Expand and Exterminate version 0.42

[Gota]

problems with epic scaling:
1)visual,aesthetic one.
Icons will never look as good as the units and playing with icons is less immersive.

2)gameplay.
Playing with icons and from a zoomed out view does not allow you to see the facing of units,which is a major issues,does not allow you to see where enemy projectiles hit to know whats being hit,what isn't and how close the enemy projectiles are hitting.
With icons you can't see how damaged a unit,or a group of units,is.

I personally,enjoy centralized bases less(hubs)but for me that's a non issue if the question is to play or not to play the game.

Look at SupCom.
Icons fit the gameplay much better since the astronomical amount of units means there is no need for the kind of information that is needed when there are smaller amounts of units and the game is more about making sure your numerous units survive.
I don't think playing Supcom style,with hordes of units,is as rewarding as playing with the amounts of units that TA mods have,more or less.
Also i think the engine and pathing do not support such numbers.
Even if you increase units numbers you will need to change a lot of stuff to make it confterble to play the game.
Things like camera,change icons to be more detailed and convey much more information etc...

I think it would be good for EE if it focused on smaller scale battles and instead of trying to differentiate the game by making it have a huge scale it would be more rewarding to change and invent new units types or change the behavior of existing units.
If your units behave differently on the battlefield,than.it would truly feel like a different game.
How about research?how about assembling units?different armor types for different parts of a tank like in s44?different commands to create formations?

[smoth]

maybe you should raise your icon distance.

[Fanger]

All valid concerns, and I understand better where you are coming from. You have an issue with the camera movement you say, which camera are you using, I generally use the overhead rotatable. I have not had much issue using this camera, now perhaps this is because I have spent alot of time playing games like Homeworld and this movement is comfortable to me.

As far as the scale, I dont think all units can shoot eachother all the time, but almost all RTS games I have played have had units shooting at eachother from essentially 20ft away. This honestly bothers me I know we dont have such short ranges and to see two huge tanks wailling on eachother from spitting distance really looks out of place to me. I wanted the ranges to feel long for everything and even more so with artillery. The key thing to note is that the weapon ranges are not different from before they are pretty much the same, its just the number of units that can fit in said range is greater. This mechanic has lead to some other issues. What I would like to do Knorke is keep this scale, because It allows me to have ships be correct sizes, and to make Large units that are visually interesting and can have a more varied effect on the battlefield. SO what do you think we can do to help allievate your problems without reverting the scale..

[1v0ry_k1ng]

Why do you always try to make people look like TA fanboys althought many times people have given good arguements?
Imo that is trolling.
I never even played the original TA.
I like everything, except that I can not see units and I think the weaponranges dont add depth but are just annoying.
I like hubs, airpads, eco and stuff.

ok, maybe i should explain it again then.
To me when playing it is important that I can quickly see what a unit represents.
I have no problem with learning what unit is what, that is not the trouble.
I find it also important to see what my units are shooting at, to see if those enemies are getting nearer, running away or they are not getting hit at all due to walls or whatever. So either I must scroll around like mad all the time or use a fitting zoom.

But if you have to zoom in on every unit to tell them apart, that is as if you set up your OS not to display filenames but only icons.
Just imagine that for a second. You would have to mouse-over over every file to see its name. Now imagine you are searching a specific file. You would have to go through every single file, how annoying and tireing would that be!
That is what EE feels like for me. I want to play a game, not look at 2d bitmaps floating around on a 3d terrain or spent 80% of my clicking on camera movement.
So, that is only the visual side.

Gameplay wise, I think it dumbs down the game because all units can hit all enemy units all the time. (slightly exaggerated)
Just to give one example, artillery placement gets less important this way because almost every spot near the frontline is good enough to bomb most important places. Maybe realistic, I think its boring.

Spring engine wise:
In my experience, small units have problems firing proberly in spring due to trees and small bumps in the ground. That seems not tatical but purely random and is often just confusing.

[quote="Gota"]problems with epic scaling:
1)visual,aesthetic one.
Icons will never look as good as the units and playing with icons is less immersive.

2)gameplay.
Playing with icons and from a zoomed out view does not allow you to see the facing of units,which is a major issues,does not allow you to see where enemy projectiles hit to know whats being hit,what isn't and how close the enemy projectiles are hitting.
With icons you can't see how damaged a unit,or a group of units,is.

I personally,enjoy centralized bases less(hubs)but for me that's a non issue if the question is to play or not to play the game.

Look at SupCom.
Icons fit the gameplay much better since the astronomical amount of units means there is no need for the kind of information that is needed when there are smaller amounts of units and the game is more about making sure your numerous units survive.
I don't think playing Supcom style,with hordes of units,is as rewarding as playing with the amounts of units that TA mods have,more or less.
Also i think the engine and pathing do not support such numbers.
Even if you increase units numbers you will need to change a lot of stuff to make it confterble to play the game.
Things like camera,change icons to be more detailed and convey much more information etc...

I think it would be good for EE if it focused on smaller scale battles and instead of trying to differentiate the game by making it have a huge scale it would be more rewarding to change and invent new units types or change the behavior of existing units.
If your units behave differently on the battlefield,than.it would truly feel like a different game.
How about research?how about assembling units?different armor types for different parts of a tank like in s44?different commands to create formations?[/quote]

THANK YOU

my thoughts 100%

I am bored shitless of ota. I DO NOT WANT OTA. I like EE because it is a VERY DIFFRENT GAME. even 0.163 played VERY, VERY diffrently to OTA.

I have NO PROBLEM WITH HUBS.
I have NO PROBLEM WITH EPIC UNITS.
I have NO PROBLEM with any change since 0.163...

