Ennemi building stay out of los - Page 4

Ennemi building stay out of los

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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Gnomre
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Post by Gnomre »

Look, this does not make the game more strategic, it dumbs the game down.

Realism isn't always the best thing for a game. Like Storm said, if you want realism, your units should be able to see for miles and fire equally as far. If you want realism, your units won't just have one weapon, they'll have artillery and machine guns and other crap like real things. If you want realism, you will indeed play with permanent LOS like Storm said, since surely two races with over 4000 years of technology (including teleportation via warpgates) can manage fucking orbital GPS satellites.

TA already has sufficiently low levels of micromanagement. Dumbing it down, making the game easier will not make better players, it'll just make a boring, easy to play game. If you take out any more micromanagement (manual radar targetting really needs to be put back in, realism be damned), it'll just be two computers playing each other. The only interaction from the player will be starting up the damn program!

It's a sign of skill at the game when you are able to pay attention to your scouts and mark the things that matter. It's an even greater accomplishment with a teammate, when one scouts and the other does the marking so they can BOTH bombard. I thought the SYs were good players at one time, and realized what made TA better than every other game that makes scouting a game of permanent LOS, but I guess I was wrong.
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Storm
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Post by Storm »

There's unmapped and fogged. Black fog is the map you never been to. Grey fog is what you cannot see.

And this should be toggable together with a heap of other similar functions. Spring TA with radar target, radar build and perm LOS or Old TA with neither of them.
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zwzsg
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Post by zwzsg »

Making as much things toggleable is important. The cavedoggies thought games should be played with terrain black, unexplored, but left the option anyway. After a few years, it emerged that playing with black terrain is retarted and that playing with terrain known but covered in fog of war is the only sensible way to start a game.

I want a battleroom filled with buttons, toggle, and box with numeric values. Most of them would just be considered by most of people like just a nice background decoration that reminds how powerful Spring is, but some button, and/or with some people, and/or in some situation, they would save the day. That means we urgently needs a better battleroom, and also to have a battleroom that can be used offline, or on LAN.

To get back on the subject of remembering building after view:

In Dawn of War, WacraftII, WarcraftIII, etc... many units are meele. They can't fire at building without touching it in the first time. In TA on the contrary there isn't a single meele unit, all units are ranged, and many have really long range. That means that is good for DoW, WCIII, etc... isn't good for TA.

In TA&Spring you've got either:
- unknown
- radar coverage
- visual coverage
and also:
- former visual coverage
- radar coverage and former visual coverage
- former radar coverage

It's important that not all coverage give the same ease to attack enemy, that each coverage gets its own useability and purpose.

Because we're talking about a RTS, it's important to understand that real time needed to perform an action is to be considered a cost, like the metal cost, the time-to-build cost, etc... So, if something is very powerful but consumes alot of real time, it can be considered balanced and not better that somthing less powerful but more automatic. However I also agree that having to micromanage units isn't funny (unless it's a krog) and should be kept to the minimum possible in a good RTS.

In the old TA, radar coverage meant you could see if there were units and how many, but not which unit, not even if they are buildings or units, and you could fire at them only by devoting much real time to micro. It was nice in a sense that radar had a use, to find out if zone is occupied by enemy, but not as useful as visual sight, which would say what units exactly, what they are doing etc.. and would give autofire. Making units able to fire on radar dots could somehow made sense as it could have been frustating to know there are units but not to be able to fire at them, but I'm sure the ability to fire on radar dots could have been disabled, and the game would still be very enjoyable. Radar would be returned to a role of simply knowing a few seconds in advance when the enemy is coming. TA radar system wasn't that good a system because it meant that in order to win people had to manually click radar dots all the time to use their missile turrets and samsons to their max efficiency. And it's not as funny to fight radar blips without ever seeing the units they are.


In current spring, radar dots were added to main view and units would autofire on them. To prevent this from completly removing the needs for visual view, radar dots in spring were made imprecise. It does quite changes the gameplay. In current spring, radar is much more important than in TA, because in TA radar was important only between highly skilled players that knew to radar target, while in Spring laying a radar next to a guardian change everything even for a newbie. However, the impreciseness meant that firing on radar was most of the time damaging the terrain, showing your presence to the enemy, but not dealing much actual damage (unless if left very long, or in crowed area, or....). Only with visual the shots would effectively destroy the enemy.

