Anti-porc measures

[Gabba]

I'm saying this as a complete outside observer who has only specced games (and done a bit of single player).

But seriously, people, I think I've seen the ultimate porcing weapon: the Zenith meteor controller. It costs only 50 energy to operate, so you can't even stop it by killing its power source.
In my opinion it should need 3-4 fusions to power it.

Also, terraformed walls are nearly indestructible, you need to get constructors right next to them to terraform them back. They should at least be destroyed by artillery, otherwise you have this ridiculous wall of dirt stopping whole armies. It seems to me that constructed walls (if you still hav'em) should be tougher to destroy than those.
Oh yeah, and planes pass through really high terraformed walls (engine limitation?), so maybe somehow limit the max height?

Edit: Never mind the suggestions I changed to tiny text. CA doesn't have tech levels as several of you wisely pointed out, and I'm falling to my bad habit of discussing a bunch of unrelated stuff in the same thread.
Lastly, it may not match your design philosophy, but something that works really well in Forged Alliance is that even the Tech 1 point defense costs the same as 8 tanks. Gives a nice advantage to non-porcers, so that's something to keep in mind.
Edit: other random suggestion from FA: give radar to lvl 1 scouts (if you haven't done it). That helps a lot in the early game when you want to attack turrets from outside their range with artillery. Otherwise the advantage is with the porcer, who has both longer range and better sight.

That's all folks. Have fun, and remember that drinking and driving your Krogoth don't go together.

[lurker]

Is it possible to *build* one without that much energy? And a couple fusions is nothing in cost in comparison. Just consider it as having no energy cost to run. Does it even get built outside of entrenched FFA? Terraform height is limited, yeah planes bug etc. annoying, oh well. It's tough to make a good terraform wall, and while I would prefer being able to damage it with artillery, I doubt any tanks would make it over the resulting pockmark surface. Tech 1 defense in supcom is long ranged and reasonably effective. An llt has a hard time vs. a single tank.

[Gabba]

Is it possible to *build* one without that much energy? And a couple fusions is nothing in cost in comparison.

Maybe they cost nothing in comparison, but they take space and need to be protected as well. What I want is a big power complex I can target to stop the insanity. So make that 10-12 fusions if needed.
And yeah, it probably only gets built in FFA, which is where I saw it. But still.

Tech 1 defense in supcom is long ranged and reasonably effective. An llt has a hard time vs. a single tank.

Llts are effective enough vs early raiders (2 scouts, one or two peewees), especially since there's no tech one mobile radar. I think it's just more fun to encourage people to protect their base with units, not turrets.
But hey, it's just food for thought. People probably like the fact that they have a lot of cool turrets to build.

[Regret]

give radar to lvl 1 scouts (if you haven't done it)

1) build radar
2) morph into mobile radar for puny resource cost
3) ???

[Saktoth]

Zenith
The Zenith is ridiculously expensive, the most expensive unit in the game. It is, indeed, the ultimate porc weapon, in fact, it is the ultimate 'Wow man this game has gone on WAAAAY too long' weapon.

50 energy is 1.66 fusions. It could probably cost more to run but its not a big balance issue since the unit is basically ridiculous. It is just there a way to end a game in a spectacular fashion because your economy is so ridiculously superior to his (Though there have been a few FFA's where someone builds a Zenith and there are paniced alliances as everyone attacks him to try and get it down).

Terraform
There is discussion ongoing regarding Terraform walls. In the test build, constructors can be set to do an amount of restoring around themselves when destroyed, so you can suicide constructors into a wall to restore it.

Also, prescision bombers have no problem with terraform since their weapon drops directly down.

We're looking at longer term solutions (say, flattening siesmic missiles).

Planes flying through terraform is just an engine thing. Terraform gets more expensive the higher you build so this wont be something that comes up often. Gunships will fly through them very frequently, unfortunately, but this happens with normal cliffs as well.

Radar/Defenses
Firstly, its important to remember that there are no 'techs'. You can build anything at any time, a units use is simply dictated by its appropriateness to the situation.

CA is a very aggressive game. Your line can fall and have holes punched in it dozens of times in a game and you can lose a lot of territory or economy very fast. Cheap, spammable static defense is sort of key to the balance, allowing you to have some kind of territorial integrity. It might not seem this way if you watch FFA's but nobody wants to attack in a FFA until they are sure they can beat the opponent: thats just FFA politics making the game porcy.