EXCEPT THE EPIC SCALE, for all the reasons above. Not because its less like OTA. S44 and SWS 1.0 have the exact same problem. SMALL UNITS COMPROMISE VISIBILITY AND GAME-PLAY. With a better icon scheme, this will be less of a problem BUT YOUR BEAUTIFUL 3D MODELS ARE BETTER THAN ICONS.

Cannot stress this enough! Nobody posting here is asking for you to conform to TA. They are asking you to conform to the factor that currently most limits our ability to play the game: Visibility.

edit:
reply to post posted while posting- good icons would help immeasurably

[smoth]

out of curiosity, are you on a <17 inch screen or something?

[luckywaldo7]

I think the problem with scale is the camera zoom. Its irritating to zoom at close distance because each for a tiny bit of scroll the camera will move drastically. Of course, if you slow the zoom down, then it becomes irritating to try to zoom out at farther distances.

Ideally I think the zoom speed should scale with distance from the map. Close in and zoom is slower for more precision. Farther out and zoom is faster for more speed.

With this the game would actually feel like it was taking place on a much larger battlefield instead of just making units feel puny.

I have no idea about how to go around making a lua camera though, but I believe KDR made one for Air Raid and Regret made one for general use.

Now that I think about it though this is camera behavior I would like in any spring game I play.

[Pxtl]

The camera needs a lot of work for that approach, I agree. I can see what Fang has in mind - play at a low angle, hovering over your units, with the far-end of the view pointing at the enemy. I've tried doing that in Spring. For me, the big failing of that approach is the Minimap, which fails to rotate with me - it's horribly disorienting to lose the connection that "up" on the screen means "north" on the minimap. Doesn't the camera still get stuck on the edge of the map, too, and fail miserably to point _at_ the target when hitting F3?

[zwzsg]

I like EE, such a pity that Fanger is such a cry baby that'd rather raegquit than accept the valid criticism, ignore the trolls, and keep on working.

For me, the big failing of that approach is ...

For me, the big failing of that approach is that the camera position itself directly vertically of the chosen point instead of centering it on screen.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

out of curiosity, are you on a <17 inch screen or something?

20 inch

but I play with the default camera

[Gota]

For camera,an i have suggested it many times to all sorts of projects including even OTA mods,copy Supcom FA camera...download the game if you don't own it and just see how the camera works,how it zooms out,tilts etc...They have,for obvious reasons,the best camera for such a scale.
If you really want to keep this scale,change gameplay,allow to build many more units and build the micro around managing masses of units.
This,however(imo) requires a totally new approach to group control.
Some sort of direct/indirect group control with formation building(in short a lot of work but will be worth it),a new way of somehow monitoring the flow of unit groups etc...
To have the game feel like it was made for faced paced,large scale combat youd have to invent and rebuild the fundamentals since spring was not built to play supcom style games(if you want to avoid the somewhat shallow unit and group control in Supcom and make it as engaging and immersive at this big scale as it is on smaller scales)...
And of course a differently structured UI.

[Pxtl]

Alternately, the "epic range" would work well if we didn't need the information. You'd have to strip down the gameplay terribly to do that. That is, remove the various classes of robots so we really _don't_ care what we're looking at. Because you really do need to know if you have cons, AA, immobile turrets, or attack units in the blob of troops you just selected.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

the gameplay is just fine as it is.

[Neddie]

Maybe we can force Rotatable Camera use...

[AF]

I liked EE, the only problem I had with ti was if I turned up the unit icon distance to see the models, I had to squint, I ended up playing icon wars zooming in to see what the icons where then zooming out to control them, yoyo-ing back and forth.

In the end I started building general mixes of units and sending them out in clumps, I would control the clumps assigned to groups and trust that they were an even mix of units and zoom in to check what the enemy was and where they were headed. It worked but it was sub optimal at best.


Now the unit models arent gettign any bigger, and I think retexturing them will onyl go so far before we zoom out enough for the problem to come back.

Suggestions:

• Further differentiated unit icons
• When mousing over units we should see their tooltip, but their tooltip should contain their picture or a render complete with something showing the type of weapon they have.
• Selected units should show small buildpics in a list with say '5x' in the corner if 5 of that type are selected
• The minimap events widget should be bundled with the game

Again, I believe that changing the models is not a solution, and we aren't going to get a reversal of the epic scale ( which has its benefits too ).

So we should focus on User itnerface improvements here rather than model changes.

[Neddie]

I agree, E&E can do a lot with a newer Lua-based GUI. Where are you in the we, AF?

[AF]

I can advise and eveyr blue moon wade in and implement a tonne o stuff, and of course NTai.

If you can manage to put lua gadget based gameplay that isnt supported by current AIs in there then that would be very good news for me =]

[Neddie]

I'm not in the "we" - everything is contingent on Fang picking people for support.

[Pxtl]

Really, the camera thing might help, but I really can't see a way to make an "epic scale" game with a variety of dot-sized units work well without seriously changing the gameplay. Squads help a little, since you can move the icon to the centroid of the squad instead of covering each individual unit, thus allowing the player to actually see units fighting with the icon providing higher-level data.... but even then, it's not a perfect solution. Plus, squads bring their own host of problems.

The RTS game I played that pulled off the "epic ranges" well was Battlezone, which worked because it's an FPS/RTS hybrid.

[Google_Frog]

I'd play EE if hosted it.

I think the 'epic' scale is fine. All it needs is much better unit icons with a unique icon per unit which quickly conveys it's role. Units need to be differentiated at combat zoom (range circle screen width). The models don't look all that different so they would have to be much too big to be different at combat zoom.

[zwzsg]

So it'd be more of a SupCom clone and less of a TA clone? I'm not that fond of icons war myself, seeing actual 3D models battling it out provides me much more enjoyment.