Spring RTS Engine

Are people with thousands of hours in game expected to grind away (for 90 games!) and unlock units?

I'm going to go ahead an assume yes, and thusly ask if any consideration has been given to people who have played CA/ZK/ROBOT BATTLE SIMULATOR 9001 on and off for years, and wether some sort of "has >X total in-game time= gets all unlocks automagically" has been considered?

I'm fully aware that I could host my own battles and set mod options, but lets be realistic and accept that when I play ZK it will be joining a populated springie session for maybe 2 or 3 of every 30 or so of my games. The current unlock shenanigans basically completely neuters the motivation to do this. If I even did host my own it would be via SL relayhost and ergo gain me 0 xp anyway.

I guess TL;DR= Are you guys open to the idea of a grind concession to people who clearly do not need to be spoon-fed the unit set?

That's something I could get behind...

You can use "!setoptions unlocks=0" in the autohost to turn unlocks off. Most people don't care if you do this.

Tbh I really hated grinding through to get units back to, but it is mostly units you won't use anyway.

Well, there have been times that I wish I had Singularity Reactor.

Although in every PvP game I've played, I've come to thank myself for not buying it.
Either I find and destroy the enemy's one (and a good chunk of infrastructure with it) or enemy bombers/raiders would have destroyed mine had I had one instead of many fusions lying around. (losing or 2 of which does not hurt nearly as much as losing a singularity)

As it is right now, I suspect the singularity is pretty useless for any PvP game on maps smaller than Supreme Battlefield or so.
Hurts to play chicken without it though.

It's use is directly proportional to your ability to keep the enemy out of your base.
Which is a factor largely dependant on if you're already winning or not.
So... yeah. i forgot where i was going with this.

OMG I have been watching some of these games and developing an interest and now I find out this has unlocks?

Look kids, not everything that is popular when you are a child is a great idea. Namely, your World of Warspring is dead in the water.

It is unbelievable how much work this game must have taken. You will treasure the lesson learned here all your life!

Unlock is very good idea wtf u talking about.

sillynanny wrote:OMG I have been watching some of these games and developing an interest and now I find out this has unlocks?

Look kids, not everything that is popular when you are a child is a great idea. Namely, your World of Warspring is dead in the water.

It is unbelievable how much work this game must have taken. You will treasure the lesson learned here all your life!

I have no idea wtf you are trying to say

I believe his underwear got twisted when he spent about 15 minutes reading about the various units, then found out he had to actually play more than 1 game to experiment with all combinations he was thinking of.

Or he's hatin'.

Not hating. Just not playing a promising mod and telling you why.

There is no way that I am going to play a game in which my opponent has more options than me. I mean one thing is ARM vs CORE and I could have chosen at game start like my opponent did. But to have to grind? I'm anti-grind.

Actually the trend in gaming is towards unlocks and Call of Duty (among others) certainly seems to be thriving with it.

Given that new players in ZK start with >55% of units already unlocked (increasing to >90% in maybe two hours of playing), I'd say we're actually an abberation in that regard.

I agree with sillynanny that unlocks is a ridiculously stupid idea. 90 games? You must be kidding me. I have played thousands of games of BA.

KingRaptor wrote:Actually the trend in gaming is towards unlocks and Call of Duty (among others) certainly seems to be thriving with it.

Given that new players in ZK start with >55% of units already unlocked (increasing to >90% in maybe two hours of playing), I'd say we're actually an abberation in that regard.

Which is why I said that not everything that is popular is a great idea. Farmville is more players than any other game. Do you want to drop spring and go play it? Exactly.

I have not played Call of Duty. 55% unlocked in ZK?? Holy shit it is so much worse than I thought. I thought it would be like just a couple units here and there, not nearly half of the units.

And 90 games? After all the work put in this game, to shoot yourself so spectacularly in the foot, leg and groin area is... sad. Because I love spring and would love more popular games running on it.

Heavier unlocks please...
you should be forced to play for months before unlocking everything...
I'm not being sarcastic.
Makes the game much more interesting whne you have something to play towards.

Also you might want to consider that Call of Duty is not an RTS. It is possible that you can come up with an RTS that has unlocks (besides yours) but then you won't have the ''successful game with unlocks'' argument.

Gota wrote:Heavier unlocks please...
you should be forced to play for months before unlocking everything...
I'm not being sarcastic.
Makes the game much more interesting whne you have something to play towards.

Ah yes the fine art of noob crushing. The hallmark of every successful game. And every successful coward.

I haven't played AA & BA for 6 years because unlocks kept me motivated. What kept me coming back was the gameplay experience.

Maybe something ZK devs should take a lesson from?

Cheesecan wrote:I haven't played AA & BA for 6 years because unlocks kept me motivated. What kept me coming back was the gameplay experience.

Maybe something ZK devs should take a lesson from?

Exactly. When Gota says

Makes the game much more interesting whne you have something to play towards.

You should understand that what you play towards is improving your gameplay, dealing victoriously with situations in which you lost in the past, beating players that are better than you, but you just tried extra-hard... All that kind of stuff.

Some of us are adults and we don't need our goals chosen and numbered for us.

Much of the intent was to ease the learning curve for newbs. While BA has 2 or 3 viable starting factories, ZK has like 10. So unlocks help prevent newbies from being overwhelmed from all the options. Also things that tend to often be newb-traps (super fusion, annihilator) and locked away so that they are forced to learn how to really play the game first.


And truth be told, you end up unlocking units really fast. Much more of your time will be spent unlocking modules to customise your commander.

Obviously, the biggest problems are that players with much different levels of unlocks will be playing together, and people with previous CA experience have no need for unlocks. The first problem will go away with a big enough community, there isn't really anything that can be done about the second.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of experienced RTS gamers who could whoop most ZK players with just a day of practice. Don't force people into things like unlocks.