Static radars, jammers and shields can be morphed into mobile variants. So every factory has access to them. Honestly, long term, if the mobiles and statics continue to cost the same and be identical, we might as well just make the mobile variant buildable directly and have no static variant.

[Pxtl]

Really, the "restore" command needs some lua-love. The radius sucks, the time-cost sucks, etc. It is nightmarish to claim a base on BlackStar that got nuked.

I'd rather see better "restore" mechanics than restore-kamikaze builders.

And the proper solution to walls is impossible due to an engine limitation. The typemap is fixed - you can't create and apply custom map terrain types, which would be the righ way to handle walls - then it would be simple... you crank up the softness of the wall-terrain, and then when they're damaged below wall-level you switch back to the default terrain type.

[CarRepairer]

I added the "Restore Bomb" state button to constructors because you already use cons to restore enemy walls anyway. Flick it on before sending them in and even if they die before barely restoring using their nano, their death will still serve you well. (It's a bit buggy right now as the button will show ON when it's OFF sometimes. Small fix but I forgot about it.)

Whether or not this is a permanent solution doesn't matter, it's to help porcy games move along at this point in time.

[Gabba]

In the test build, constructors can be set to do an amount of restoring around themselves when destroyed, so you can suicide constructors into a wall to restore it.

Interesting solution.

I just see one problem with that: your own constructors will flatten your walls when they die (to bombers for example), unless you micro which ones have the "flatten" setting to high and which don't.

[Neddie]

That would then penalize stacking constructors around in large groups, which might not be a bad thing.

[luckywaldo7]

Zenith
The Zenith is ridiculously expensive, the most expensive unit in the game. It is, indeed, the ultimate porc weapon, in fact, it is the ultimate 'Wow man this game has gone on WAAAAY too long' weapon.

50 energy is 1.66 fusions. It could probably cost more to run but its not a big balance issue since the unit is basically ridiculous. It is just there a way to end a game in a spectacular fashion because your economy is so ridiculously superior to his (Though there have been a few FFA's where someone builds a Zenith and there are paniced alliances as everyone attacks him to try and get it down).

I think it would be very resonable to give it around a 200 energy requirement, so just under a superfusion. It would mean that you really wouldn't be able to keep the thing running nonstop when you didn't have a specific target, because you would be sacraficing some overdrive to it (or maybe you just have a ton of energy, in which case would be a ton of good targets). Current setup can occasionally be a problem; one ffa I was just finishing up my second zenith when springie crashed, with much of my metal from overdrive rather then reclaim.

If nothing else the Starlight should have some more energy cost. At the moment it costs absolutely nothing to operate.

I just see one problem with that: your own constructors will flatten your walls when they die (to bombers for example), unless you micro which ones have the "flatten" setting to high and which don't.

Thats why it's a toggle atm, off by default. So they will only restore on death when you want them too.

[Google_Frog]

I'm hoping to remove restore eventually after replacing it with much easier to use commands like smooth and level to height. Restore is free and I'm not aware of any way to make it not free. Terraform that costs metal would balance it a lot but currently restore would be too powerful against it. Restore can't be removed currently as the other terraform interface is even worse.

[Saktoth]

Pxtl: Totally right on typemap control, we need that badly.

The Starlight actually takes 300 e to run, but it doesnt shut down if you have no e.

Which is, yeah, wrong.

[Argh]

Wow, somebody else noticed that typemap control via Lua would be nice, finally. Great, now let's bug the devs again, and explain that it's holding up a lot of stuff, not just this.

As for obstacles, here's why terraform isn't in P.U.R.E.: it's not the walls, it's the way you can screw with pathfinding and the steering code. I agree with Pxtl: until we have better ways to tell Spring to not pathfind in some areas, it's an issue to even include it a little bit.

Try an experiment. Instead of building a wall, build them in scattered clumps, loose enough to let a units through, but without straight lines (this is actually really cheap compared to building walls of any length, btw, because it doesn't need to be perfect).

Next, watch the hilarity as your opponent attempts to attack your base, and Spring's pathfinder goes bonkers trying to accommodate it. I swear it's the most abusive thing in any game that allows terraform atm, it's like really strong DTs that also totally hose pathfinding and can't be run over. If you do it with holes, you also have a clear field of fire for your direct-fire weapons. Or you can just use indirect stuff that's usually fairly useless and pound them to death while they can't respond.