Marker and whiteboard in current spring are like the radar firng on old TA: something potentially powerfull, but more than balanced by the micro cost. In fact it's even less powerful, because radar firing in TA is perfectly accurate, while a maker manually layed in a rush isn't accurate, and also it cost more micro time. Marker and whiteboard so are a nice addition, but that doesn't change alot the gameplay. I like how it can be used to draw order and battleplan graphically on the map while playing with an ally, instead of having to talk with words. I've never heard of marker being overused in elite games. Unlike radar fire. So I think it should be left as it is: a nice addition to communicate with allies and to remember things without having to use a real life marker on the monitor, but that isn't uber strong for elite online games.

Having the game remember the exact position of structures isn't neccessarly a good thing for spring, because it would mean that, against defense, visual los wouldn't be needed. Basically when battling against a fortification, you'd just explore it once and then let your diplomats firing at them within the safety of their long range. It's even worse because structures can't move and so are already at a really great disavantage when it comes to ranged fight. Having the position of structures wobble around like radar dot could be a solution, but it would probably look ugly.

So not remembering the structures by default, and having marker than are possible but not much used because of their micro cost, sound like a good idea. Since other people disagree, make it at least toggleable!
Doomweaver
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Post by Doomweaver »

Its simple, just have the same error when firing at units you have spotted previously as you have with radar. It doesn't make much sense, but it makes the game so much better - you get the best of both worlds, effectively. You need less micro, because you don't have to be with your scouts all the time to take advantage of them, but it doesn't unbalance the game because anything you can scout out you can also no doubt find with radar.
mongus
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Post by mongus »

i say ... we can try it for "free" for a while... then assign it to a building.. or make it togglable... and laugh :lol:

or maybe we should kill all the verminof this forums! :twisted:

... im getting some other ideas latelly...
Gnomre
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Post by Gnomre »

mongus wrote:or maybe we should kill all the verminof this forums! :twisted:
Kill everyone except the SYs, Storm, zwzsg, and myself? Sounds like a plan to me.
mongus
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Post by mongus »

Preparing nuclear launch!

edit: i think Storm should be erased too.
and titan, i would pay that price to see you all gone!
Last edited by mongus on 23 May 2005, 19:40, edited 1 time in total.
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ILMTitan
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Post by ILMTitan »

Mongus, I hope you do realize that you were not in the group specified by Gnome. Also, without the vermin of these forums, who will we rely upon to spam every forum in the world once spring is fully released?
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FLOZi
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Post by FLOZi »

Gnome wrote:
mongus wrote:or maybe we should kill all the verminof this forums! :twisted:
Kill everyone except the SYs, Storm, zwzsg, and myself? Sounds like a plan to me.
:(
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Redfish
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Post by Redfish »

Well I think this topic makes it clear that a lot of ppl want a lot of different things. the SY's would be crazy to try and make everyone happy. And it's still the question if someone will play a game with 1000 options. We'll just have to see it. I think at the moment there is something more fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in spring that needs more attention than new features.
10053r
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Post by 10053r »

Storm, I read this whole thread, and I am unable to see how having scouts remember the location of non-mobile units is equivelant to "no nukes, no berthas, no emg, no units on hills". Since you just seemed to repeat that point over and over again, and I can see no logical equivalence, I am forced to believe that your point is invalid. Please elaborate on how this analogy is a valid one.

However, zwzsg does make intelligent arguments, so I will respond to those. I agree with your underlying assumptions zwzsg. I have said for years that there are 3 resources in TA: energy, metal, and attention. Adding this feature does give all players more attention, and I agree that giving players more attention is not always a good thing. For example, in MOO3, they basically made the game into an exercise in choosing techs and planets to colonize. By automating so much of the game, they made it basically unplayable.

However, we have a totally different situation here. We can always add more to our game to consume attention in exchange for every attention-giving addition. This feature makes things easier, yes. But we must ask what that attention that will be freed can be spent on. And the answer, in my opinion, is many far more fun aspects of the game. Choosing where to attack, how to attack, what to build, how to gather resources, and how to organize our bases are core elements of Spring.

