Spring RTS Engine

sounds nice!
though.. making teching to T3 fast .. really makes no sense at all.
i have some friends, that dont like BA and.. mostly everythign on spring, but i think thye would like this mod, wiht some changes.
you have lots of special and cool stuff, which this type of player likes, though... for all of them, OTA has too many units already, and you want to add much more stuff to BA... i just mean...
you will have even more unit types, and at the same time you want to make the individual units more important (eg. one would have to care about older wind gens more then about new ones, and that with all units there are), plus you want to make some units more complicated to handle (one has to choose which addons to add to each factory) plus adding more complexity through a research system.
you could say it is a market niche, but i can imagine there will be no customers at all in there.

It sounds alright, but... does the world really need yet another TA mod? Will anyone play it? Will the end result be worth the work?

I can't speak for you and obviously don't have your abilities when it comes to modelling, texturing and the rest... but it seems more productive for talented people to work together on something great rather than each making something that's just good.

My personal favourite project is CA, which is really driving things forward and adding interesting new ideas and options. Maybe you could talk with the developers about exploring some of your ideas e.g. day/night cycle, unit upgrades, a research system and new hovercraft as mod options (personally, I'd love to see a mod option that has an individualised upgrade such as the golden morty for every unit on experience).

This would mean that your ideas get exposure in an established mod with a playerbase who almost by definition enjoy trying new ideas (perhaps unlike much of the BA playerbase).

Alternatively, LLTA seems to cover the big stompy units / loads and loads of units niche and again brings some new ideas to the scene, so it might suit you to work with them.

I know that I only really play CA (despite knowing about XTA, BA, MA, LLTA, NOTA, AA, KuroTA etc. etc. *A) because it's the most fun, polished, innovative and dynamic mod - almost certainly it would be impossible for a single developer to achieve as much, as quickly, as the CA development team have/are.

I can't see myself being drawn away from this by another single-developer start up which will more than likely be updated once every 6 months then forgotten about - if it gets off the ground at all.

It sounds alright, but... does the world really need yet another TA mod?

This doesn't sound like 'yet another' TA mod. This sounds at least a little more interesting.
Great work. Can't wait to try it.

@ Tribulex & LordLemmi : Hummm I'll think about that

@ hoijui : Yep, actually my thread was more a "write all ideas I have" than "write all ideas for my mod" so sure it may be pretty bad to put some ideas together. I just want to see this power system and command center first :)

@ Crayfish : Yeah you'r right. Again, I'm not going to start this project now, maybe later, maybe not. And sure I'm not going to do that alone. I've followed some free game project (many fails :D) so I know how it's hard to do a game.
Humm, another TA mod because I can't remodeling TA stuff and doing new models for my mod at the same time. So if I do something, I'll use my TA models, so it will be a TA based game.

@ El Idiot :

Well, if you're going to be doing yet another TA mod, what niche is this going to fill? We have BA for the competitive types and the incumbent mod, CA for the fast gameplay and new ideas, and NOTA for the slow, methodical gameplay. In order for this to get played, it will have to stand out. What is going to make your mod stand out in contrast to all the other mods that use the exact same units?

As ive said before, we'd love to have you work for CA. We've got a big team and a mature project that really desperately needs art and artists.

Your balance and gameplay ideas are kind of ambitious to say the least though, will need a lot of lua, take ages to dev and even longer to balance. Mod snowball stuff. Slow down, try working a bit at a time!

Either way if you do make a new mod, dont base it on BA. Add in one new unit at a time and balance as you go. Starting from BA doesnt make your life easier. BA is massive and complex with 400 units and thousands of variables. You change one variable (esp something like teching or the economy) in BA and it totally throws off every single one of the 400 units and all the other deeply interconnected components. Starting with a complex mod just makes your life much more difficult when it comes to changing or adding anything.

Here is a story about this i like to tell. In CA, we made all non-artillery units see to slightly longer than their range- IE, if you can shoot there, you can see there. In BA, almost all units have slightly less sight radius than range, so that they benefit from having spotters or advanced scouting.

In BA the rocko can just outrange an LLT, but since it cant see the LLT until its too late, you have to scout the LLT first and then get LoS on it or attack ground. It takes a lot of micro and can be a bit hard to reliably outrange an LLT.

With the rocko seeing to its max range, its trivial to spot the LLTs and pummel them from outside the LLTs max range. You dont even need to scout, LLT's are totally useless vs rockos. This meant the rockos range had to be reduced to be less than the LLTs, so it could no longer outrange it.

Though this reduction was slight, this meant that the rocko was slightly less effective. Rockos are one of the major way to deal with the Warrior (slow, but incredibly powerful). Since they can outrange and outrun warriors, they can just snipe them at range. However, with less range, there is much less of a margin for rockos to deal with, warriors catch them more easily and when a warrior catches a rocko he is dead meat.

So warrior range had to be reduced to give the rocko that comfortable margin. But warriors are one of the major ways of dealing with raiders such as the ak and peewee, and less range makes them slightly less effective, so ak and peewee need a nerf, and that changes other things etc etc.

All this from an LoS change...

Starting with an already complex game makes it that much more difficult. If i was doing CA over again, id never use BA or any OTA-deriv as a base.

Saktoth wrote:As ive said before, we'd love to have you work for CA. We've got a big team and a mature project that really desperately needs art and artists.

But you have to admit you don't really have an attractive project from an artist's point of view (once you inform yourself a bit or ask people) because you kinda lack the vision of a game - it's more about just "working on it to make it better". New ideas come in and gameplay changes in a quite random manner. Like if you did the Pyro just a couple of months ago the model would be kind of a "waste" right now. It was meant to be just a normal K-Bot and now he's some sort of jumpjet infantry and because of that really should have thrusters or some kind of neat features (like an animation of little wings unfolding or whatever). The model of course wouldn't be non-usable but in the end just putting some firy FX under the feet is kinda lame when talking about actually creating models especially for CA...

Saktoth wrote:Either way if you do make a new mod, dont base it on BA. Add in one new unit at a time and balance as you go. Starting from BA doesnt make your life easier. BA is massive and complex with 400 units and thousands of variables. You change one variable (esp something like teching or the economy) in BA and it totally throws off every single one of the 400 units and all the other deeply interconnected components. Starting with a complex mod just makes your life much more difficult when it comes to changing or adding anything.

I disagree on that. Actually starting with modifying BA is probably the most easy way to get into modding Spring because you have a solid base with lots of examples for different things and behaviours. Creating a good balance also isn't THAT hard if you have played BA like a lot and once you understand lots of the mechanics you can even do some major changes like I did for MA without breaking everything. You're right though that for a total beginner who never played TA or BA it would be kinda insane to start with the BA basis although by sympling doing some trial and error by playtesting things might come out just fine but it will take its time...