Game balance and longevity

[Cervator]

This is meant as a sort of philosophical discussion on non-specialized game modes, so not really our game mode Light & Shadow. Although it may also relate to L&S if you were able to play beyond a victory condition like "defeat enemy king" - then what?

In most Minecraft setups I've played the focus has been on building, which is of course the thing that made MC big. I've wanted to try more difficult survival, RPG, society building, etc. I know there are a few things like that out there but haven't had a chance to play on a multiplayer server. I saw but barely played the old and seemingly single player only "Yogsbox" modpack in the Tekkit launcher, which seems to have interactive NPC societies rather than the boring vanilla villagers, plus also low starting health and player advancement.

On UniCraft, the EVE University MC server I've been a small part of for years, the focus has slowly gotten more and more tech heavy, with a wide range of preferred play styles. It has been brought up that the level of tech mods almost emulates creative mode where everything is free, and all some players want to do is build. Others attempt self-imposed honor rules that restrict what's allowed in a subset of the world. Always we end up resetting the world after activity drops off. I've invited them here for ideas and feedback

I keep believing I can enjoy MC at my slow pace on an otherwise fast-paced server, but then hit a wall after I find some slightly unusually colored rock to go build up my spawn house a little - and there's a giant castle with amazing architecture and machinery way beyond my expertise that came out of nowhere That's one of the "balance" issues I'm thinking of.

In ways I feel it is "too late" for MC's heart to change much, as the general focus (or lack thereof) has been set, although I know there are a few communities out there with long-term persistent "super servers" (anybody tried something like that?) The overall MC player-base is now so wide I don't think you can ever cater to all types on one server. With the advantage of starting from scratch what can we do to balance the overall game and encourage longevity? Even if it leaves the game (mode) a tad more narrow / focused than MC.

In something like L&S you can simply set a victory condition that ends the game then play over and over. There's still some limited space for creativity in building defenses and the game length could be extended quite a while by making the map and tech tree bigger. But eventually the "round" would end and you'd reset. Unless you could transform that world into something different?

Beyond L&S our "normal" game mode is somewhat undefined and might just be "everything enabled that the player desires". Other serious game modes mentioned over time have been "Untrue Tao" (a stepping stone for factional testing with an interesting backstory) and "Steam Fortress" (more Dwarf Fortress-style gameplay). Maybe the "mainstream" game mode(s) will all usually involve those sorts of elements. The estate/holding write-up started by Brokenshakles
has some more interesting details. But either way how can we encourage player involvement, game balance between different play styles, and world longevity, as we soon begin the content/gameplay stretch toward Alpha?

Like I've long believed and talked about I think a dynamic world populated with many different creatures with their own goals is key, making the world much bigger than the player - because honestly that's all you get in MC. The world is exactly what you put in and nothing else. You build huge super structures populated by ... nobody. They're pretty and impressive though, just empty. Reminds me of my brief visit to Second Life.

Positive time sinks are important and in the sort of tech heavy MC world I've gotten used to you can eliminate near all the time sinks, thus sort of approaching creative mode. Machines take care of themselves, take near no upkeep, and usually just in the form of fuel you'll end up sourcing from other machines. Machines don't throw tantrums, or at least MC hasn't gotten to that level of tech mod yet

With creatures assisting in world progression, both on their own (autonomous societies) and with the player (pushing away some of the machines), and requiring substantial upkeep themselves (which can be done on a curve - easy at first at a basic level, progressively harder if you want to invest the time), I think that's a huge step and in our setting (voxel world with working multiplayer) still fairly novel.

Of course there's tons of other stuff needed, independent player progress, exploration (benefiting from a more dynamic world), and so on.

So what do you all think? What experiences have you had, what do you think works, do you have any good resources (articles etc) to share, and how would you like us to proceed?

 

[Gremilcar]

Thank you for inviting me into the conversation, Cerv.


I have played on EVE-Uni server since world 2-0. I saw the desolation of late stage vanilla server (2-0), I was present, and partially responsible for the vitality of the next world (3-0, Seamus square construction remained active until server reset). When we upgraded to the modded gameplay I had to drop out from late game due to ISP problems (4-0, 4-2), which still haunt me albeit at much lesser degree, than before.

I've also played of multitude of other servers: Long lasting vanilla and modded servers, Creative servers dedicated to redstone and constructing megaprojects, as well as other small niche servers. Some were quite nice, and I still frequent them sometimes.