This will force players to add defense in depth to their bases, so that it is difficult to get intelligence on the core of the base, and also encourage use of planes, since they will be so valuable for intelligence gathering. Personally, I have felt that planes are overpowered for a long time. They are not a choice, but a MUST in any good strategy, since hawks and vamps are massivlely effective, and now in XTA even level one brawlers kick ass. One way to balance this could be to dial down the health on planes relative to the amount of metal they consume. Making them more fragile will mean that a small amount of anti-air will pick them out of the air before they get a good photo of the enemy base.

Additionally, I feel like this will encourage play on large maps, which I see as a good thing. A large map will mean that there is much more ground to cover, forcing scouts to work harder to get those photos.

Lastly, and this is primarily directed at Storm, we must realise that our genre is Real-Time Strategy, not Real-Time Notetaking. This feature will change how I attack very little. I will still follow planes as they scout, but instead of struggling with the GUI to select my attack units and target the appropriate structure, then reselect the scout to manuver it for maximum effectiveness before it dies, I will be able to concentrate on getting good photos, and then follow them up with reasonable attacks. All bases are defensively deficient in some way, or else the player has not been attacking properly, but this will just mean that when you are scouted, you had better get good intel on your opponent quickly so that you can see how they are planning to attack and prepare your counter-assault.

I give this feature two thumbs up, SY. Thanks a bunch, and I am looking forward to the next release, especially with added larger map support.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

I'm not sure if this is good or bad, i really don't know

maybe this will make it easier to spot "weak"spots in the defenses so u could attack @ a other spot, instead of plunging all your units down the same path all game long...

On the other hand, it might take away too much attention time needed, for example

u just build 20 peepers and then u let them fly over the entire map. with out tracking them. After all the inteligence is in, u can attack.

i'm in doubt..
mongus
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Post by mongus »

Warlord Zsinj wrote:An attractor would make sense if you stuck it on a spy unit, which cloaked. So you send the spy unit into the enemy base, and it effectively "tags" the enemy units for your plasma shells to hit. Similar to the way commandos today will laser-tag targets for bombers.
i think this idea, with slight modification is good for this tag. (and for spy-kbot).

e: fits perfectly dont u think?
just replace "attractor" with Persistent Building LOS (PBLOS) :roll: .
Last edited by mongus on 23 May 2005, 21:19, edited 3 times in total.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

wrong thread mongus..
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Storm
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Post by Storm »

Storm, I read this whole thread, and I am unable to see how having scouts remember the location of non-mobile units is equivelant to "no nukes, no berthas, no emg, no units on hills". Since you just seemed to repeat that point over and over again, and I can see no logical equivalence, I am forced to believe that your point is invalid. Please elaborate on how this analogy is a valid one.
I am making the same claim as Gnome and Zwzsg, but with different words...

Thing is with the games I have described so many times is that the people within take out everything that is hard and that takes effort to use. They strive to remove strategy parts of the game to make it simple enough for their gaming.

This, as opposed to what certain of you beleive, is not the same thinking that we should make the game more complex and cumbersome instead, like Dune or Starcraft where you could only select a few units at a time and had to babysit all the plants for build ques. No, that's a completely different thing. The winner in StarCraft is the guy that can click fastest and with severe micromanagement controls the base made of 30 buildings. The winner in TA is the guy that controls the radar, that controls scouting and expanding. What happens here is the removal of the scouting bit...

Some time ago, when I was young, it was a game of skill to be able to concentrate a lot of effort and attention to precisely pinpoint the location of a central building and take it down. With this feature, all you need to do is sending five towards the enemy base once in a while. As soon it will be possible to issue orders to the minimap, it will be even easier. You won't have to devote the slightest bit of attention and still see the entire construction of the enemy base. You will see the whole thing... Instead of knowing that he got heavy MTs from that certain direction, you will know how many, if they are blocked by a feature from any specific direction and their exact positions for bombardement, not to mention all important buildings that will suffer the curse. Instead of saying "Oh, I think I caught a glimpse of a Moho Metal Maker", you'll be saying "Ok, there's the Moho there, many MTs there and a nice runway over the wind farm this way". It is, is anything removing the strategy from the game. Once long ago you had to be skilled to do it. Now you merely spend two seconds sending the scouts.

