What do you want to see more of in CA?

[CarRepairer]

http://quotes.springlobby.info/?246

[knorke]

i like the slightly cartoonish/funny units.
here comes the can poke poke poke
gives personality to them.

[PicassoCT]

could we have sort of a mission generator like ET:Quakewars has it in Multiplayer. Sort of Take this unit, and kill these one.. two.. three enemy units with it, to power it up for two minutes, making it superCAN?

[CarRepairer]

could we have sort of a mission generator like ET:Quakewars has it in Multiplayer. Sort of Take this unit, and kill these one.. two.. three enemy units with it, to power it up for two minutes, making it superCAN?

Can morphs to Keg? Then to Drum?

[PicassoCT]

Yes, although, after thinking longer about it, this idea isnt exactly userfriendly - only pros could handle those missions, while having large scale battles running - and they make only sense for resisting, relativ long-lived units (Can, Keg)

Sorry, enthusiams is one thing, but that was scrap on my side. Also i guess that point made earlier, that only regular CA Players should be taken as advisors and no trollz does aplly on that suggenstion. Sorry to disturbed the brainstorm.




On the otherside, there is this Urge.. to give in.. to the features...i detest, myself for it, just one more idea, and i will be gone. Just one- more-

How about a LongRange Nanospray Tower, that disassembles Scrap and your buildings alike around him and heals Unit in a seleted area, without ever adding the metall and energy to (a maybee empty)?

Now, time for those spacetomatos you prepared!

[luckywaldo7]

I can see a lot of people are overwhelmed by so many options that flat balances gives you, which is quite understandable when you are new to the game.

I think this will be solvable by the single-player campaign. At the start your build options will probably be limited to mexes, solars, llt, radar, and a single lab, maybe bot infantry lab. You focus on just the basics of expanding, defending, and attacking, without worrying too much about unit choice. As the campaign goes on you will periodically gain access to more specialized defenses, economy, and labs.

The beauty of this system is that players will find it fun to get access to cool new stuff, and it will give them time to explore the best uses of new units.

And of course, there could be some interesting mechanics added in to how you acquire technology. If this campaign was done for 1faction the technology could be spread out among many different mini-factions, and you needed to defeat them to gain their technology. Perhaps you would even need to literally capture them.

[SirMaverick]

1) a consistent style. i see some things in CA that are cartoons

I heard this often but what does cartoons mean? Screenshot pls.

I always thought that picture of Lenin at the beginning of game ruined the feeling. I'm not being political here. It just dont fit in the big picture. It would fit in some WW mods, but not a space/futuristic/scifi game as much as there is a game option called "communism."

+1, but it was once decided to keep the image. Communism is even misleading. You just share part of the resources. Com share or Coop mode is more communism: you share resources and control.

[Licho]

Why is that misleading, in communism you have no control
And in every form so far there also was some basic form of private property (own storage)

[Saktoth]

I can see a lot of people are overwhelmed by so many options that flat balances gives you, which is quite understandable when you are new to the game.

I think this will be solvable by the single-player campaign. At the start your build options will probably be limited to mexes, solars, llt, radar, and a single lab, maybe bot infantry lab. You focus on just the basics of expanding, defending, and attacking, without worrying too much about unit choice. As the campaign goes on you will periodically gain access to more specialized defenses, economy, and labs.

The beauty of this system is that players will find it fun to get access to cool new stuff, and it will give them time to explore the best uses of new units.

And of course, there could be some interesting mechanics added in to how you acquire technology. If this campaign was done for 1faction the technology could be spread out among many different mini-factions, and you needed to defeat them to gain their technology. Perhaps you would even need to literally capture them.

Yes, this! Almost precisely what i had imagined.

The whole tech tree dynamic is a holdover from singleplayer campaigns, when you introduced players to the tech tree a piece at a time. It makes perfect sense to use that structure there. Each concept, from economy to defense, can be introduced with its own mission that exemplifies its use: A pure recon mission with lots of radar, a pure reclaim mission with no mexes, and missions where you must beat different strategies from shieldporc to flash spam.

I think CA seriously needs more singleplayer content, but for this we need a better missionbuilder and some devs dedicated to doing this (Licho says that making singleplayer content is more work than making the game itself, though im not sure thats true as long as we keep it modular). Problem is we dont even have enough devs to get 1faction IP free at this point (sounds etc atm- though we are almost there for the rest of the stuff).

For now we will have to make do with chickens (Which should be improved to better reflect the game, like the original chickens, and be less tower-defence).

In other words: Choose your path. Either get rid of the silly things completely or just go with them and turn the whole sleigh to that direction...

I've never minded the silly side of CA, i always thought it was cute and funny, and Machios cartoons were hilarious. But without a good humourist, like Machio, we cant hope to make the whole game that funny. Attempts to replicate Machios humour have been somewhat lackluster.

I've personally put a lot of effort into writing a Story for CA, which is incredibly serious, but most of the other devs do not like it which is enough to discourage me at least. With no clear creative consensus even on who should be responsible for the task, we can have no clear story.

That story will probably eventually win out by virtue of being the only one written though, and being more reflective of our higher quality art content than a cartoony storyline.

As for the can, i always wanted it to be a big brute with massive claws, but maackey copied the hack-job placeholder, sticking a spear in the end of the old cans gun, turning it into a fridge-with-spear.

[Pxtl]

I can see a lot of people are overwhelmed by so many options that flat balances gives you, which is quite understandable when you are new to the game.