Over the course of this "study" it was found, that some things tend to keep players for much longer time. Here are most general ones:



Server consistency:

Ratio between Perceived Difficulty/Challenge and Reward should remain somewhat constant. As players get accustomed to the tools they have they begin to perceive some actions as less challenging as such true Difficulty/Reward should increase over time albeit arithmetically. Many of the mods are notorious for having quite an opposite curve: where most of the things are rather challenging in the beginning and grow exponentially less challenging as player progresses.

Many players come to a server for a specific reason, many don't mind their server experience changing a little bit, as long as the core reason of what they enjoy is still there. Many mods are notorious in a way that by giving players more and more powerful tools gameplay ends up completely changing the experience of a player. Many have heard people saying "I like starting new" or "I like to start with a set of machines already there" - in many cases it is actually caused by a person desiring a certain ratio. Unfortunately many mods tend to quickly degrade this ratio very close to creative level. This would've been fine, but many players joining Survival servers usually join them due to the survival aspect.

Player engagement:

Players joining the server tend to stay longer, if they are engaged into a communal activity. It could be:

- communal construction
- working for a common cause (redstone research, creative building research)
- competition (pvp servers, team pvp servers)
- team survival (hardcore servers)
- generally good community, where one would be interested talking to.

Some of these activities are defined at the start of the server/game, some are implemented by players/admins, and some are intrinsic to the community. Where activities could be excluding towards one another it is generally beneficial to have at least some if not more in order to encourage newcomers staying over longer.

Player retention:

This is the major thing, in fact the previous two major aspects above are essentially stepping stones towards this step - late game player retention.

Beyond them there are other things one can do to encourage players to stay:

1) Concentrate players to increase player-player interaction

2) Encourage players visiting each other
- Promotion of infrastructure

3) Promote necessity of trade
- Decrease the discrepancy between newcomers and old players.
- Decrease old players ability to be self sufficient

4) *fake* activity: As Cervator mentioned above having abandoned monuments aka Second Life is bad. This could be alleviated multiple ways:
- use additional NPCs (from more mods) to create activity
- utilize visible active components to keep structures seem active (trains instead of tesseracts, automatic light systems, golems, etc)

 

[Cervator]

Thanks for the great post Gremilcar - that note on ratios seems a very good way to put it, and it very obviously off in MC (typically, at least). I think that's a good way of thinking about other related fields as well. For some reason my tendency of getting stuck micromanaging bedroom furniture layout in Dwarf Fortress comes to mind. As time passes and my fortress grows I end up spending more time micromanaging furniture/workshops (ratio goes up), which slows down time (lots of pausing) which breaks the beneficial game elements (ratio goes down) that come from the passage of time (moar goblin sieges!) and I end up just not playing anymore.

With potentially vast sinks through creatures I hope we can find good ways to detect and balance those kinds of ratios as development goes on. I wonder if you could outright define a series of "too much, about right, too little" questions to test from time to time in different players.

 

[Skaldarnar]

First of all, thank you Gremilcar for the detailed post

I will just add some thoughts to it:
Although it might be diffcult to achieve in a good manner, I would like to see experienced players and noobs play along on the same servers (or at least on some of them). One major point that keeps me from playing MMOs is that I don't have the wish (and the time) to suit my gameplay/gaming times to other players just for staying "on the same level". This would be no matter in short lasting modes like L&S, but imho becomes important on somewhat persistent servers. Having a trading system and rewards could be a step in the right direction, and there are other ways that encourage collaboration between players...

 

[Cervator]

After a nice round of IRC discussion (I'll be brief to not knock over the more interesting notes glasz was taking) I'm reminded there are more dimensions to this than my initial post - it isn't just about short-term feature-specific worlds like L&S vs. long-term persistent worlds.

You really end up with a range of game styles, with one dimension being how open-ended the mode is to the whims of players. You might have a range from creative (heavy focus on building things, user-generated content, art, possibly very divergent styles) to story-centric (more constrained in-game tools, focused setting, back-story, etc). Attaining balance and longevity would vary wildly between the two extremes, in a creative setting balance might barely matter to longevity while it would be critical in a story setting - lest the world would stop making sense, especially if people start building spaceships in a fantasy world.

