Spring RTS Engine

Everybody knows this map from the AoE campgain.

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... mapforever

Map was made before but the existing versions were not so good, how can all your miners mine that mineral if there is not even minerals! Now there is minerals.

The second thing you notice are the perfectly evenly placed start positions. It is a new recipe, in fact it is more like a formula, never was a map more balanced.

Each startposition has minerals but no metal: You must reclaim the minerals. The minerals grow back so more eating = more money.
After a while the minerals start creeping towards the map center and then only there new ones will spawn.

mineral model & texture by LathanStanley
thanks to Godde for testing :)

There mapoptions to set how many minerals grow, how fast they creep and whether there should be minerals in middle.

tested with BA, XTA, zK
size: 14x14

Typical knorkemap. Is there a map option that sets the amount of minerals per plant?

Jools wrote:Typical knorkemap.

There is no such a thing. His maps are truly innovative, refreshing gameplay more than anything happened to Spring... I'm looking forward to testing this!

Yep, CnC style like in old Azure Fields, but here seems with some resources producing.

Economy idea is nice, crystals are nice, good model/effect stuff, but map idea itself..

Hermuld wrote:

Jools wrote:Typical knorkemap.

There is no such a thing. His maps are truly innovative, refreshing gameplay more than anything happened to Spring... I'm looking forward to testing this!

That's what I mean't. Typical knorkemap :)

PepeAmpere wrote:Economy idea is nice, crystals are nice, good model/effect stuff, but map idea itself..

You mean the heightmap+texture? In some threads I tried to find more talentated mappers for coop but is not so easy.

Is there a map option that sets the amount of minerals per plant?

I think only way to do that is making different set of features like on map WakkaWakka and was too cumbersome. Though with mapoptions you can controll how much resources there are.
Instead of having superflexible but cryptic mapoptions I tried to find some good default values...so it is resources=high instead of minRespawnFrame=450, mineralNPerSpA = 30 because nobody ever knows wtf that means or what numbers are playable.

excellent concept! Knorke FTW

knorke wrote:

PepeAmpere wrote:Economy idea is nice, crystals are nice, good model/effect stuff, but map idea itself..

You mean the heightmap+texture? In some threads I tried to find more talentated mappers for coop but is not so easy.

Is there a map option that sets the amount of minerals per plant?

I think only way to do that is making different set of features like on map WakkaWakka and was too cumbersome. Though with mapoptions you can controll how much resources there are.
Instead of having superflexible but cryptic mapoptions I tried to find some good default values...so it is resources=high instead of minRespawnFrame=450, mineralNPerSpA = 30 because nobody ever knows wtf that means or what numbers are playable.

afaik feature defs have access to modoptions

FLOZi wrote:afaik feature defs have access to modoptions

yes it does.

FLOZi wrote:afaik feature defs have access to modoptions

But can a map edit feature defs (I assume through the /gamedata/defs.lua ) without clashing with half the the mods defs.lua?

not without complications I suspect.

You can put feauredefs in customparams (does it exist for features?) and access things from there instead. But this map works good as is.

something like this works (in feature def) Sadly Game.stuff does not work, would be usefull if you wanted to include mobile units in the map. (They must use a moveclass that exists in the mod)

Nice concept, but still why you completely cut off from metal income if you dont have middle? at least in zk you have no other way to make metal without those crystals so it is middle or nothing all sides becomes useless. I would decrease metal in islands, but not completely cut it out. so you still can make some counters to middle porc.

zero-K:
There is mapoptions for that but zK autohosts do not know mapoptions.

In the zK FFAs some players were already destroyed before creep to middle and there were some mineral fields in empty corners that nobody seemed to notice.
So many of the "starving" players had acess to resources but did not notice, instead trying to make fusion and nukes.
Some will come with time I t hope, but you see similiar things in normal games: players sitting in huge wreck fields and not reclaiming.
Large FFA even on normal can often be bit un-fun with bad players since they like to porc and when having advantage it drags the game endless. Now with unusual eco everybody is a bit newb so yeah

For example it seems most players do not know how to reclaim efficiently, picking out single minerals. Some make nanos and the idle-builder widget does it for them but generally much fail.
Use area reclaim+repeat:on or patrol.

tl,dr; Not change my mapdesign to incooperate bad players. They better be learning fast.

In most other RTS games where you have limited resources which are gathered (e.g. wood in Age of Empires, Empire Earth, etc.), units tend to go to the next (usually nearest) resource once the current one is depleted.
I guess it's somewhat different in Spring games since wrecks tend to be obtained from front-line combat and gathering stuff automatically like that is rather risky, but in the case of this map such automatic gathering behavior wouldn't be bad.
I'm not offering a solution nor a suggestion, just commenting on why new players have trouble with spring-like gathering (reclaim) methods.