AND, the master point I'm talking about. Normally, when you see all the radar dots in your enemy's base, you think "Heck that's a lot of radar dots". Guess what, now that all buildings are permanent, you will see all the buildings and the remaining, unmapped dots are therefore mobile units. Wow, you just found out a way to separate your enemy's army from his defenses in the radar view, successfully defeating the purpose of the radar being an anonymous target. It's a fully fledged LOS generator. And what differs from the glimpse of the forces with a quick flyby is that you will continue see the building-unit differences and can determine the concentration and exact movement of forces long after your cheap scout run. The game becomes a step closer to pointless.
This feature will change how I attack very little. I will still follow planes as they scout,
Nope. You don't have a single reason to.
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RightField
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Post by RightField »

Gnome wrote:
mongus wrote:or maybe we should kill all the verminof this forums! :twisted:
Kill everyone except the SYs, Storm, zwzsg, and myself? Sounds like a plan to me.
And I even made textures for you back in the ol' days! Backstabber! :P
10053r
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Post by 10053r »

Storm wrote:
With this feature, all you need to do is sending five towards the enemy base once in a while.
Ok. This convinces me that you are playing a different game than me. That is to say, you are only playing on maps that are really small. Spring has forced me to play on small maps, but I normally consider a map of size less than 20 x 20 (in OTA terms) too small to play.

When you play vs me on a map where I can't LRPC your base from my base (which is why maps less than 20 x 20 are silly), I have a forest of anti-air extending nearly 3 screens beyond anything useful in my base in any direction. This is neccesary because air is so good (see my reply to you in another thread). Therefore, your 5 scouts are going to be fragged around the time they notice that I have a base at all. Now, if you send 50 scouts, you may see something, but then you deserve to.

On the other hand, when I start shelling your base from a forward installation, I always radar jam it. So you are going to be either following the stream of shells backwards (and I like to use multiple installations to switch up the angles to confuse that), or frantically searching around 40 screens worth of ground looking for the spot where the bertha(s) are. When you finally do overfly it, you deserve to not have to use several waves of finks to figure out the exact location of the bertha. After all, you saw it after the first one.

Perhaps this feature makes extremely small maps less fun. But I never thought full moon or the desert triad were anything more than little skirmishes to be played when you can't get a real game together anyway. Furthermore, I'd be willing to debate you for hours about why little maps are inherently inferior to large maps.

In real war, one of the most important things is denying your enemy intelligence. This feature raises the value of intelligence, so it also raises the value of intelligence denying strategies (cloakable fusion, anti-air, etc). Cloakable fusion, for example, just weren't worth it before, because even a 10% cost premium isn't worth the ability to exchange half or more of the energy produced by the building for invisibility. Now it might be.

Lastly, you say:
Quote:
This feature will change how I attack very little. I will still follow planes as they scout,

Nope. You don't have a single reason to.
I'm sorry, but you are just wrong. If I am scouting, it is because I want information now. If I wait to look at it, it might be stale (there might be anti-air that has appeared, for example). Therefore, it makes sense to scout whenever you are going to use the information, and if I am bothering to waste a unit to get info, I will want to spend the attention to get that info NOW, not to mention the fact that micro-ing the scout will make it survive longer and produce more useful info. For example, when I scout your base with a fink, it has a very limited lifetime over your base. So if I see a Moho, I'm going to want to go in that direction to see if you have that section of your base set up as a resource farm. If you do have it set up as a resource farm (makes it easier to defend but a more juicy target), I'm going to want to bomb over there, because 20 bombers can probably kill 4 targets, but 5 bombers can't kill 1 target.
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Storm
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Post by Storm »

Ok. This convinces me that you are playing a different game than me. That is to say, you are only playing on maps that are really small. Spring has forced me to play on small maps, but I normally consider a map of size less than 20 x 20 (in OTA terms) too small to play.
You are reading into words and missing the point. I don't need half the effort to scout now than before. I don't even have to care, just send the planes and forget about it.

And hell, I don't know what kind of game you are playing where you have the time to extend three screens with MTs before I make my move. In most of the games I've played or veterans I've seen, nothing of such magnitude occurs, unless the game size excells 40x40 or some poor player is left alone for 40 minutes. If you really have three screens filled with MTs before I have a chance to get a few Peepers up, then I willingly admit you the master of the game and won't say a word about it henceforth.