"Staying on the same level" is another facet like that. I have the same problem in MMOs (most of which are story-centric), I don't play consistently enough to keep up with friends and then get bummed out. Or in MC (usually creative-centric) I don't get deep enough into the tech then flake out from my tiny plans when something vastly grander already appeared out of nowhere next to me. Some MMOs have found clever methods to insta-balance players so they're at the same "level" but that comes with its own pros and cons. IMHO favoring skill-based systems over level-based systems is a good start (helps avoid older players automatically being better at everything), injecting some sort of offline progression as well could help further (like skill training from EVE or limited offline resource gathering from an assortment of MMOs)

I still vaguely recall the "fealty" system in Asheron's Call, although honestly mostly in name more than function. In a serious long-term story-centric setting I'm hoping a feudalism-like setup where you progress up the ranks could help, with newer players able to help older players at a lower tier as they learn and progress. That's a deep topic though and I'm stopping for now

In short: Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers. Video game worlds have layers. As do cakes.

 

[glasz]

Here are a few of ideas, mostly from my impressions on playing MC :

I never actually tried the tech mods, even on tech mods server it never appealed to me, its too much like MMOs : level up to level up to level up until you reach the final level and theres nothing much to do. What i like to do on MC is the survival thing, and exploration. So i will focus here on how i think those 2 aspects could be improved IMO, even thoug we just had an IRC discussion that goes beyond that.

SURVIVAL

Into survival i put everything that you have to do to stay alive (obviously), that is mostly geting food supply in MC. It could be possible to expand on that by making it a little more complex and realistic, without making it too constraining and frustrating. In MC you quickly get to a point where not only your life isnt in danger anymore, but you produce food at an industrial level (even in non tech mods). A good balance would the possibility to build a comfort zone (also known as home) where you are safe, providing you take care of it.

Of course all these additionnal constraints should be balanced by a richer world : more animals, more plants, NPCs, etc.... I think in that regard, as some mods have shown it, nothing prevents us from having a much bigger fauna / flora than in MC.


So, a few ideas concerning survival :

+Add to the necessity to eat, the necessity to drink, to maintain body temperature, and there could even be diseases that you'd need to heal from with plants.
+Make growing / breeding a little more difficult by slowing(gestation time for cattle, plant grow much slower, etc...) things and making them less predictable.
+Adding seasons, requiring to plan ahead (nothing grows in winter), occasional disasters, cattle diseases, predators, whatever makes it a little more complex and realistic without excess.
+Making food perishable, making stocks and preservation should be an issue.
+Limiting a lot what you can hold in your inventory, making survival an issue again when you go on a trip far from home(see below).

EXPLORATION

Exploration, traveling and discovering, would be more rewarding if not everything possible in the world is at walking distance. If you want to see other biomes you'd need to plan for a relatively long, and of course dangerous, journey. As said above the richness of the universe should make it worthwhile. So :

+Larger biomes area. You dont cross a desert unless you're prepared.
+biome specific content. Other biomes dont just look different, the biome hold biome-specific plants and animals. The rare flower that you need to heal from a disease might only grow on the top of mountains. Available materials give local buildings a specific appearance.


EDIT

I forgot to mention hunting, as a way to get food. More challenging: animals dont wait for you except for the predators, puting the emphasis on team work and the need to craft range weapons. More rewarding : one animal should provide much more than the usual 2 porkchop.

 

[glasz]

adding a brief sum up of what i suggested on IRC : an alternative to the sandbox/3d canvas use of voxel technology would be to use it to make a world that changes and evolves, but on its own terms, autonomously. Of course the player can play a part in these changes, influence them, but in a certain limit, realistic in regard to the world "rules" (its specific laws of physics, wich could of course be alien / magical, but yet consistent). As we suggested on IRC titanesques tentacled blasphemous alien gods could make sure the geology never gets boring by occasionnally show up to dig canyons/ build mountains. If we manage to gather enough ideas to make a world that evolves interstingly by itself we can then afford to limit the player's capacity to dig/ build by again making things a little more realistic.

 

[glasz]

Morning thoughts : i dont like the XP thing in MMO, i think its pointless, force the player to do things he doesnt like (spend hours leveling) just to keep up with people who will leave the game anyway once the ultimate goal(the final level) is reached. Its not realistic either. The difference in power between the new and the old player is ridiculous, and serves only as some kind of bitter reward for the old player to have spent all this time leveling. This mecanism is maintained in MMOs mostly because, IMO, it creates an addiction to the game. You need that level up, you just dont know why.

