralysis, I know for a fact that some of my opponents are aware of the restriction, and play on the assumption I won't parachain, so it also limits my ability to threaten with F's.

So am I providing evidence that parachains aren't needed to compete at a high level? Yes. Am I providing evidence that it's not an extremely imbalanced spell? I don't think so.

In order to explain why, I'll start with why I self-imposed this rule in the first place. When I started out, around the time I first approached elo 1600, I started to realize how powerful paralysis was, and though I never thought of myself as a paramancer, there was a time when I found myself using paralysis extensively. What would invariably happen is that in the middle of a match I would cast paralysis at some point, and then think "alright, I'll break the chain and do something else now" just before noticing that my opponent had some kind of spell he was threatening in two turns, and that if I kept up the para just a little longer, I could stop it. After I stopped that threat, I'd say "oh, but now if I para just one more turn, I can also respond to a second threat", and this would continue ad infinitum. I would end up using massive parachains even though by this point I had already begun to feel that parachains made games less dynamic and interesting. I remember Succat (a self-declared "paraholic") once saying that he pleased to see that I had a nice "para trigger", or something to that effect.

However, I felt like paralysis wasn't one of many useful strategies at my disposal, it felt like a crutch. I realized that if I left it up to how I happened to feel during a match I would always find an excuse to continue parachaining, so the only way to force myself to be more creative was to make a rule out of it, and by making it public I would feel pressure to keep at it. I was also hoping, I think, that other people would follow suite and I would see fewer long parachains coming at me, but that part never happened.

After I stopped parachaining (and charming hands to "-", and opening "D/P"), I found I really did explore a lot of different options, and was pleased with this decision for a time. Then when I got to around elo 1800 for the first time, over a year ago, I started to realize that I was going to be playing more often against the very best players in the game, and that they all used parachains and parafod extensively (some of them more than others, but every single one of them used parafod to kill me at one time or another). I felt like my own refusal to use parachains might be an insurmountable barrier that would keep me from being able to compete with them, and I honestly got to a point where I started playing very few friendly and ladder matches, and mostly just played in the League because the monthly rules were one surefire source of continued variation in play, which is what I wanted.

At some point I noticed that the players in the league, even ones who normally used parafod often, were less likely to use paralysis when a monthly rule was in play even if the rule didn't have to do with paralysis. In other words, the fact that we were playing in an unranked space where new strategies were encouraged made people drop their paraholic ways and try new things, and the results were sometimes brilliant. However, when they returned to ranked games, most players would stop thinking outside the box and play safe.

This encouraged me to try more seriously to take on the good players head on with my personal rules in play, and I could almost tangibly feel myself gradually getting the hang of beating paralysis. It's also worth noting, when I say something like "beating paralysis", that I actually used paralysis a lot myself. In fact, when I went on the warlocks archives recently, I was surprised to find that I apparently cast paralysis, per game, more often than average. The difference is that I don't cast long chains - I'll cast paralysis once or twice (or maybe thrice) and then break off into something else, and then come back and cast paralysis again a little later. It's a good spell that I like using, but forbidding myself from relying on it made my weaves more dynamic and forced me to be more creative, so I felt like I was getting the best of both worlds. In fact, in my final match against Xade in the tournament, I opened with paralysis on my left hand.

I really wasn't expecting to do as well as I did in the tournament, but if it's a sign of anything, I think it's a sign of how much I gained specifically by avoiding using paralysis as a crutch and trying to be just a little strange (Bio went so far as to call one of my moves in the final match "insane", which made me smile). That said, being the only player who doesn't use parachains has still been a serious restriction, and I've had a number of games where I believe I would have definitely won had I allowed myself to use a parachain. One of the other noteworthy aspects of the tournament was the appearance of a number of new players around the same time, some of whom experienced players found "shockingly good." The shock, I think, stems from the fact that these players haven't yet learned what the popular weaves are, and so make plays that are unexpected and hard to predict - experienced players would do well to try and learn a little from their games with these new players.

