How long should the average mission last?

Liam

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
This is a topic that, interestingly enough, rarely comes up. What is the ideal length of an average mission?

In some simulation-style games you play play a single epic mission from start to finish (like Civilization, Sim City etc). We don't have this situation, and for now at least, most of Empires will be based upon a series of self-contained missions.

Most missions will go through a roughly similar progression:
Build a small, efficient start-up colony;
Explore your local territory;
Expand your colony + claim food + deal with hazards;
Complete mission objective (e.g., win a significant final battle)

- So how long do you think the whole sequence should take?
- How long should the game be in each 'state' (i.e., how would you like to spend most of your time? Do you want to build up really fast and concentrate on colony vs colony war, or would you prefer to spend most of your time planning and designing your colony, dealing with battles as you go?)
- Do you like to set the pace of the game yourself? (e.g., turtle in, build up until you feel you are strong enough to win)
- Or do you prefer the game to maintain a certain pace of increasing danger so you are compelled to react?

Obviously every mission is different and peoples' play styles are different so I am just hoping for some numbers in the ballpark (we will do a bit of everything regardless, but it would be good to know what the general preferences are).
 

Drexel

Larva
Backer
Beta Tester
I would say a good mission length in my opinion would last about 30-40 minutes. That gives me the opportunity to jump in and finish one if I have some downtime in the day, but then I can really get through a few if I have a good chunk of time to play.

My personal play style in base building games is to turtle up and send out my guys when I know I won't take too many losses. That is always my goal; send as many soldiers (er ants) back to the queen as possible. I think a good chunk, at least 30% of the mission time should be about exploring, expanding, and defending your base and then the rest of the time can be about building up the army to finish your mission goals.

I understand the difficulty here because you don't want the game to be just about wiping the enemy off the map, but a slow buildup time really drags on and on. I think the great games out there are the ones that ramp up the difficulty within the mission as you expand and grow. The best of those figure out a way to do it by more than just throwing harder enemies at you.
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
^ Yep, 30-40 minutes sounds about right to me, with some key ones perhaps being longer and some optional / not-related-to-main-events ones a bit shorter.
 

Liam

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
I guess after a few games, building up from scratch too slowly might become a bit of a drag. This could be less of an issue if your base building is very different each time and requires a good portion of dynamic strategy rather than just speed and build-order.

Ramping up the difficulty as you expand and grow is a difficult one as you say. The problem we have to avoid is the steamroll effect where you reach a sustainable critical army mass and nothing can stop you. There are tricks to maintaining a challenge, like having sub-objective checkpoints and expanding maps - these can work nicely with rationing available resources to prevent your army becoming too powerful too soon. A timer can keep the pressure on as well but I don't want to over use this as it impacts negatively on turtle-style play which can be a lot of fun in games with a focus on base-building.

We don't know what the perfect formula will be for the most repayable mission type. Our approach at the moment will be to try and produce a range of different scenarios. As long as we have variety, things shouldn't become tedious, and we should hit on a few gems.
 

MBargo

Woo hoo!
Backer
Beta Tester
Since there is no save point (and pause) in the game, the ideal length of one scenario will probably be 20-30 minutes.

I also like to turtle myself and then send a squadron to kill everything (its why I'm mostly unable to complete Might&Magic Heroes scenarios in first attempt :p), but even that, playing the same scenario few times in a row (without any big changes) probably will be received as boring.

I do not like any time pressures (like "stand waves of enemies for 30 minutes"), but if it would be a totaly optional thing (for example - you wish to unlock that non-necessary ant with nice features? complete this optional scenario!).

I would like to see some challenge - for example limited area to evolve a colony (blocked by 'undiggable' stone) with limited food/or goal to gather xyz units of food and killing xyz enemies. It could be another option for optional scenario.

You could also add some "narration"to those campaigns. A short story about how the colony evolves perhaps? With some disasters to explain "reset" of the whole colony (like floods, very cold winter, attack of another colony (for mentioned above "optional" mission with waves)?

I remeber first RTS (like Dune or Warcraft) in which first mission (tutorial-like) always was "gather xyz resources" ;D
 

AntsAreAwesome

Worker
Backer
I say it be optional. Like maybe have different difficulties, or maybe different type of AI playing styles. I play Catan on my phone, and the way they did it was actually really smart. So pretty much they had a bunch of different AIs with different like skills (eg. speed, expansion, aggresion, and skill). So maybe do something like that?
 

HaukHans1

May the dinosaur be with you
Backer
Beta Tester
Just dropping in to say that having timers like "1 minute until bla-bla happens" can be really stressfull
 

Serafine

Queen
Backer
Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
I'd say they should take an increasing amount of time.

The first missions should go relatively quickly (10-20 minutes), because you're likely to have few unit types so there's no advanced planing or tactics or anything like it happening.

The average mission should take 30-40 minutes (60 for the slow pokes).

The last missions in the campaign however could very well be tougher with larger maps and more planing/strategy/tactics (and some back-and-forth vs the AI opponents) so they could as well take 2-3 hours.
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
Serafine said:
The first missions should go relatively quickly (10-20 minutes), because you're likely to have few unit types so there's no advanced planing or tactics or anything like it happening.

Yeah, I think the first missions will definitely be short "training" ones that introduce the mechanics and concepts (very important as the control system is significantly different to most RTSes.
 
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