I think this will be solvable by the single-player campaign. At the start your build options will probably be limited to mexes, solars, llt, radar, and a single lab, maybe bot infantry lab. You focus on just the basics of expanding, defending, and attacking, without worrying too much about unit choice. As the campaign goes on you will periodically gain access to more specialized defenses, economy, and labs.

The beauty of this system is that players will find it fun to get access to cool new stuff, and it will give them time to explore the best uses of new units.

And of course, there could be some interesting mechanics added in to how you acquire technology. If this campaign was done for 1faction the technology could be spread out among many different mini-factions, and you needed to defeat them to gain their technology. Perhaps you would even need to literally capture them.

You underestimate the complexity of CA. I'd start even simpler.

First mission is combat bots only - the only cons are a lab, and maybe a nanotower to assist. I'd start with Veh for Logos and Bots for Nova, since both of those labs include the radar tower. Don't even give them the full lab, just the basics - use this as an introduction to TA movement/combat. Teach them how to take down turrets before you teach them how to build them.

Second mission is cons only (and a nanotower again). No lab, no offensive units. Just play a little Tower Defense do terraforming. Bring in a more-complete Lab later on in the mission (also an opportunity to introduce capture or rez) so they can get some offensive firepower.

Third mission you start introducing the comm and higher-level buildings.

Then you start showing them the other labs.


..... although I love the idea for 1Faction. Doing it as a "Megaman" style theme of "YOU GOT.... Walker Factory!"

Hell, after the basics, you could even present it as a Megaman-style screen where the player gets to pick their next mission... although you'd probably have to tier it like Megaman 8 did, since it would be kind of impossible to even try the navy mission without amphibs or air. Tier 1 = veh lab. Tier 2 = bots, hovers, planes. Tier 3 = tanks, walkers, specops, gunships, boats.

[Saktoth]

If you'd like to spend some dev time on this, pxtl, lucky- we need people working on it. Especially fixing missionbuilder.

[quantum]

Making a campaign is a terrible idea.

CA is designed as a multiplayer game and has no clear relative advantage in singleplayer.

We have no singleplayer development experience.

Decent singleplayer content is extremely time consuming to create, even with ideal tools, and maintaining the missions might take even more time than creating them.

This means we'd be starting a gargantuan project in an unfamiliar field in which we have no comparative advantage.

Chickens or another very replayable subgame is a much more realistic plan for single-player. We are good at imagining and executing that kind of project, and it would give us the best bang for our very limited bucks.

[zwzsg]

Did I mention I have some sort of single player missions system? No triggers, objectives, or anything advanced like that, but certainly enough to make the kind of mission luckywaldo7 is talking about. Merge my code with CA. Fire up SpringLobby or TASClient, use their interface to set up unit restrictions. Add one or two NullAI, run game. Cheat you and the enemy a bunch of unit. Enqueue them all the orders you want. Save game. Eventually edit save to change the AI to my Regenerative AI and set up timers in some unit queues. Move savegame into /Missions/ Et voilà!

It should not require expert coding skill, so whoever want CA missions, don't ask for it, just do it! I'd make a CA mutator and a sample mission, if I didn't know by experience that no one would bother downloading it. And it's true that making a mission is very time consumming indeed.

[Saktoth]

CA (and spring) is never going to grow without singleplayer content.

The vast majority of gamers do not play online, especially not in a competitive environment like spring with no introduction to the mechanics outside of playing human opponents.

We must have accessible singleplayer content, even if it takes the form of skirmish or chicken style games.

We dont need grand sweeping campaigns with dozens of missions and triggers and such.

[Licho]

How about not telling people that enemies are humans? :)

[CarRepairer]

How about not telling people that enemies are humans? :)

Brilliant! Single player games require a client that logs you onto a special proprietary server. It has software that runs special powerful AIs, which need allotted cpu time on the server (so you have to wait some time before you can start the game up).

Secret: It's a sneaky lobby client with a matching system that logs you onto the spring server, joins a host and blocks all chat messages. Hee Hee

[JohannesH]

Wouldnt chatting AIs be better? I heard Starcraft 2s AI says GG too!

[knorke]

CA (and spring) is never going to grow without singleplayer content.

The vast majority of gamers do not play online, especially not in a competitive environment like spring with no introduction to the mechanics outside of playing human opponents.

We must have accessible singleplayer content, even if it takes the form of skirmish or chicken style games.

We dont need grand sweeping campaigns with dozens of missions and triggers and such.

But would the average gamer bother to set up spring (imo its still a little confusing compared to commercial games) to play some casual chicken style game?

zwzsg: The kp mission thing is a start but without triggers its basically a skirmish against roaming enemies which is very limited.
That other (broken) mission editor is a good start too, but is missing many important triggers/events as well.
Basically you would need all the functions of the starcraft or warcraft 3 editor.
Then it would be very easy to create tower defense, "dota", micro maps etc this way.
These games also bridge the gap between single and multi player.

[SirArtturi]

Before singleplayer and campaigns we need to get rid of the lobby system and make ingame "lobby" run through spring.exe. Also GUI needs to be improved drastically. We need menutoolbar based simple, solid and visually cool GUI.

After that, there is sense to start making singleplayer campaigns...

[Pxtl]

Having used the SC editor, I agree that it's featureset would be a good goal for any mission-editing program... although a good easy-to-use map-generator of some form would also be needed.

Why does the "lobby" need to run through Spring.EXE? Do you mean just sweapping filenames around? Or re-skinning the lobby to look like a game-app instead of a productivity app?