Anyway, players want some kind of reward, some status from their senior status. But not necessarily in a selfish way. An old player like to share with new players, like to transmit. But you cant share XPs. So my original thought was : instead of rewarding people with XPs you cant share and that give you a ridiculously unrealistic advantage upon newcomers that mostly prevent you from playing with them, why not reward them with wealth, money. Thats something you can share.

Then this morning i had this other idea : what if they could share knowledge ? In MMOs there's this problem : the very first players have to learn the laws of this new universe the hard way, patiently, dangerously. Then they make a website with all their findings, that the new player will just have to read to instantly know the right path for optimal leveling. Gone forever is the adventure of discovering a new universe. So, my idea : what if our proceduraly generated universe would not only generate its appearance, but also its very rules and organisation? The laws of physic, magic, behaviors of animals, hotspots for questing, mystical places and creatures, whatever? Then discovery whould be back at the core of the game for each newly generated world, knowledge the most valuable thing to trade, exchange, offer.

 

[Skaldarnar]

glasz, I missed a bit of the IRC discussion, so its good to read about it again

I would like to add that plants should have a variety of effects, some good, some neutral, some bad (maybe like in the elder scrolls games). That would at least make players think about what they eat, and they could turn poisonous plants into a pleasant meal by some cooking process.

Changing the environment/landscape sounds very interesting, but in my opinion there should be a way to protect what the player has built. A good example would be Hexxit, where you can protect your base from random meteorites. In your scenario one could build some shrines or temples worshipping these alien gods to protect the area around.

 

[glasz]

Skaldarnar : yes, plant should have a variety of effects, and thats typically the kind of universe "rules" that could be set up at world generation. You'll never know in advance wich plant is benefical (healing or boost), neutral (food) or poisonous (with maybe hallucinogenic effect, allowing to have fun with shaders).

I like the idea of a shrine to win the favours of the gods.

 

[Cervator]

I concur on "mixing it up" and have had similar thoughts in the past where for instance a rune-based magic system would apply meaning to each rune per player. So although you might read from a spoiler site that you can get steam with fire + water, your character doesn't necessarily know which rune is "fire" and which is "water" until you've experimented somehow. That would be a spot where older players could share knowledge but via an in-game feature rather than via spoiler sites or just telling people directly.

One tricky piece is in-game representations visible to more than one player - you can't have a gate that creates a door of fire when you approach it and display its runes clearly on the door frame if said runes mean "fire" to one player and "cheese" to another. But possibly you could obscure the rune in general with some hazy effect and only reveal it per-player with the right symbol after it has been learned.

Doing it once-per-world (like with plants) would be easier, and still would lower the "spoiler" effect since you can't have a global spoiler site. It would probably also be a bit of an (unwelcome?) shock when a player eats what used to be the "healing" herb in one world in a new world where it is deadly poison

A potentially very powerful (and undoubtedly to some very annoying) tool would be only allowing players to individually learn less than 100% of a topic on their own, like what plants or runes do. That would encourage older players to share knowledge with new players who then might learn one plant/rune the older player cannot, and trade that knowledge back. Knowledge of some things could be accessible more rarely than others, making a "jackpot" effect when a particular player learns a rare secret only 5% of players learn (especially if you cannot pass on knowledge that you didn't discover personally). That would need to be carefully approached to not make some players feel slighted by the almighty RNG.

 

[glasz]

On the mixing things : i think it'd work if there is a real feel of a NEW world. If it feels too much like the same world, only the red flower that used to heal is now poisonous and the blue poisonous flower now heals, it will feel artificial and just annoy players. So not just changing the way things behave, creating new things. In terms of flower that would mean new shades of colour for the flowers, for example, maybe new sprites, new name(the easiest thing to procedurally generate) wich means not all possible content combinations are present in one instance of the world. It would feel more legitimate and logical to have to learn the properties of a flower you never seen before.

 

[Cervator]

Agreed - outright procedural flowers including names would be excellent. and would add substantially to replay value

Which kinda reminds me of that floral generator from woodspeople we saw a long time ago. Especially as we seem less bound by 16x16 everything these days. The LetsPlay world PaprikaPeng is running with looks great with some hi-res textures. Adeon
has a highly detailed locomotive and minecart that look pretty awesome too. Unsure of the performance hit on a whole world, but it is tempting to think some mid to hi-res flowers wouldn't break the bank ...

