To be honest, if you are planning to have 2 new factions, I'd just start with one of them.

Sounds daunting, I know, but remember that you'll only need to do the 'T1' resource/defense buildings and one factory worth of units to make a playable game, and thats only 20 or so units (plus wrecks).

To be totally honest, the TA 'market' is oversaturated. There's already BA, which is a great 'stable' (doesn't change wildly between versions) game, XTA which is essentially a completely different game that looks kinda the same, Supreme Annihilation which (afaik) started as BA with a mathematical unit cost balance formula and has had some tweaks over the last 2 years or so. These are the only 3 TA mods that get any 'real' playtime (I'm not counting CA/0K in this as its really not TA at all anymore, just a few leftover units) and BA has an absolutely dominating share of this.

So imo its much better to start with the premise of "TA-like gameplay" [even if all you really did was slap a new model onto an existing set of unit stats] than "TA but balanced 'better' and a few extra bits chucked in"

I suppose I have a different understanding of "Easy to learn, hard to master". In my mind, that means that the concepts and mechanics are simple, but the strategy and decision-making is hard.

The game Go is easy to learn - it has only one game piece and just a few rules. But there are books and books and more books written on how to play *well*, and the finest computer programs struggle against even moderately skilled players.

Is that what you want to emulate?

Why do you take that as an insult to anyone... Obviously he wouldn't/shouldn't bother if he thinks someone already did a *A better than he will. And why not be hopeful that if he just does a good enough game people will like it, if that is the main thing he'll focus on. If you htink he's not good enough to make such game, fair enough, but implying it can be considered an insult too


But yeah subtle things like exact mex-build timings is what makes for a hard to master game... It's easy enough to basically understand how to make a mex, and that getting and keeping them is good, but understanding the best timing is the subtle thing. Though that's true no matter how much it costs. How to build mexes is the of top weighty decisions in TA games.

added a pic of a small sphere base with a bunch of units to the first post.

EDIT: also added one with the core commander model i made (i use 3do cause its easier for me to get things done)

I will look forward to this project Raar as you are a good modder with skill. Reality says this mod will fail, but hopefully you will be bold and try to make something completely original, a lot of great mod makers worked with modifications of TA. Foreboding Angel made FUNTA, and eventually went to continue onto Evolution RTS. If you ever need help, I or this community will help if your not an asshole. Not to worry, I don't think your an asshole.

Hehehe funta was good times ;p I mainly engineered that to be a coop vs computer sort of mod and it worked out really well Wow, that was forever ago.

Thanks for the support.

this thread makes me remember how long i've been doing this.

Now i have nearly all land units, most air units and some sea units for the 2 extra factions, their weapons and sfx, etc.

i've been testing them in single player with no opponents (using cheat/give to spawn enemies)

before i start harassing people to try this, i'd like to play vs some AI

any1 recommended?

O_o

wow talk about silent modding :D

Can't rly help with the ais, I hear shard is good (?) but it may be broken (?). I like the cut of the nota ai's jib too, (NOE ?), it has cool stuff like formations and unit groups and stuff.

i'm thinking more on the line of something that builds units, clumps them and throws them at you, and expands, like the ota AI did.

something simple.

(i've been silently doing it yes...on and off because of work, other games, etc.)

i added some updated pics to the first post, including the aspect of the commanders morph options for each faction.

there's more than what i've shown, i'll post more info on the next few days.

EDIT: added another pic with some ships and subs for claw and sphere

i've changed the attack subs with no turrets to turn their bodies to face their target, gunship style. The sub body parts were moved onto an invisible turret so the sub can still maneuver while firing, with one limitation: i only allowed it to aim forward in a 90deg arc, so it won't fire while running away from the enemy.

hey raar whats up

Dropping by to say looking good, if you ever need someone to test, count me in.

thanks

i'm planning on releasing a working beta for people to play on the end of next week.

Normally I would reject this as more *A BS but I give you a pass seeing that you have put some real work into it.

It does annoy me that all your hard work is somewhat wasted on *A content, but beyond that, it sounds quite interesting. I'll be sure to give it a go

Pardon me if this has already been answered but do any AI's work with it currently?

Shard could be coaxed into doing what you want, but grab the buildbot builds as the build distributed in the installer has a crash bug on startup ( the great mingw build infinite loop bug, crushed by Abma )

the way you descibe the AI, is pretty much what we have in current Lua AIs (they are bundled with the mod. S44 had it first (CRAIG), and ZK has CAI.

nope, i have no AI for this yet, and from what you are saying, it seems there's no ai that will work with it "out of the box".

i'll focus on finishing the units and roughly balancing it.

just make it build everything once, scavenge for ressources and send everything it builts towards the enemy, if and only if the unit is not a con unit.

i did not meant to say it is bundled with your mod but that Lua AIs are bundled with mods, and that if you want one of them, you should copy it from one of these mods that have one, and adjust it a bit.

Working with Shard isn't hard, at its most basic level you just need to tell it what each unit should build, and it'll start from there. You can go further and add custom logic but that's not necessary to get it up and running in your game.