Blood and Steel beta 03 - Page 5

Blood and Steel beta 03

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KingRaptor
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by KingRaptor »

Design critique:
  • What's the design rationale behind the scale? It's really small, even smaller than S44, and infantry move at like 3 m/h. Transports help with the problem, but you can't always count on getting one or two with the reinforcement wave.
  • The random reinforcements system isn't really desirable; in addition to the whole "8 rifle squads vs 8 MBTs" thing, you can't change your unit selection to deal with specific threats (like AA vs gunships). Making it entirely player selected probably isn't the way to go, but there should be a way to get specific units you need. I think being able to request a unit class (anti-inf, anti-armor, AA, scout, etc.) and you get more units of that type showing up in that next wave would work well.
Problems I noticed:
  • Lots of things aren't documented, like infantry cloak reducing their speed, engineer squad's satchel charge mode immobilizing it, AA dumbfire mode refusing to attack heavy armor...
  • Units fire at the base even though they can't hurt it.
  • Morph needs buildpics displayed on the buttons. The player shouldn't need to look at the tooltip just to tell which of six identical morph buttons gets the bunker.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by bobthedinosaur »

!
Last edited by bobthedinosaur on 25 Oct 2009, 05:51, edited 1 time in total.
maimfromaway
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Joined: 22 Jan 2009, 03:28

Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by maimfromaway »

Why not make it so the player has a limited number of points to spend on reinforcements?

A basic rifle squad would be like 1 point, a tank would be 5, etc. Naturally the numbers need work, but it's just an example.

The player could then increase both the number of points they could spend and the speed of the reinforcements by capturing cities.

That's just my 2 cents. Other than that, I like the mod. Keep up the good work.
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Pxtl
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Pxtl »

Perhaps some kind of pool you pick units out of? Like, you've got a hand but you can only play so many "cards" at a time? Get 10 units, pick half. Something like that.

Alternately, a shared listing of mercenary units that all players have access to and they all bid on. Don't show who is bidding on what, but players get to know what is being bid on - if somebody is putting money down on the aircraft, that means you should put money down on AA. Not so good for 1v1, but might work nicely for FFA. The pool is random, so the game fluctuates... and you can make use of unpopular units by picking up bargains.
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Argh
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Argh »

Send them a full regiment at a time, Bob, and keep it rare enough that it isn't so much like poker. The whole, "this is what you've been given to do the job with" aspect is good, but if there aren't good counters available, then it stops working. Moreover, then the game design is driving behavior, not user choices, which is not good, in a game that, unlike poker, requires spending your resources (in the form of troops). You can't "bluff" in a RTS very easily.

Giving players a much larger, more balanced delivery (with coorespondingly larger times between) and an initial delivery that is 100% the same for all players (so that there are no insta-wins during the rush) might address these issues.
maimfromaway
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by maimfromaway »

Just got done playing with an AI. Couple of notes-

-it takes way too long to win, since the Satchel Charge ability doesn't do that much damage and recharges very slowly. Plus, since you're attacking your enemy's main base, those engineers are very likely to get killed when the next wave spawns.

-infantry moves very slowly, and there's almost never enough transports for all of them.

-infantry has a tenancy to kill friendly infantry in the line of fire, which can be a pain if you don't keep track of them.

-the arty walkers also tend to keep firing even when there isn't a target in range or when they're moving, but that might be a glitch or an issue on my part.
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JohannesH
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by JohannesH »

bobthedinosaur wrote:Randomness to the spawn is something I really like about the game, but you are right. That getting a bad hand you can't use with the current situation is pretty tough, such as not having any anti air but being overwhelmed by Air. But every class has a unit specializing in countering the other classes. Maybe I'll look into designing a way to keep it random but have some kind of demand weight for players, to try and get specific units. I am just afraid that they would spam a lot of heavy units and make the game unbalanced.
imo, if spamming heavy units would be unbalanced, then its actually worse when its randomly assigned - one player might get those good units while the other doesnt. I think it should be a top priority to get the different spawns about as useful, no matter how you pick them. Or it could be something like you getting always some basic stuff, like infantry and scout cars, and on the heavier stuff you could pick what you want.
Saktoth
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Saktoth »

Deformation and cities
levelGround = false,
You can make your cities as large as you like. They will 'float', but just add a 'block' underneath them in the model that extends well into the ground (like a foundation).

Though really, is there a reason why you cant just have them deform the ground? If you do make them larger though, they might start to overlap eachother. Again, id look at just autogenerating your resource points rather than relying on the metalmap. It will make micro easier and make the fights for them more significant, too.