 

[glasz]

Morning thoughts : since we can best create a unique flower appearance through combination (of 2 or three colors, i'll explain that in the flower generation thread), we can also create original plant behavior by combining several effects. A plant could contain poison and healing stuff, and halucinogenic effect, at various percentage. Some plants could be absorbed as is, others would need some preparation to extract the desired principle.

 

[Jtsessions]

Bit busy at the moment but just read the OP; I have a few ideas and will continue to think on this. I'll edit my post later today and let you know.

I think it's great that we're considering these things from the ground up, and I think that the end result will show as much. You're right, though - I've run an MC server with friends, and every time we hit the same slump that you do. At the same time, we want to preserve the "sandboxiness" that games of this nature lend themselves to, and I would agree that I think a large part of that would be putting the player into a living, changing world that goes on with or without them.

Just offhand, at a conceptual level, I think that our best bet is "metacontent" (because metaprogramming just wasn't enough). Content that creates content - like the procedural flowers that you guys are talking about. NPCs that build things, dye systems, some sort of customization regarding appearance or gear (if gear is to come). It's intuitive that things like this are greater than the sum of their parts in content, because this sort of content does a couple of things:

1. It's rooted in sandbox design. Sandbox design is almost always going to last someone much longer than non-sandbox gameplay will and better embraces the minecraft and dwarf fortress-style roots of the game.
2. The creation of an underlying system to support procedural generation or dynamic NPC creation/etc may take some overhead, but these systems often prove far more readily extensible (!!and could be extended through mods, potentially!!) and thus facilitates the generation of both more content and content that is more open-ended.
3. Lastly, this type of content caters to multiple player types. As glasz said, we could tie in functionality to aesthetic procedurally generated objects or creatures which would both expand the "explorability" and creativity of the game, as well as add more concrete content for progression-based players.

Another thing to consider is that we have a powerful resource in our support of game modes. That alone can add a lot of replayability and flavor to the game, especially when the game modes are unique and interesting. We shouldn't neglect our ability to innovate with respect to game modes.

I haven't read many of the other replies yet, but will go back and do that soon. I'm sure some of this has been mentioned already

EDIT1: As glasz mentioned in a post above, part of the key to the longevity of PROGRESSION BASED modes (IE not creative) is having an "economy of goods" where items leave at rates that are similar to the amount coming in.

In minecraft, you very quickly can build farms that give you FAR more food than you'd ever need yourself. Once you're generating a surplus relative to the amount you consume, you just won the food game. Done.

On the flip side, if the player is constantly struggling for food, gameplay could become too big a PITA as players will be constantly struggling to meet basic needs. THAT SAID....

We could tie something like this into difficulty settings. How cool would it be to make perishables go quicker based on the difficulty setting in addition to other mechanics changes instead of simply doubling enemy damage? It'd be the difference between the way a player feels repairing/maintaining MMO gear and managing ammo in early resident evil games - it would REALLY expand the way the game felt in a creative, non-stat based way while giving the player the freedom to "set the curve" wherever they were best retained.

TL;DR, we should watch the amount of resources out vs resources in.


EDIT2:

On the mixing things : i think it'd work if there is a real feel of a NEW world. If it feels too much like the same world, only the red flower that used to heal is now poisonous and the blue poisonous flower now heals, it will feel artificial and just annoy players. So not just changing the way things behave, creating new things. In terms of flower that would mean new shades of colour for the flowers, for example, maybe new sprites, new name(the easiest thing to procedurally generate) wich means not all possible content combinations are present in one instance of the world. It would feel more legitimate and logical to have to learn the properties of a flower you never seen before.

This sounds -so cool-, and expanding on this would really add to the game from an exploration standpoint. Additionally, I'm wondering how feasible it would be to dynamically assign a list of properties to plants on world creation. For instance, imagine that in one world, there's a plant that cures poison, but in another, the only plant that cures poison also hurts you a little bit. Small changes like this, as glasz mentioned, might be enough to really make exploration interesting and change the metagame regarding progression based play, though I think that dynamically assigning traits might be a bit too close to changing the mechanics in a potentially annoying way.