And no, in the games I use to play I can't shell my enemy from my base either. I'm not talking GoW or Sherwood size here.
On the other hand, when I start shelling your base from a forward installation, I always radar jam it. So you are going to be either following the stream of shells backwards (and I like to use multiple installations to switch up the angles to confuse that), or frantically searching around 40 screens worth of ground looking for the spot where the bertha(s) are. When you finally do overfly it, you deserve to not have to use several waves of finks to figure out the exact location of the bertha. After all, you saw it after the first one.
Again, I don't know what kind of strange games you play, but a Bertha isn't something that really occurs in the common game. It's a heavy weapon, it takes a multitude of recources, taken from your standing army. No, you will not have time to build a multiple installations to confuse me unless you playing a giant metal map or Evad River (where bertha rush is the whole damn point).

If you have your heavy stuff jammed, then godspeed, that makes it play just like normal.
This feature raises the value of intelligence, so it also raises the value of intelligence denying strategies (cloakable fusion, anti-air, etc).
Wow, anti-air was never important in this game until now

* Storm facepalms *
Cloakable fusion, for example, just weren't worth it before, because even a 10% cost premium isn't worth the ability to exchange half or more of the energy produced by the building for invisibility. Now it might be.
I do build cloakable fusions after getting first one-two normal up. That's solely so they can survive a giant plane swarm a-la TA.
If I am scouting, it is because I want information now.
Well, with this function, you build a reasonable group and send it away. You can easily check what they found exactly when you got the time and will.
not to mention the fact that micro-ing the scout will make it survive longer and produce more useful info
False, because you seem to completely miss the fact that altering the course of the plane forces it to slow down and become an easier target.
So if I see a Moho, I'm going to want to go in that direction to see if you have that section of your base set up as a resource farm.
Of course, but hey, in my base, you'd never find such a gathering. :roll:

Yes, after all, with some micro, you could squeeze a bit more information out of it, just in the same way that you can outmaneuver a whole army of Storms with one single Flash if you took that time. You're just missing the point again.
Drake
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Post by Drake »

Personally I think that it was a real bother in TA that the location of buildings would not be remembered. (Especially since I could never find a perfect button for use with the whiteboard ;))

I don't really see that it would make the game dumber if building sites were remembered. After all, what are the effects of buildings being remembered? As I see it there are three major ones:

* Ground defense gets weaker (as mobile units such as Lugers and Merls will have a much easier time taking out fortified locations)
* Berthas & bombers get stronger (because they will be easier to control for maximum damage)
* Click speed and reaction speed will become less important (trying to mark accurately all the targets a peep swarm uncovers is arguably the worst clickfest in classic TA after radar targeting)

I don't mind the first issue really. Defence in TA is really quite powerful, and rightly so, (stationary installations should be able to pack a greater punch that those that can move), but it is also inflexible, also rightly so IMO. When you invest resources in defence you get alot more power for your metal than when you invest in mobile units, and this is offset by the inflexibility. The change in LOS rules will make the inflexibility a greater deficiency, so thus it's cocievable that some types of defence would need to be strengthened slightly to retain the balance. Personally I don't see it as a terribly sad thing that the slow creeping forward with various defensive structures would be severly hampered... I just hate that style of play though, so I guess I'm biased...

The second issue is perhaps more of a problem. Berthas and bombers are already arguably the strongest weapons in any skilled player's arsenal. On the other hand, berthas would be harder to defend as well, so that will offset their strengthening quite a bit.

The third issue I think is a great boon to the game. I really don't want to have a pulse of 150+ when I play this game. But it really IS required to pump some heavy adrenaline if you play a hard game against tough opponents. I don't claim to be an expert on this game, but I have played quite a few games with some of the better players in the world (SY's and TAG's), and the games get EXTREMELY hectic, even without the constant extra need of babysitting scouts and marking targets at 200 clicks per minute...

So the only really serious problem I see is that the already brutal bombers get even worse. Then again, I like the fact that there is no way to build a base that has ANY impenetrable part. Anything that makes TA more aggressive and less "creeping" forward with the big guns really makes happy.
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Storm
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Post by Storm »

Brutal bombers? Have you even played Spring lately? Yeah, you know, the game where planes are completely worthless due to autotargetting.
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