So my general point is this - once you've played warlocks for a long time it can become very comfortable to fall into regular patterns - go for charms and ogres as often as possible, and then when you have enough initiative advantage go for parafod or bolt an opponent to death. However, any time that a strategy becomes common wisdom, it starts to get stale, and forcing yourself to play in ways that are less comfortable is the best possible way to continue learning new things. To return to my original question, paralysis is an extremely powerful spell, one that I think is imbalanced, which is precisely why it, more than anything else, prevents players from developing creative strategies. If paralysis weren't so strong, my decision not to use it wouldn't have had as big an effect on my playing style.

In short, choosing not to parachain can be good for you.

Chess and Resource Management

My local Starbucks has a chess board sitting around, so I decided to play against myself. Since this gives me perfect predictive power about what my opponent is going to do, it obviously removes some of the standard elements of Chess, but there was one thing I realized when playing it: Chess is first and foremost about mobilization. That is, you begin with all pieces in play, but since most of them are behind a wall of pawns to start with, they don't immediately threaten your opponent. The way you gain options is by moving them into positions where they can form threats.

On reflection, this is more similar than I'd thought to modern strategy games and their treatment of resource management. Think of Magic, where I've chosen cards to place into my deck - the cards are there, but they're not in a usable state, they're not active threats, until I draw them (and have enough mana available to use them). Even if I play an RTS game, say Starcraft, I have a potential army that becomes realized when I gather enough resources to build it, and the question I constantly have to balance is how long I should spend mustering threats before I try to use them - if I'm playing well, I should attack as soon as I think I have a force my opponent won't be able to defend against. This is the same kind of strategy I'm using in Chess - I'm trying to move my units into a position from which they can simultaneously threaten my opponent, and as soon as I think I can launch an attack my opponent can't defend against, I will.

So revelation of the day: mobilizing units and building them are, from the perspective of their impact on strategy, extremely similar (as long as it takes a similar amount of effort). The big difference, of course, is that my units can still be used to defend in many situations before I've moved them at all. If you like, however, you can imagine these situations as my opponent bringing the units into play (like if my opponent plays a card that results in me drawing new cards, or allows me to respond by playing one). It also suggests a certain consistency between the way classic and modern games conceive of strategy.

Just thought that was interesting.

Waving Hands 2: Finite Resources

So, given how fan-ish I was in my previous post on Waving Hands (aka Spellcaster, aka Warlocks), it shouldn't surprise anyone that I've continued playing the game in the interim (though a little less frequently now that my boss has figured out what the strings of random letters on my monitor are), and I think it's time to return to what makes the strategy feel particularly deep.

In particular, it's occured to me that several of the elements I discussed before are enabled by a single feature - finite resources. In this case, your primary resource is your HP, which you "spend" for better position and the chance to complete major spells. The key here is that your HP starts off at a set number (15), and generally only decreases. I mean, there are healing spells, but they're less efficient than their analagous damage spells, and in any case your HP can't go above 16. The healing spells have their uses, but in general, the game is about gradually moving toward 0 HP.

Why does that matter? First of all, it keeps the game from dragging out - every turn that passes brings you closer to the conclusion because resources are always being spent faster than they're generated. More importantly, perhaps, it prevents either player from establishing an unbeatable advantage, like you can achieve in many real-time strategy games. In Age of Empires III, if I played the Dutch and survived to the Imperial Age, I got an economy going that was so absurdly efficient that it was virtually impossible to defeat me (because I could replace units as fast as they died without putting any significant dent in my resources). In warlocks, you can't build up your resources and then steamroll your opponent - you only have the resources you started with, and even if you have a clear HP advantage, you can always be defeated by a single Finger of Death or permanent enchantment, so you're never safe.

Now, in order for this to work, it doesn't require that there is actually no resource generation at all, just that resource generation is limited. In addition to healing, I would count monster summoning as "resource generation," in which case it might seem possible to build resources (by summoning endless hordes of monsters). The fact of the matter, though, is that getting out multiple summoned monsters is hard. Not only can your opponent disrupt or dispel you, but once you have a monster summoned, you have to pay attention to them, or they might be charmed by your opponent, and become their ogre or troll. Monsters are a good investment, but they have to be maintained, and can be expensive to cast in the first place, so the decision to bring out a monster is itself an important strategic decision. While summon ogre is a popular opening spell, you can win a match without ever summoning anything.