Solutions? Easiest one, by far, is to give Real Artillery the ability to fill in holes and gradually knock down walls. Instead of always being a negative tool, going lower, give players a "daisy cutter" bomb that will flatten terrain that sticks up a lot while filling holes, or something, in exchange for a lot less damage. Then people can prep an assault route with artillery.

Or give them an "earthquake bomb" which rapidly moves the terrain up and down in a circle, then settles down, with the new terrain being lumpy but closer to the average height before it goes off. Expensive, cpu-wise, yes, but it would be cool.

Or give players a tool specifically for nullifying terraform.

Give players an assault-class "bulldozer" that will flatten terrain- higher or lower gets moved to bulldozer's height every few frames in front of the blade, when the blade is on (give 'em a control button, they won't want it on constantly). That would be sexy, it would be a fun model / animation, and it would be in keeping with building good RPS. A smoke-spewing, armored bulldozer with a couple of popguns and a lot of frontal armor would be a lot more interesting than a Generi-tank.

Oh, and overall... CA's not terribly porcy atm. Most of the defenses are actually pretty useless for real cost, imo. Better to just build more units, specifically stuff that counters early rush. Cheaper, and if you counter well, you can then counter-rush ftw.

[Google_Frog]

Wow, somebody else noticed that typemap control via Lua would be nice, finally. Great, now let's bug the devs again, and explain that it's holding up a lot of stuff, not just this.

Where were you when the typemap control thread was active? http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=18879

Try an experiment. Instead of building a wall, build them in scattered clumps, loose enough to let a units through, but without straight lines (this is actually really cheap compared to building walls of any length, btw, because it doesn't need to be perfect).

Given that walls are meant to make an area inaccessible how is using a few walls to make an area harder to reach an exploit? Sure it costs less but the game designer is allowing players to block paths anyway.

Solutions? Easiest one, by far, is to give Real Artillery the ability to fill in holes and gradually knock down walls. Instead of always being a negative tool, going lower, give players a "daisy cutter" bomb that will flatten terrain that sticks up a lot while filling holes, or something, in exchange for a lot less damage. Then people can prep an assault route with artillery.

Gradually knock down walls.. you want to try and code that? I'm going to have a go at it when I have time. There are going to be more terraform weapons such as the seismic missile, level crawlies, crater crawlies etc...

Give players an assault-class "bulldozer" that will flatten terrain- higher or lower gets moved to bulldozer's height every few frames in front of the blade, when the blade is on (give 'em a control button, they won't want it on constantly). That would be sexy, it would be a fun model / animation, and it would be in keeping with building good RPS. A smoke-spewing, armored bulldozer with a couple of popguns and a lot of frontal armor would be a lot more interesting than a Generi-tank.

This is already an idea which will be implemented as a crazy t3 thing for assaulting forts/trenches. The idea is to make it create ground underneath itself as well as flatten so it can fly in a sense.

[Argh]

Where were you when the typemap control thread was active?

I'd already asked to be able to use Lua to define custom TypeMaps, and alter the pixel values, several times. I sat that one out in disgust, frankly. Having the ability to use Lua to simply write "don't go here" or "use this path ONLY" for a given Unit class would be very, very useful.

The problem is pretty darn simple: that data is currently read from the SMF. After that, it's static. There's no reason at all that it couldn't be dynamic data that could be altered on the fly, but the devs have expressed little interest. I could care less about simply changing typemaps that are already painted onto a map- that won't allow for Lua to do dynamic stuff in terms of pathing, such as denying movement through zones, slowing Units down by changing the state, encouraging certain Units to only use a certain part of the map to move on, regardless of the heightmap, etc.

Given that walls are meant to make an area inaccessible how is using a few walls to make an area harder to reach an exploit? Sure it costs less but the game designer is allowing players to block paths anyway.

It's an exploit because of how poorly Spring handles it, and how few effective counters there are, if you want to do it to a large area. I'd be 100% fine with it, if the game design had better fixes available. Again... just try it, you'll soon find that building walls < building random clumps, for area-denial. It beats the heck out've DTS, imo, for cost, if you want to seal a big area, because you can leave a "tease" path, and if people try to go anywhere near that area, and it's the most "attractive" zone to the pathfinder, they'll get bottlenecked in the "tease" zone pretty often, unless people are paying attention. It's amusing, how you can make Spring's pathfinder do Bad Things. Counters that were going to win on a time-cost basis would make it palatable- you can deny me in the first 10 minutes, but eventually I can clear the route, and you can't do much other than cost me resources and micro-time.