You might want to look into worldbuilder as a way to make random cities each with different buildings (and each building acting as its own obstruction rather than the whole thing having a single hitsphere). Argh can tell you more about that though i dont really know what its capable of, but at the very least you can use the models.

Target/Chase categories
You shouldnt need a widget. Look at the target cats in CA, you need to set it in the unitdef.

In the main body
category = [[STRING]],
This will determine what category the unit is in for targetting purposes. Any string of letters.

noChaseCategory = [[STRING STRING1 STRING2 STRING3]],
This will determine what the unit will not chase. It can still shoot this target, but it wont try and close range with it.

In the weapons list (not the weapondef)
onlyTargetCategory = [[STRING STRING1 STRING2 STRING3]],
The weapon will only shoot at these targets.

Note that you can exclude as many categories as you like which makes things much easier.
Google_Frog
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Google_Frog »

You could use those target categories to remove a lot of your weapon switching. For example the AA truck can shoot land and air but needs it's weapon switched to do so, same with engineers vs buildings. If I tell a unit to attack something it should automatically use the right weapon.

I find the scale of the units is much too small. The models of the infantry are impossible to see at a playable zoom, the zoom where you're able to see a reasonable portion of unit ranges. Gameplay scale is defined by 2 things; speed and range. The current speed:range of infantry makes them immobile for practical purposes as it takes much too long for them to walk their range. You also run into issues with the heightmap at that low level. With infantry that fire only a few elmos off the ground slight heightmap variations can make them unable to fire and there's no way to account for it as the heightmap resolution compared to your units is too low. If I were you I'd increase the unit sizes by a few orders of magnitude and speed up infantry.

The slow infantry also make the random spawning much more of an issue. Without transports infantry are practically useless. A player who starts with transports will easily out-expand a player with no transports basically deciding the game with the first random spawn.
Saktoth
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Saktoth »

The weapon switching seems deliberate: When attacking ground, they cannot move, so they can operate as mobile AA or as static anti-ground semi-artillery.

Of course the toggle happens very quickly, the reload on the special weapons is very long, the toggle doesnt change the reload time of the weapons. IE you can fire the prometheus's super guns then switch to the regular guns while the super gun reloads, you can fire the vultures volley attack then switch him to anti-air to move around, then fire it again when he its reloaded, etc.

Still, this sort of makes some sense in that you dont want the shots for these weapons to be wasted, so they work a bit like special abilities from other RTS's.
Regret
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Regret »

ANY RECENT COOL NEW ADVANCES.
BaNa
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by BaNa »

Regret wrote:ANY RECENT COOL NEW ADVANCES.
YES NUMEROUS.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by bobthedinosaur »

DEC?
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Spawn_Retard
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Spawn_Retard »

what happened to this?
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by bobthedinosaur »

It's not my priority as I'm planning other things. One of the reasons BaS was kind of an awkward game is because I couldn't decide the scale I wanted to make it, and now I'm working on other games that have either a strategic large scale, and the more tactical small scale.

I'll probably make a nicer final release for it some time in the summer when I don't have school, and maybe I'll throw in another race just for people to have some variety.
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Spawn_Retard
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Spawn_Retard »

haha i love how you say throw in a race :p.

anyway, can we sort out a autohost for this?

This is still a mod at the end of the day, and getting it out there will get people downloading it and hopefully playing it. (and possibly more interest)

I think i only played once and wasnt too impressed but i think i didnt understand the game more than anything.


Just like cursed i'd appreciate a autohost, just the one to be able to idle in and possibly get a few people to download and play it.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by bobthedinosaur »

Sure. But I think it is currently broken, with the new spawn system. So You might need to wait till I get time to fix it up.

Also it uses 0 TA IP.
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Spawn_Retard
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Joined: 21 Dec 2006, 14:36

Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by Spawn_Retard »

Will the new spring release break it by the way?

And is there a version that is stable but possibly older? (i dont mind some stuff missing if it plays).

And will you be making the autohost, or are you leaving that up to someone else?
tehphan
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Joined: 31 Aug 2010, 03:11

Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by tehphan »

im a noob, i just got spring a few days ago and i dont know how to install these kinds of mods, like where do i put all the files and that kind of thing. i couldnt find a readme anywhere so maybe you should include one just for the noobs.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Blood and Steel beta 03

Post by bobthedinosaur »

This mod/ game is broken, So don't bother.
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