And that's what really matters here - that every decision is meaningful. In most RTS games, resource gathering is so central, that it single-handedly determines the outcomes of the game, and decisions like army makeup and where and when to deploy units are secondary. While I immensely enjoyed AoE3, over time the games start becoming identical - the game was about perfecting my rapid development strategy. Games of Waving Hands, on the other hand, are wildly different and unpredictable, and that's what keeps me fascinated with it.

Speaking of strategy games, I just got my hands on a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, so now I have something other than Valentine's Day dinner on my to-do list this weekend.

Waving Hands

I was recently exposed to Spellcaster, or "Waving Hands," and was immediately excited to try it out. The logistics prevented me from trying it for a while, until I found a site that hosts automated sessions between players at RavenBlack Games (I'm Ellipsis on there, so if anyone wants to create an account and send me a challenge, feel free). Now that I've gotten to actually play the game (a dozen or so times) I can say that my excitement was justified.

Spellcaster is a game about dueling wizards. Nothing terribly innovative there, seeing as how an entire gaming medium (the collectible card game) was spawned by a game with the same premise. The innovative part is how you cast spells - by making gestures with your two hands (usually abbreviated as letters you can write down in sequence), combinations of which create spells. Now, this is conceptually very cool, but that's not what makes Spellcaster a good game. It's the fact that the gameplay is very simple (just consists of picking a gesture to make with each hand each turn), but very strategically deep. We can be a bit more specific, though, in talking about what makes the game good:

1) Micro-goals with feedback: Each individual spell is made up of several coordinated actions and could be counterspelled or otherwise interrupted by an opponent. As a result, every individual spell that you complete gives you a sense of accomplishment (proportional to the difficulty of completing the spell).

2) Engagement Level: The game allows you to control how much time you invest in it. There is no time limit between turns, so you can take as long as you want to make a decision. You can check on the progress of the game every once in a while (or just get an email reminder when it's your turn) and play at work. Alternatively, you can spend time strategizing, trying to figure out your opponent's plans, etc, and this time pays off. The ability of the player to control how they play can be very valuable.

3) Balance: Sure, the big spells are flashy and do a lot of damage, but one interruption from your opponent spoils the effort you put into preparing that spell. Meanwhile, the minor enchantments only affect your opponent for one turn, but they're easy to pull off and can disrupt his rhythm. What particularly pleases me about the balance is that even though there are different play styles, every spell is useful to every player - sometimes, a situation just calls for "remove enchantment" or for "anti-spell" and this is just as true for a defensive player as for a fan of the big, flashy spells.

4) Dynamic: You will never succeed at this game by picking a "dominant" strategy and going through the motions. The game relies very strongly on predicting what your opponent is going to do (so you can counter their attacks and make sure they're unable to defend themselves from yours), and the result is that play is very fluid and often unpredictable (your opponent is working very hard to make sure it's upredictable!).

5) Come Backs: The game does not provide any means for the winning player to secure and easily hold onto his lead. If one player has 5 monsters out and is invisible and immune to fire, cold, and physical attacks, all it takes it one dispel magic to level the playing field. Similarly, even if you hit your opponent with a strong spell, they might have something up their sleeve that they've been planning for a while that will take away your advantage. The point is that I've had many games where I was clearly ahead and ended up losing, and many in which I was clearly behind and still pulled out a victory.

This post, of course, isn't just an extended advertisement for the game - these basic elements that make the game compelling are elements that should be included in any game that strives to be strategic, because they are the elements that create a rich play experience. To balance out the post a bit, I can quickly point out the major problem with the game: steep learning curve. The only people who play this game are those who committed themselves to learning how to play it, and who are willing to repeatedly look over the 40+ entry spell-list trying to figure out what kind of options they and their opponents have, and what the advantages and disadvantages of each are. If a game had this kind of strategic depth and was able to lead players in and teach them the skills they needed in a more incremental way, it would be the stuff of greatness.

-Silent Ellipsis