Gradually knock down walls.. you want to try and code that? I'm going to have a go at it when I have time. There are going to be more terraform weapons such as the seismic missile, level crawlies, crater crawlies etc...

I may find time for that. I'm sorta busy atm with that sea factory and P.O.P.S. and other stuff, but it's something I might be interested in building some base tech for. I need to play around more with terrain manipulation anyhow, so that might be a good warmup exercise.

This is already an idea which will be implemented as a crazy t3 thing for assaulting forts/trenches. The idea is to make it create ground underneath itself as well as flatten so it can fly in a sense.

I was thinking T2, as a replacement for a redundant assault tank for 1Fac, myself, but it's not my game, that's just a random thought. At T3, why not just have a giant walker that can stomp minor impediments flat? Should be possible to combine auto-flatten + some screenshake & dust FX for a cool result. Kinda like the Overlord, but it not only stomps buildings and enemy Units, it also stomps terrain that is + / - the original around itself.

[JohannesH]

Its amazing how easy it is to win when your enemy doesnt pay attention.

[Saktoth]

*ehem* Nomenclature now, you two, CA doesnt have tech levels.

The typemap thing is infuriating. We need control, especially with terraform. What is typemap in comparison to heightmap?


Anyway, i cannot reproduce this thing you are talking about Argh. Ive peppered the map with terraform and partially blocked chokes and have nothing like what you're describing. If i leave a single 1 unit wide gap, they find it and all pour through. The long range pathfinder can have trouble finding holes, (the blue line in debug mode) since its such low resolution, but issuing a move order to get them closer brings in the shorter range, higher resolution pathfinder (you can see terraforming outside LoS so this doesnt even take much micro to do this). If the long range pathfinder doenst find the hole, it will go a longer route, but you get this problem on some maps too (castel gods say). If it doesnt find any other route though, it will just try and get as close as possible- which, if it gets close enough to bring in the short range pathfinder, it will find the hole.

Leaving gaps that are too small to go through is identical to a solid wall, the pathfinder tries to get them as close as possible to the move order if there is no valid path.

Finally, these results are identical to DT's- impassable terrain is impassable terrain. One would also expect the same result with trees etc if they are uncrushable.

Does PURE have different pathfinder resolutions or somesuch (is that even possible)? I know in Imperial Winter, there was one map that just sent the pathfinder completely bonkers (Units would walk clockwise around an obstacle, get to a certain point and decide that walking anti-clockwise is faster from there, then get to a certain point and decide clockwise is better again, meaning they just mill back and forth. It could be fixed by giving them lots of incremental move orders though).

[Argh]

Maybe that's been addressed since I last tested it. I was testing stuff that was 2-4 Footprint squares, trying to get through areas that, in theory, had enough room, but confused the A* a lot.

If you do patterns like this, where X are holes:

Code: Select all

X            X            X X     X
   X     X      X      X X    X    X
         X           X         X
                  X          X       X
     X    X     X          X       X 
X  X X  X       X      X X     X X

There's a path, but it's hard for A* to figure out, and units tend to get stuck. If you do it in chokepoints, it caused hilarity (when I tested it).

Same was true with certain patterns of DTs, but when you compared expenses / durability / build time, it made much more sense to use terraform (at the time). Unlike DTs, for example, a pattern of holes like that were pretty much permanent, short of a builder leveling them for quite a long time, so you could easily funnel people's units, or at least force them to enter range of things they couldn't hit back easily. It was a great force multiplier for certain things, and about the only way that I could ever justify paying for fixed defenses that weren't AA.

If that got fixed, it got fixed, in which case, I can put some of that stuff back in (I had trenches for infantry to use and some other basic stuff, nothing fancy).

Does PURE have different pathfinder resolutions or somesuch (is that even possible)?

Absolutely not. I've been playing around with alternative LOS systems for awhile, but I don't want to write a pathfinder atm, and I certainly don't think I'd do any better than what we have.

[smoth]

WTF op: jumpjets

/thread

[Saktoth]

The pathfinder was updated recently but i dont remember anything very screwy with this kind of thing: Again, you'd expect the same results from trees.

I've been playing around with alternative LOS systems for awhile, but I don't want to write a pathfinder atm, and I certainly don't think I'd do any better than what we have.

I mean perhaps you can set the pathfinding resolution in the same way as you can set the LoS resolution, and PURE's might be lower (not sure if you can even do that).

You want screwy pathfinding, check this:

Thats the one i was talking about: They cant decide which path is superior so they just run back and forth on that spot.