As an aside, glasz, you have some sexy ideas

 

[Cervator]

On difficulty I'd like to see us expand on what's traditionally a single toggle between easy, normal, and hard (and maybe some extremes like peaceful or hardcore). I want to offer a whole advanced options screen purely related to difficulty and some of these resource balancing scales. Of course, this is only if the player opts to get into that level of detail, like everything else - don't overwhelm

On top of that if the server admin(s) decide to support it, that could include tweaking during the world's lifetime to make adjustments as players become more established. Not that we shouldn't try to balance that naturally as well, but give players the tools to fine-tune. On the flipside there could be hard-set variants as well that people can play to climb ladders / compare their performance with others.

Absolutely agreed on resource balancing in general. A huge body of NPCs should help us gain more options to tweak and keeping the world dynamic offers more potential. If a terrible accident happens during harvesting season and the villagers didn't stash away enough food in the granary ...

Having a "world palette" for procedurally generated stuff needing color sounds cool, if that can be pulled off. Introducing larger regions of the world as distinct from others likewise. Super biomes so to say.

 

[glasz]

Thanks Jtsessions

And with these encouragements i will continue my morning thoughts serie :

Immortius has given us a hint on an intersting book "Guns, Germs and Steel" a book about environmental factors on the development of civilisations. I have claude levi-strauss on my to read list, an anthropologue that studied the syntax of myths. Here are some random thoughts about that.

Knowing how to use a plant could be done through direct testing (absobtion) but couldnt work in all case, e.g. you'd never have an occasion to know the benefits contained in a given plant if it also contains a potent poison. The techy way to work around that would be to have some lab analyzer. Another way would be through communicating wit NPC tribes who know and use the plant. Of course they wouldnt give you a straight answer, rather tell you one of their mythological tale.

Example : the Kawoomba tribe are mostly hunters and warriors. They worship the god Mazumpa. Mazumpa is told to hold a pink gahyna flower in his right hand, a blue zoyna flower in his left hand, and some zzzzyhnkju herb between his teeth.

Solution : in the hand that gives (left in my made up mythology) is a very poisonous flower. The god gives death. In the one that takes is a flower that gives strength. But it also contain poison, wich can be neutralized through the absorption of the zzzyhnkju.

The idea : We'd have a first layer of vegetation. In its growth, a culture would learn how to use some of this vegetation. Of course the one they can find in the part of the world they live in. They dont necessary know ALL the plants, just a few of them. The more dangerous the plant, the more unlikely they had a chance to know how to use it. But if they did, the more likely it became part of their mythology. Depending of the kind of benefits given by the kind of plant of wich they master the use, they develop a certain kind of activity(we could come up with some neat diagrams of different activity orientations , like farming <-> hunting). And finally they build a mythology that encompass this knowledge they have of the world, the way they inhabit it.

 

[Cervator]

That's pretty much exactly how I hoped we could do it, with some added artwork

I think in boring old technical terms so I only came to "have npc tribe know x and have way y to have the player find out/learn" heh.

Your version is much cooler

 

[Skaldarnar]

Those are all paeceful ways to get the information, but we should also take other ways into consideration.

Violent players may fight themselves through a tribe to get into the holy temple and steal some records/notes of the priests. They will get some information the player might have received by the peaceful method (not all, though) and there is a chance that he may encounter new horizons with these records - as long as he is able to read it!

Another approach would make use of a sophisticated NPC system: Being the lord of some village means that there may be some scholar who can help you with plants. You can provide them animals to test the effects of plants (slower progress, but you are still accepted by other tribes). Or you allow the "Dark Arts" to be practiced, which means the maesters in your village take other NPCs for their tests (faster progress, but you are proscribed by most other tribes and they will eventually start a war with you).

 

[glasz]

Skaldarnar : that is a possibility of course, but then it means the player is in a position to either fight a whole tribe, or become the lord of a village. If he is, that means the knowledge he seeks is not crucial for his survival anymore, and he only wants it to get extra power. It all depends on the kind of gaming experience we seek. I had in mind a more survival experience, wich means a situation where the player is very vulnerable, at least in the beginning. He has no advantage over any NPC, in fact NPCs have the advantage of number, and knowledge of the environment. You seem to be more interested in a scenario where the player has a clear advantage over the world around him, and is in a situation to conquer it by force. Thats seem to me to be a different scenario, also of course with time a player could evolve from a vulnerable stage to a conquering stage.